In December, Google spent $700 million to resolve claims by states that its Play Store had powerful app makers with high fees and harsh terms. About six weeks after that, Google paid $350 million to settle a lawsuit accusing it of improperly sharing users’ personal information.
On Monday morning, a Massachusetts company called Singular Computing said it had settled its lawsuit with Google over allegations that the tech giant had stolen the chip’s designs. Singular said in a press release that it had “entered into a patent settlement and license agreement with Google.”
Google is also on the brink of a fourth legal settlement in three months to end allegations that it tampered with the privacy settings of its Chrome browser.
In just a few months, Google spent more than $1 billion to clear the decks for legal battles that could prove far more damaging to the company and that could reshape the entire Internet industry: two federal lawsuits it filed the Department of Justice, targeting the Google search engine and its advertising activity.
The Justice Department accused Google of rigging the search market through preferential deals with phone makers like Apple and Samsung. The company will return to court in May for closing arguments in what is likely to be the biggest legal test for a tech company since US v. Microsoft more than two decades ago.
In the other federal lawsuit, expected to be heard in September, the Justice Department said Google “corrupted legitimate competition in the ad technology industry” by taking control of the wide range of tools that advertisers and publishers depend on to buy and to sell ads. Google has denied wrongdoing in both cases, saying its search engine fosters online competition and its ad technology has provided a financial lifeline to publishers and other online businesses.
Google said in a statement that it was not clearing the decks for future litigation and had won dozens of cases in US courts over the past year.
“When it makes sense, we settle cases to avoid protracted, uncertain and costly litigation,” said Jose Castaneda, a Google spokesman. “And when we need to defend ourselves and the industry, we do.”
The Justice Department could ask the court to bar Google’s preferential deals with browser makers and could argue that distribution platforms for its search engine, such as the Chrome browser or the Android operating system, should leave the company.
The department has already argued that Google should be forced to spin off its ad tech unit to ease the ad industry’s reliance on the company. Any divestment would be a costly and time-consuming process, wiping out the company’s revenue and influence.
Most of the recent settlements also followed the company’s stunning loss to Epic Games, maker of the hit game Fortnite, in a high-profile trial in December. Epic had alleged that Google undermined competition for app makers through high fees and strict rules, and a San Francisco jury agreed. Google has launched its appeal against the verdict, but a federal judge may order the company to accept more payment methods and app stores on its Android mobile operating system.
Douglas Melamed, a visiting fellow at Stanford Law School, said that “in this era of fairly dramatic changes in regulatory and legal risk for all these big tech platforms,” ​​Google may be thinking it’s time to settle smaller cases “for let’s do it”. don’t hang it over us.”
Google’s patent case with Singular revolved around some of the company’s most important chips — used to run artificial intelligence — called Tensor Processing Units. Singular had said its founder, Joseph Bates, met with Google from 2010 to 2014 and discussed its chip plans. Years later, Google’s TPUs infringed on two of Dr. Bates, Singular argued when it filed its lawsuit in late 2019.
Singular cited an email from Jeff Dean, Google’s chief scientist, in which he wrote that Singular’s designs “really fit in” with Google’s chip initiatives. The parties agreed to settle the case in January.
Singular had sought $1.67 billion in damages. The companies declined to comment on the financial terms of their settlement. In its statement, Singular said Google had agreed to a patent license. The tech giant did not admit fault.
“As we showed in court, Singular’s patent does not apply to Tensor Processing Units, which were designed and built independently by Google engineers using Google technology over many years,” said Mr. Castañeda, a Google spokesman.
Dr. Bates, Singular’s founder, said the company’s goal was to give universities supercomputers, which he hopes “can help limit the concentration of power that artificial intelligence is giving big tech companies.”
In the $700 million settlement with attorneys general for all 50 states, Google agreed to allow app makers to offer their own billing systems and app stores on Android devices. But crucially, Google can continue to charge big companies fees regardless of how consumers pay, although app makers get a discount for processing their own transactions. If the states’ claims had not been settled, they would have been litigated during Epic’s trial.
In December, Google said it would settle a class-action lawsuit that claimed its Chrome private browsing tab settings, called incognito mode, weren’t very private. The lawsuit alleged that Google had misled users by continuing to track their online activity while incognito.
The case had already generated negative headlines for Google, including the revelation that its chief marketing officer, Lorraine Twohill, wrote to Google CEO Sundar Pichai complaining that the incognito feature was difficult to market because it “wasn’t really private, so it required really murky, countervailing language that is almost more damaging.”
A California federal judge has ordered Google to pay penalties for missing discovery deadlines, footing some of the legal bills for the plaintiffs’ lawyers, led by high-profile attorney David Boies. Google said in a statement that it “engaged in exhaustive discovery.” A trial was scheduled to begin in early February and would have brought more revelations about Google through evidence and testimony. The company said in December it would settle the case, and a formal settlement is expected this month.
“We filed because we essentially got what we could have gotten if we had gone to trial and won,” Mr. Boyce said in an interview.
In February, Google said it would pay $350 million to settle a shareholder lawsuit over a privacy breach at the defunct social networking site Google+. The service had inadvertently given developers access to user information from 2015 to 2018, the Wall Street Journal reported in 2018, and Google was accused of hiding the issue from users and regulators even after the problem was fixed.
The company had settled with Google+ users for $7.5 million in 2020, but the shareholder lawsuit continued. Google had tried several times to have the case dismissed, including in 2022 when it unsuccessfully asked the Supreme Court to intervene. Ultimately, the only way to make the case go away was to strike a deal.
It is possible that in many of these cases Google would have had to pay more money in damages than it agreed to if they had remained in court, Mr. Melamed and other legal experts said.
“The problem with litigation is that every time you go into court, there’s an 80 percent chance that anything will happen, including getting arrested,” Mr. Melamed said, quoting a friend. “It’s so unpredictable.”
