> If it quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, has ducklings, and swims in the water, it's clearly a moose, or a t-rex, right? (a) we have a whole legal philos

> If it quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, has ducklings, and swims in the water, it's clearly a moose, or a t-rex, right? (a) we have a whole legal philosophy based around "If we're gonna deprive it of duck-related rights, we'd better make damn sure it isn't a t-rex or a moose." (b) remember, what these rules protect us from is the government having arbitrary power to jail people by calling us ducks. > Everyone is entitled to a fair, public trial decided upon by a jury of their peers Who owns the right there? It's not the government; it's the plaintiff and defendant. If both concur on a non-public trial, the Constitution doesn't force the trial to be public. The right to a public trial is a waivable right. ... which is really the crux of the matter. The DOJ has a right to ask for a public trial here also; if it's not public, that implies they have not. They really should be the ones people are up in arms about if we think there's a public interest in publicizing the trial proceedings, as they represent the public in these proceedings. In this case, Google argues that the loss of trade secrets in the act of defending themselves constitutes irreparable harm, the court agrees, and the DOJ doesn't appear to have dissented. That's enough to settle the issue for this case. > Alternatively, they could have just not gone and done the actions that caused the government to bring the lawsuit You are, again, assuming the DOJ's case is legal truth before they've made it. The easiest way for a corporation to never open itself to lawsuit is to do nothing. Obviously, we don't want to incentivize that as the common outcome; we lose our whole economy if we do. So the law tries to find a balance. In the case of this antitrust suit, I think there's a good case to be made that the DOJ is trying to bend precedent to make something illegal that the law was not previously understood to make illegal; the idea that Google has a "search monopoly" is a very frog-boiling argument of reinterpretation of law over the history of the company. (If we're doing full disclosures: I do own Google stock still. I expect them to beat this lawsuit and then I'll cash out after the victory bubble).