This week the DOJ concluded its case-in-chief in the search remedies trial. There was a lot about how the government’s proposals would help competitors — but precious little about how they’d help consumers. Key takeaways 🧵 1/ It’s clear the proposal to break off Chrome would be bad for consumers. Google VP of Chrome @laparisa testified that it would leave users with just a “shadow of current Chrome.” Some of the valuable features that could disappear? ⬇️

DOJ’s proposed remedies in the search distribution case would harm America’s consumers, economy and tech leadership. Here’s what we learned at trial this week. 🧵 1/ In short:

1️⃣Remedies are being pushed by well-funded competitors w/ their own agenda.
2️⃣AI innovation & competition are thriving — w/o gov’t intervention.
3️⃣Forcing Google to give away search data risks your privacy & security.

We’ve received a few questions about naming within Google Maps. We have a longstanding practice of applying name changes when they have been updated in official government sources. For geographic features in the U.S., this is when Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) is updated. usgs.gov/tools/geograph…

Over the past few days, some people on X have posted claims that Search is “censoring” or “banning” particular terms. That’s not happening, and we want to set the record straight.

The posts relate to our Autocomplete feature, which predicts queries to save you time. Autocomplete is just a tool to help you complete a search quickly. Regardless of what predictions it shows at any given moment, you can always search for whatever you want and get easy access to results, images and more.

Here’s what happened, why and how we responded to it.

🧵(1/5) → (2/5) First, Autocomplete wasn’t providing predictions for queries about the assassination attempt against former President Trump. That’s because it has built-in protections related to political violence — and those systems were out of date.

After the horrific events in Butler, PA, those predicted queries should have appeared but didn’t. Once the issue was flagged, we started working on improvements, and they’re already rolling out. You can see many relevant predictions now:

The Federalist was never demonetized. We worked with them to address issues on their site related to the comments section.

“We are fully aligned and continue to work with the US Government to contain the spread of COVID-19, inform citizens, and protect the health of our communities. (1/6)

https://twitter.com/Google_Comms/status/1238574670686928906

“Google is partnering with the US Government in developing a nationwide website that includes information about COVID-19 symptoms, risk and testing information. (2/6)