Oh, welcome to the Tech meme right home for Friday, April 18, 25. I'm Brian McCullough today. Google is ruled an illegal monopoly again. But for a different reason this time.

Switch to pre-orders are back on. Americans are flocking to Temu and Shian alternatives. And in the weekend, long-read suggestions, what if I told you 25% of community college applicants

are now AI bots?

And not only that, the bots are now, quote, attending classes.

Here's what you miss today in the world of tech.

Well, it's happened again.

A U.S. judge says Google acted illegally to maintain a monopoly in

some online advertising tech. This is the second time in a year a court has found Google acted

illegally in a monopolistic context, though this time it is different from last time, quoting the times.

Judge Leone Brinkama of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia said in a

115-page ruling that Google had broken the law to build its dominance over the largely

invisible system of technology that places advertisements on pages across the web.

The Justice Department and a group of states had sued Google, arguing that its monopoly and

ad technology allowed the company to charge higher prices and take a bigger portion of each

sale. In addition to depriving rivals of the ability to compete, this exclusionary conduct

substantially harmed Google's publisher customers, the competitive process, and ultimately

consumers of information on the open web. Judge Brinkama said. The government argued in its case that

Google had a monopoly over three parts of the online advertising market. The tools used by online

publishers like new sites to host open ad space, the tools advertisers used to buy that

ad space, and the software that facilitates

those transactions. Judge Brinkema ruled in the government's favor in two of those, finding that

Google illegally built a monopoly over publisher tools and the software system. She dismissed the

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