One document the company unsuccessfully tried to keep behind closed doors — Judge Amit Mehta made it public — involved a Google vice president bragging about how “addictive” the search giant’s services are, comparing them to tobacco and illicit drugs.

The executive, Michael Roszak, said that means Google is free to “mostly ignore the demand side” — i.e., consumers — in favor of “the supply side of advertisers, ad formats, and sales.”

In short, Google’s products are, by design, so addictive that it can exploit its users for economic gain without worrying about what the users themselves actually want or need. …

“The secrecy surrounding the proceedings is unprecedented in antitrust trials,” Carnegie Mellon professor Diane Rulke declared, and the Times’ “other antitrust experts” also “described the proceedings as unusually opaque, adding that the government’s antitrust case against Microsoft more than 24 years ago was far more accessible to the public and the press.”

[Here’s another question: why isn’t the government fighting harder to make it more public? Glenn suspects that it might be to hide their collusion with the tech giants on censorship, and I suspect he may be right. Read it all. — Ed]