BRUSSELS — The European Commission has opened an antitrust investigation into whether Google breached EU competition rules by using the content of web publishers, as well as video uploaded to YouTube, for artificial intelligence purposes. The investigation will examine whether Google is distorting competition by imposing unfair terms and conditions on publishers and content creators, or by granting itself privileged access to such content, thus placing rival AI models at a disadvantage, the Commission said on Tuesday. In a statement, the EU executive said it was concerned that Google may have used the content of web publishers to provide generative AI-powered services on its search results pages without appropriate compensation to publishers, and without offering them the possibility to refuse such use of their content. Further, it said that the U.S. search giant may have used video and other content uploaded on YouTube to train Google’s generative AI models without compensating creators and without offering them the possibility to refuse such use of their content. The formal antitrust probe follows Google’s rollout of AI-driven search results, which resulted in a drop in traffic to online news sites. Google was fined nearly €3 billion in September for abusing its dominance in online advertising. It has proposed technical remedies over that penalty, but resisted a call by EU competition chief Teresa Ribera to break itself up.

LONDON — You might say they have nothing left to lose. Britain’s once-dominant Conservatives are still reeling from their worst-ever general election defeat. Polls put them third, behind populist insurgent Nigel Farage’s Reform UK and near-level with the leftist Green Party. Yet facing annihilation, Britain’s oldest political party has finally rediscovered attack mode. Kemi Badenoch — a year in as leader — is landing more consistent blows on Keir Starmer in their weekly clashes, after months of griping from her MPs. Badenoch’s job has been made easier by the Labour government’s plunging fortunes; changes in Tory personnel; a system that hands resources to the “official” opposition; and a secretive attack department that combines nerdy research with fighting like hell. Some Conservatives even seem to be — whisper it — enjoying themselves. “We’re not fighting dirty, just critiquing what the government is doing,” argued one person who has worked closely with Badenoch. But they added: “We’re starting to actually do the fun bit of opposition, which is whacking a failing government over the head.” Since August, the party has helped force Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner from office over a housing tax scandal, and scrutinized the personal affairs of Chancellor Rachel Reeves and (now sacked) Ambassador to the U.S. Peter Mandelson. Badenoch has also applied pressure to Starmer over Labour’s tax policy as she prepares to respond to this Wednesday’s budget. POLITICO spoke to over a dozen senior Tory aides and politicians, all of whom were granted anonymity to talk about internal strategy. Most of them doubted these successes would do anything to move the polls — or save Badenoch from a leadership challenge if local elections in May go as badly as expected. But the person above said: “It’s good for morale, right? We’re still deep in opposition, we’ve still got loads of problems to fix, but we’re in a much better place than we were a few months ago.” OUT WITH THE ‘YES MEN’ Prime minister’s questions (PMQs) guarantee Badenoch a weekly moment in the spotlight. Several people who spoke to POLITICO suggested changes in her top team have helped. Tory MP Alan Mak departed Badenoch’s tight-knit PMQs prep team when he left the shadow cabinet in a July reshuffle. Her chief of staff, Lee Rowley, and Political Secretary, James Roberts, both left the wider leader of the opposition (LOTO) team, while Badenoch’s Parliamentary Private Secretary (PPS) Julia Lopez — who liaises with backbenchers — was promoted to Mak’s old role. Into the Wednesday prep sessions came Badenoch’s new PPS, John Glen, “policy renewal” chief Neil O’Brien (who shares some of her pugilism on social media), and the ex-MP and TV presenter Rob Butler, who has helped her work on her presentation skills. Kemi Badenoch is landing more consistent blows on Keir Starmer in their weekly clashes, after months of griping from her MPs. | Lucy North/Getty Images Stephen Gilbert, who spent five years as political secretary to David Cameron in No. 10, also joined the wider LOTO team. Mid-ranking aide Stephen Alton was promoted to head Badenoch’s “political office.” “The clearout of the prep team and frankly bringing in better people is at the core of why she has markedly improved her PMQs performances,” argued one Tory official. Allies suggest Glen has improved communication with backbenchers. On Mak’s involvement, the official was ruder: “Who the fuck thought that was a good idea?” A second Tory official argued: “They’ve got rid of the yes men.” Others argue the opposite — that there is continuity, and loyalists abound. Badenoch aide Henry Newman, promoted to chief of staff after Rowley’s departure, still attends PMQs prep alongside Lopez, her spokesperson Dylan Sharpe, and uber-loyalist shadow cabinet minister Alex Burghart. There are still misses. When Rayner admitted she had underpaid housing tax moments before the first PMQs of September — a clear open goal for the opposition — Badenoch asked only a brief question before pivoting to economics. But her team is showing signs of greater agility. The following week, Badenoch pressed Starmer hard over his appointment of Mandelson. The PM stood by the ambassador, yet sacked him the next day over his ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. When Shadow Defence Secretary James Cartlidge stood in for Badenoch earlier this month, he quickly pivoted to ask about an accidental prisoner release — which wasn’t yet public — and succeeded in tying Deputy PM David Lammy in knots. A person with knowledge of that day’s preparation said six “beautifully crafted economy questions” were ready for Cartlidge, but “we collectively found out a bit in advance [about the prisoner] — like, 10 or 15 minutes — and we all felt he should go on it, and if he wasn’t getting a serious answer he would just need to keep going. It was a horrible decision to have to make 10 minutes beforehand, but ultimately it was the right one.” Other people offer to help. Shadow Cabinet ministers join PMQs prep on their brief. And while Badenoch’s relationship with former Cabinet colleague (now Spectator editor) Michael Gove is far cooler than it once was, he still speaks to Grimstone and Newman, who used to work for him. One person said Gove has even suggested jokes, claiming one about the government’s plan being “so thin it could have been sponsored by Ozempic” came from him. (Another person denied that Gove provides Badenoch with jokes.) ‘WE’RE GETTING KEMI TO BE MORE HERSELF’ Allies of Badenoch insist much of the improvement is down to the leader herself. “Kemi has basically cracked a way of getting at the prime minister and not letting him off the hook,” said a second person who has worked closely with Badenoch. “Her confidence has been a big change.” Badenoch’s initial style as leader had puzzled — and in some cases infuriated — some on the right who knew her as one of Westminster’s most headline-grabbing MPs. She began with a focus on “rebuilding trust,” serious reform, and policy renewal that would take years. Nigel Farage’s radical right-wing party overtook the Tories in opinion polls last Christmas and has seized the agenda since. | Oli Scarff/Getty Images Then Reform came along. Farage’s radical right-wing party overtook the Tories in opinion polls last Christmas and has seized the agenda since. “Reform became the most interesting, hottest thing in politics,” said a third person who has worked closely with Badenoch. “So the timeline got sped up, and we needed to make sure we were part of the conversation.” The scale of internal frustration at Badenoch was painted in a brutal July profile in the New Statesman. Her former performance coach Graham Davies, who parted ways with her acrimoniously after her 2024 campaign, told the author she “doesn’t do the process, doesn’t do the practice and doesn’t like it.” But Badenoch is still here, and a leadership challenge appears to be parked — at least until May. Over the summer, Badenoch decided she wanted to cut through more with the public and show the kind of politician she wanted to be, said a person with knowledge of her thinking. She even noted how public awareness of Farage soared after he took part in the reality TV show “I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out Of Here!”. (Badenoch will not, however, be eating any animal testicles.) She also realized that the “rebuttals are as important as the questions” at PMQs, said a fourth person who has worked closely with Badenoch: “While the initial initial view was that this needs to be very prosecutorial, it’s much more of a theater event.” Allies worked to help her bring out her “sassy” side, said the second person quoted above. “Her voice has got a lot stronger,” they added. “We’re getting Kemi to be more herself.” WELCOME TO THE ‘ATTACK CELL’ The other side of the story is in Conservative Campaign Headquarters (CCHQ) — where it all began with two parliamentary questions. Known by few people beyond the Westminster bubble, the obscure “PQ” system lets MPs send technical queries to ministers. It is faster and more effective than Britain’s exemption-filled freedom of information regime. One PQ asked if Starmer paid full council tax on his grace-and-favor flat; he did. But when the other asked if Rayner did the same, ministers replied with a non-answer. This pricked up the ears of Sheridan Westlake, a veteran operator at CCHQ who spent 14 years in government — and is now turning his knowledge of its diversionary tactics against Labour. Government officials are said to sigh in frustration when another Westlake PQ comes in. Despite being signed off by different MPs three months apart, the two questions had both been crafted by Westlake and his small CCHQ team. The discrepancy triggered months of Tory and journalists’ digging into Rayner’s housing arrangements that — eventually — led to her resignation in September over a separate issue (she had failed to pay enough stamp duty on her new home.) Into the Wednesday prep sessions came Badenoch’s new PPS, John Glen, “policy renewal” chief Neil O’Brien, and the ex-MP and TV presenter Rob Butler. | Wiktor Szymanowicz/Getty Images The Rayner chase was “great fun,” said a third Tory official. They said CCHQ formed a five-man “attack cell” to co-ordinate lines with Badenoch’s office a few streets away. Much of it was based on work from the Conservative Research Department (CRD), a secretive team who keep their names hidden. The five men in the so-called cell were Westlake, CRD Director Marcus Natale, a member of his CRD, CCHQ Executive Political Director Josh Grimstone, who oversees the story “grid,” and Head of Media Caspar Michie. Rayner was not the only hit job. Three Tory officials said the CRD was involved in a story about Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ housing arrangements, though they would not be drawn on exactly how. (Reeves admitted breaking rental licensing rules for her family home, but was backed by Starmer.) CCHQ has been gathering attack material on Starmer’s likely successors, given the expectation of a Labour leadership challenge next year. It works closely with right-wing newspapers such as the Mail on Sunday, Telegraph and Sun to keep up momentum by furnishing attack research and quotes. At the same time, officials try to pump stories into the TV bloodstream by helping Badenoch work up lines to say on camera. “You force the BBC to pay attention,” the third official said. There are parallel operations too. The Guido Fawkes blog, whose publisher is former CRD director and serving Tory peer Ross Kempsell, keeps up communication with CCHQ and has always run a drumbeat of critical journalism on Labour — though a fifth Tory official said there had been some twitchiness inside CCHQ at the tone of Guido’s coverage of Reform UK, too. NOT THERE YET The Tory fightback has also involved plenty of luck. Issues the Conservatives found out about — such as Rayner’s tax arrangements, and a trust on her former family home — were neither the full picture nor proof of wrongdoing. Newspaper journalists did much of the digging. And while one person said the CRD now has about 10 members, numbers were slashed after the election. The first Tory official quoted above said the unit is “still not firing on all cylinders. They’re doing some good work, but probably the redundancies and scaling back post-election cut too deeply into what should be a key function.” CCHQ staff who survived the brutal post-election redundancies insist the operation is becoming more organized and morale has improved — but that is from a low base. New Chief Executive Mark McInnes has “oiled up the machine,” argued the third Tory official: “The sackings were brutal at the time, but we couldn’t just keep operating how CCHQ always had.” OUT OF PRACTICE Life back in opposition has taken some getting used to. The second person who has worked closely with Badenoch said: “When we were in opposition last time, it was a very different world. There was a handful of TV stations and newspapers, and now we’re in the modern age. We’ve had to bed in and learn what this crazy new environment is.” The Tories now get barely any media coverage for their initiatives unless they are genuinely head-turning. Some shadow ministers even complained internally about this at first, said one person with knowledge of the conversations. Kemi Badenoch decided she wanted to cut through more with the public and show the kind of politician she wanted to be. | Gary Roberts/Getty Images But now, argued a fourth Tory official, “the penny has dropped … unless voters hear from us, they’ll think we no longer exist.” There is no denying that much of the Tory boost has come from a Labour collapse. Badenoch simply has “way more material to attack,” argued a fifth person who has worked closely with her. “It’s an abundance of riches every week now.” The first person who has worked with her added: “[Labour] are uncannily reminiscent of our last days in government — beset by scandal, one thing goes wrong after another, no sense of direction, everyone is miserable. You can actually see it physically in the Commons … little knots of Labour MPs all whispering to each other.” With public opinion moving against Labour, Tory MPs worry less about looking like hypocrites. Many of the crises that they highlight — prisons, for example — are in public services that arguably collapsed under their tenure. The fifth person who worked with Badenoch said: “At the beginning there was a hesitancy to attack Labour because we were carrying the baggage of 14 years of mistakes.” As time wears on, collective memory might start to fade. IS ANYONE LISTENING? Even if it all goes to plan, a big challenge remains: outgunning Farage. As the “official” opposition, the Conservatives get the most money for researchers, and opportunities to hold the government to account through PQs, PMQs, committee hearings and debates in the Commons. Yet it is Reform that cost the Tories many of their seats in 2024 and now has a soaraway poll lead. Farage’s ascendant party has announced policies outside parliament, where (thanks to having only five MPs) it is barely a presence. Farage sits on the same side of the Commons chamber as Badenoch; this system is not designed to hold him to account. The fourth Tory official above voiced a fear that the public will see two establishment parties scrapping in parliament while Reform floods the zone on TV and social media. In short, the Tories are honing their game, but there’s a new game in town. Then there is May. Scotland, Wales and English metropolitan councils, including in London, will go to the polls. The elections are the closest thing Britain has to “mid-terms,” and while many areas are already Labour-controlled, Badenoch’s rivals will be watching closely. One former minister and current MP said: “The expectation is that May election results will be very bad … Tory MPs want to see an uptick in the poll performance or talk of a leadership challenge will persist. Her [party] conference speech was good and bought her more time, but clearly everyone realizes we can’t stay on 17 percent for the next three years.” The first Tory official quoted above was even blunter: “It’s ultimately froth. None of it is moving the polling needle, and that’s what we live or die by.”

BRUSSELS — The European Commission wants Google to break itself up. The U.S. search giant says no. Google has delivered its formal response to a landmark ad tech antitrust decision by the Commission, rejecting the watchdog’s prescription of an asset sale to address its competition concerns. The firm submitted a compliance proposal late Wednesday that includes a set of product and technical changes, including some to be rolled out within the year, that aim to open up its ad tech empire to rivals. The move comes on the final day of the deadline imposed by the Commission on Sept. 5, when it fined the Alphabet unit €2.95 billion for its conduct.  In its decision, the Commission concluded that Google’s abuse was a product of the “inherent conflict of interest” it has by owning such vast swaths of the infrastructure that powers online advertising. A spokesperson for the Commission confirmed in a statement that the EU executive had received Google’s proposal, and that it will now analyse the proposed measures. The search giant has proposed a series of immediate product changes, such as giving publishers greater pricing power, as well as longer-term fixes to increase the interoperability of its ad tech tools. “Our proposal fully addresses the EC’s decision without a disruptive break-up that would harm the thousands of European publishers and advertisers,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement. News publishers on both sides of the Atlantic have long lamented that they face few options other than Google to administer their ad-powered businesses, ultimately forcing up costs for the already struggling sector.  Those complaints crystallized in the early 2020s, when both the U.S. Department of Justice and the European Commission launched antitrust investigations into Google’s control over the plumbing of online advertising. When the Commission issued its final decision in September, it made the unprecedented move of stipulating that its concerns could only be resolved if Google ceded control of its market-leading ad tech tools. The measures proposed to Brussels by Google fall far short of the envisioned structural sell-off that both the Commission and its American counterpart envisioned as a solution to Google’s distortion of competition in the online advertising sector. They also largely echo the proposals Google submitted to the U.S. federal court overseeing the Trump administration’s ad tech case, where it, too, proposed a mix of behavioural fixes. Closing arguments in the U.S. trial will begin on Monday. In its statement, the Commission said it would analyze Google’s remedies against a yardstick of whether they end and address the conflicts of interest that Google’s ownership of the sellside, buyside and exchange infrastructure upon which digital ads are priced and placed. The Commission has never imposed structural remedies and faces a high legal bar for doing so, legal experts have told POLITICO.

LONDON — Donald Trump’s war against the media has gone international.  Britain’s public service broadcaster has until 10 p.m. U.K. time on Friday to retract a 2024 documentary that he claims did him “overwhelming financial and reputational harm” — or potentially face a $1 billion lawsuit (nearly £760 million). It’s the U.S. president’s first notable battle with a non-American media organization. The escalation from Trump comes as the BBC is already grappling with the double resignations this past weekend of two top executives, Director General Tim Davie and news CEO Deborah Turness, amid the growing furor sparked by the release last week of an internal ombudsman’s report criticizing the Trump program as well as the BBC’s coverage of the Gaza war. Trump told Fox News he believes he has “an obligation” to sue the corporation because “they defrauded the public” and “butchered” a speech he gave. POLITICO walks you through the possible road ahead — and the potential pitfalls on both sides of the Atlantic.  WHY IS TRUMP THREATENING TO SUE?  The U.S. president is objecting to the broadcaster’s reporting in a documentary that aired on Panorama, one of the BBC’s flagship current affairs shows, just days before the U.S. presidential election.  The program included footage from Trump’s speech ahead of the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot, which was selectively edited to suggest, incorrectly, that he told supporters: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you, and we fight. We fight like hell.”   But those lines were spoken almost an hour apart, and the documentary did not include a section where Trump called for supporters “to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”  “I really struggle to understand how we got to this place,” former BBC legal affairs correspondent Clive Coleman told POLITICO. “The first lesson almost you’re taught as a broadcast journalist is that you do not join two bits of footage together from different times in a way that will make the audience think that it is one piece of footage.” The U.S. president’s legal team claimed the edit on the footage was “false, defamatory, disparaging, and inflammatory” and caused him “to suffer overwhelming financial and reputational harm.”  BBC Chair Samir Shah apologized on Monday for the “error of judgment” in the edit. Trump’s lawyers said in their letter that they want a retraction, an apology and appropriate financial compensation — though their client’s subsequent comments suggest that may not satisfy him at this point. DO TRUMP’S CLAIMS STAND A CHANCE?  Trump’s lawyers indicated in their letter that he plans to sue in Florida, his home state, which has a two-year statute of limitations for defamation rather than the U.K.’s one-year limit — which has already passed.  The U.S. president is objecting to the broadcaster’s reporting in a documentary that aired on Panorama, one of the BBC’s flagship current affairs shows, just days before the U.S. presidential election. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images To even gain a hearing, the U.S. president would first need to prove the documentary was available there. The broadcaster confirmed the Panorama episode was not shown on the global feed of the BBC News Channel, while programs on iPlayer, the BBC’s catchup service, were only available in the U.K.  The Trump team’s letter to the BBC, however, claimed the clip was “widely disseminated throughout various digital mediums” reaching tens of millions of people worldwide — a key contention that would need to be considered by any judge deciding whether the case could be brought.  U.S. libel laws are tougher for claimants given that the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment guarantees the right to free speech. In U.S. courts, public figures claiming to have been defamed also have to show the accuser acted with “actual malice.”  The legal meaning doesn’t require animosity or dislike, but instead an intent to spread false information or some action in reckless disregard of the truth — a high burden of proof for Trump’s lawyers.  American libel standards tend to favor publishers more than those in Britain, so much so that in recent decades public figures angry about U.S. news reports have often opted to file suit in the U.K. That trend even prompted a 2010 U.S. law aimed at reining in so-called libel tourism. Yet Trump’s legal team is signaling it will argue that since the full video of Trump’s 2021 speech was widely available to the BBC, the editing itself amounted to reckless disregard and, therefore, actual malice.  BBC Chair Samir Shah apologized on Monday for the “error of judgment” in the edit. | Henry Nicholls/AFP via Getty Images “The BBC’s reckless disregard for the truth underscores the actual malice behind the decision to publish the wrongful content, given the plain falsity of the statements,” his lawyers wrote.  However, a court battle wouldn’t be without risks for Trump. Prateek Swaika, a U.K.-based partner with Boies Schiller Flexner, said pursuing litigation “could force detailed examination and disclosure in connection” with Trump’s Jan. 6 statements —  potentially creating “more reputational damage than the original edit.”  COULD THE BBC SETTLE?  Trump has a long history of threatening legal action, especially against the press, but has lately had success in reaching out-of-court agreements with media outlets — including, most notably, the U.S. broadcasters ABC and CBS.  Trump’s latest claim is the flipside of his $20 billion suit against CBS’s “60 Minutes” over an interview with then-Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, which Trump claimed was deceptively edited to make Harris look good and therefore amounted to election interference.  CBS settled for $16 million in July, paying into a fund for Trump’s presidential library or charitable causes, though the network admitted no wrongdoing. The settlement came as CBS’ parent company, Paramount, was pursuing a corporate merger that the Trump administration had the power to block — and after Trump publicly said he thought CBS should lose its broadcast license, which is also granted by the federal government. The president doesn’t hold that same sway over the BBC, though the organization does have some U.S.-based commercial operations. Some news organizations have also opted to fight rather than settle past Trump claims, including CNN, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Some news organizations have opted to fight rather than settle past Trump claims, including CNN, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. | Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images “Litigation is always a commercial decision and it’s a reputational decision,” said Coleman, suggesting settlement talks may look appealing compared to fighting a case that could “hang over the heads of the BBC for many, many years, like a dark cloud.”  COULD THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT STEP IN?  Despite the BBC’s standing as a state broadcaster, the Labour government has so far taken a hands-off approach, perhaps unsurprisingly given Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s ongoing efforts to woo Trump on trade. No. 10 said on Tuesday that the lawsuit threat was a matter for the BBC, though Starmer subsequently reiterated his support for it generally. “I believe in a strong and independent BBC,” Starmer said at prime minister’s questions Wednesday. “Some would rather the BBC didn’t exist … I’m not one of them.” Perhaps eager to stay in Trump’s good books, the PM’s ministers have also avoided attacking the president and instead walked a diplomatic tightrope by praising the BBC in more general terms. Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy on Tuesday reiterated the government’s vision of the BBC as a tool of soft power. The BBC documentary did not include a section where Trump called for supporters “to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.” | Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images “At a time when the line between fact and opinion, and between news and polemic, is being dangerously blurred, the BBC stands apart,” Nandy told MPs Tuesday. “It is a light on the hill for people here and across the world.”  WHO WOULD FUND ANY PAYOUT?  The BBC is funded by the country’s license fee, which requires any household that has a TV or uses BBC iPlayer to pay £174.50 a year (some people are exempt from paying). In the year ending March 2025, this accounted for £3.8 billion of the corporation’s overall £5.9 billion in income. The remaining £2 billion came from activities including commercial ventures. Any licence fee revenue that funded a settlement with Trump would likely go down very poorly as a political matter, given looming tax increases in the U.K. as well as the U.S. president’s significant unpopularity with British voters. The corporation lost a €100,000 (£88,000) libel case earlier this year against former Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams after a Dublin jury found the broadcaster falsely connected him to a 2006 Irish Republican Army killing, showing there is a precedent for politicians winning cases.  Responding to a question as to whether license fee payers would fund any legal sum, Starmer said Wednesday: “Where mistakes are made, they do need to get their house in order and the BBC must uphold the highest standards, be accountable and correct errors quickly.” Singer Cliff Richard also received £210,000 in damages and around £2 million in legal costs from the BBC in 2019 over a privacy case, though those payments were within the scope of its legal insurance. MIGHT AN ALTERNATIVE PAYMENT WORK?  The BBC has paid damages to a foreign head of state before, including compensating then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in 2019 for an incorrect report. But Trump technically faces rules on accepting foreign payments. There’s every chance that a settlement to Trump could pass through another vehicle, as the with the CBS agreement. ABC’s settlement involved $15 million to a Trump-related foundation alongside $1 million for his legal fees.  Trump’s former attorney Alan Dershowitz suggested just that on Tuesday, saying if the corporation made a “substantial” contribution to a charity “that’s relevant to the president might put this thing behind them.” 

A message from Brussels to Google: Would you break yourself up, please? The search giant faces an early November deadline to say how it intends to comply with a European Commission decision in September, which found that it had illegally maintained its grip on the infrastructure that powers online advertising. With a €2.95 billion fine in the rearview mirror, the Commission and Google find themselves in an unprecedented standoff as Brussels contemplates the once unthinkable: a structural sell-off of part of a U.S. company, preferably voluntary, but potentially forced if necessary. The situation is “very unusual,” said Anne Witt, a professor in competition law at EDHEC Business School in Lille, France. “Structural remedies are almost unprecedented at the EU level,” Witt added. “It’s really the sledgehammer.” In its September decision, the Commission took the “unusual and unprecedented step,” per Witt, to ask Google to design its own remedy — while signaling, if cautiously, that anything short of a sale of parts of its advertising technology business would fall foul of the EU antitrust enforcer. “It appears that the only way for Google to end its conflict of interest effectively is with a structural remedy, such as selling some part of its Adtech business,” Executive Vice President Teresa Ribera, the Commission’s competition chief, said at the time. As the clock counts down to the deadline for Google to tell the Commission what it intends to do, the possibility of a Brussels-ordered breakup of an American tech champion is unlikely to go unnoticed in Washington, even as the Donald Trump administration pursues its own case against the search giant. (Google accounts for 90 percent of the revenues of Alphabet, the $3.3 trillion technology holding company headquartered in Mountain View, California.) Executive Vice President Teresa Ribera, the Commission’s competition chief. | Thierry Monasse/Getty Images Google has said that it will appeal the Commission’s decision, which in its view requires changes that would hurt thousands of European businesses. “There’s nothing anticompetitive in providing services for ad buyers and sellers, and there are more alternatives to our services than ever before,” Lee-Anne Mulholland, its vice president and global head of regulatory affairs, wrote in a blog post in September. PARALLEL PROBES The proposal for a voluntary break up of Google marks the culmination of a decade of EU antitrust enforcement in digital markets in which “behavioral” fixes achieved little, and a unique alignment in both timing and substance between the U.S. and the EU of their parallel probes into the firm’s ad tech empire. “It would have been unthinkable 10 years ago that there would be a case in the U.S.  and a sister case in Europe that had a breakup as a potential outcome,” said Cori Crider, executive director of the Future of Tech Institute, which is advocating for a break-up. The Commission formally launched the investigation into Google’s ad tech stack in 2021, following a drumbeat of complaints from news organizations that had seen Google take control of the high-frequency exchanges where publishers and advertisers agree on the price and placement of online ads.  Google’s control of the exchanges, as well as infrastructure used by both sides of the market, was like allowing Goldman Sachs or Citibank to own the New York Stock Exchange, declared the U.S. Department of Justice in its lawsuit in 2023. It also created a situation in which cash-strapped news organizations on both sides of the Atlantic saw Google eating an increasing share of revenues from online advertising — and ultimately posing a threat to journalism itself. “This is not just any competition law case — this is about the future of journalism,” said Alexandra Geese, a German Green member of the European Parliament. “Publishers don’t have the revenue because they don’t get traffic on their websites, and then Google’s algorithm decides what information we see,” she said. The plight of publishers proved hefty on the other side of the Atlantic too. In April, the federal judge overseeing the U.S. government’s case against Google ruled that the search giant had illegally maintained its monopoly over parts of the ad tech market.   A spokesperson for the company said that the firm disagrees with the Commission’s charges. | Nurphoto via Getty Images The Virginia district court held a two-week trial on remedies in September. The Trump administration has advocated a sale of the exchanges and an unwinding of Google’s 2008 merger with DoubleClick, through which it came to dominate the online ad market. Judge Leonie Brinkema will hear the government’s closing arguments on Nov. 17 and is expected to issue her verdict in the coming months. STARS ALIGN Viewed by Google’s critics, it’s the ideal set of circumstances for the Commission to push for a muscular structural remedy. “If you cannot go for structural remedies now, when the U.S. is on the same page, then you’re unlikely to ever do it,” said Crider. The route to a breakup may, however, be both legally and politically more challenging. Despite the technical alignment, and a disenchantment with the impact that past fines and behavioral remedies have had, the Commission still faces a “big hurdle” when it comes to the legal test, should it not be satisfied with Google’s remedy offer, said Witt. The U.S. legal system is more conducive to ordering breakups, both as a matter of law — judges have a wide scope to remedy a harm to the market — and in tradition, said Witt, noting that the U.S. government’s lawsuits to break up Google and Meta are rooted in precedents that don’t exist in Europe. Caught in the middle is Google, which should file its proposed remedies within 60 days of being served notice of the Commission decision that was announced on Sept. 5. A spokesperson for the company said that the firm disagrees with the Commission’s charges, and therefore with the notion that structural remedies are necessary. The firm is expected to lodge its appeal in the coming days. While Google has floated asset sales to the Commission over the course of the antitrust investigation, only to be rebuffed by Brussels, the firm does not intend to divest the entirety of its ad tech stack, according to a person familiar with the matter who was granted anonymity due to the sensitivity of the case. Ultimately, what happens in Brussels may depend on what happens in the U.S. case. While a court-ordered divestiture of a chunk of Google’s ad tech business is conceivable, U.S. judges have shown themselves to be skeptical of structural remedies in recent months, said Lazar Radic, an assistant law professor at IE University in Madrid, who is affiliated with the big tech-friendly International Center for Law and Economics. “Behavioral alternatives are still on the table,” said Radic, of the U.S. case. The Commission will likely want to align itself with the U.S. should the Virginia court side with the Department of Justice, said Damien Geradin, legal counsel to the European Publishers Council — of which POLITICO parent Axel Springer is a member — that brought forward the case. Conversely, if the court opts for a weaker remedy than is being proposed, the Commission will be obliged to go further, he said. “This is the case where some structural remedies will be needed. I don’t think the [European Commission] can settle for less,” said Geradin.

GIULIANO DA EMPOLI, THE MODERN MACHIAVELLI An Italian-Swiss writer specializing in top-level power games and autocrats has become essential reading for Europe’s political elite, particularly Emmanuel Macron. By GIORGIO LEALI in Paris His name is Giuliano da Empoli, and in recent years his works have become some of the most fashionable reading for those in Europe’s halls of power. | Illustration by Natália Delgado/ POLITICO There’s an outsider among the small group of people following French President Emmanuel Macron in the narrow corridors of the United Nations and the lavish meeting rooms of the Riyadh Ritz Carlton. He is neither a bodyguard, nor an aide, nor a diplomat. He thinks of himself simply as a writer.  His name is Giuliano da Empoli, and in recent years his works have become some of the most fashionable reading for those in Europe’s halls of power. Just like notorious Florentine diplomat Niccolò Machiavelli, author of “The Prince,” da Empoli specializes in diagnosing the strongmen of his age. While for Machiavelli that meant studying the secrets of Cesare Borgia’s success, da Empoli has been exploring the world of Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman. His last two books focused on tyrants and autocrats, and presidents and ministers across Europe have gobbled them up in the hopes of surviving the increasingly dog-eat-dog world of geopolitics. Macron is on first-name terms with da Empoli and quotes him in his speeches. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen — who has spent much of this year sparring with Trump over his threats to Greenland — has a direct line to the phlegmatic Italian-Swiss national.  In an elegant parlor overlooking the garden at the Parisian headquarters of his publisher Gallimard, da Empoli admitted to POLITICO that, like Machiavelli, he likes to be “the one who is in the room, in the place where decisions are taken and things happen, but who stays a bit on the side.” Best-selling novel “Le Mage du Kremlin” by Giuliano da Empoli on sale in a book shop in Paris. | Sam Tarling/Getty Images While Machiavelli tailored “The Prince” as a guidebook on Realpolitik for Florentine statesman Lorenzo de’ Medici, da Empoli also views himself as providing advice to the leaders of his day, in return for access to top-level subject matter. “For me, it is a way to get material to feed my writing. For them, it is also a way to have a different perspective from that of professional advisers or the other people they speak to,” he said. Machiavelli and da Empoli admittedly had different reasons for picking up a pen. The Florentine wrote his masterpiece to try to win back favor and a political role with the Medici family, on whose orders he had been tortured. Da Empoli insisted he was happier as a writer, staying on the sidelines. Ironically enough, he said he was turned off by the cut-throat nature of politics he encountered in his earlier days. BRUSSELS IS NO PREDATOR In France, da Empoli mania is in full swing.  Companies, universities, lobby groups and think tanks are bending over backward to get him to speak at their events.  “He is a big headliner. Clients want us to book him as a guest for their annual events and seminars, especially given the current geopolitical uncertainties,” said a Paris-based strategy consultant who was granted anonymity to protect their relationship with clients. “But it is hard to get him, as his agenda is full for months.”  Macron brought him to the United Nations General Assembly in September last year, followed by a state visit to Canada. Last December he joined the French president on an official visit to Saudi Arabia, where he filled his notebook with ideas for his latest book — which the French president quoted in a speech to the army this summer. That book, “The Hour of the Predator,” was published in French in the spring and comes out in English next week. It explores the universe of Trump, Putin, Crown Prince Mohammed and Salvadorean President Nayib Bukele — the self-styled “world’s coolest dictator.” (There is not a single mention in this non-fiction work of the European Union’s institutions or their leaders — whom da Empoli considers to be the exact opposite of predators.) Giuliano da Empoli said he has no plans to exploit his fame for a return to front-line politics. | David Levenson/Getty Images Da Empoli argues these leaders owe much of their success to their ability to surprise adversaries with rash and sometimes ruthless decisions, like the killing and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The Saudi crown prince, da Empoli writes, is the type of leader who would have thrived in Machiavelli’s times. Da Empoli described him as the “reincarnation” of Italian cardinal Cesare Borgia — who, as Machiavelli wrote, killed his enemies after inviting them for dinner. “These Borgias are characters who move in a world without rules — or break the rules, producing political miracles,” da Empoli said. It’s a world in which rule-bound Brussels struggles to make the grade. “If there’s something that brings together Trump, Putin and tech lords … it’s that they all attack almost daily Brussels, its rules, the European integration process,” he said. “Having written a book entirely about predators, it is normal, natural, that Brussels doesn’t feature in it.” MACHIAVELLI’S NEIGHBOR Politics has been part of da Empoli’s life since childhood. His father, Antonio, was a top economist who advised socialist Prime Minister Bettino Craxi. In 1986 the elder da Empoli survived an attack by far-left terrorists when Giuliano was 12. That’s when he first learned that politics comes with an inevitable dose of violence — a theme he regularly returns to in his books. “Politics is the activity that must prevent us from killing each other, but for this very reason it also concentrates a great deal of violence within itself,” he said. Da Empoli had become a young progressive by his early 20s, but was academically intrigued by the success of center-right tycoon Silvio Berlusconi among young voters, who skewed left in the 1990s. “It seemed important to me to investigate the reasons of the success of the adversary — which, after all, is what I continued doing until today,” he said. So the young writer published his first book on the struggles of young Italians, in which he criticized the Italian left for seeking short-term consensus to the detriment of future generations. The book earned him lunch invitations and the friendship of former Italian President Francesco Cossiga, an eccentric Christian Democrat. And his ideas lined up neatly with the policies later championed by Matteo Renzi, whom da Empoli ended up working for. The young writer published his first book on the struggles of young Italians, in which he criticized the Italian left for seeking short-term consensus to the detriment of future generations. | Leonardo Cendamo/Getty Images Da Empoli started as Renzi’s adviser when the future prime minister was mayor of Florence. As Renzi’s deputy for culture, da Empoli’s office in the Palazzo Vecchio was next to the one Machiavelli had occupied when he was secretary of the Florentine Republic. He once said he even felt the famed author’s spirit floating there. During his years beside Renzi in Florence, da Empoli came to the conclusion that skilled politicians take too much pleasure from violence and betrayal, and that this wasn’t what he was looking for. So da Empoli progressively left front-line politics. He founded a think tank called Volta in 2016, published articles and wrote books on the rise of populist movements — including Italy’s 5Star Movement — and the role of the spin doctors behind them. Yet da Empoli continued to orbit the political world, developing a network of influential contacts from Macron to former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, never quite cutting the cord from politics completely. After years of shuttling between Italy and the French capital, in 2019 da Empoli decamped for Paris, where he was born, drawn by the country’s “intimate connection between literature and politics.” The French capital remains a place where authors and philosophers still enjoy fame on the level of rock stars and actors, and where politicians regularly try their hand at writing fiction. Macron, as a teenager, even dreamed of becoming an author.   Stuck in a silent, locked-down Paris during the coronavirus pandemic, da Empoli wrote “The Wizard of the Kremlin,” his first work of fiction. The book tells the story of an imaginary Russian spin doctor inspired by former Vladimir Putin adviser Vladislav Surkov.  He chose to write a novel because he thought a “subjective and perhaps less-rational” work would grant him greater creative freedom to explore the themes he was interested in.  The Wizard Of The Kremlin (Le Mage Du Kremlin) red carpet during the 82nd Venice International Film Festival on Aug. 31. | Earl Gibson III/Deadline via Getty Images It hit bookshelves on April 2022, a few weeks after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and quickly became a bestseller. Readers hungry to better understand Putin and the oligarchs in his inner circle lapped it up.  “The book gave a form of collective intelligence to events that in themselves seemed just brutal and violent,” said former French Culture Minister Aurélie Filippetti, a writer herself.  “I don’t know a single person in the [French] political world who has not read his books.” Da Empoli’s star is now brighter than it has ever been, even if the movie adaptation starring Jude Law (who plays Putin), Paul Dano and Alicia Vikander premiered to mixed reviews at the Venice Film Festival in August.  The author’s admirers say his success has much to do with his capacity to make complex topics easily digestible, often by skillfully mixing refined historical anecdotes with references to pop culture and TV series.  Like Machiavelli, da Empoli is not so interested in the morality of his subjects, but is rather focused on understanding what’s going on inside the minds of characters like Putin or Trump. And that’s a point he particularly cares about. “The common thread of my books is to try to enter in the head of the villains, of the adversary,” he adds. “It is more interesting than to simply stigmatize them.”

From the SWAP: A Secret History of the New Cold War by Drew Hinshaw and Joe Parkinson. Copyright © 2025 by Drew Hinshaw and Joe Parkinson. Published by Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. In the third week of March 2023, Vladimir Putin dialed onto a video call and reached for a winning tactic he had been honing since his first weeks as president. He approved the arrest of another American. By then, Russia’s president was running the world’s largest landmass from a series of elaborately constructed, identical conference rooms. As far as the CIA could tell, there were at least three of them across Russia, each custom-built and furnished to the exact same specifications, down to the precise positioning of a presidential pencil holder, engraved with a double-headed eagle, the state symbol tracing back five centuries, on the lacquered wooden desk. Neither the 10 perfectly sharpened pencils inside nor any other detail in the windowless rooms, with their beige-paneled walls and a decor of corporate efficiency, offered a clue to Putin’s true location. Russia’s president refused to use a cell phone and rarely used the internet. Instead, he conducted meetings through the glow of a large screen monitor, perched on a stand rolled in on wheels. The grim-faced officials flickering onto the screen, many of whom had spent decades in his close company, often were not aware from which of the country’s 11 time zones their commander in chief was calling. Putin’s staff sometimes announced he was leaving one city for another, then dispatched an empty motorcade to the airport and a decoy plane before he appeared on a videoconference, pretending to be somewhere he was not. From these Zoom-era bunkers, he had been governing a country at war, issuing orders to front-line commanders in Ukraine, and tightening restrictions at home. Engineers from the Presidential Communications Directorate had been sending truckloads of equipment across Russia to sustain the routine they called Special Comms, to encrypt the calls of “the boss.” The computers on his desks remained strictly air-gapped, or unconnected to the web. Some engineers joked nervously about the “information cocoon” the president was operating in. But even from this isolation, the president could still leverage an asymmetric advantage against the country his circle called their “main enemy.” One of the spy chiefs on the call was proposing an escalation against America. Tall, mustachioed, and unsmiling, Major General Vladislav Menschikov ranked among one of the siloviki, or “men of strength” from the security services who had risen in Putin’s slipstream. The president trusted him enough to run Russia’s nuclear bunkers and he played ice hockey with his deputies. Few people outside a small circle of Kremlinologists had heard of Menschikov, head of the First Service of the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the successor to the KGB. But everybody in America had watched the spectacular operation he had pulled off just a few months earlier. An elite spy agency under his command orchestrated the arrest of an American basketball champion, Brittney Griner. Hollywood stars and NBA legends including Steph Curry and LeBron James demanded President Joe Biden ensure her swift return, wearing “We Are BG” shirts on court. Menschikov helped oversee her exchange in a prisoner swap for Viktor Bout, an infamous Russian arms dealer nicknamed “the Merchant of Death,” serving 25 years in an Illinois penitentiary. This account is based on interviews with former and current Russian, U.S. and European intelligence officials, including those who have personally been on a video call with Putin, and the recollections of an officer in the Russian leader’s Presidential Communications Directorate, whose account of Putin’s conference call routine matched publicly available information. Those sources were granted anonymity to discuss the sensitive details of the president’s calls. Trading a notorious gunrunner for a basketball player was a stunning example of Russia’s advantage in “hostage diplomacy,” a form of statecraft that died with the Cold War only for Putin to resurrect it. In penal colonies across Russia, Menschikov’s subordinates were holding still more Americans, ready to swap for the right price. They included a former Marine, mistaken for an intelligence officer, who had come to Moscow for a wedding, and a high school history teacher whose students had included the CIA director’s daughter, caught in the airport carrying medical marijuana. Disappointingly, neither of their ordeals had yet to bring the desired offer from Washington. Menschikov’s proposal was to cross a threshold Moscow hadn’t breached since the Cold War and jail an American journalist for espionage. A young reporter from New Jersey — our Wall Street Journal colleague and friend Evan Gershkovich — was flying from Moscow to Yekaterinburg to report on the increased output of a local tank factory. If the operation went to plan, the reporter could be exchanged for the prisoner Putin referred to as “a patriot,” an FSB officer serving a life sentence in Germany for gunning down one of Russia’s enemies in front of a Berlin coffee shop called All You Need Is Love. The murderer had told the police nothing, not even his name. From the moment Putin gave his assent, a new round of the game of human poker would begin that would see a cavalcade of spies, diplomats and wannabe mediators including oligarchs, academy award-winning filmmakers and celebrities seek to help inch a trade towards fruition. The unlikely combination of Hillary Clinton and Tucker Carlson would both step in to advance talks, alongside the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and Rupert Murdoch, the media mogul who would wrestle with whether to fly to Moscow to personally petition Putin. All told, CIA officers would fly thousands of miles to orchestrate a deal that would come to encompass 24 prisoners. On the Russian side: hackers, smugglers, spies and Vadim Krasikov, the murderer Putin had set out to free were all released. In return, the U.S. and its allies were able to free dissidents, westerners serving draconian sentences, former Marine Paul Whelan, and journalists that included the Washington Post’s Vladimir Kara-Murza, Radio Free Europe’s Alsu Kurmasheva, and our newspaper’s Gershkovich. Looking back, what is remarkable is how well it all went for the autocrat in the Kremlin, who would manage to outplay his fifth U.S. president in a contest of taking and trading prisoners once plied by the KGB he joined in his youth. An adage goes that Russia, in the 21st century, has played a poor hand well. The unbelievable events that followed also raise the question of how much blind luck — and America’s own vulnerabilities — have favored the man in the “information cocoon.” The prisoner game continues even under President Donald Trump, who in his second term’s opening months conducted two swaps with Putin, then in May discussed the prospect of an even larger trade. It is a lesser-known item of the Russian president’s biography that he grabbed his first American bargaining chip just eight days after his March 2000 election, when the FSB arrested a former naval officer, Edmond Pope, on espionage charges. It took a phone call from Bill Clinton for the youthful Putin to pardon Pope, an act of swift clemency he would never repeat. Twenty-three years later, on the videoconference call with General Menschikov, Putin was in a far less accommodating mood. He wanted to force a trade to bring back the FSB hitman he privately called “the patriot” — he’d been so close to Krasikov, they’d fired rounds together on the shooting range. Some CIA analysts believed he was Putin’s personal bodyguard. In the previous months, before he approved Gershkovich’s arrest, three Russian spy chiefs asked the CIA if they could trade Krasikov, only to hear that rescuing a Russian assassin from a German jail was a delusional request of the United States. Days before the call, one of Putin’s aides phoned CIA Director Bill Burns and asked once more for good measure and was told, again, the entire idea was beyond the pale. Menschikov’s officers would test that point of principle. His men would arrest the reporter, once he arrived in Yekaterinburg. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- It was just after 1 p.m. in The Wall Street Journal’s small security office in New Jersey, and Gershkovich’s tracking app was no longer pinging. The small team of analysts monitoring signals from reporters deployed across the front lines of Ukraine and other global trouble spots had noticed his phone was offline, but there was no need to raise an immediate alarm. Yekaterinburg, where the Russia correspondent was reporting, was east of the Ural Mountains, a thousand miles from the artillery and missile barrages pummeling neighboring Ukraine. Journal staff regularly switched off their phones, slipped beyond the reach of cell service, or just ran out of battery. The security team made a note in the log. It was probably nothing. A text came in to the Journal’s security manager. “Have you been in touch with Evan?” The security manager had spent the day monitoring reporters near the Ukrainian front lines, or others in Kyiv who’d taken shelter during a missile bombardment. But he noticed Gershkovich had missed two check-ins and was ordering the New Jersey team to keep trying him. “Shit,” he texted back, then fired off a message to senior editors. The Journal’s headquarters in Midtown Manhattan looked out through a cold March sky onto Sixth Avenue. Within minutes, staff gathering in the 45-story News Corporation Building or dialing in from Europe were scrambling to reach contacts and piece together what was happening in Russia. The paper’s foreign correspondents with experience in Moscow were pivoting from finalizing stories to calling sources who could locate their colleague. One reached a taxi driver in Yekaterinburg and urged him to stop by the apartment where Gershkovich was staying. The chauffeur called back minutes later, saying he’d found only dark windows, the curtains still open. “Let’s hope for the best,” he said. Though there were still no news reports on Gershkovich’s disappearance nor official comment from Russia’s government, the data points suggested something had gone badly wrong. The Journal scheduled a call with the Russian ambassador in Washington but when the hour came was told, “He is unfortunately not available.” The problem reached the new editor- in-chief, Emma Tucker, who listened quietly before responding in a voice laced with dread. “I understand. Now what do we do?” Only eight weeks into the job — in a Manhattan apartment so new it was furnished with a only mattress on the floor — Tucker was still trying to understand the Journal’s global org chart, and had met Gershkovich just once, in the paper’s U.K. office. Now she was corralling editors, lawyersand foreign correspondents from Dubai to London onto conference calls to figure out how to find him. A Pulitzer Prize finalist and Russia specialist on her staff made a grim prediction. If the FSB had him, it wasn’t going to be a short ordeal: “He’s going to spend his 30s in prison.” And when editors finally located the Journal’s publisher to inform him of what was going on, they hoped it wasn’t an omen. Almar Latour was touring Robben Island, the prison off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa, where Nelson Mandela served 18 of his 27 years of incarceration. There was a reporter nobody mentioned, but whose face was engraved into a plaque on the newsroom wall. Latour had once sat next to Daniel “Danny” Pearl, the paper’s intrepid and gregarious South Asia correspondent. In 2002, the 38-year-old was lured into an interview that turned out to be his own abduction, and was beheaded on camera by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a mastermind of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 — leaving behind a pregnant wife and a newsroom left to report the murder of their friend. Paul Beckett, the Washington bureau chief and one of the last reporters to see Pearl alive, had thought of him immediately. He managed to get Secretary of State Antony Blinken on the phone. America’s top diplomat knew exactly who Evan was; just that morning he had emailed fellow administration officials the reporter’s latest front-page article, detailing how and where Western sanctions were exacting long-term damage on Russia’s economy. It was an example, Blinken told his office, of the great reporting still being done in Russia. “Terrible situation,” Blinken told Beckett, before adding a promise America would pay a steep price to keep: “We will get him back.” -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Biden White House’s first move after learning of Gershkovich’s arrest was to call the Kremlin — an attempt to bypass the FSB. The arrest of an American reporter was a major escalation and if National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan could reach Yuri Ushakov, Vladimir Putin’s top foreign policy specialist, Sullivan hoped he could convince Ushakov to step back from the brink. At best, he assessed his odds of success at 10 percent, but this was a crisis that seemed likely to either be resolved with a quick call or drag on for who knows how long, and at what cost. “We’ve got a big problem,” Sullivan told Ushakov. “We’ve got to resolve this.” The answer that came back was swift and unambiguous. “This is a legal process,” Ushakov said. There would be no presidential clemency — only a trial, and if Washington wanted a prisoner trade, they were going to have to arrange it through what the Russians called “the special channel.” In other words, the CIA would have to talk to the FSB. Sullivan hung up, and his team braced themselves to brief the Journal: the newspaper was going to need to be patient. The White House was trapped in a rigged game, facing the crude asymmetry between the U.S. and Russia, whose leader, in power for a quarter-century, could simply order foreigners plucked from their hotel rooms and sentenced to decades on spurious charges. Griner, the basketball champion, hadn’t even returned to the basketball court in the three months since her exchange for “the Merchant of Death,” yet already, the Russians had scooped up another high-profile chip. The CIA and its European allies had been quietly trying to fight back in this game of human poker. They had spent enormous energy tracking and rounding up the Russians Putin valued most: deep-cover spies, or “illegals,” who spent years building false lives undercover, taking on foreign mannerisms and tongues. Norwegian police, with U.S. help, had nabbed an agent for Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency, posing as a Brazilian arctic security professor in Norway’s far north. Poland had arrested a Spanish-Russian freelance journalist: His iCloud held the reports he’d filed for the GRU, on the women — dissidents and journalists — he’d wooed across Central and Eastern Europe. It had taken the spy service of the Alpine nation of Slovenia, known as Owl, nearly a year to find, then jail, a carefully hidden pair of married spies, pretending to be Argentines running an art gallery — sleeper agents working for Moscow’s SVR foreign intelligence agency. Not even their Buenos Aires-born children, who they spoke to in fluent Spanish, knew their parents’ true nationality or calling. Yet for all that work, none of these prisoners worked for the agency that mattered most in Russia and ran the “special channel” — the FSB. Putin himself had once run Russia’s primary intelligence agency, and now it was in the hands of his siloviki, the security men he’d known for decades who included Menschikov. There was, the CIA knew, only one prisoner the FSB wanted back: Krasikov, the FSB officer serving life in a German prison. America was stuck. Every stick it could beat Russia with was already being wielded. The world’s financial superpower was drowning Putin’s elite in sanctions, and almost every week Sullivan authorized another carefully designed shipment of weaponry to the battlegrounds of Ukraine, whose government complained bitterly it was being given just enough to perpetuate a war, not enough to win. And yet America’s government had to worry about the conflict tipping into a nuclear exchange. What else is there in our toolbag? Sullivan asked himself. We’re doing everything we can. But the game was rigged. Which is why Putin kept playing it.

Listen on * Spotify * Apple Music * Amazon Music Julia Ruhs und ihre Umsetzung des Formats “Klar” spaltet die Medienrepublik: Die Moderatorin wird nun vom Norddeutschen Rundfunk abgesägt und darf nur noch Ausgaben des Bayerischen Rundfunks gestalten. Der Streit um Ausgewogenheit, Migration und öffentlich-rechtliche Neutralität nimmt damit weiter Fahrt auf. Der Druck auf Europas Finanzen steigt: Die Ukraine braucht im kommenden Jahr vermutlich über 100 Milliarden Euro für den Krieg, während die USA sich zurückziehen. Hans von der Burchard analysiert die Verhandlungen der EU-Finanzminister über eingefrorene russische Assets jetzt am Wochenende und die Buchungstricks von Ursula von der Leyen. Im 200-Sekunden-Interview fordert Anton Hofreiter die sofortige Beschlagnahmung der Vermögen und kritisiert Friedrich Merz, der zwar klare Worte finde, aber zu wenig liefere. Zum Schluss: Ein Blick auf 10 Jahre POLITICO in Europa – gefeiert mit „The Party“ in Brüssel. Das Berlin Playbook als Podcast gibt es jeden Morgen ab 5 Uhr. Gordon Repinski und das POLITICO-Team liefern Politik zum Hören – kompakt, international, hintergründig. Für alle Hauptstadt-Profis: Der Berlin Playbook-Newsletter bietet jeden Morgen die wichtigsten Themen und Einordnungen. Jetzt kostenlos abonnieren. Mehr von Host und POLITICO Executive Editor Gordon Repinski: Instagram: @gordon.repinski | X: @GordonRepinski.

A U.S. federal judge on Tuesday refused to break up Google for monopolizing the online search and ad markets, and instead imposed lesser restrictions on the tech company’s day-to-day operations. District Judge Amit Mehta in Washington rejected the Justice Department’s request to force the $2.5 trillion company to spin off its Chrome browser and Android products. While Google dodged the most severe possible outcome, the judge ordered that the company must share some of its search data with competitors, a penalty that was still narrowed in scope from what the government asked for. Breaking up Google would have immediately made this the largest antitrust remedy in modern history, with the case drawing comparisons to the 1984 breakup of AT&T and the government’s failed bid to split Microsoft in the early 2000s. The decision offers a glimmer of hope for other tech companies facing potential breakups of their businesses, including Meta, Amazon and Apple. Mehta ruled last August that Google locked up 90 percent of the internet search market through a partnership with Apple to be the default search provider on its Safari web browser. Google had similar agreements with handset makers and mobile carriers like Samsung and Verizon. Mehta also found that Google illegally monopolized the market for ads displayed next to search results. That decision came after a 10-week bench trial, and set up what’s called a remedy trial, which took place in April. It was during that second trial that the Justice Department asked Mehta to break up the company to resolve its illegal monopoly. The case spanned two administrations, starting under President Donald Trump’s first term, going to trial under former President Joe Biden, and now Google has pledged to appeal in Trump’s second administration. Google also faces another remedy trial in September for maintaining what a federal judge ruled in April was an illegal monopoly in the almost $300 million U.S. market for digital ads. Judge Leonie Brinkema of the Eastern District of Virginia said Google maintained its monopoly by tying together its ad server business, used by online publishers to manage ad sales on their sites, and its ad exchange business, which auctions off digital advertising space on websites. Google claimed it won half the case and vowed to appeal the other half. Other major antitrust cases remain in the wings that could also drastically reshape the way the tech industry operates in America and across the globe. These cases and investigations come as lawmakers and regulators are worried about tech companies cornering the market for artificial intelligence in a similar fashion as what happened with e-commerce, social media and online search. Amazon is slated to go to trial in early 2027 over claims it squashes competition to rip off sellers and consumers while peddling a subpar shopping experience riddled with confusing advertisements. Apple faces claims its billions of iPhones sold since 2007 were designed to lock users into its products while raising costs for consumers, developers and artists, among others. Depositions and discovery in that case are scheduled through early 2027. And chipmaker Nvidia is the subject of a Justice Department investigation over its purchase of AI start-up Run:ai.

Federal agents searched the Maryland home of John Bolton, former national security adviser during President Donald Trump’s first administration, early Friday, according to two law enforcement officials. “The FBI is conducting court authorized activity in the area. There is no threat to public safety. We have no further comment,” a spokesperson for the FBI’s Washington Field Office said. A Department of Justice spokesperson declined to comment, but referenced Friday morning posts from FBI Director Kash Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi. “NO ONE is above the law… @FBI agents on mission,” Patel posted on X, to which Bondi replied: “America’s safety isn’t negotiable. Justice will be pursued. Always.” Bolton came under investigation in Trump’s first term over a tell-all book about his time as national security adviser, which officials said revealed classified government information. The Justice Department sued Bolton in 2020 in an attempt to block publication of the book. But a judge rejected that effort while also publicly faulting the former national security aide for proceeding without final sign-off from the government. DOJ also conducted a parallel criminal investigation into Bolton’s handling of classified information, but dropped the probe and the suit the following year, after President Joe Biden’s appointees took office. After his time in government, the former Trump adviser became an increasingly strident critic of Trump, attacking his foreign policy and national security moves. Bolton was among a group of former officials whose security details Trump revoked on the first day of his second term, despite active threats on Bolton’s life from Iran. A spokesperson and an attorney who represented Bolton in the earlier probe did not immediately respond to requests for comment Friday. Representatives of the publisher of Bolton’s 2020 book, Simon and Schuster, did not immediately return messages seeking comment. Eli Stokols contributed to this report.