IANAL, but a lot of the arguments in the DoJ lawsuit seem really weak. See https://appleinsider.com/artic... Clearly this case will test legal definitions and interpretations on antitrust and related law. Apple will not only hire the best talent to defend itself, but it will also seek to set precedents on the interpretation of antitrust law as matters of law. Thus I suspect the DoJ "bowl of spaghetti" will end up setting a lot of precedents in ways that a stronger, more focused action would not.

In both this case and the Apple antitrust case, it seems that the overwhelming popularity of a product gets turned into a call for government control when some decide they don't like the terms under which the product is provided. The idea that a product which gains a significant market share because of its value/utility should suddenly submit to a different set of rules to meet demands by its customers, or by those who sell on that platform to the platform's customers, sure strikes me as conceptually and legally strange.

But that's not what they did. And if you're developing software for virtualized server containers, 'physical inspection' would be a bit hard to argue.

I think you could argue it's capricious. If the job can be done on-site or remotely, but only on-site would be eligible for promotion, that could be argued as "unfair evaluation criteria" not related to actual job performance.

One possible argument would be 'unfairly changing promotion criteria to include irrelevant behaviors'. The plaintiff would have to prove to the jury that 'forced commuting to the office' is 'irrelevant', and that this change/new policy is "arbitrary and capricious".

I wonder if this could be challenged in state courts, particularly by an employee living in a state with strong labor protection laws.

I've argued for the last 10-15 years that ACM and IEEE should lead the way and go to open access models for their publications. They need to ween themselves from the addiction of publications as a revenue source. (Disclosure: I was an ACM SIG Officer for several years in the '80s and '90s, so I have an understanding of at least one SIG's finances.) Certainly there are costs that need to be accounted for, but I thought those could be managed through membership fees, sponsorship, possibly 'publication charges' for authors and their institutions, and efforts at cost avoidance through the publication program.

If you hold vendors legally liable for vulnerabilities in their software, no one will be willing to make software.
Why risk jail or financial ruin if something goes wrong?

That hasn't stopped people from making cars, airplanes, medical devices, prescription or non-prescription drugs, to name Just A Few industries... And to pick on Boeing, do you think it's A Good Thing that Boeing NOT be held liable for the safety problems in their aircraft? The MCAS problem was in large part a software problem.

You think other palces are immune?

No. I think the US system has MANY MORE POINTS OF FAILURE.

Why vendors should not be held legally liable for vulnerabilities in their software that enable such attacks?

And, of course, the US medical system once again shows the implicit problems with the complexity of the network of middlemen that "manage" heath care by adding overhead to the system to line their own pockets.

https://cacm.acm.org/magazines... Note the discussion on how they handle recursive structures, adopting an approach from Rust.

The guy Boeing fired as CEO, Dennis Muilenberg, had an engineering degree. That doesn't help if you're then trained to become a cost manager.

Designated Engineering Representatives had legal obligations to the FAA, so this was not just 'employees signing off'. I don't know why FAA abandoned this system, which worked well for a long time. (I'm sure Boeing told the FAA all kinds of "costs too much" stories.)

Until Boeing does a top-to-bottom reset of its culture, shuffling executives who came up and were successful in the "financial focused" Boeing of the last 20 years will just result in a new set of people to blame for a new set of failures.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... A long resume as a lawyer, much of it in technology, but it's not clear to me he learned to code.