Google opened its defense against allegations that it holds an illegal monopoly on online advertising technology Friday with witness testimony saying the industry is vastly more complex and competitive than portrayed by the federal government.

“The industry has been exceptionally fluid over the last 18 years,” said Scott Sheffer, a vice president for global partnerships at Google, the company’s first witness at its antitrust trial in federal court in Alexandria.

The Justice Department and a coalition of states contend that Google built and maintained an illegal monopoly over the technology that facilitates the buying and selling of online ads seen by consumers.

Google counters that the government’s case improperly focuses on a narrow type of online ads—essentially the rectangular ones that appear on the top and on the right-hand side of a webpage. In its opening statement, Google’s lawyers said the Supreme Court has warned judges against taking action when dealing with rapidly emerging technology like what Sheffer described because of the risk of error or unintended consequences.

Google says defining the market so narrowly ignores the competition it faces from social media companies, Amazon, streaming TV providers and others who offer advertisers the means to reach online consumers.

Justice Department lawyers called witnesses to testify for two weeks before resting their case Friday afternoon, detailing the ways that automated ad exchanges conduct auctions in a matter of milliseconds to determine which ads are placed in front of which consumers and how much they cost.

The department contends the auctions are finessed in subtle ways that benefit Google to the exclusion of would-be competitors and in ways that prevent publishers from making as much money as they otherwise could for selling their ad space.

It also says that Google’s technology, when used on all facets of an ad transaction, allows Google to keep 36 cents on the dollar of any particular ad purchase, billions of which occur every single day.

Executives at media companies like Gannett, which publishes U.S. Today, and News Corp., which owns the Wall Streel Journal and Fox News, have said that Google dominates the landscape with technology used by publishers to sell ad space as well as by advertisers looking to buy it. The products are tied together so publishers have to use Google’s technology if they want easy access to its large cache of advertisers.

The government said in its complaint filed last year that at a minimum Google should be forced to sell off the portion of its business that caters to publishers, to break up its dominance.

In his testimony Friday, Sheffer explained how Google’s tools have evolved over the years and how it vetted publishers and advertisers to guard against issues like malware and fraud.

The trial began Sept. 9, just a month after a judge in the District of Columbia declared Google’s core business, its ubiquitous search engine, an illegal monopoly. That trial is still ongoing to determine what remedies, if any, the judge may impose.

The ad technology at question in the Virginia case does not generate the same kind of revenue for Google as its search engine does, but is still believed to bring in tens of billions of dollars annually.

Overseas, regulators have also accused Google of anticompetitive conduct. But the company won a victory this week when a an EU court overturned a 1.49 billion euro ($1.66 billion) antitrust fine imposed five years ago that targeted a different segment of the company’s online advertising business.

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Using state-of-the-art energy efficiency technologies to renovate existing properties and construct new ones could enable Europe’s construction sector to almost eliminate its carbon emissions by 2060, a new study suggests.

Published in the journal Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, the research is the first to fully assess the potential for energy demand reduction across the construction sectors of the United Kingdom and all European Union member states.

It highlights that 75% of Europe’s building stock is currently classed as energy inefficient, with total floor space also projected to increase by more than 20% over the next three decades.

In spite of this, employing a combination of technologies including solar energy and heat pumps within both residential and non-residential properties could reduce the total energy used to heat and cool buildings by up to 97%.

With growing concerns over energy security, particularly in light of recent geopolitical events, the researchers say that harnessing such technologies could significantly reduce energy costs as well as enhancing people’s health and quality of life.

More broadly, they say, transitioning towards a net-zero building sector offers substantial potential to mitigate the impacts of climate change and play a pivotal role in meeting the targets set out in the Paris Agreement and other global climate goals.

The study’s lead author is Dr. Souran Chatterjee, Lecturer in Energy Transitions at the University of Plymouth, who said, “The building sector can play a pivotal role in mitigating the impacts of climate change. Our study unequivocally highlights the potential for reducing building energy demand, and the crucial role it can play in achieving climate neutrality targets right across the UK and Europe.

“Many of these demand-side actions in the building sector would also enhance well-being, having a positive impact on people’s health and productivity, and creating more jobs. It is important to understand that the more we delay, the more energy we will need to power our homes and workplaces over a longer period of time and that will hinder our ability to achieve climate targets.”

In addition to the University of Plymouth, the study also involved researchers at the Central European University, University of Szeged, and the Institute for Geological and Geochemical Research.

They used a mathematical model called the High-Efficiency Building (HEB) energy model to calculate the energy demand reduction potential—and the net-zero feasibility of the building sector—for the UK and each of the European Union Member States.

Among the calculations were that the energy required for cooling residential buildings across Europe could be reduced by up to 86% by 2050, while for non-residential properties the figure could be around 76%, if the sector aimed for its most ambitious net-zero targets.

This could be particularly beneficial in countries such as Italy, France, Greece and Spain where there is greater reliance on air conditioning as part of building projects.

For heating, aiming for the most ambitious targets could lead to a reduction in energy demand of more than 80% by 2050, and for hot water the energy demand could be reduced by around 50%.

Increasing the numbers of heat pumps and other on-site energy production within future residential developments could increase the demand savings for both heating and hot water to around 90%.

The study also showed that if comprehensive renovations and efficient constructions are not implemented, the total thermal energy demand of the building sector could increase by up to 7% by 2060.

For at least two years, CEOs have been trying to bring employees back to the office, citing remote work’s supposed negative effects on productivity, morale, and creative collaboration. Managers, we’re told, are having a hard time monitoring and motivating dispersed teams. But what if bringing employees back to the office won’t put the genie back in the bottle?

Kevin Rockmann, professor of management at the Donald G. Costello College of Business at George Mason University, argues that the furor over remote work masks deeper cultural issues at play in many organizations. This cultural malaise has employees pining for an imagined past where they felt grounded and connected with their colleagues. In short, remote workers aren’t unmanageable—they’re suffering from pangs of nostalgia.

Rockmann’s recently published research paper in the Journal of Management (co-authored by Jessica Methot of Rutgers University and Emily Rosado-Solomon of Babson University) documents the results of surveys conducted during the height of COVID (September 2020).

The thrice-daily surveys were delivered over a two-week period to 110 full-time professionals. Respondents were asked to report on their feelings of nostalgia, as well as emotional coping strategies, task performance, and counterproductive work behaviors (e.g. withholding support from colleagues and stealing time from their employer).

The overwhelming majority of participants (98 out of 110) admitted to experiencing nostalgia for life before COVID. And these feelings could have either positive or negative outcomes, depending on how the respondents dealt with them. Rockmann points to two pathways that showed up across the surveys as a whole, which he labels “approach” and “avoid.”

One way respondents reacted to nostalgia was to use so-called “cognitive change” strategies, which help regulate emotions through shifts in perspective. For example, someone feeling sad about being trapped at home during the pandemic could think to themselves, “It could be so much worse. At least I don’t have COVID like so many others.” These strategies seemed to evoke empathetic responses, leading the survey participants to reach out to colleagues to check in or offer assistance.

Equally prevalent in Rockmann’s results, however, was a much darker pathway. Instead of reaching out to others in response to nostalgia, respondents tended to turn inward in an attempt to minimize the emotional discomfort. Psychological researchers call this sort of reaction “attentional deployment.”

“It’s a defense mechanism whereby you don’t feel you have the means to really connect with others, so you leverage your attention away from the source of pain,” Rockmann explains. This pathway led to incidents of “acting out”—the above-mentioned counterproductive work behaviors.

Rockmann says these COVID-era findings remain relevant for at least two reasons. First, survey respondents’ written comments sound like they could have been written yesterday, rather than four years ago. Common nostalgic themes revolved around co-workers, the structure of co-located work, etc.—all oft-heard plaints of remote workers in 2024.

Second, the normalization of remote work well predated COVID—as Rockmann’s past research on the topic has documented. COVID accelerated an inevitable transition that was already well underway. Therefore, workers of a certain age would likely be feeling some nostalgia, even if there had never been a COVID pandemic.

How can organizations help employees conquer nostalgia, or at least encourage healthier ways of coping with nostalgia? The obvious answer might be what CEOs are trying to do—end remote work altogether.

“While return-to-office may make sense for some companies, I would emphasize that nostalgia cannot be fixed that way. Nostalgia is about longing for the past—or, more accurately, longing for a return to how we remember the past, usually through rose-colored lenses,” Rockmann says.

Any political demagogue will tell you that people are most susceptible to nostalgia when they feel isolated and afraid. The fact that nostalgia is so widespread in today’s workplace would seem to confirm Rockmann’s past research showing how organizational cultures fail to promote positive relationships among employees.

Combating the nostalgia epidemic will require a cultural reset for many organizations. “Managers will need to engage much more closely with employees, asking sensitive questions (e.g. ‘What do you miss about working here before COVID?’) and co-creating individualized solutions to help employees fully adjust to the major changes in their working environment,” Rockmann says.