The purpose of the law is precisely to make Eric Schmidt say what he did. In general, the law can't hope to prevent undesirable conduct, but only create social norms that prevent undesirable conduct at scale. Laws against murder won't stop jealous lovers from killing spouses, but do stop people from turning murder into a business. They won't stop casual drug use, but do stop Wal-Mart from getting into the meth business. Etc.

You know, any user can probably use those tools in adsense (or is it adwords) to monitor how popular search terms are and make similar predictions.

If searches for X brand is way up one month then you might be able to predict that x band will have a good quarter.

The way I heard the story was that they decided that it would be evil, rather than illegal. But I think that might have been pre-Schmidt.

It's only illegal if that is based on data that is not publicly available, right?

So long as they used public information- why would it be illegal?

I once had an interesting discussion with a tech-savvy criminal attorney about whether security researchers could trade public equities using early indicators of compromise or private knowledge of 0-day (gained from outside the company, not under NDA). She thought about it a bit and said "The insider trading laws are so broad that if the US Attorney didn't like it they would make it illegal, and if you had talked to anybody about it they would go down for conspiracy."

My interactions with the criminal legal system as an expert witness since then have only reinforced my belief in Harry Silverglate's axiom that pretty much every US adult is merely an un-indicted Federal felon living their lives at the mercy of the thousands of AUSAs who could plunge them into a living hell.

And that is a problem, that we should solve.

They were talking about using information from the stream of search queries issuing from each company, as I remember the story. So they'd get advance knowledge of layoffs, diseases among key personnel, that kind of thing.