Deep Dive
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And that's commercial break. Nice. Ooh, hear that? My neck cracked. So satisfying. Speaking of satisfying, I just used a Clorox toilet wand. Ooh, with the cleaner already in it. Yes. All in one. The brush just clicks on. Click. Then you swish, swish, swish. Ah. And pops right off into the trash. Just click. Swish. Pop. Clorox. Clean feels good. Clean feels good. Oh, we're back. Use as directed.
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Breaking up is hard to do times two. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty Carino.
Google has been ruled a monopoly not once, but twice. First in its search business and then its ad business. We're diving into the latest move by the Justice Department on today's Marketplace Tech Bytes Week in Review. Plus, OpenAI retreats from its pivot to profit after its plan to restructure the business hit some snags. And we say goodbye to the old school internet phone call platform Skype.
But back to that Google case. This week, the Department of Justice again pushed for breaking up part of the company's business. Officials want the tech giant to sell two of its ad tech products, which Google says would be nearly impossible. We spoke with Joanna Stern, senior personal technology columnist at The Wall Street Journal, to get her take.
It's very interesting also coming off of last week where we've been hearing arguments from Google about why they can't quite sell Chrome. And so a lot of this is now figuring out what parts of the companies could be broken off. I mean, one of the arguments that Google's making in this case is that it's technically not feasible to break these two things apart that the
code won't work, that these tools are so highly integrated. A similar argument, in a sense, was made around Chrome, that no other company could really support the technical infrastructure that Chrome needs to have, especially for just the cost of that and what company could come along and buy that. So these are obviously kind of
common arguments being made, right? It's too hard to do this. There's not, it's too much money. Technically it's too hard, but something's going to have to give somewhere.
All right. Well, I wanted to bring in this other development, which is also kind of in the whole big tech, you know, regulation space and having to do with Apple, which is being forced to stop collecting fees on purchases made outside its app stores. This is kind of the most popular.
recent development of this very, very longstanding Epic Games trial. A federal judge weighed in again because the allegation was that Apple was not complying with the previous judgment from 2021. Joanna, what's kind of the upside of this for consumers?
Yeah, I love this one because it does impact consumers so clearly. I mean, when you used to want to buy a Kindle book in the Kindle app on an iPad or iPhone, you would not really have an option to do it there, right? Because Amazon did not want to pay the fee to Apple. They did not want a cut of that. So they basically just said, you can only buy books through our website.
And Apple restricted that. They said, you can't do that. And so with this suit, Apple was told, you have to allow this. But what's revealed in this update and by the judge, who's very unhappy with Apple, is that Apple was making it hard again. They made it so people could send people to outside websites, but they were really throwing up a lot of roadblocks with something called a scare screen.
And what comes to light in the filing is that basically Apple had all these internal meetings about how can we scare people from going to the web. Back to Kindle, Amazon comes along this week and says, we're adding a buy this book button to their Kindle apps. And so you press that button and now you're going to be able to go out to a website to buy. So
If anyone is listening, I bet you've encountered this. If you're a Kindle user, I have for many years. And it takes away that friction. And so that's a win for consumers.
Well, now we want to go and check in on the darling of the AI industry, chat GPT maker OpenAI. This week, CEO Sam Altman announced they are retreating from this plan to transition into a fully for-profit company. We also got some news this week about appointing a CEO of Applications.
But, you know, OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit. It then created this capped profit arm to take investment from, you know, big investors like Microsoft. But that was still controlled by the nonprofit. The plan had been to shed that nonprofit control by the end of the year, but...
But that plan got a bit complicated. Folks like Elon Musk, Meta, you know, some civil society groups were objecting to this plan, often in court. Now this week, OpenAI says, forget that. The company is sticking with the nonprofit control. Joanna, what do you think is going on here?
I think what's been going on is that Sam Altman and the board of OpenAI have wanted to shift the company to a for-profit. That means they can just take much more money in funding, but they felt that pushback, probably didn't think it was worth it at this point. And I don't think this is the end of this, but this is what they're saying they're going to do right now.
I mean, and this nonprofit is, you know, the composition of it is pretty friendly to Sam Altman. This is kind of like a reconvened nonprofit board since the previous one tried to fire him in late 2023. So it's sort of not clear if it kind of changes the direction of the company that much, but
But being governed by a nonprofit, they do have a fiduciary duty to the public and not to investors, right? Right. And Altman made a pretty clear point to say that they're still going to be taking some investment, billions of dollars investment from SoftBank. So this is, to me, seems like they stay the course. But I think we'll be hearing about this again. Also, interestingly enough, this week,
Sam Altman announced that they are creating a new role, someone CEO of applications. This is the role. And that is going to be filled by someone named Fiji Simo, who is very well known in the tech industry, had a long career at Meta or previously Facebook, ran their ads and the Facebook app.
and now is the CEO of Instacart. And so I think this is actually a really big sign of where the company is going, that the company really does see itself as a consumer tech player. They need this sort of bigger position so Sam Altman can focus on, and he said in a post on X, he can focus on safety and compute and really building AGI and the big future of AI. She can worry about the business. We'll be right back.
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You're listening to Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty Carino. We're back with Joanna Stern, Senior Personal Technology Columnist at The Wall Street Journal. We wanted to take a moment to talk about
To say goodbye to Skype, Microsoft shut the platform down on Monday. Of course, you know, this was a very early mover in the video call space. It was launched in 2003. It was later acquired by eBay, which I didn't really realize. They didn't really do anything with it. They sold most of it off to private equity. And then Microsoft bought the platform in 2011.
I used it a ton, you know, when I was kind of, you know, traveling and studying abroad in that period of time. But Joanna, do you have any fond memories of Skype? Oh, I have so many fond memories of Skype. Fun fact about me is that my first job out of college was working on Skype. I was working at a PR agency that represented Skype. So I it
It really led to me wanting to become a technology journalist because I was starting to read a lot of the tech press. And this was the time, I mean, you mentioned it, like we didn't have video calling on our devices, right? I mean, this was revolutionary. And then we could make cheap phone calls. I mean, it really did start us this way to make cheap phone calls overseas, right?
And I was just like really into the tech and started reading a lot of the tech press and reading coverage of it. And so I just decided I want to be a technology journalist. So Skype kind of changed my life in a few ways. Wow. Amazing. I had no idea I was going to get an answer like that.
The last time I put money on my Skype account was in November 2020, according to my emails, which honestly was kind of past the prime of Skype. So I'm trying to remember what I was doing, but I think I must have been, you know, having some kind of an emergency situation where Zoom wasn't working because Zoom is what took over just before and during the pandemic, which was prime time for video calls, right? I mean, what happened to Skype?
I mean, that is what happened to Skype. I mean, well, first of all, I think it was, it was really...
impactful on being able to make those cheap overseas calls. Because if you remember when Skype first came around, we were using our cellular phones and cellular bills to call overseas were exorbitant, right? I mean, still can be if you don't have the right plan. And so that was like number one use case of Skype. And then two came along video calling. And I was just thinking about when I got my mom a webcam and she could use the webcam on her computer. And
But then think about like what happened with phones is that we don't think about video calling as some special thing anymore. We FaceTime all the time. And that's just part of the phone. And that's part of the system, the operating system. And so Skype had a hard time. And then it kind of failed to meet that Zoom moment, as you're talking about in the pandemic.
We're all at home and people start gravitating to Zoom for some really basic reasons that we can see bunches of boxes on the screens and it's easy to use. And Skype was kind of like this old thing that, oh yeah, remember Skype? And it took them a while to catch up. They started adding and Microsoft started prioritizing Microsoft Teams and here we are.
That was Joanna Stern at The Wall Street Journal. You can find the full video of this episode of Marketplace Tech Bytes Week in Review on our YouTube channel, Marketplace APM. And subscribe if you haven't already to watch us every Friday. Daniel Shin produced this episode. Jesus Alvarado also produces our show. Gary O'Keefe is our engineer. Daisy Palacios is the supervising producer. Kelly Silvera is our executive producer. I'm Megan McCarty Carino, and that's Marketplace Tech.
This is APM. Hi, I'm Morgan Sung, host of Close All Tabs from KQED, where every week we reveal how the online world collides with everyday life. You don't know what's true or not because you don't know if AI was involved in it. So my first reaction was, ha ha, this is so funny. And my next reaction was, wait a minute, I'm a journalist. Is this real? And I think we will see a Twitch streamer president, maybe within our lifetimes. You can find Close All Tabs wherever you listen to podcasts.