The US Will Not Break Up Meta - DTNSB 4997
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Today, Matteo Doni tells us about incabulators and more from your emails. I'm Tom Merritt. And I'm Rob Dunwood. Let's start with what you need to know with the big story. And it's not tariffs. They're later.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission's antitrust case against Meta began its arguments in court on Monday in Washington, D.C., in front of District Court Chief Judge James Boasberg. The FTC argues that Meta purchased Instagram and WhatsApp to eliminate competition and to assure a monopoly position in the social messaging space.

The agency intends to show evidence of a decline in quality of Meta's apps as a result. They're going to point to increased ads, weakened privacy. The agency is also going to rely on some emails that they got during discovery. There is one from CEO Mark Zuckerberg in particular that indicates that

that the intention in buying WhatsApp and Instagram was to reduce competition. That 2012 email in particular from Zuckerberg discusses the Instagram deal as a way to quote, neutralize a competitor.

So the FTC is going to say they bought these specifically to eliminate competition. These apps aren't as good as they could have been on their own. And Meta's apps altogether aren't as good because they don't feel competition anymore. Meta is going to argue the opposite, of course. They are going to say that despite any alleged intentions, whether they wrote in an email that they wanted to eliminate competition or not,

The company has faced significant competition from TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat, Apple messages, X, the list goes on.

Meta will also lean on the fact that the FTC did not challenge the deal for Instagram in 2012 or the deal for WhatsApp in 2014. So Meta is going to say, look, you all didn't have a problem with this when we first did it. Of course, that was under a different presidential administration. And we've faced plenty of competition. So even if we wanted to eliminate a competition, we didn't do it. A lot of the experts think that that's a pretty strong argument.

This case has now spanned three presidential terms. So lest you think that this is one particular president's ball of wax, it seems to have spanned across multiple administrations.

Of course, President Trump being the administration that started it and the administration that's currently prosecuting it. The FTC began its antitrust investigation into Meta in 2019, filed its lawsuit in December 2020. So after the 2020 election, but before the inauguration, the complaint was dismissed in June 2024 for insufficient evidence. But the judge gave instructions on how to meet the threshold in refiling and it

It was refiled under President Biden's administration. And on January 11th, the judge approved it for trial, saying the case was, quote, far more robust and detailed than before. So if you heard that this got dismissed, it didn't get dismissed because of a trial. It got dismissed because the filing didn't have enough stuff in it. The judge said, put more stuff in it. They put more stuff in it. They refiled. Now we got a case.

The trial is expected to last eight weeks. We're going to see Zuckerberg take the stand. We're going to see former COO Sandberg take the stand. Meta has been lobbying the government to drop the case so far.

Semaphore reports that FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson and the Department of Justice antitrust enforcement attorney have both met with the president to encourage him to let this case continue. And it is, for now, continuing. Rob, what do you think of this idea that Meta should be punished for acquiring WhatsApp and Instagram because they wanted to eliminate competition? I think two things could probably be true here.

I don't necessarily know that Meta said, you know what, let's go buy Instagram because if we buy Instagram, we're going to stamp out all the competition. I think they said, oh, Instagram looks cool. What is it going to take for us to build that? Oh, it'll take that. What will it take for us to buy it? Oh, it'll take that. OK, let's just go buy them because they thought it was cool tech.

The other thing that is true is that it seems like Meta and executives at Meta are incredibly careless about talking in things like email about competition and stuff like that as they are talking about buying these companies. So if you just say, you know, well, the words that they said really, really makes it look like they're trying to stamp out competition because they may have actually said those words in an email conversation.

I think there's maybe a bit more nuance to that. You know, I'm not standing for Facebook under any stretch of the imagination, but I do believe that in the case of Instagram, it was cool tech that they didn't have and they thought it would have been quicker and easier to just buy them than to create it. And definitely that was the case with WhatsApp.

Yeah, certainly. I mean, they already had Messenger and they have kept Messenger, even though they operate WhatsApp. Interestingly, the case for Meta having a monopoly position with WhatsApp would be stronger internationally. But this is a U.S. case. So we're just going to be talking about the U.S. and WhatsApp is not nearly as dominant in the messaging space in the United States.

This is going to turn on whether you can convince the judge that Meta not only has a dominant position, but is abusing that position. I think that's going to be a tough case to argue. I think you're going to be able to point to TikTok. You're going to be able to point to Snap, which actually Meta tried to buy at one point and Snap turned them down. But that kind of doesn't matter now. The fact that you've got competition out there for Instagram, the fact that WhatsApp is not dominant.

in the messaging space. Neither is Messenger, I think is going to work in Metasphere. Yeah, WhatsApp particularly. It's not dominant. I would venture to say that most Americans don't know what WhatsApp is. I mean, you know, us being into as tech as we are, clearly we know what WhatsApp is. We all use WhatsApp.

But most Americans probably have no idea. For them, it is SMS or iMessage is the thing that they know or Facebook Messenger or things like that. But WhatsApp is just – it is very, very – people are using it more. But it's pretty rare that Americans use it just because you never really had to. Yeah. And again, if they were to file this case somewhere else like Europe, they could make a bigger argument that WhatsApp is dominant. But this is a U.S. case, so –

My guess is we're going to get some really interesting emails. We're going to get some interesting stories, as we always do when big names like CEO Mark Zuckerberg have to take the stand. There's going to be a little bit of courtroom drama, maybe not TV-level drama, but a little bit of courtroom drama. And if you were to force me to place a bet, I would bet Meta wins this case.

Um, they win or they, they do some type of settlement to where it's just a rounding air for them. And as far as what they ultimately agree to, they won't agree to anything, but there may be some settlement to where maybe a couple hundred million dollars. And I'm saying that number lightly. I mean, that's a lot of money, but not to met him.

So that's where the politics of it comes in. Right. Which is the administration is currently friendlier to Zuckerberg than they have been in the past, but they're still pursuing this case. And maybe there's a deal to be made to settle out of court. Like you say, you know, we're met a fork over a good number of a big check. Right. It's a big check.

Maybe they agree to do some other things. I don't know what those would be. They certainly have changed a lot of policies recently that appear to be in order to mollify the current administration. So I almost feel like they played their cards already on that front. But I think you're smart to say look for some kind of deal out of court. I think that's a possibility as well.

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There's more we need to know today. Let's get to the briefs.

Samsung released a new phone and tablet with replaceable batteries, the rugged Galaxy X Cover 7 Pro and the Galaxy Tab Active 5 Pro. Both have removable backplates. These are meant for enterprise customers who need protection in the field. Feature-wise, the X Cover 7 Pro has object eraser, circle to search, and a

and a Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 chip, but it also has a brighter screen, a bigger battery, Pogo pins for charging, IP68 water and dust resistance, and military standard H10H certification for drops. That means it has the highest dust protection and can be submerged beyond one meter in depth. It can also work in extreme environments. The tablet has the same features as well as the ability to operate while plugged in without a

battery and the ability to hot swap batteries. The Xcover 7 Pro phone goes up for order on May 8th, and the tablet comes in early June. Pricing has yet to be announced. Samsung has also paused the worldwide rollout of One UI 7 after reports in South Korea that the update caused some Galaxy S24 users to be unable to unlock their phones.

Well, that's not good. Thankfully, the reports seem to be localized, but they pause the whole thing anyway. And get back to that, you know, replaceable batteries. That is a thing that there are a good number. They may be a small percentage of the overall market, but a good number of people who really want them.

I see a lot of people trying to convince their company to buy them one of these, whether they need the rugged phone or not, just to get that replaceable battery. I'm sure there'll be ways to get them as an individual or as well, but I'm going to guess they'll be pretty pricey.

Probably not terribly inexpensive on these devices because they know the company is going to be paying for them. But the removable battery, if you are out in the field doing stuff, just to be able to replace your battery without having to go and charge so that you don't have to come in or be without your device, that is a good thing.

Friday, the U.S. updated its guidelines to make clear that semiconductors and therefore many consumer electronics, smartphones, laptops, etc., are exempt from newly installed reciprocal tariffs. As with everything with this tariff thing, it's fast moving and it's confusing. So let's try to break it down as simply as possible.

Semiconductors are not subject to the 125% tariff on China or the remaining 10% blanket reciprocal tariffs on all nations. Those are the ones most recently announced.

However, semiconductors already were and still are subject to a 20% tariff that was implemented separately from the reciprocal tariffs earlier in the year. So it's not like semiconductors don't have tariffs. They just don't have the most recent round of tariffs.

Plus, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told ABC's This Week on Sunday that an investigation into the electronic supply chain is underway and semiconductors eventually will fall under their own tariffs. So not part of the reciprocal tariffs, but part of a

effort to reshore production of semiconductors into the United States. They expect that investigation to be complete in a few months. Lutnick said they're going to have a special focus type of tariff to make sure those projects get reshored. Lumber and pharmaceuticals are in a similar exempt status, but I think semiconductors are getting more of the attention. Well, Tom, there's nothing confusing about any of all this. Yeah.

There's a there's a lot of math that has to be done. I am I am hopeful that we are at least thinking deep, more deeply about how these tariffs are going to affect manufacturing, whether it be here or abroad and how we get stuff from here to there, from stuff from there to here. It looks like we're doing a little bit more thought experiments on this.

Step one, cause chaos and uncertainty. Step two, look for opportunities to gain an advantage. Step three, gain that advantage. That's my interpretation of what the plan seems to be right now.

Sony announced Sunday that it is again raising the price of some PS5 models in some markets. In Europe, the PS5 Digital Edition goes up 50 euros to 500 euros. It goes up 40 pounds. In the UK, to 430 pounds. In New Zealand, it goes up $90 to $860. And in Australia, it rises $100 to $750. The standard PS5 also got a price increase in Australia, up $30 to $830. And in New Zealand, up $50 to $950.

Sony also lowered the price of the Blu-ray drive and add on in all these markets. Sony last raised prices in multiple markets in 2022, including the UK, Europe and Australia. So, Tom, this is this is clearly an effect of tariffs going into place everywhere, you know, as far as what's happening here lately.

Is it? I wonder. The prices have been going up for stuff and they're not raising the price in the United States. Now, some people argue like they're trying to protect the price in the United States by raising it elsewhere. I wonder maybe I'm maybe I'm being a little tinfoil hat here. If Sony was like, yeah, the price of manufacturing the stuff is going up. There's some inflation to deal with.

let's use the cover of tariffs to implement this price increase we were going to do anyway. I was just going to rephrase my statement. This is happening because tariffs have just wreaked havoc on Earth.

This is our opportunity to charge more and we can give people a reason why. So I absolutely agree with you on that. Yeah, yeah. And as I'm always repeating, prices are not caused by cost. Prices are caused by what can you get people to pay. And the PS5 is in demand. So that's the other part of this is, hey, if people will pay it, we can charge more. And in the United States, they don't feel like people will pay more. So they're holding that price steady.

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman writes that Apple wants to beat meta to market with true augmented reality glasses that are lightweight and you can wear all day. Meta getting a lot of good reports about the Ray-Bans, but those aren't really augmented reality. They're not projecting anything into your field of view. Gurman's sources say Cook has made it Apple's top priority to do this.

A first step toward that may be a lighter version of the Apple Vision Pro that connects to the Mac and works as an external display. It's also still working on a lighter and less expensive standalone version of the Vision Pro as well. These glasses are really interesting. And Apple, they've got to get them small. It cannot be a headset. They have to be glasses. So if they can get to that, then maybe they'll be cool.

I think more and more people are starting to realize the benefit of having glasses as a display. It doesn't work in every situation, but certainly travel, it's something. So if Apple can get this to market ahead of Meta, I think that would be a big win.

NVIDIA said Monday it has commissioned more than 1 million square feet of manufacturing space in Arizona and Texas to build test chips. Also, production of Blackwell chips has begun at the TSMC Fab in Phoenix. NVIDIA also says it's building manufacturing plants with Foxconn in Texas and Wistron in Dallas. NVIDIA is partnering with Amcor and SPIL for packaging and testing in Arizona. NVIDIA says that in four years it expects to be producing half a trillion dollars worth of infrastructure in the U.S.,

The announcements come after NVIDIA received an exemption last week to continue to export its H20 chips to China. Well, that's a coincidence, isn't it? Half a trillion. These numbers that these companies are putting up, half a trillion? That's why I tend not to. I always want to put percentages, not dollar amounts, because once you get past, I don't know, $1,000, our minds don't really understand what that is. Half a trillion. What is that? That's like a shipping container full of dollar bills. I mean, that's a lot of money.

Here's a cool story about Google and dolphins. Google is working with the wild dolphin project, which has been underway since the mid eighties to decode dolphin speech. Dolphin Gemma is an open version of Google's Gemini models. It was trained on decades of WDPs recordings of Atlantic spotted dolphin sounds can use tokens to predict likely next dolphin sounds just the way large language models predict likely next words in human speech and

WDP has been using modified Pixel 6 phones in the field to create vocalizations and listen to replies while they're collecting data. And starting this summer, the devices will be upgraded to be based on the Pixel 9. Dolphin Gemma is going to be open sourced for all researchers to access starting later this summer as well.

This is a really cool use of AI. AI gets a bad rep for a lot of reasons. Some of them deserve. But this is one that just sounds cool. You can't go wrong with dolphins, can you?

Yeah, like trying to we're not only trying to understand dolphins with this, but also we'll be able to tell does their communication rise to the level of being considered a language? And if it does, does it have a grammar? Does it have syntax? There's nothing about the story I don't like. Very, very cool story.

Intel has agreed to sell a 51% stake in its programmable solutions group, which is made up of Altera, which Intel acquired in 2015. The new FPGA-filled programmable gateway company will be the majority owned by Silverlake Investing Group. Those are the essentials for today. Let's dive a little deeper into an ongoing story. Follow up.

Mateo from Tech Travels geek went down a rabbit hole for his April Fool's video on encabulators. The lore runs deep with this when Tom sat down to talk with Mateo about what he found. Mateo, thanks for joining us, man. Well, thank you for having me on the show. As a longtime listener watcher, it's always a pleasure to be on your favorite shows. And thanks for meeting up with me in Japan at the coffee shop where we got to talk about encabulators for the first time. That was fun, too.

Apologies if I ruined your holiday with this very heavy information. No, no, quite the opposite. You brought some mirth and joy into what was a good holiday, but it increased it by a little bit. So you did an April Fool's, an April 1st YouTube video about the history of encabulators, which, as I understand it, since this is not an April Fool's video, we can admit, is entirely fictional. There is no such thing?

Yes, there is no such thing as an encabulator. It's a running joke in the engineering world and has been since the 1940s when a student published a paper in an engineering journal about turboencabulators.

which are completely made up. They don't exist. And the idea is that the turboencabulator was an electromechanical machine with nonsensical, high engineering sounding terminology thrown in. And it's essentially perfect.

proves the fact that if you deliver information or technobabble in a confident way, you can confuse the listener and make them believe that it's a credible thing they have no idea exists and hope to learn something but have nothing to actually learn. It's one of those things that

similar to dropping a sentence in an engineering meeting about a flux capacitor and catching up those who have never been exposed to the backs of the future movies. I had heard about sky hooks, which have a similar but not so deep history, I don't think, as encabulators. So I was delighted when you told me about these. And it goes back 80 years. How did you become familiar with encabulators?

So I became familiar with this about 15 years ago. There's been a lot of engineering-focused companies or engineering companies who have used this for internal jokes or have used this to draw people's attention to the fact that using too much technical jargon, using too much in-language can be a negative thing.

And so, and mainly from the humor side, Rockwell Automation, which is a real company, did a video with one of the actors involved in the early renditions or engineering demos of encabulators on video. So Rockwell Automation's one is a two-minute video. You can find it on YouTube. It's their video about the turbo encabulator, or sorry, the retro encabulator, which is another one.

And it is just flat. It's a straight-faced presenter giving a technical demo and explanation about how this improves someone's life. We don't know who, but customer success is at the center of what they're doing. And there's two minutes of just techno babble, which is very, very believable.

And so throughout the years, obviously the encabulator or encabulation, which is the process of using an encabulator,

has been given lots of suffixes, so words at the front of it. So obviously it started off as a turboencabulator. There was then videos about the retroencabulator. More recently, three years ago, Tom Buck on YouTube did a video about the photoencabulator or specifically the deluxe photoencabulator. So it's a running joke in the tech world, specifically in the engineering world,

And one of those things that you hope will make the engineering people or the people who are in the industry realize that what they're seeing and is understandable between themselves is actually technobabble to anyone from the outside world.

Do we know how that first one got published at all? Like, how did it slip past the people who were supposed to stop that sort of thing from getting published? We don't know. Either everyone at the publication was part of the in-joke and let it through, or it just got through for some reason. It was 1944. I'm sure many people had other preoccupations in the UK at that time. Certainly.

I think that that sort of subtle humor is in the original paper, which I do admit I've read, and is full of beautiful language, which is still valid today. So if you had to speculate...

which you do in this case, how do you think it is that it stuck around for so long? Right. So it's not just that there was a paper in the 1940s and people still talk about it. It's that people continue to develop the idea and publish new things. Rockwell doing a video, YouTube videos. What, what makes it persist? Do you think? I think it's, it's partly a tradition thing. And because the engineering world may be,

or tends to

go for people with certain traits and certain focuses. When you're an engineer, you think very systems-wide or process, you're process-driven. And so something that actually fits in that space and becomes an in-joke becomes a constant reminder of what is the bigger picture and the fact that you're in a little bubble, you're solving problems constantly,

But to the outside world, it's like magic. Yeah. And to the outside world, they can't tell the difference between the real things you're saying and the encabulator thing. It's just one of those things. It helps give perspective, in my view, to the fact that often you are talking technobabble to everyone else. It's just the few insiders who understand it. And I think that

is the true purpose of it, or I think it should be nowadays, is to remind us engineers that we're so specialized and so into things that it means little or nothing to them. If, for example, I speak to my parents about the latest smartphones and their GQs, they have no idea what I'm talking about, much in the same way as if I'm

doing a five-minute video about encabulators, or in my case, AI encabulators, and how they're improving the travel industry in Asia. Yeah.

For those who got distracted while they were listening to this episode and don't know what an encabulator is, can you explain what the most recent innovations in encabulators are? Sure. So essentially, an encabulator or the original encabulator has a base plate of prefabulated amulite.

surmounted by a malleable logarithmic casing in such a way that the two main spurving bearings are in a direct line with the panometric fan. That's the sort of

of what an encabulator is. And obviously we've moved past the physical encabulator. We now have digital encabulators or as most recently SANS ICS, which is a cybersecurity company, they did a video about the hyperencabulator.

where they brought back the original actor-presenter from the 1990s video about the retro-encabulator to represent the latest innovations of the hyper-encabulator. And then Tom Buck obviously...

I did his video about photo encabulators on his photography-focused YouTube channel. I just thought I would do one about AI encabulators because AI as a suffix is great for anyone wanting to get people's attention nowadays, especially in the tech industry. Yeah, and it's good that encabulators have become AI because the tariffs on sparving bearings have recently gone up. Yes, absolutely.

But then again, we have reciprocal tariffs on semi-bovoid slots. So it's all good. No, it's a fair point. Before we let you go, I have to recommend everyone to go watch the AI Incubulator video. If they want to find it, where should they go?

Um, so youtube.com slash tech travel geeks, all one world. So tech travel geeks is my YouTube channel. It's my passion project where, uh, I cover consumer electronics, gadgets, accessories, even fashion. Anything I think makes the travel experience better because I love traveling and I love tech. And often tech, uh, is great. Much the same way as you use chat GPT whilst in Japan, using a smartphone, using a power bank, uh,

really does take away a lot of the friction people have whilst traveling, especially to places where there are different languages and different cultures. Yeah, fantastic. Mateo, thanks so much for talking with me today. I appreciate it, man. Great. Thanks for having me. Share your knowledge of encabulators with others in our Discord. We have a great Discord going on. You can join it by linking a Patreon account at patreon.com slash DTNS.

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Ah, really? Thanks, Capital One Bank guy. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com slash bank. Capital One N.A. Member FDIC. We in every episode of DT Nestle's Unshared Wisdom. Today, Marty is helping us understand.

Yeah, Marty says, hey, crew, you mentioned the 50th anniversary Microsoft story and then a few days later brought up Cursor, which is cool to hear. So I wanted to highlight those stories as somewhat related. I feel like this entire story needs DTNS level research, as I would be curious to hear what your thoughts on the situation are. When Microsoft launched their agent mode as part of the 50th event, what they didn't

announce is they also started blocking their extensions like the C++ extension from being used in VS Code forks like Cursor and also Windsor. Microsoft has always open sourced the IDE VS Code under an MIT license, but not the extension marketplace. What is tricky is that to use the IDE for a lot of functionality, you need to use their extensions.

Cursor has gotten around this for a while by allowing you to import extensions from VS Code and creating their own, what appears to be fork of the extension marketplace. But even their marketplace is being blocked now. Microsoft has also removed the ability to download the extension installers from their website as well, further preventing you from using any extension in VS Code forks.

Because of this, I canceled my cursor subscription and reluctantly moved back to VS Code because there are extensions I can no longer use or the ones I do are three plus months out of date as that's the last version that cursor can import. So things have already started to have compatibility issues.

Uh, he goes on to, to talk about like how many other people he wonders are running into the same thing. It seems like a lot more people are moving back to VS code and finishes with. So altogether, it feels like Microsoft is increasing pricing while locking out competitors. Maybe that's just how it feels on the surface, which is why I'm interested. If your team is interested in this topic, what your thoughts are. Any who thanks for reading. Happy to hear. It sounds like Tom had a good time in Japan. Thank you, Marty. Um,

It does appear that Microsoft has found a good way to say, yes, it's open, but we drew a line around extensions and we're going to use that to our advantage and are pressing that advantage. I don't know. I don't have a good sense of how much damage that would do to cursor, but it certainly is a pressure that Microsoft is using to get people to use Copilot instead of cursor. Yeah.

there's no question that they want more people to use Copilot. That is the answer. Copilot is the new thing. That's what Microsoft wants you to do. So if they can apply a bit of pressure in here, I believe it's just a bit of pressure, but if they can apply some pressure to get you to move over to their new stuff, I think they're exercising that muscle.

Yeah. It does not appear to have reduced the buzz around cursor. I still see lots of people enjoying it for, for all kinds of reasons. Uh, so, you know, it's always hard when you're in a bubble like that to understand like, well, just how wide is the same experience outside of my circle? Cause my circle seems to be experiencing the same way. So I'd, I'd ask people in the audience, uh, send us

some emails and let us know if you too are like, yeah, I'm seeing fewer people using Cursor or the opposite. Like, no, no, no. It's getting a lot of adoption from these kinds of users in this other kind of situation. Be curious about that. So once again, thanks to Marty for sending in this email. And we also would like to know what you're thinking about. If you've got some insights into a story, feel free to share it with us at feedback at dailytechnewsshow.com.

That's right. Big thanks to Mateo and Marty for contributing to today's show. Thank you for being along for Daily Tech News Show. The show is made possible by our patrons, patreon.com slash DTNS. Also, don't forget we have a new music show. Want to keep up on music news in less than five minutes? Check out dailymusicheadlines.com or tell a friend who's into music about it. Talk to you tomorrow. The DTNS Family of Podcasts.

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