How Apple lost control of the App Store
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Hello and welcome to VergeCast, the flagship podcast about being right, esoteric legal opinions, four and a half years later after you wrote that blog post. It's a niche, but it's ours. I mean, honestly, what else is it? You bid your time, and finally, finally. It took a long time, but I can say, we can all say, it's a flagship podcast of people who can say, I wrote this blog post four years ago, and I was right.

That's true. That's where you want to be in life. And I welcome our tiny but dedicated community. Our competitor podcast in this field, as you know, our week. Yeah, we're going to win this Webby next year for sure. I'm your friend, Eli. That's David Pierce. Hello. Jake Kastrakis is here. Hey, good to be here. Obviously, what we're talking about is the big Apple ruling that came down this week. Apple was found in contempt of court, referred for criminal proceedings because an Apple executive lied in court under oath.

I was joking with a big tech executive today that sometimes I think we founded the verge 13 and a half years ago to cover this story. Like we just needed to be here because Apple got in trouble for lying about the difference between a button and a link and how much those should cost. And the vert, the verge was just lying in wait to be like, yep,

Buttons and links. That's what we do here. I had the exact same experience reading the ruling. We're going to talk a lot about this, but I had this distinct moment of being like, oh, where do the buttons go is the verge. That's the whole question we are here to answer is where do the buttons go? Yeah. There's a line in there that says a better design button would make the market more competitive. And I was like, well, we did it. That's the verge cast. Like, I don't know what to tell you.

That's our whole show. That's all we ever talk about. So we're going to talk about that at length. All of us have been covering that story every inch of that story for a long time. So we can talk about that. Meta is still in trial. It's antitrust trials ongoing. David was at the Google trial where Sundar Pichai was on the stand this week.

We'll talk about Brendan. We always talk about Brendan. He lurks. He looms over the ecosystem. But first, I want to start with a party speaker update. A party speaker update? A very important party speaker update. Party speaker capitalism is in the running to become the newest podcast within a podcast. So as you all know, it is our belief that the market for gigantic Bluetooth party speakers with LED lights in the drivers is bigger than anyone can comprehend.

It's right in front of you, but it's so big you can't see it. Just like the party speaker. It's a worldwide phenomenon. It is driving the whole tech industry, and no one wants to talk about it. It's shoved under the rug, and we talk about it here on the Birchcast. We're five generations into these things. The market is demanding them. People are providing them over and over again. They're getting bigger. They're getting bolder. So we've asked people to send us these party speakers in the wild. It's like cryptids. Have you seen Bigfoot?

I will say a lot of people send us photos of the speakers in the box in the store. I appreciate you. I love that you see a speaker and you think of us. It makes me happy. That's not what we want. That's not in the wild. You know what I mean? That's in captivity. It's constrained. The speaker zoo, as we call Best Buy. I want to see what's really happening. I want to see what this market really looks like. So we've gotten a million pictures of speakers in stores, but that's not quite it. I appreciate you, but that's not it.

We've gotten a second million set of photos of speakers at kids' baseball and softball games. Yes, those are very good. Those qualify. These are the primary market, from what I can tell. Walk-on music for 12-year-olds who are about to just hit a dinger. That's what party speakers are for. Everyone's very happy about this. Great. I would like to understand what is going on in Europe based on the imagery we have received from our listeners in Europe.

So Daniel sent in a picture of two people riding a scooter, like one of those bird scooters. The person in front is sitting on what appears to be a three foot party speaker with his hands on the handlebars. And then there's a person standing on the back on the brake and they're just cruising. This might be the coolest picture I've ever seen in my life. It is one of the most European pictures I've ever seen in my entire life. We'll run it. We'll put smiley faces over the faces. The whole thing. If you watch it on YouTube, you can see the photo. Um,

We'll put it in the container post on the website. Everybody looks really cool. Daniel says he thinks that the speaker is on, the lights are on. He took the photo from his car. I appreciate you having the wherewithal to be in your car, see this, pull out your phone, snap a photo, think of us and send us the photo. Yeah, there's a little motion blur in here. Like something's happening. That's what you want.

Like if you run a tech podcast, you want people to see this and be like, I need, I need to send this in. That's the kind of citizen journalism we're looking for. Um, Daniel says he thinks it was on because the lights were on, but he was in a car so he can hear it. And then he said, and then he says, somehow it's not the first speaker on scooter I've seen in Oslo either. So there's a hot new trend in Norway.

where people are putting speakers on the scooters and cruising around with the speaker as a chair. I love it. I love it. Just send us more photos of that. Is it possible that portable stool that plays music is an underrated feature of the party speaker? I don't know.

I just say this, it's a, it's a cryptid, right? It's everywhere. It's nowhere. No one can see it. There's no research. The great analysts of our time are not writing party speaker notes to CNBC. You know, like we have to do this together ourselves.

Otherwise, no one will understand it. Okay, so that's one. Again, I don't know what's going on in Europe. And then there's even more European speaker activity. Fabio writes us. Fabio sent us a video. He says, I'm writing you from Milan, Italy, where I realized I have witnessed the largest concentration of party speakers outside a U.S. Navy ship for weeks without realizing it.

Yesterday, as I was walking through the Porta Vencia subway station, I think that's how I pronounce it, I saw LEDs lighting up a kid-sized party speaker and realized I was the right person in the right situation to send you an email that would fill your heart with joy. I love you, Fabio. You were right, Fabio. It did. The subway station there in Porta Vencia is the ideal place for people of all ages, genders, nationalities, and passive lives to gather and train their dance moves.

What each of these groups had in common was party speakers blasting music in the echoing hall, all different songs, different genres of music. I'm saying there were four plus speakers, but only because I managed to film four speakers. But believe me, there were more. And then he sent us a video of competing groups of European teenagers, like practicing dances in the subway station with different speakers. And they're all kind of next to each other.

This suggests a possibility that I had not even considered until just now, which is a party speaker arms race. Oh, yeah. That is the party speakers. The only way to outdo someone else's extremely portable party speaker is with a larger, extremely portable power speaker with more bass and more lights. More lights. And this is how...

Like the way Apple gets you from a MacBook Air to a fully kitted out MacBook Pro, you just you got to go up the line or you're going to get bested on a party speaker. So wait until you're the next one. So I said last week my dream because we had heard that the U.S. military has a lot of party speakers in it. And I said, can someone please send me a picture of a party speaker next to a fighter jet? Preferably taking off. I will say I requested taking off at dusk.

But we got the next best thing. Jason, who is a literal fighter pilot who listens to the show. Thank you very much, Jason.

It says, I can confirm that the U.S. Navy is a target population for the party speaker market. I am a pilot in a U.S. Navy F-18 squadron, and our sailors love the big party speakers for providing something to listen to while working in the hangar while shoreside or in the hangar bay of an aircraft carrier when deployed. They can't wear AirPods while working. They need to maintain clear ears, and the work environment can be loud, so you need speakers to pump out a good amount of volume.

Anything that has lights added cool factor. The Navy units don't own purchase them. Our sailors do it on their own dime to make work a bit more pleasant. It is not uncommon to have dueling party speakers playing very different music separated by 100 feet. It is chaos for the ears, but it helps with morale. And he sent us a photo of a party speaker next to an F-18, which rules. And he actually gave us the model number of the speaker. It is an Edison PSL 800. I love it.

This is like maybe the best photo we've ever gotten at the Burj. It really is. It's very good. And I also, I like this because...

You can sort of imagine the meeting at Sony and all these other companies where they were like, should we should we make it so that you can like use a bunch of them sort of together? Like you can you can chain them together via Bluetooth or whatever. And somebody's like, who in the hell is going to put more than one of these in a room? Look at the size of this thing. Why would you need more than one? And the Navy's like, listen, guys, I need six of these all at once. So a lot of them can do like or a cast and actually be chained together.

Like this is a part of like a mesh audio standard that exists. Everyone's very, they've all done the bad thing, which is they took the standard and they named it their own thing. So you don't know, but it's actually the same called a broadcast. And so you can't chain like a hundred speakers together with just a standard that exists that all the companies support. But that's good. But that's not what we're seeing.

We're seeing groups of competing teams playing different music on different speakers right next to each other. Groups of sailors doing fighter jet maintenance playing different songs and different speakers right next to each other.

This is like the end result of I'm listening to my own TikTok on the subway. But now with like, this is your arms race. We're all listening to everyone's TikTok on the subway. I love it. I love it. All of you, thank you for emailing us. Even the people who send us pictures of the speakers in Walmart. This is an escalation. You got to send us even better pictures and videos of party speakers in the wild. We have to figure this out as a community.

There's no market intelligence on party speakers. If there is, it's like locked away in the Sony vaults. We're going to bring it out. We're going to bring this to light. The media is not talking about this. The mainstream media could never. Do you see this in the New York Times? You turn on CNN at night. Are they showing you pictures of fighter jets with party speakers? Edison PSL 80s? 800s? Whatever. They're not talking about this.

I love it. Thank you all so much for sending this stuff. We want to see more of it. It is very funny to me. And I love that we're doing this little project together. All right. We should talk about Apple. It's a big one. Middle of the night filing from Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, the judge in the case Epic versus Apple. That case filed in 2020. Big trial. Epic said Apple had a monopoly over its own devices, which is very disappointing.

It's a very big argument to make in 2020 that you have to rewind your brain. This is the beginning of the modern tech antitrust era.

All this stuff hadn't happened. The idea that Meta and Google and Apple would all be facing federal lawsuits about having monopolies was not on the table in 2020 when Epic filed this case. Epic also picked this fight very specifically and very aggressively. It dropped the 1984 commercial. It did a thing with payments inside of Fortnite designed to get kicked out of this. Antitrust moved slowly, and this case has taken place.

five years. Uh, but Epic has pushed harder and more aggressively and more like with more spectacle than anybody else in this entire whole realm of antitrust fights. Yeah. And it, it, it, it, against Google, it, it has won in like substantial ways against Apple. You know, it's really interesting is again, it was, it was so early that I think the judge in that case looked at Epic's arguments. It,

looked at the standards, the sort of like 1980s antitrust standards that we had. Again, 2020, pre-Lena Khan at the FTC, right? This is the Trump administration, this case was filed under. So we hadn't had this big conversation about changing antitrust standards and whether Ronald Reagan was bad. All this stuff that created the conditions that we're in now. This is before all that. So I think the judge looked at all of that and said, well, I'm not going to be the first judge in this case to accept

this pretty big idea that Apple has a monopoly over its own devices in this specific way. Like, no, I'm not, it's just like not going to happen. But I have all this evidence that the app store is bad and that Apple restricts competition on the app store. And I'm sitting in California and there's a California unfair competition law. And I'm going to say under this California unfair competition law, which is very broadly construed, Apple has to stop prohibiting developers from even saying that

you can buy digital services and digital products elsewhere for a cheaper price. Because at the time, Apple prohibited Netflix and Spotify and Epic and anyone else from even saying this subscription is $3 cheaper if you do it on our website. You couldn't even say you can also subscribe on our website. You couldn't even have a link to your website. In the Apple ecosystem, the broader internet did not exist and was not allowed to exist.

And that was the thing Epic won on, right? Like it lost on some of its bigger swings. But like we all spent a lot of time in those years talking about the phrase anti-steering provisions. And that became the thing here. Well, so, you know, there's this narrative. I could argue this either way. But there's this narrative that Apple won most of the case and Epic only won this small thing. And anti-steering was the whole thing. It was the whole thing.

What Epic really wanted was to put the Epic game store on iOS and control its own store. But you only want to do that if what you're mad about are Apple's rules for its store. Sure. And what is the biggest rule? The biggest rule is the Apple tax. Like far and away, the biggest rule is that to put a button to buy anything in your app, you have to pay Apple 30 or 15 or whatever percentage structure it worked out to by now.

And if you get rid of that rule, the incentives for wanting your own store kind of fall, right? You've solved the problem. The only reason you want another store is to have lower rates. Or in the case of the alternative stores we're seeing in Europe, to do apps that Apple otherwise wouldn't let you do. Emulators and porn apps and stuff like that. But for the vast majority of developers, all they really cared about was I can't do purchases in this app without paying Apple a fee.

like netflix doesn't care you can look to europe like we haven't seen that much change we have which may might be because apple's rules are so strict over there still but how many uh you know brand new ideas for apps or models for apps are we seeing over there that couldn't exist in the app store right apple is just like here's emulators well so the number one model was emulators and the instant that happened apple changed its rules to put emulators in the store

And so you see like competition leads to results. But my point is the whole game here was always anti-steering. It was always letting developers say you can transact for cheaper somewhere else. And Apple lost. It just lost. And so in the realest way, the biggest part of the problem was being dealt with by the court. And I think this judge, again, remind your brain to that period in time, was looking at the landscape of antitrust policy and antitrust law and saying, yeah, I can't just like

change the law before it's time. She just wasn't going to do it. That's not how district courts work. Maybe courts of appeals do that. Maybe the Supreme Court does that. They love doing that. But the sort of district court judge in Apple versus Epic wasn't going to say, you know what? This Lena Kahn's a real firecracker. It just wasn't going to happen. So Apple lost in this state court claim. They litigated tonight's circuit. They lost. They asked the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court said, no, Dice, this is done. And then I think Apple didn't take it seriously.

And they, Jake wrote the entire narrative, which we should talk about. They did played all these games to fake compliance with this ruling because they weren't taking it seriously. And I got caught, like caught in the worst way possible.

And now the judge is like, actually, we're not just doing my small anti-steering rule. We're doing the big one. Like you're not allowed to do anything because you've delayed for so long. You've made the harm worse. So now it's a free for all app developers can do anything they want effective immediately to do transactions in their apps. No more fees. And you have no choice. And she says, it's worth reading this entire opinion full because it is full of bombs. She's at the end. She says, this is an injunction, not a negotiation.

So it's like, this is over. I do think, I think the narrative here is important. And Jake, I know you wrote this through and you should kind of give us the timeline because I think, I think saying Apple didn't take it seriously actually lets Apple off the hook a little bit. I think Apple, Apple,

basically got this ruling and had two years worth of meetings about how to give two middle fingers to this ruling and to continue to get what it wants and to essentially like we talked about it on the show as malicious compliance. Like this was the most malicious possible version of compliance to the point where Judge Gonzalez-Rogers decided, actually, this isn't compliance at all. You have gone out of your way to not comply with this order while looking like you're complying with this order and in fact, lying to the court about how you're not complying with this order.

not complying with this order. But Jake, you ran down the timeline here. Can you just give us like the short version of it? Yeah. And the judge is pissed. Like she sees through all of it and is furious about how it went down. Yeah. I think Apple has for a really long time operated in this environment where it can kind of just, you know,

Control whatever it wants and do things how it wants to. Nobody's really on them. They make some tweaks around the edges and say, sorry, see you later. And they got this ruling. And, you know, back in 2021, they're

And it was, it was, it felt pretty narrow and it was kind of open-ended. It was just right. You have to allow links and buttons. You have to allow them to go to the web. You can still charge if you want to. You just have to do it in a reasonable way.

And so Apple sat down and they went, okay, how are we going to comply with this? And they kept looking at options. And basically each time they would look at something, as the judge kind of paints the picture, they often had this sort of like Goldilocks array, right? There was the, hey, let's do the great version of this where developers love it and it really hurts us. Let's do the middle option where we do a little bit of restriction, or let's just go all out and make sure that devs don't get too much here and we protect our

our profit um and so you know first they they go okay what what percentage cut do we want to take on the web should we do no cut should we do a little something should we do something else they're like no no we should do uh we should do it we should take a cut what cut should it be um some you know uh phil schiller's like i don't think we should do a cut at all um tim tim cook goes yeah 20 27 let's do 27 how do they get to 27 they just invent it um

You know, how should these links and buttons look? Should they be rich buttons that are clearly buttons? No, they should be text links because we don't want to look ugly. Should there be a screen to notify you that you're going out to the web? Oh, we should make sure it's a big, giant pop-up that takes over the whole screen. And so every single time the judge looks at this and goes, they internally discussed options that were not so bad.

And then they chose the worst option. And I think there's this thing that happened where they had some leeway. They could have put some restrictions in place. They could have done a fee. They could have done a big pop-up. But I think when they chose the worst option every time, the judge just goes, sorry, all you've done is maintain the status quo. I said that this is anti-competitive.

You can't just continue to be anti-competitive. That's exactly what the injunction says to do. And when she gets to the end of this, she's just like utterly put out and just saying, I don't think there's any reasonable world in which Apple believed it was actually complying with the injunction I put down. So there's another turn to this. The anger is doubled, tripled, quadrupled.

Because there was a first hearing about compliance and Apple showed up and lied to the judge and said, we commissioned this report that says, here's how much value we provide. And this is why it's these rates. And they had an executive, a VP of finance, come on in and say all these words about when the decisions were made. And the judge didn't buy it in the room at that time. And she sent them away and she ordered document production. She got all their emails and all their slacks, all their meeting notes. And so we're going to have another hearing.

to find out what you were doing in real time to see if what you are saying to me is true. And so all of the stuff that we have, Jake wrote it through. It is just a story. The judge wrote a story in her opinion. And we just, Jake just translated it from legalese to like human. It's just a story about Apple having these meetings backed up by notes,

At moments, Apple engineers and PMs and designers are literally discussing how to make the language scarier because the execs will like it better. Like that is a literal phrase that we have from their slacks. And then an Apple executive showed up in court and tried to argue that in design terms, scary doesn't mean what you think it does. Yeah, it's a term of art. Judge Rogers is like, no, it's not. This is all designers are like, scary it up a little bit. Yeah.

Yeah, people say that all the time. Jake, what did the judge say? Strains incredulity or something? Oh, she said it strains common sense. Just like, like, absolutely. Like, come on. I cannot believe you are lying about scary having a specialized meaning.

Like you wanted to be a scary message. They kept adding scarier language. At the end of it, Tim Cook looked at it and was like, we need to add some more. Like they all just wanted this. We're talking about the full screen pop up that appears when you click a web link that that is this big warning that you're leaving that leaving the app. It's like.

They had an option that was just a little pop-up that said, hey, you're opening Safari. And they're like, no, like giant paragraph of text. Yeah. Yeah. And just, Nilay, to finish what you were just saying, the thing that they discovered after getting all of this documentation was that this study that Apple had commissioned basically saying, here's why we're worth 30% that they said they then made all of their decisions about actually came at the end of all of this process where Apple had spent months and years trying

debating what to do here and then gave themselves data at the end to justify all the decisions they had already made. And then showed up in court and lied about it. Well, and this was a particularly big deal because the last time around, the judge had said, hey, okay, you can charge a commission for stuff outside the app store. It just has to be based on something. And so in this ruling, she's going,

What is this based on? You had the opportunity to value your technology, to figure out what it was worth, and you just didn't do any of that. You decided on a number and then worked back to get up to that number. And that was a big out. I think she even calls it an out in the ruling. This is a big out for Apple, right? It's not everyone gets to put their buttons in and not pay you any money. It's we understand, the court understands that you spend a lot of money developing iOS and the iPhone. Right.

App developers, it's fair to expect them to pay you for that work in some way.

Figure it out, figure out the formula that's fair so that developers can make good decisions. And there it feels like they're participating in a market and Apple picked a bunch of numbers that basically made it impossible for developers to leave an app purchasing right inside of 30, they picked 27%. And every developer it's in this record as well says, well, Stripe is going to cost us more than 3%. Yep. So this is just not worth it to us. And Josh says, well, that's just not right. Like you just picked a number and.

because it sounded good. And you know that developers aren't going to leave. Like, here's all this evidence with these executives talking about how developers won't leave. The only person, by the way, who comes off looking good in this entire sequence of events, Phil Schiller. Phil Schiller. Yeah. Kudos to Phil, who was the one saying we should not take commissions and fees. You know, Phil ran the app store for years. I think he's still, you know, he has like some emeritus role at Apple now. I think he still plays a very active role in the app store. He's the one who talks to developers.

Like he is the face of that organization to developers. He, I, you know, he used to work with Steve jobs very closely. I think he was there in like the power book years when Apple was not a behemoth. I think he knows what it's like to be the underdog and need those developers to do what you want them to do instead of punishing them to do what you want them to do, which is what you can do when you're very powerful. And at every turn, he's like, well, what if we do the right thing? And Luca Mastri, Apple CFO is like,

What if we just charge them all the money we can? And Tim Cook is picking the finance team. Literally, the words Cook chose poorly are in this decision. And look, we have a lot of people listening to us. We're not interpreting the decision. This is the judge saying it as clearly as she can. This is over. I have made these findings a fact. This is what happened. And this is what Apple has to do now. No more excuses.

Actually, at the very end, I think the last line of the ruling is there will not be another bite at the apple, which you can just see her just hit and return at the end of that one. I mean, bang. Take it out of the typewriter. But yeah, there's something there where, look, I mean, these are big businesses. They have to print a bunch of money.

Apple stock price affects things like firefighter pensions in this country. Like these are massive load bearing pillars of the American economy. They have a lot of people that they are beholden to, but you can just see that they picked the finances over the product over and over again. And if they had just figured out a way to make in-app purchases worth more to developers than leaving the ecosystem, they pro developers I think would have picked in-app purchases.

Every single time. It's just easier. And they didn't. They instead, they punished the ability to compete. Right. I mean, that's what we've been hearing from developers for years, right? And that's what Apple knew when it went from 30 to 27%, right? Is even if it was a reasonable financial gain for those developers, which it wasn't because of like payment processing fees, the convenience kills it, right? Like the most people I have talked to over the years have always said,

I'm happy to play by the platform rules as a tiebreaker just because it's simpler. It makes building my app simpler. It's easier for users who have to click fewer buttons to subscribe. When it works financially, it is the better option. And so if Apple had just found a way to make itself a tiebreaker, it would have won. And instead, it way overshot. And so Judge Gonzalez-Rogers just basically blew the whole thing up. Yeah. So just to sum up her ruling, it's just

Literally, she says to summarize the court found that Apple's 30% commission allowed it to reap super competitive operating margins was not tied to the value of its intellectual property and was less anti-competitive. Apple's response was to charge a 27% commission again, tied to nothing on off that purchases where it had previously charged nothing and extend the commission for a period of seven days after the consumer had left the app. So if you left the app in a link and then bought something on that website, seven days later, you still owed Apple money, which is nuts.

Apple's goal was to maintain its anti-competitive revenue stream. The court prohibited Apple from denying developers the ability to communicate with and direct consumers to other purchasing mechanisms. Apple's response was to impose new barriers and new requirements to increase friction and increase breakage rates with full-page scare screens, static URLs, and generic statements. The goal was to dissuade customer usage of alternative purchasing opportunities and maintain its anti-competitive revenue stream.

In the end, Apple sought to maintain a revenue stream worth billions in direct defiance of the court's injunction. This is bad. That's just bad. And again, this is not, Apple says it will appeal, but this is not going to be the same kind of appeal. But in the meantime, also the other thing is, and this is the flip side of what happened before, is Apple did nothing for a long time because they didn't have to. Now it has to do something. Like the thing that is going to change is,

quickly is that developers are going to start updating their apps with loud, aggressive ways for you to pay for the app outside of the app store because they can now. Like even under the provisions before, there were all kinds of wacky things, right? You could have one link. It wasn't allowed to be in the normal in-app purchase flow. It had to be somewhere else in the app, which was like, it was all design. It was just shenanigans all the way down. And now,

By the rules of this ruling, I can open up my app and the very first thing it shows me is a link to go subscribe somewhere on the web. I can't pay in a button in the app is the one difference, right? Like it's still, it can send me to a website that takes Apple Pay, but it can't take Apple Pay right there. We're going to find out because this is what I was saying about being right four years ago. Four years ago, the injunction was Apple can't prohibit developers from using buttons and external links.

The difference between a button and an external link exists only in our shared metaphysical reality. Right. We all just decide that as a family, what the difference between those two things are. And like in this ruling, there are literal pictures of buttons and links that the court thinks are competitive and aren't competitive. And Apple every time says,

chooses the least competitive one. It defines button all the way down to a piece of plain text with a little, you know, that little box with the arrow. That's a button indicates you're about to go. They're like, that's the, that's a button. You can have that button. And the court's like, that's not a button. And Apple's like, isn't it though? And that's where we're at. Right. And so my headline four years ago is the future of the app store depends on the difference between a button and a link.

Like Apple pushed back on that hard. They're like, we, everyone knows. And then for four years, it's spent time trying to convince the court that these shitty, but these shitty links were actually buttons. This is a real thing that happened in our nation's court system. And the judge eventually got tired of this and said, not, and now, uh,

She said, look, we're not arguing on buttons and links anymore. Here's what I'm saying. To make up for all of your bad behavior, you are no longer allowed to impose any commission or any fee on purchases that consumers make outside an app. And that means you have no reason to audit, monitor, track, or require developers to report any purchases or any activities that consumers make outside the app. So Apple had this ability before.

But they acted badly. So the course is, nope, that's gone. I'm just taking it off the table. They're no longer, Apple's no longer allowed to restrict or condition developer style language formatting, quantity flow, or placement of links for purchases outside an app.

So anything, any quality of a link is now off the table. Those two things right there are the whole ballgame. It's the game. That's the app store. That is Apple going from what it wanted to the 180 degree, not what it wanted. Like this is the worst case Apple scenario. Apple also prohibited from prohibiting or limiting the use of buttons or other calls to action or otherwise conditioning the content style language formatting float or placement of these devices for purchases outside an app. So you can style the buttons any way you want now.

So now the difference between a button and link doesn't matter. You can style them both any way you want. She had a different bullet for links and buttons. She knows what she's doing. George Rush has figured this out. I say this as a virtual. They are not allowed to exclude categories and developers and apps from obtaining the link provisions, which they were going to do, right? They were going to say games in particular had to keep paying the money.

All those Candy Crush whales are about to get a 30% discount. They are not allowed to interfere with the consumer's choice to proceed in or out of an app by anything other than a neutral message apprising users they're going to a third-party site. So no more scary language. And they're not allowed to restrict a developer's use of dynamic links that bring customers to a specific product page in a logged-in state rather than just requiring static links that make customers have to log in again. Again, this is very Vergy, right?

Apple was saying you can only have static links, so you couldn't carry login tokens through the links. So you would land on Netflix.com, but it wouldn't know that you were logged into the Netflix app. You have to log in again to get your discount. Apple knows this is friction. So the judge says, no, I'm all the way to mandating the use of dynamically generated links in apps so developers can pass login states.

This is the ballgame. To your point, David, this is the whole game. Apple lost its revenue stream in the App Store. In-app purchase revenue is going to go down. If they'd played ball, they could have maintained a healthy chunk of it. One thing that I don't know if anybody has looked at in like 15 years or however long the App Store has existed, what does it actually look like for Apple to compete with web purchases? What does it do? What changes now?

If they have to contend with this. I mean, I can think of a million things just off the top of my head. If you buy everything in the App Store or the Apple system, you have a catalog in one place of everything that you bought. You have a catalog of every subscription that you have. You can cancel those subscriptions. You can manage your purchases. Maybe you can transfer purchases to someone else because there's a shared centrally maintained database of who owns what.

You don't need a blockchain for that if you just trust Tim Cook to run that database. There's a million things you can do if you are the central transaction provider that Apple has not had to do or not even been pushed to do because you can't buy anything anywhere else. And so the only thing you can offer outside is it's a little bit cheaper, then you're terrified of that. But if you say to customers, protect your purchase by buying it with Apple, it will cost a dollar more, but here's all these services you get for that dollar. Maybe that'll work.

It's also easier. You don't have to do anything else. You just push this button. But they haven't had to have these ideas. Right. I mean, the other thing I think is going to be interesting here is we're going to see a lot of different ideas about how to solve some of this friction. I mean, it's not...

It's not ironic that the simplest way to pay for things on the web is Apple Pay. And in many ways, what is going to happen here is people are going to punt from a thing that gives Apple a huge commission to a thing that gives Apple a small commission. And that's fine. But we're also seeing pretty quickly, any company that collects payments is going to try to find a very quick way to

To collect payments on the web for your app subscription like this, this is going to become a really interesting competitive business like Stripe is out here already promoting stuff that it's doing. Patreon has big ideas about what it's going to do like the the.

quick internet transaction market has never had to be interesting in this space because there hasn't been a reason to do it. And so not only is Apple going to have to figure out how to compete, all these other companies are going to have a chance to figure out how to compete. And I think that to me is where a lot of this stuff gets super interesting. It's like Netflix is just going to want me to input my credit card number, right? But in a fair fight against in-app purchases, it's

where they are now at the same price because they can be because Netflix doesn't have to pay 30%. There's actually fascinating competition to see who can give me the most to be the one where I put in my credit card details. The thing that gets me at that, which I was not expecting this outcome, I knew there would be a fight about buttons and links. I just want to point this out. Yeah, we're all very proud of you, Eli. I'm very proud. If you're not proud of yourself, you don't love yourself, you know? No one else can love you back. Is that true?

Let's go down that rabbit hole for a while. Should we talk about this for a minute? Is that just a Coldplay lyric? I'm not 100% sure. All right. It's a weird time in America. I'm coursing with emotions.

This outcome from our standpoint as consumers is the best outcome because instead of we will force the app store to compete head up against an entire other app store with different rules and weirdo experiences and all this other stuff you're worried about, it's actually just everything's going to get cheaper in the same app store that you love today.

That Apple going to solve this so long ago, like that it's nuts that we're talking about like alt store in Europe and how Epic might do Epic game store. And we are having these pitched antitrust battles and you got to get all the way to like,

Can you construct a legal argument using the existing consumer welfare standard to prove that Apple has a monopoly on its own platform? And at the end of the day, they just screwed it up and they got to the result that I think most developers wanted, which is we're still going to rely on the App Store for discovery, for distribution, for

And now we can just collect more margin from the things people buy in our apps with alternative payments. Or there's another version of the upside here, which is now all of a sudden there's a stuff that if you're a developer, you can put into the app store as in-app purchases if this forces Apple to...

be more competitive on that front too, right? Like step one is everybody just goes and buys stuff elsewhere. But like the best case scenario is there is a step two where Apple is forced by that to be more competitive and play ball with in-app purchases so that you can start to do things like

buy Kindle books in the app store again. And they're like, we've talked a lot over the years on this show about all the kinds of things that you can't do in the app store because it's not a 30% margin business. And things like things like books and audio books are like right there on that. And so we've made the experience awful. And so if this works and becomes actually competitive, then

It actually turns back towards making the App Store version of everything better. I'm not counting on that because Apple will appeal to death before it allows that to happen. But like the tie here should be good for both sides and ultimately for however you want to use the app, it should be better.

when these fees start to fall apart. I'm glad that you have a good and kind heart because you went to people will buy art and culture more easily. And I went to, oh, fuck, the NFTs are coming. What can't you buy in an app right now? You know what definitely isn't a 30% business or NFT? There's 30% of nothing is what? So we'll see what happens. There's that. But I do think we're going to see a new kind of competition here.

Yeah, it's good. And the joy in the developer community is unreal. I mean, it truly is like we've just gotten an outpouring. And Jake, I think you've seen more of these than I have even over the last several hours as this has been happening of just the grand enthusiasm from people who are like, oh, my God, finally, the day has come. We can play in the App Store again.

Yeah, developers are usually pretty wary about criticizing Apple. And here, everybody's just like, got it, let's go. We're ready. We've been waiting for this. Like, we have the product ready. We're submitting it. Like, people are ready to go. There was one, Ryan Jones, who's the developer of an app called Flady that I really like. It's, I always follow Flady because they're,

always at the forefront of like interesting Apple features. Like whenever Apple releases anything, Flighty is there. Cool. Great job, Flighty. And Ryan Jones, who runs the app, tweeted, so what's going to happen starting tomorrow, apps in the US will have save 20% with Apple Pay type buttons right next to normal buttons or better yet, only have the link out button on the paywall. Apple specifically cannot limit anything about the button.

That's something I had not even thought of, that people might just bypass the idea of in-app purchases entirely. And when you hit the subscribe button, it might just take you to the web, which is a thing everyone is familiar with. And suddenly, so like, not only do I have to compete with in-app purchases, I might be able to do away with them entirely. Yeah. And then you're still completing it in the Apple ecosystem with Apple Pay for a much lower fee. Right. The thing that I think is going to be really fascinating is if developers do this quickly enough,

and everything gets cheaper or more competitive or more vibrant, there's all this excitement in developer community. And then Apple appeals and starts fighting to put the genie back in the bottle. It still might not matter if they win. Because you can't be like, well, we won this court case. So everybody stop it. Go make your app worse. Yeah.

Like we will have run the A-B test. They like that 30%. Look, Todd Hazleton this morning woke up and was like, I got to write this down. Like the amount of pressure on Apple is out of control right now.

So we'll link that piece too. It's really good, but he just listed them. He's like, okay, tariffs, tariffs are going to increase the costs of every product. And Apple has to figure out how to work that into its margin. The Google search remedies case, which we'll talk about in a second here might just take $20 billion off of Apple's bottom line. And that's pure margin. Google just pays Apple $20 billion to be the default. Yeah. They might just go away. That's the, that's one of the very real results of the case that is ongoing. Yeah.

And then the entire part of the business that's growing is services. Every quarter now, it's services that's growing. It's not Apple TVs and MacBooks. It's not the iPhone. It's not the iPad. It's services. What services? They don't want to say it. They want you to think of severance. It's not severance. It's Candy Crush Whales. Yep. Apple's entire business has been taking 30% of Candy Crush Whales, and that's been growing for years.

And so you're going to take that too now. So you're going to lose the $20 billion from Google. You're going to lose the Candy Crush whale money. You're going to increase the margin pressure because of tariffs. Wow, that whole business has changed. By the end of this year, all of the fundamentals of Apple's business will be flipped. And then what's the next turn that everyone's talking about, whether you believe it or not? It's AI, AI, AI. Well, they had to delay their AI project. This company is suddenly real shaky. And that's not to say the iPhone's bad.

The thing that they do is really good. It is still like the centerpiece of the modern tech economy, but you're just like, wow, all of the pieces of this puzzle just got real frayed around the edges. Like what's going to happen? How do they recover from this? And I'm, I'm hopeful that there's smart, creative, really interesting people who work at Apple.

that they are finally forced to be creative and invent the next turn, as opposed to figuring out more and more ways to extract dollars from the iPhone. Yeah, I mean, it is funny to watch this sort of rhyme with the Google trial, in that if you sort of boil it all the way down, like Apple found its version of Google search in the 30% commission, which is just essentially a perpetual money machine, right? It is, if you want to exist in the world,

you have to give us money. That's what Google did with the internet and that's what Apple did with mobile, right? And boy, did it work gangbusters. But eventually, if you get someone who is willing to peel that apart, it becomes really hard to put back together. And like Google is furiously fighting to not have happened to it. Essentially, what just happened to Apple, which is a judge says, absolutely not. You just can't do this thing anymore. I am curious if Apple, you know,

Still tries to pull something here. The judge put some pretty strict limits on things, but Apple explored some other options, right? They were like, hey, we could charge people based on how many downloads their apps get. That's one of the things that they pulled in Europe. But they're not allowed to do it anymore. They can't condition links on that. They could just charge people. That would totally upend the App Store model. Yeah, I think if you're Apple...

that's pretty dangerous. You're probably fearing this ruling, which is the goal, right? Like Judge Gonzalez-Rogers here is very much attempting to strike the fear of God into this company. Like, if you cross me again, I will ruin you is pretty much the message of this thing. It reads a little like that. Yeah. I mean, it is going to be really interesting to see because I'm confident there have been meetings all day in Cupertino about

Not maybe not how to ignore this, but how to get around it. Like, how do we keep getting our services revenue without this? And some of those meetings are about products and some of those will not be about products. But but like the this ruling intentionally and in as many words works.

opened the floodgates for developers and is basically like they get to do this now and you can't stop them or it's illegal. It also opened the floodgates for regulators. So I was talking to some antitrust people yesterday after the ruling hit and a little bit of insight

Maybe you can share that. But the overwhelming feeling was like, finally, someone has called Apple out on their hubris. Apple, their rep around the world when it comes to this stuff is, how dare you? No, we'll fight you till you die. Arrogance and hubris, just absolutely like, the comparison was made specifically to Google. And they're like, Google's pretty arrogant and noncompliant as well, but at least they pretend that they're nice. Which tracks, like totally tracks. Like Google's like,

We make YouTube music. Just a bunch of goofballs over here. Apple's like, we make the iPhone and none of you will ever have taste like we have taste. So please shut up.

And like, it just bit them in the ass here. Like they didn't have to get to this position and now they're totally constrained. Well, and to that point, one of the things Apple has said over and over throughout this whole process is, and every big tech company does this, is they, they yell and scream about security and privacy, right? That if you do this, if you allow developers to put links in their apps, it will devastate privacy on the internet. People will be opened up to fraud. Everything will be horrible. And, uh,

All over this ruling from Judge Gonzalez-Rogers, it just says that is a lie and that's not what you think. That is not how you feel. And I can prove it. Right. And that is like the stuff in this documents was you had a meeting about money and then you told a story about privacy. And those two things have nothing to do with each other. And I am tired of hearing the privacy story because it's about money. And that is like we've all kind of known that.

But it's different to say it when you have the meeting minutes in front of you. And it's like, oh, you know what never came up in this meeting about whether it should be 27% or 30%? User privacy. Turns out you don't actually care except as a justification to the public who you hope don't really understand what's going on. The thing that I heard specifically yesterday when I was talking to some folks was if the DOJ is smart, they will take this ruling and amend the complaint against Apple for antitrust.

To include a bunch of what you're saying, right? That you can take your complaint and amend it. The complaint is basically the offense monopoly and Apple uses it to legally command all kinds of other industries. And there's a laundry list of ways to do that.

Well, if you're smart, now you have a bunch of evidence that says, oh, they super do that. And you're going to amend your complaint to put... And all of their defense, again, which is about privacy and security and taking the best care of users may not actually be what you're worried about. Yep. So these things begin to stack up. Like the regulators around the world are looking at this decision and they're looking at this judge saying, you know, actually, I can just body up and punch Tim Cook in the nose. And they're emboldened. Like the joke I was making last night was like, there are bells ringing in Paris. Like...

There's a bunch of happy gray suited European lawyers being like, finally, it's happened. Like someone is finally like punt, like landed a punch and it's because of Apple's attitude. And that is such an own goal. Like they did not have to get here. That said, we have a statement from Apple that says they disagree with the judge's ruling. They're going to appeal it. There's, there's an amount of, even all the statements we're getting, the India app developers, having, you're very excited, the big companies.

like Spotify and match groups that have been fighting this the loudest, a little more measured.

The proof is going to be in the pudding, right? It's going to be the app updates. I sincerely believe the next 14 days of app updates from all of these companies is going to be fascinating. Here's the one that's going to be the most fascinating. Tim Schweeney says Epic will put Fortnite back in iOS. How? I was talking to Jay Peters about this earlier. This suggests that Epic has been updating the Fortnite iOS app forever.

for years waiting for this day. I'm serious. Like that is what has been going on is Epic has been waiting to win so that it can, it can victoriously and ceremoniously reappear in the app store triumphant over Apple's monopoly. And it's going to work. And I like, I guarantee you every big app developer. Wait, how will it work? So the mechanics of this case, Epic broke Apple's rules and,

by shipping a secret update to iOS Fortnite that allowed people to purchase stuff in Fortnite without in-app purchases. Apple kicked him out of the store, said, you broke our rules. Epic said, ha ha, it was a troll. And they filed a lawsuit. They've gotten here where Apple's noncompliance with the injunction has gotten Apple in a bunch of trouble. But Epic lost on did you willfully break the iOS developer agreement? There's nothing in this ruling says Apple has to give Epic its developer account back.

So how are they going to put it back? That's a good point. So I think they do have Fortnite ready because they brought it to the EU a couple months back. Oh, yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah. Because they launched that at the game store. They had another battle with Apple over a developer account in the European Union, which Apple briefly banned. So it remains unclear to me if they have a developer account in the U.S.,

Um, or if Apple is required to, to by any means, uh, let them have Fortnite on the store. I feel like Apple's allowed to just be like, yeah, sorry guys. Like we're pretty pissed about this. I will say Tim Sweeney put out what he calls a peace proposal.

Which is super not a peace proposal. No, it's just a nice. He says Epic puts forth a peace proposal. If Apple extends the court's friction-free Apple tax-free framework worldwide, we will return Fortnite to the Apple store worldwide and drop current and future litigation. It's like, yeah, if you give in completely everywhere forever, we'll give you our video game.

Cool, buddy. It sounds, David, like Tim is going to come on to one of our shows soon, right? I think so. I hope so. We've asked for him. So I want to ask him very specifically how he thinks he's going to get Fortnite back in the store. All right. We should take a break. There's yet more litigation to discuss here on our tech podcast about cell phones and party speakers. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from LinkedIn.

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All right, we're back. Now on to active litigation. Here on the America's Favorite Tech Litigation Podcast. Look, we opened with party speakers to draw you in. Yeah. If people would launch more gadgets, we would talk. It's about to be developer conference and gadget season again. And I'm very much looking forward to that. Wait, can I sidetrack you? Because David, there was something you wanted to talk about up front.

that we skipped over. Oh, you're right. So we could do a little intermission here. Let's do a brief gadget intermission. Like a palate cleanser? Yeah.

Because I need to know, Nila, you in particular, but both of you, we got to talk about the slate truck for like five minutes because we talked about the slate truck with Tim Stevens on Tuesday's show. He wrote a great story for us. He's written a couple of great stories for us about the slate truck. I would say, without giving too much away, traffic to our website suggests that this is the most interesting thing that anyone has done in a very long time. It's neck and neck between slate truck and calling Jeff Bezos a coward. Yeah.

That's our audience. That's about right. Yeah. So let's, what do you think? You weren't here for our talk with Tim on Tuesday. What do you make of the Slate Truck? I listened to it actually the other day. I love Tim. Tim and I used to work together. It's so much fun when he writes for us and does stuff for us. I'm like, take my money. I don't need a pickup truck.

I used to need a pickup truck when I lived in the woods on an unpaved road and had to take my own trash to the dump once a week with a baby in the house, which meant the trash could not stay in the house for more than two days. Do you understand what I'm, do you understand what the baby was doing? Babies like trash.

Babies make the worst trash in human history. Yeah, that's real. It's not great. So yeah, we, you know, there was a time when I like loaded the bed of a pickup truck like several times a week in a pandemic and drove away and that was great. And then I moved to Westchester. Pickup truck was incompatible with this area. Sold the pickup truck. And I saw the slate truck and I was like, what if?

What if I found a reason to take my own trash to the dump truck? But it's not a very pickup-y pickup truck. Like I have never once in my life been like, you know what I need is a pickup truck. And I have still been on the Slate Auto website a half dozen times this week being like,

I could buy this car. They did the one extremely smart thing about this late auto website. Even if you're not a pickup truck person or a car person, they, the configurator is so much fun because the thing is so modular by design. They're like, I don't know today. I want a yellow SUV tomorrow, a red pickup truck with a Bluetooth speaker. And they usually screw with it. I think their, their ability to capture the trends and,

In cars right now with what people are doing with cars and not what like Ford thinks people are doing with cars is super interesting. So every car culture is dominated by people wrapping their cars, like all over the place. People buy like car people buy what you know, when you're like trying to buy a car, like a used car, if you're a car person.

There's a party that's like, I want to make sure I get the color I want, but there's another part that is like, I know exactly what set of specs and option packages I was looking for. And the color is almost immaterial because I'm absolutely going to wrap this car when I get it. Like, that's just a thing that happens in this world. Lots of people wrap new cars.

So for Slate to say, you know what, like we can just do away with a paint shop or metal body panels and assume that our customers are going to wrap the card with their specifications. There's something about that that I think is incredibly smart, right? They're not at the, what does the big company think the market wants? They're at the, what is the community doing and how do we deliver to the community the product that might work? And I don't know if any of that's going to work.

Right. Like it's new. I don't know if the car's any good. We haven't, no one's ever driven in one. I think listening to Tim, it sounds like Slate hasn't spent a lot of time. It does sound like they've sat in it a lot that we know for sure. But has it gone anywhere? There's something about that, which I love, which is like, they're at the fringe of car culture in a very specific way that I think is super cool.

Yeah, that's fair. Jake, you're famously a truck guy. Everyone who knows you knows you love a cable knit sweater and a pickup truck. What do you think of this thing? I'm neither a car guy nor a truck guy, but this is the coolest truck I've ever seen. That's how I feel. This is the thing. It's like every single time I am in a car, I have a problem with something. The speaker system is terrible. The infotainment system is terrible. I love that they're just like, listen, you were going to be mad about it anyway.

Bring your own speaker. I don't care. You're going to put your phone up anyway. Like, just do it. It's like such a delightful approach. It feels very friendly and welcoming. And like, I kind of love that, even though it's actually like deeply for tinkerers. The big question to me, and again, not a car guy, people love really large vehicles. And they started with...

a truck and a small truck. Like when I see old trucks in the wild, the wild being the streets, I like I'm like, oh, my God, they're so cute. Like this adorable little truck that that was actually just a full size truck from 10 years ago. So I'm really curious.

how that taps into the market they're going for. But it's a really cool idea. Yeah, Nilay, is there a turn towards, obviously, like everywhere else, it's, you know, the 90s and early 2000s again. Are we going to do that with cars? Are we going to go back to like, you know, the cars our parents had back in the day? Is that coming? Because that's kind of what the slate truck is, aesthetically. So one, I want people to go on TikTok. And technologically. And technologically. And technologically.

They're all going to have cigarette lighters in the beginning. It's going to be great. I've been around with a boombox on my passenger seat for a long time. That's a real thing. Go on TikTok and just search for the Ford Ranger song. No further commentary. It's just an ecosystem of content that you can be a part of. It's very good. When I say my TikTok feed is trucks jumping over stuff, I'm offering you a door. That's very good. You know, the market's distorted. The trucks are big and they cost $100,000 because...

trucks are excluded from some fuel economy standards and people buy them and then you make them bigger and then dentists can write them off on their taxes in specific ways. And then you make them cost so much money because that's just pure margin for the automaker. Like there's just like a nonsensicality to that part of the market. Because when you show people a picture of like the Rivian R3X, everyone's like, that's what I want.

I want a weird little 80s hatchback that goes 300 miles on a charge. Like, give me that. You show people a Ford Maverick, which is still huge compared to the slate truck. And they're like, I want that. Give me that. So there's a distortion in the market that I think everyone thinks is real, but it really is like the part of taxis, like section one, so now it's like you can write off the full value of a giant vehicle all at once if you run a small business and you claim that

yes, you know, your dry cleaners need the truck of this size. And so people do it. And like, there's just a distortion in the market. And I think this is the antidote to that in a real way, but I know like carmakers have been making their cars bigger. I will. The other thing I will, I'm curious if the audience feels this way. I think all cars are ugly right now. Like they are so ugly. I agree with that. Yeah. Very, very few cars are just straightforwardly beautiful. Yeah.

And this trend back to sort of classic designs, like very handsome profiles, it just can't come fast enough. Oh, I totally agree. We've been lost in this, like, cars should look like the future thing for a while now. And, like, there's a Hyundai and Genesis dealership just down the street from me. And so, like, every day, some new stupid spaceship-looking thing comes driving by my front door. And I'm like, what have we done here? Like, people love the IONIQs.

It's all fine. And every single one has like more weird angles. And it's like, why? These aren't cars anymore. What are we doing here? Yeah. My favorite weirdness in the current car design market is everyone has decided the headlights should be vertical. But we should still pretend to have very tiny, small, horizontal headlights, like eyebrows. And I'm like, this looks horrible. Like, have any of you looked at the cars?

I just don't know what's going on. So it's nice to see some classic profiles come back, I think. The car's not going to ship for another year, two years. It's vapor tilt ships, man. Yep.

But, you know, who doesn't love drinking out of vaporware car? It's like America's favorite pastime. That's what we do here. And it's past. It's a render. So at least at least we're past that point. It's not just a drawing of a car. It is a car. And that's that's something. Jake, thank you for that. I feel much better. Let's go back to the courthouse. There's so there's so, so much. All right.

All right, David, you, let's start with Google because it's simpler. The meta case is so complicated. It's going to take us a minute. David, you were at the Google trial in the courthouse this week with Sundar Pichai in the stand. For what I gather, he was just there to say, please, please don't make me sell crime. Kind of. I actually expected him to be a tiny bit more that than he was. And so, uh,

I've been in the courthouse three out of the eight days now. And I think I've missed a couple of interesting people, but I've seen a bunch of the most interesting moments of the remedies trial so far. And

The thing that has become abundantly clear is that Google is petrified of the part of the DOJ's remedies that suggests that what Google actually needs to do is take its search index, its ranking information, which is just like how it ranks all the stuff when it puts it on the page, and the query streams that it gets, which is all the stuff that people are actually searching for, and essentially give that to anyone who wants it at what the DOJ calls a marginal cost. Nobody knows what a marginal cost is or who's going to decide.

That is one of the things Google is concerned about. But of all the things that DOJ wants, that is the one...

that Google is terrified of. And so Sundar, when he was on the stand, spent a long time talking about how scary that is. And you could tell the line he had rehearsed either in his head or with a bunch of people who work for him at Google. I suspect both. Yeah. You know, you think he just workshopped it in the mirror that morning at the hotel? He's just in the car on his way going, reverse engineer, reverse engineer. But his whole thing was essentially that if...

Google has made itself into what it is because it has essentially outinvested and outspent all of its rivals for 25 years. And it's true, right? Like nobody has tried harder at search for longer than Google. Certainly true. And the thing he kept saying is if you do this, if you take away all of the stuff that we have done and you give it to everybody else who asks for it,

I don't know how, as Google, we can continue to justify investing in search the way that we have. And what he said is if you give people all this data, they can reverse engineer Google. If you have all the information, you have the order in which we rank that information, and you have all the stuff that people are searching for, that's the whole thing. That's it.

You can get from there to every single thing about how Google works is Google's argument. They don't have to give you the algorithm, but if you have the inputs and the outputs, you can figure out the algorithm. And he over and over was like, if you let people reverse engineer Google, why would I keep building Google? And it is like just forcefully saying that over and over. And he has really interesting thoughts about Chrome because he started Chrome. Like Chrome was how Sundar sort of made his rise inside of Google in the first place. Yeah.

But the thing for him is he's like, you cannot make us give this away because it will crush Google search. And then the DOJ is sitting there being like, yeah, that's the goal. That's what we're here for. And so it's fascinating. Like for so much of this trial in the liabilities phase and in the remedies phase, these two sides have been talking completely past each other. Google is like, we're very good. And-

The DOJ is like, everything you've done is illegal. And they just have not been speaking to each other. And it was Sundar was the first time that it was like, oh, we're actually all talking about the same thing now. And what Google is saying is you think that what you have to do is solve some of the problems that you've created. And what I'm saying it will happen is it will kill Google.

And it was just fascinating. And Judge Mehta, who is overseeing all of this, has asked a lot of questions about how big a deal this kind of thing would be. In the opening arguments, he asked a lot of questions about what's a behavioral remedy and what's a structural remedy. And does this change within Google search constitute a behavioral remedy, which is easier to ask for and get, or a structural remedy, which is essentially breaking up Google? And Sundar Pichai's argument is this is breaking up Google. Like,

He could not have been more apocalyptic about what happens if this happens. And it was fascinating. You know, it's interesting. There's some wonkiness about behavioral remedies and structural remedies that

Behavioral remedy is we're going to change the way you act and the government will watch out. Be cool. Be cool or show up. Right. We're watching you. And there's a big argument. You can actually listen to Rebecca Slaughter, FCC commissioner on Decoder earlier this week. Her argument is behavioral remedies are more intrusive.

Right. It's the government over your shoulder saying what you can and can't do. Right. And the structural remedy where you break it up is actually the more democratic, small d, democratic solution. Because you're just like, well, you're broken up now. Everyone try your best with government out. And there's some real back and forth there. Right. Like, do you want a Google that has this administration sitting over its shoulder being like, are you behaving yourself? If you don't, if you love this administration, do you want a Google that

I don't know, has President AOC sitting over their shoulder saying, are you doing what I want? Like, there's a lot to contend with there in the behavioral remedy. Whereas the structural remedy might be the end of Google, if you listen to Sundar Pichai. It's hard to evaluate which one's like a better idea. Right. I mean, it is sort of funny. I went into this thinking, and I have talked to a bunch of people who confirmed that they were also thinking this, people sort of in and around the trial, that the idea that Google should have to divest Chrome

Was the big swing nobody thought they would get right that this was this was the thing you performatively give up in order to get the other stuff and that it would wind down to just just don't you can't pay Apple $20 billion a year that that was going to be where this landed. The DOJ has argued far more forcefully than.

for the idea that solving search in this way is what has to happen. And Google has come to believe pretty clearly that it's a real threat and that it would be much scarier. Like you get the distinct sense that Google would much rather sell Chrome than give up this search data. Well, you know, there's like a natural experiment for Google because they're just the default on iPhone. That's like, it's not iOS Chrome that's making them the money right now, right? It's

It's Google searches in Safari. Right. What they would lose if they lost Chrome, right? If somebody else is operating Chrome, I guess the threat is that they have their own search engine or AI service to replace it. But if they can still offer a cut of search traffic and just say like, hey, if you want to, still just going to be more Google search. Yeah. They're going to be paying a lot. Yeah. To be clear-

Google would very much like to hold on to Chrome. And Sundar talked a lot about that. And it's his baby. It is his baby. But also he talks a lot about the Chromium project, which is he is correct in saying Chrome.

Chromium is the most important thing in web browsing right now. And it's a technically open source thing that Google fundamentally controls and runs and operates. He said 94% of the code commits to Chromium over the last year have been from Google employees. It spends huge amounts of money on Chromium. Microsoft's browser is based on Chromium. Brave is Chromium. Almost all of the browsers people use are Chromium.

Or Chrome. And that matters, right? Like, that's a huge deal. And the idea of some other company, like, I asked a person around this trial, like, is the idea of OpenAI administering Chromium possible?

terrifying to you and they just laughed at me like and and chromebooks change chrome os changes like it is a huge change for google in a really meaningful way and all of a sudden the the default android browser becomes not yours which is meaningful too but but again like that is all immaterial to google if it can't win at search anymore like chrome only matters because search matters and if you kill search who cares i find this chrome argument so disingenuous

Can I just say that? Like, I agree. Everything is Chrome. Electron is Chrome. Half of the desktop apps I'm running right now are Chromium. Yeah, that's true. Like, right. Notion Calendar is a Chromium app. Like, it's running. It's just an Electron thing, right? Like, whatever. All of those companies have an enormous incentive to make sure their apps still work and that Chromium is good. Google has an enormous incentive to make sure the Android browser is good, which means it will continue developing Chromium upon which it is based.

So this idea that if they don't have Chrome, just like Chrome on Windows anymore, that they won't just immediately fork Chromium? They can't. That's not allowed. They're not allowed to make a browser at all? By the rules of the remedies that the DOJ has proposed, Google would not be allowed to do that.

It could land elsewhere, but the idea of like... Right, they can negotiate their way out of that and say, we need to make our first party browser on Android. Right. A question we've gotten a bunch from folks actually is like, couldn't Google just make another browser? And there's a ton of wiggle room in it, but like letter of the law, no, it couldn't. It would not be allowed to. Yeah. I mean, it just feels like that's the give and take here, right? Like a bunch of people are still very motivated to keep Chromium going.

A lot of people don't spend the money because Google will. Right. That's the interesting counterfactual. Right. But if that development moves elsewhere, it's not like all those people have suddenly lost their incentive. Like Electron as an open source platform unto itself relies on Chromium. You can just see how that development ecosystem will like help. It won't be as big. It won't be as rich. Right. You won't get as many like, you know, old time classic Google neckbeards like doing Chromium out of the good of their heart against no revenue.

Which is a thing that a company in Google sale can do and a company with Google's culture can do. Like, uh, you know, I've interviewed Sundar before. I'm like, is AI killing the web for like an hour? And he's like, I love the web. And it's like, you believe him because he made Chrome. He cares whether or not he's actually killing the web. And that was the heart of that conversation last year. I don't know what's going to happen here. It just feels very much like Google making a search a little bit more interoperable, uh,

Against the worry that someone will reverse engineer all of search and then make it so that Google is worth nothing to consumers is, is just like fake worry. They're still Google. The people still say they're going to Google it. Yeah. Like you could make being an exact copy of Google today and people wouldn't use Bing. Bing has made being an exact copy of Google today and people won't use Bing.

There's something about this that just seems... We'll see what happens. But it feels like they're making all of this... You know, it's like the smartest people in the world are saying, we can't solve this problem. It just never rings sincere to me.

Yeah, no, I think that's fair. And the other thing I should say about Chromium is I've talked to a lot of people who make browsers who would love for Google to be less intense about running Chromium. Everybody I talk to who doesn't work at Google and works with Chromium is like, God, it's so annoying that Google runs Chromium because what they want goes and everything they do is to benefit Google in some way. And wouldn't it be great if we had a neutral thing that just wanted browsers to be great?

The problem is that's very expensive and no one has ever done it before. But to your point, no one has ever done that before because Google always has. So like, is there a way in the wings for this to work? It's certainly possible. The DOJ certainly believes there is. Are there scaled open source projects that run the entire world that don't have a Google involved? Yes.

Linux exists. Now, does Linux have its own deeply fucked governance problems? It absolutely does. But like it exists. Somewhere Sundar Pichai just heard you comparing Google to the Linux Foundation and started sobbing uncontrollably. I'm just saying the whole world is like, man, I hope the one guy shows up to commit code to Linux for free. And like, it works. Like thus far it has worked. Okay.

All right. That's a Google case where David, I think you're going to be in that courtroom a bunch, uh, just down the hall upstairs.

Around the corner. Down the hall. It's all pure chaos. My favorite thing is, this is a little inside baseball for everybody. So the way this works is these courtrooms- We should say it's the meta case that's just down the hall. Oh yeah, the meta case is just down the hall. And what I should say is the courtrooms typically don't allow any electronics at all, right? Like you can't even type on your laptop while you're in there. You can't have phones, no nothing. So what a lot of

media members do who want to like take notes and write stories. There are media rooms for each one of them. And sometimes it's another courtroom and they just get like a video feed of the trial and they watch it there. They move the media rooms around every day. So every morning you show up at the courthouse and it's just

pure chaos of a bunch of reporters trying to figure out which room to go to. And every morning there's somebody who thinks they're in the Google trial, but is actually in the meta trial and vice versa. And the other day when I was there for Sundar, they started the morning with a completely unrelated criminalization

criminal trial. Just like it was just another trial that Judge Mehta is overseeing. And so for five minutes, he just had like a procedural conversation with a lawyer about when they were going to talk to this guy about his crime. And people are like pouring into the media room as this is on the screens being like, who's in the jumpsuit? This guy in like an orange prison jumpsuit. And everybody's trying to figure out which Google executive this is. Yes. It's fantastic. It wasn't Andy Rubin. It was not, in fact. But so the Meta trial, there are like

There are a lot of things going on in this meta trial. But we should note Lauren Finer is in that. Do you and Lauren see each other in the courthouse? We do. We pass each other in the hallways a couple of times a day. That's hilarious. And Lauren has become like sort of the house mom of the courtroom. Every time I look around, she's like directing somebody where to go and telling them where the cafeteria is. And she's like, no, the medium's over there. Lauren lives in the district court of D.C. And someday she will leave and she'll be on the Verge cast and it will be very exciting.

But there are kind of three threads that I want to talk about from the MetaTrial this week. And the first is TikTok, which has come up an awful lot in the course of the MetaTrial because the like big open question for all of this, and we've talked about this, is like, what is a social network? Right. And that is.

what was it one day where TikTok was gone has turned into this incredibly interesting data point of who competes with who based on what happened when TikTok was gone. And TikTok's head of operations was on the stand this week talking about what Reels is versus what TikTok is and how people use Reels and how people use TikTok and how Instagram has adapted Reels and its own app to match TikTok. But this question of like,

What is TikTok and how have all the other apps, particularly within meta, responded to it has become like one of the most important parts of this whole trial.

And it's deeply bizarre because TikTok is supposed to be gone. So is it good for meta or bad for meta when people flock to its apps in place of TikTok? Right. That shows that they are the sun around which everything else orbits. On the other hand, it shows that people are other places. It's really true. And also a lot of different...

A lot of different witnesses on the stand this week have been forced to acknowledge that there is nothing remotely unique about Instagram at all. I mean, over and over and over. Instagram is just a copy of other apps smashed together. Exactly. Which I've enjoyed very much. Like there was a there was a line from I believe his name is Aaron Pressman or Aaron Presser, excuse me, at TikTok.

who called TikTok reels and shorts virtually and deliberately indistinguishable in function and user experience, quoting something that the company had written in March. It's fabulous. I just love it. It's very good. But

This this TikTok thing, I think, to your point, Jake, is like Meta is trying to prove that it has millions of competitors. Right. And that that TikTok competes with Instagram and Instagram competes with Facebook. And actually, this is like a huge teaming ecosystem of places people hang out and spend their time.

The case against it is that Facebook is a personal social network and that that's what it does and that that's where it has a monopoly and thus all the stuff that it has done is monopolistic. And the TikTok thing, I think, on balance probably helps people.

Because what they're saying is they've had executives from Tumblr and Pinterest and Strava come up on the stand and say, OK.

We're not a social network. We are about interests, right? Like even Twitter folks said this, like we're a place to go for things that you're interested in, which is not the same as a place to go to find people that you're friends with. But Meta gets up and is like, well, when TikTok dies, everybody comes to our app. And then when TikTok comes back, everybody leaves and goes back to TikTok. So what do we do? What do we do?

I do think it's really interesting. Like, it feels to me and tell me if I'm wrong, but it feels to me like a lot of this case is premised around this idea of the personal social network, you connecting with your friends and your family, which is this very old school, old school, you know, 10, 15 years ago, I guess, vision of social media. And I feel like if Facebook vanished today, I don't know that there would be a one to one replacement.

Right. That is just not how people are thinking about social media anymore. As I think, which may be. Where are my angriest neighbors to try to send their friends to jail? There is another app for that. That is true. Yeah. But like maybe that hasn't popped up because Facebook has this monopoly and they're being anti-competitive. But maybe it hasn't popped up because people just want different types of experiences on social media. And I feel like that's what we're seeing with all these other companies that they're calling up. But this was Mark's insight.

I mean, this is the heart of the case is Mark Zuckerberg woke up and said, every so often there's a new thing that people want to do on their phones that gives rise to another social network. There's another kind of sharing dynamic. And so Facebook was whatever it was, hot or not for colleges.

And then he identified photo sharing on Instagram and said, I got to buy that one. And then he identified, and there's all these emails where he lays out his thinking. And then he identified group messaging and messaging and said, I got to buy WhatsApp. And so the point here is the anti-competitive move was to stifle the thing that could have taken Facebook's market share. And whether or not they could have bought a TikTok thing,

And it's like, we're just getting into this place where they became so big that TikTok was too big to buy and also owned by the Chinese government or controlled by the Chinese government. So like, it's like, it's the weirdest one because they, they did try to buy snap. Right. And they haven't said no.

I have this quote here from Rebecca Slaughter, who's a commissioner at the FCC. She was a Democratic commissioner at the FCC. She was appointed by Trump in the first term, legally fired by Trump in this term. But she is one of the commissioners at the FCC who voted this case out of the commission and said we should go to trial on it. And so I asked her about this market definition thing. I was like, this is dumb, right? Like, Meta's narrative about this is like,

putting us in personal social networking is whatever. And she said, look, all antitrust cases are market definition to a degree. It's very tortured things. It makes people hate lawyers. The concept of antitrust law is very simple. The administration of it gets very complicated. Market definition is always hard. Everyone has a different view about the right way to define the market. It all gets ligated. And then she went on to tell me what this case is really about is whether Meta bought competitors to eliminate the risk of competition. That is the argument at the end of the day.

Did it not want to compete on the merits but instead take out potential competition through acquisition in order to build and maintain a monopoly in a way that's illegal? It's not more complicated than that. So I think Meta is putting a lot of stock into the existence of MeWe. It's like here's this dumb thing we can say to make everyone think everything else is dumb. And then you have the actual Federal Trade Commission saying, no, this case is you saw Instagram as a rising threat and you bought it to kill it.

And they've shown that now, I think pretty conclusively. And here are all of these other threats. If you could have bought TikTok, when TikTok went down, people came to your apps. They're obviously competitors. If you could have, you would have. I don't know how this is going to go. I really don't. This is, this case is real weird. It's like this old lawyer cliche. I keep saying like, if you don't have the law, you argue the facts. If you don't have the facts, you argue the law. And if you don't have either, you pound the table. This is like old law professors say this. They think they're very clever. Um,

But that's what, that's what's happening here. Like meta is trying to argue the esoteric law of market definition and the government is like, but you bought Instagram. Right.

And that, I mean, we talked about this last week, but that was the thing that was so damaging about the Kevin Systrom bit of it. And to that point, actually, I think the most interesting piece of all that this week has been about WhatsApp, which has come up more this week than in sort of previous parts of the testimony. And it has become very clear that Facebook was petrified about what messaging apps were.

might do to Facebook in particular. And it was really worried that Google was going to buy WhatsApp and turn it into a cross-platform social network, which is very funny because at the same time Lauren is hearing this, I was sitting in the courtroom listening to Sundar talk about how bad Google Plus was and get

burned by the plaintiffs for how bad Google Buzz was. And they literally use that as an example of how Google is not able to take care of its users' privacy. That's how bad Google Buzz was. And so Google, this company that can't make a social network to save its life,

Facebook is terrified is going to spend a bunch of money on WhatsApp, make it cross-platform, and take over the world with it. Because to your point, they perceived messaging apps as the future of how people interact with their friends and family, which, check, correct. They won. That was it. That was exactly correct. The group chat has taken over the Facebook feed in a real way. And they were worried about iMessage and Facebook.

And all of this stuff, right? They looked at all the messaging apps out there and said, okay, we are the place people hang out with their friends right now. That is going to move to messaging apps. It's more private. It's easier to administer. Like, there's just a lot of reasons for it. And...

They went and got WhatsApp, A, because they understood that that was going to work, B, because they understood that Facebook's own stuff, including Messenger, was not going to be that. There's been some really interesting testimony from folks at Facebook who were just like, Messenger just wasn't that thing. It was popular, but it just, it wasn't it. It wasn't going to win. And then they were worried about what iMessage might be. Like, there were questions inside of Facebook about whether Apple was going to turn on ads and more social features inside of iMessage.

And Apple's just like, we're not going to do that. That's a stupid idea. We would never do that. Um,

But that's been the other thread of this is the same thing Mark Zuckerberg saw on Instagram, which is photo sharing is the way people are going to share going forward. And he was right about that. He was also right about messaging apps. And so now the question is, did Facebook sort of neuter WhatsApp by buying it or did it help it ascend to new heights, which is the exact same question on Instagram? Yeah. I don't know, man. Did you look at all these cases?

The end, like Apple's just first quarter of the year is like, well, Apple's going to be a whole different company. Google's going to come out of these cases. We haven't even talked about ad tech remedies. Like that hasn't even started. Right. You think Google will be a different company if you pull apart search? Wait until you gut the money. Google's going to end the year in a totally different place. Meta might end the year in a totally different place. Like we're in for restructuring of the internet. It's coming. Yeah.

Good. Something's going to happen. If you know what it is, by all means, tell me. I think it's party speakers. But something's up. You can feel it in the air. It should be exciting. It's weird. Like so much other stuff is so foreboding that I think this feels foreboding, but I think it's actually exciting. Like there's space.

these companies under all this pressure is going to create space. Yeah. Other people are going to build stuff. You look at what happened at the Microsoft case and it's like, because of the Microsoft case, we got Google. Like that's, that's just a thing that happened. Right. And we're, we're now doing that at greater scale with a bunch of different companies all at once. And it's, we're doing it at a very weird economic moment. So I think like,

And this is ordinarily a time that you would see venture capitalists just like falling all over themselves to invest in everything everywhere because suddenly there's it feels like there might be space in tons of these markets for the first time. That's not happening because they're all in group chats being weirdos with each other. They've got dumber ideas. One of the one of the answers regulars I talked to yesterday said VCs have hated Apple for so long. It is only a matter of time before the money starts flowing. I believe it. I mean, there's so much there.

So we'll see. We'll see. I'm just saying it's all this stuff is happening and you can argue about the individual twists and turns, but this is the stuff that creates space for new companies. And honestly, that's a little exciting. All right. We got to take a break. We're going to run through this later. It's going to happen. We'll be right back.

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All right, we're back. I think we got it. This one's got to be short, David, this time. Yeah, I have things to do. For once, I can't just podcast with you clowns forever. We got party speakers to find. Exactly. Can someone invent a metal detector for party speakers? My Navy ship is leaving soon, so I have to finish this podcast. Please, please, more enlisted service members. Send us photos. Neeli, is it time? It's the lightning round, but is it?

Is it once again that time for America? It's time. Okay. It is time for America's favorite non-food podcast within a podcast. That I feel I can say comfortably. Award winning. Future award. Award inventing. Proposed award winning podcast within a podcast. Brendan Carr is a dummy. All right. So a quiet, another quiet week for Brendan. He did congratulate himself a lot. We just had 100 days of the Trump administration broadcast.

Brandon put out a tweet with just a list of things that he says he's accomplished. He, Brandon believes that he's strengthened national security and advanced public safety. He believes he's protected consumers and expanded America's space economy. Brandon all by himself. Is that Brandon's job? He's unleashed high speed infrastructure. He's restored our leadership in wireless, which as you know, is under constant existential threat. If you don't upgrade the 5g network,

something China. Yep. It's just there. It's just in the background all the time. And, you know, he says he has restored free speech. So it's a long list. We'll link it. It's a tweet. Under restoring free speech, he claims that he has joined DOJ Assistant Attorney General Slater and FCC Chairman Ferguson to launch a campaign to smash the censorship cartel and restore free speech rights, which means sending threatening letters from the government about other people's speech.

And just upside down world all over the place with Brendan. So Brendan's very proud of, it's a very Trumpian. Everything he says is a thing that he didn't do. Yeah. Uh, and a lot of it is just stuff the FTC does. Like he was like, we did a spectrum off-trend. It's like, yeah, it was Tuesday at the FCC. Great. What I want to call it this week is we, there's a bunch of all

of other 100 Days coverage of Brendan that we should call out. We did a big piece. Carl Bode, who we love working with, just ran down all the stuff Brendan has done. It's basically familiar, I think, to VergeCast listeners, particularly listeners of America's Favorite Podcast from the podcast Brendan Carr's Dummy. That piece is great. Carl is a ferocious writer. He has been the model for how I think about writing for consumer advocacy and consumer rights for a long time. He just did a great job. So go read that piece. I also want to call out

Other people have started taking note of Brendan in real meaningful ways. So FIRE, which is a free speech advocacy organization, not without its own controversies, has a strong point of view on what case it takes and doesn't take people a lot of feelings about it. You might almost call it the more conservative free speech advocacy organization. I wouldn't go that far, but some people do. They have a long piece about how Brendan sucks. Like just straightforwardly, FIRE published a piece called Brendan Carr's Bizarro World FCC.

They have a cartoon of him with a backwards FCC logo dressed up like Bizarro Superman. And the caption on the cartoon, Brandon is saying, the FCC should operate as the nation's speech police. We're just going to link it. It's a little on the nose. It's a little on the nose. Yeah. But it's not just us screaming it, right? It is some of our nation's preeminent free speech organizations, some of which, I'm pointing this out just to point it out, are not always aligned with what people think my politics are.

Although I think my politics are basically like free markets are good and don't be racist, which aren't exactly communist. But whatever, whatever you think my politics are, they don't always align with some of these groups. So racism is bad. They call me Uncle Woke. You just said like eight things that people are going to make us put on T-shirts. I just want you to know that, including they call me Uncle Woke. That's just everyone who's listening. Please know I will make that T-shirt. So I get these notes like.

I did the piece about calling Jeff Bezos a coward. I got some of the most bananas emails of all time, just like calling me like literally like you are a communist. And I was like, the only political opinions I've really expressed consistently are like free markets are good. Competition makes better products. Like what do you want from me exactly? And the answer is state regulated speech. Clearly. The LA Times is a good piece about Brendan running down all the things he's done. So the coverage is out there.

It's not just us. It's not just me. Uncle Woke. But as always, I want to end Brandon Carr's Dummy by saying, Brandon, I know you listen. I know you love attention. You do. You live for it. Come on the show, man. If you can defend any of this crap, you should do it. You should make the argument. You should say the words out loud to me and then win.

Don't you want to win, Brandon? Don't you want to collect this trophy from me? I'll make you a trophy if you win that debate. And you can have it. You can tweet about it. You can show it to your buddy Elon. The offer's in front of you. I just, I don't think you can do it. So as always, Brandon, I think you're a dummy, but you are welcome on Decoder. You're welcome on the Verge cast. You're welcome to one of those, you know, those things that you do on YouTube now where like 20 kids wave flags at people sitting in the center. We'll do that. Let's go.

I don't think you will because I think you're a dummy and I think you know that you can't win. As always, this has been Brandon Carr as a dummy, America's favorite podcast. TikTok Trends with Brandon Carr is very clearly a podcast we need to launch. So, Brandon, get asked. What's it called? Polobium? Jubilee? Jubilee! Is that it? Oh, by the way, if there's any young reporters out there who want to profile Jubilee, email us. I'm fascinated by this entire situation.

Whatever is going on there is some of the weirdest new media that has ever existed. And I don't understand how any of it works. I would like to know more. Do you want to write a feature? Send us a picture. Love this. Jake, I have a favor to ask. I put a story that Alex Heath wrote about WorldCoin in our rundown, and I didn't read it because I refused to learn anything about WorldCoin. So can you explain it while I don't pay attention? Dude, I was worried...

For folks who are watching at home, David just drops a gigantic document with a bunch of stories that we may or may not discuss. I try my best to prep for all of them. WorldCoin is so inexplicable. I spoke repeatedly with Alex Heath about this story.

I've read this story. I edited this story. I still cannot truly explain what WorldCoin is, why it exists, or what it's doing. The main news, this is the eyeball scanning startup. Sam Altman's eyeball scanning startup. It's an orb. They have an orb, scans your eyes, puts you on the blockchain, and that validates your ID. Here's the most important thing.

you can now verify yourself on Tinder by getting your eyeballs scanned by Sam Altman. Yep. And,

When you're swiping through Tinder, that's either going to be a clear way to know that somebody is or is not a match for you. So I think that's a big upgrade. The main the actual news is they're bringing it to the US for the first time. It's it's legal in most states, not all of them. But they bring it to the US. You can now get your eyeballs scanned. You now get on the blockchain. You can now get some of the world coin. Yeah.

I think the idea is that this is somehow going to help authenticate humans as being humans in a world of AI nonsense happening on the Internet. I'm not quite sure where the crypto coin comes in. That still feels a little like fuzzy magic. It'll be worth value.

somehow. But yeah, the main thing is they have brought it to the US now. They're opening some stores. You'll be able to go to Razer stores and while you're shopping for gaming accessories, you can get your eyeballs scanned and get on the blockchain. I would say everything about this feels like Mad Libs

I still, like, I'm not sure how this all came together. I'm not sure how they decided to partner with Tinder. Well, because they need auth providers, or they need to prove that being an auth provider is useful to someone. So you're worried about getting catfished on Tinder, and you're like, you know what? That's an eyeball scan. That's a real person. These eyeballs match, yeah. Yeah, that's like a...

It's like they look, they did this announcement in San Francisco. Alex Heath went, lots of people went, Sam Altman was there. People want to be there. The real quotes about all of this came at a previous event that they had last October because like any startup, they need scale. Like they need people to scan their eyeballs to make everything work. And so they're announcing the U S which will get them scale. But I just want to read this quote from last year.

To provide access to every human, we need more orbs. Lots more orbs. Probably on the order of a thousand times more orbs than we have today. Not more orbs, but more orbs in more places. Then they are launching a service called Orb on Demand that will let people order orbs much like a pizza you would have delivered to your apartment. So you can push a button and someone with an orb will come to your apartment and scan your eyes.

It's so silly. I love it. I love it. This is all completely vindicated my total uninterest in knowing anything about this story. I love it. Look, the world soon, our social networks will be full of weird AI avatars. I'll try to bone you and marry Kevin Roos. And I will prove I'm real. You are going to have to push the orb button and have an orb show up at your house and verify that it's actually you who is deeply in love with Kevin and not some rogue AI.

And it is me, Kevin, if you're listening. Get at me. I'm right here. I've been right here all along. It's very good. It's very good.

Should we do like one or two more? Yeah, let's do one or two more. We need like a palate cleanser. I would say we need more orbs. A thousand times more orbs is a good palate cleanser. Let's do the Trump thing really fast just so you can take another. I said palate cleanser, man. Wait, okay. Can I talk about some more AI nonsense? Yes. So Meta launched a Meta AI app and it has a social feed of people

People are just sharing their AI prompts. So you can have a conversation with Meta's AI and it'll just post the transcript. You'll be talking to it. You can hear somebody say like, hey, what kind of crackers should I eat today? And then the AI just is like, oh, maybe you could try a whole grain. And they're like, I don't think so. It is, I think the idea is to give people an idea of what they're supposed to do with AI. I would tell you, this is the,

single strongest argument against AI that I have seen yet. If you scroll through this feed, it is just like total nonsense nonstop. It is incredible. I can't look away. It's awful. I mean, that's what they want, right? Is I want to see what how somebody has jailbroken Meta AI. You know, Mark Sagalor gave an interview to Ben Thompson. I think he came out today as we were recording. And

He says explicitly the thing we were talking about a couple of weeks ago, uh,

He says the future of – Ben asked Mark, like, what do you want to do with AI? And Mark is like, yeah, I want to do better ad targeting, obviously. You know, we want to help people make more content, you know, feeds full of AI content, all this stuff. And he says this thing in the middle where he's like, eventually we're going to make the ads for advertisers. And you're just going to connect to your bank account and tell us what business outcomes you want. And then we'll just, like, deliver you results. Like, we'll just have sold your products for you. Which means they're going to, like, make videos of your products with AI, write the copy with AI.

generate infinite amounts of creative with AI. Like you're just going to, it's like literally a black box. Like you give them some money, they make an advertising campaign and then some of your products get sold. And that's literally his vision for the future of AI. It's so funny to put that next to the thing that

Meta executives have been saying for a while, which is that like a lot of people go to these services and appreciate the ads as content. And it's like there just is this belief that actually what people really want is AI made stuff like that. That is like a cultural value at Meta that AI stuff is good and people will like it. And I see no evidence of that fact in the actual real world. Yeah.

You tell us what your objective is. You connect to your bank account. You don't need any creative. You don't need any targeting demographics. You don't need any measurement, except you're able to read the results that we spit out. And it's like, you know, you guys have a lot of ad fraud scandals. You're kind of famous for inflating the metrics. Give us a lot of money and trust us. We're Facebook. What could possibly go wrong? I wrote a story about this. I emailed some media people, some ad agency people.

I'm sure you this quote. This is a return. I said, can you respond to this? One person said, I've reacted pretty viscerally to this. I need a moment to say something smart, which is incredible. And another person did not take the time. And they just said, quote, read the results that we spit out is gold. The full cycle towards their customers for moderate condescension to active antagonism to will fucking kill you.

Perfect. Perfect. So I suspect there's a war coming between meta and the ad industry. They're not happy with it. All right, a palette cleanser. Just to end it on like the nerdiest note I can end it on in a happy note. LG has spent 20 years trying to make OLED panels with blue phosphorescent backlights. It says it's ready to manufacture tandem panels that use both fluorescence and phosphorescence. This will bring power consumption down by 15%.

There's nothing that makes me happier. None of what you just said sounds like words to me. We're happy about this. This is good. Everything about the future is predicted first by what happens in display technology. It's absolutely true, right? You can't get curved phones or folding phones without curved or bendy OLED panels. You couldn't make smartphones without thin LCDs with low power draw. You couldn't make laptops with CRTs, although some people did try it.

You see what I'm saying? You can look ahead to what the display industry is doing. You can predict the future. I'm just saying 20 years in the making, slightly thinner, brighter, better OLEDs are coming and something will happen. That is exciting. I've been doing a lot of research on the Sony Watchman from the eighties recently for a project that will become very clear to everyone later this year. Uh,

And the enthusiasm for a slightly different take on a CRT, unbelievable. People were freaking out. They were like, they made the CRT this big and set it this big. It's going to change everything. It didn't. I'm just saying people react mostly to what things look like. And the way you change things, how things look like, you change the display technology. So if you pay attention to that, you will know what things are going to look like. Then you know the future. And you don't need an orb to do it. We need more orbs. A thousand times more orbs.

That's it. That's The Verge Cast. Rock and roll. And that's it for The Verge Cast this week. And hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-VERGE-11. The Verge Cast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Will Poore, Eric Gomez, and Brandon Kiefer. And that's it. We'll see you next week. ♪