The Google breakup is looming

38:49And they picked that path and it worked super well. And I think it taught Apple that the only swings you should make are the biggest ones possible. And it really seems like the lesson of this generation of hardware is like you build the iPod with the click wheel. Yeah. Like that bring people along with you in a way that is. Get people used to wearing a computer on their face all the time. Right. And the other thing is like when the iPhone came out, people had been using cell phones for a long time, right? Like we don't have that history yet. And so you have to do the first cell phones before you can do the iPhone.

39:17And Apple just tried to skip all the way there. And so it feels like if you wanted to, if you were to tell me somebody is two generations away from getting it right, it seems like it's pretty clearly the meta Ray-Bans, right? Like in terms of like mainstream success, two generations from now, that one feels like the easy betting favorite. Okay. Except I bought the clear ones and I am sending them back. No, everybody loves them. Sean Hallster is sending his back too. They're fine. They're a fine product and I know people who love them. Joanna Stern loves hers. Do they look cooler in pictures than they do in reality?

39:53They super look cooler in pictures than they do in reality. Because they look so cool in pictures. Wayfarers are a very classic shape. And I think they are meant to be classic in black. And then you make them clear. And at least on my face, they are too curvy. like that when they are when i have worn a lot of wayfares my life and when they are expressed in black they're like they're this very cool shape and then you make them clear and it's just like huh i'm wearing cat eye glasses so that's one thing see all the yeah all the movements i guess that makes sense there's one thing maybe clear maybe i should buy these again in black but then um they only ship the clear ones with transition lenses because they want you to wear them all the time including inside good transitions now uh they don't get dark enough outside and they also only turn blue which is weird uh and then you're like why am i wearing these glasses all the time and then as i've said many times i have huge head and the they're just like not they're just like uncomfortable on my face and i think even though i got the bigger ones it would still be uncomfortable on my face and this was sean's complaint he's like i've tried them in both sizes and the big ones are loose and still uncomfortable and the other ones are and this is the other ones are too tight and this is the fundamental problem with all of this stuff yeah is our bodies are not really designed to mount hardware on and particularly your face is a very challenging mounting environment uh and so i'm sending back and i think i'm just coming back to my graph my matrix of wearable bullshit that face penalty is just huge yeah no matter how useful it is oh the camera's not so like whatever i've got a camera in my pocket all the time and like kudos to meta for having better options but it is very true that you're still not solving it with two styles.

41:33Yeah. And then the last piece, which I think Alex brought up when he was on the show last time, it is also true that iOS and Apple keep these glasses from being actually integrated with your phone. Oh, 100%. Like the weird Bluetooth to Wi-Fi pairing switch you have to do. On Android, it just syncs with your phone because the operating system allows it to. Apple's like, you will never get close to this. You have to switch your phone to the glasses Wi-Fi network to it. It's garbage. I'm actually super annoyed at Heath because he brought up that meta is really annoyed that you can't automatically sync the photos to your camera roll on iOS.

42:13And I had never noticed how annoying it is to have to open the app and import them. Now I can't stop noticing like I was out the other day and I took, I don't know, five or six videos and like 25 photos. And I just sit there and just stare at my phone for five minutes because if you put it in the background, this stuff dies and it stops. And so I'm just sitting there watching it import one by one. And I was like, damn you, Apple. This is your fault. This is Apple's fault. Yeah. And like, we're going to talk about antitrust, whatever. But like, this is the story. The operating system limits other products to be good.

42:39You should be generally upset about that. It's my phone. I should be able to let Mark Zuckerberg look at my photos. It's my break. All right, we got to take a break. Liam has been giving me the wrap it up sign. We're way over. Somehow we spent way too much time talking about gadgets. Warren Finer is waiting patiently to talk about Google. We'll be right back with her. Adobe Acrobat Studio. So brand new. Show me all the things PDFs can do. Do your work with ease and speed. PDF spaces is all you need. Do hours of research in an instant. With key insights from an AI assistant. Take a template with a click.

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45:12We're back. David, still here. Still here. the Oculus Robots haven't gotten me yet Lauren Feiner's here hey Lauren welcome back every time we talk to you on the show it feels like some legal catastrophe has befallen Google wow that's true we have to break this pattern we like talking to you but right now you're a bit of an omen Lauren what do you think about Nintendo Alarm Pops did you buy the Nintendo Alarm Pops I did not I unfortunately have to talk about Google well at least this time we didn't make you sit in a courthouse all week which is we have been doing this time a little more procedural so there was the big google search antitrust case which the government won google lost we didn't know what the remedies would be the government has put forth it's not the actual proposal but it's like framework of a proposal concepts of a plan It's very much, it's 11 pages of concepts of a plan.

46:12And the plan, I want you to go into it in detail, but the plan right now is like everything. Every idea is on the table for us. So let's talk about that and what those ideas are. Then Google also lost the antitrust case that Epic filed against it around the Play Store. and the court has a plan for some remedies in that case, which amount to just like having to open things up and share apps with other app stores and all that. And then next to it is the big ad take case, where you were just in the courtroom for weeks. And I don't know what's going to happen there. That's a lot. And we were joking at the top of the show, and Lauren, I'm very curious for your perspective on this.

46:52That's a lot of stuff happening to Google that doesn't appear to be like having an impact. I can't tell if everyone knows that whatever we think of as Google today is going away. Like it's going to change in some way over the next X years because of all this activity. Is that what you see as well? Yeah, I agree. I think the key is maybe that it is in X years, which could be a very large number. because, you know, now that these things are in the remedies phase, at least in the case of Epic and the search case, you know, Google can then appeal and then we have a whole other process there. So it's still going to take quite a bit of time to see any real change here.

47:41I think in the epic case, it depends on if they get a stay on remedies while they appeal. But, you know, it's still, you know, it's not something that consumers are necessarily going to see a change on super quickly. But yeah, I think it hasn't really settled in for a lot of people that, you know, Google is definitely going to change. Yeah. Or at least it seems like it will based on how these cases have turned out so far. And to be fair, Google has said it will appeal all of the cases and it has asked for a stay, which means a delay on the remedies in the Epic case being applied while it goes off and appeals.

48:18And the blog posts are appropriately outraged if you go read Google's blog posts. But it's like something's going to happen, right? Like all of this stuff is happening at once and maybe Google can delay some of it and maybe Google can appeal its way out of some of it, but it can't do it to all of it. Yeah, it seems very hard to imagine at this moment that Google is able to just play it all the way out and just litigate its way out of trouble. And the sense I get just from talking to people at Google is that part of what is confusing for Google right now is that it's not clear what is going to stick and what isn't.

48:57And Lauren, I don't know if this is the sense you're getting from folks involved in this too, but there's something going on where there's so much all happening at once that it's almost like you kind of can't pick where to focus your energy. And so you're just like, well, we're just going to kind of let all this wash over us and then something will stick and we'll deal with that when it comes. But everybody I talk to even like sort of in and around all of this is just like, yeah, thrown by the volume of it all. Like, is that what you're hearing too, Lauren? Yeah, no, I think that seems right. I think, you know, a lot of all of these different cases are in different parts of Google's business.

49:34So, you know, I guess Google could say, all right, we're going to make some proactive changes in some of these businesses. But, you know, even if they think, even if they think they won't win everything, they don't know which things will stick necessarily. So it's sort of difficult to get in front of right now. Well, and I think that's actually a really good segue to the search remedies, which I want to talk about, Lauren, And I want you to help us go through because I think what I get from that is the DOJ in particular is like, no, Google, you can't just make teeny tiny changes and sort of wiggle your way out of this.

50:09Like we are coming for you and we are coming for all of it. Yeah. It's like I could not believe reading this filing how big a window the DOJ is giving itself or would like to give itself to mess with Google. And I think it's because of what you just said, Lauren, that Google is like this touches lots of pieces of our business. We'll sort of noodle around the edges and we'll build a firewall back between things and we'll let Congress yell at somebody three times a year and then everything will be fine. And the DOJ seems very clearly to be like, absolutely not. Like we are going to burn you down.

50:42And that's what James Anato, the epic judge, has essentially said. He's like, I'm going to tear this company open. And that is like the vibe is so aggressive on that front from the government side of this. It's wild. Yeah. So let's talk about the search remedies. It is a 32 page filing, only 11 pages of which are actually substantive. 20 pages are just state attorney general signing it, which I think is great. Everyone just like join the club. That's what I aspire to. Yeah. Just to be like the 11th signatory of everything. But it is it starts with we should break up Google. bullets on our minds all the way down to, I don't know, you should appoint a compliance officer for us to yell at.

51:20Lauren, take us through it. What are the approaches in here? Yeah. So basically, there's four high-level categories that the DOJ lays out that they're looking for in terms of remedies here. So the first one is about the search distribution and revenue sharing deals, I think these are kind of like the most closely tied to like the surface level of what this case was about, which was like contracts with phone makers and browser makers to make Google the default on their products. And basically the DOJ says like we'd want to put some limits on the kinds of contracts that Google can make. So, you know, that seems like probably the lowest hanging fruit here.

52:07But it's also something that doesn't really fundamentally change Google's business. But another part of that section, they talk about making structural changes, which means a breakup involving Google's ownership of Chrome, Android and the Play Store. And so it's basically saying like, there are these other channels, where Google distributes its search engine, that Google has an advantage in that its rivals don't. And, you know, that's fundamentally a problem. So that's kind of where, you know, we get from this more surface level remedy of contracts to something that really would like go into Google's business and change it up.

52:59Just to pause on that one, I want to get to the other ones. But I think the move from the first part of that to the second, I think, is what's so interesting about this whole filing. Because it's like, if you take the argument to be that Google made illegal amounts of money from its search engine, which is like, not exactly the argument, but it's like, it's you can get there pretty easily, right? You have to make some things up and not be right, but you can get there. No, but it's like that is what they're – part of what they're saying is – It's not an illegal amount of money. It's they illegally protected their monopoly.

53:36And thus made a ton of money, right? But they're not so worried about the money. No, but they are. But the point is what they're doing and there's all this setup at the top of the document that is like not only do we have to stop Google from doing what it's doing, we have to undo it and fix it. Yeah. And pull the market back. And they have a quote from somebody that's like, you know, we can't go back in history, but we have to do our best to fix it. And so it's like that's how you arrive at we have to split off Android. Because, Lauren, I think you're exactly right. The obvious thing to come out of this or one obvious outcome would be no more search deals, right?

54:13You can't pay it to be the default anymore. That seems like a very straightforward answer to what Judge Meta clearly had issues with. but then it's it's a surprisingly small number of steps from that to even if you let google be the default search engine in the thing that it already owns it's still too powerful and so it's like that that leap feels wild but i was surprised at how quickly the government got there i would say so it's not to me it's not money it's data the money is like related to data you can't make a good four things right you can't make a good search engine without all the data that google collects And if they continue to own Chrome, you're hooped.

54:52But I agree with you. It's a small jump from these search deals are illegally being made to we should tear Google to shreds. Right. Because Chrome makes you too powerful. Because Chrome makes you too powerful. Yeah, I agree with that. Okay, Lauren, what are the other two remedies proposed or concepts of a plan? Yeah. So the next one, kind of what we were just talking about, was the accumulation and use of data. So, you know, during the trial, the government kind of described this like self-reinforcing cycle where, you know, users go to Google because it's the default and it's what they're used to using.

55:29And they enter their search queries and then Google gets a lot of information from what you click on about what's actually a useful answer. And because it, you know, kind of has this, basically has all of these distribution channels pretty much set to itself as the default, you know, most people are going to Google. And then other search rivals are kind of being deprived of that query click information and then, you know, aren't able to improve their services as much. And then, you know, they're not they don't feel as good to users and then they go back to Google. So that's kind of the cycle that was described at trial.

56:12Including by Satya Nadella. Yeah. Very. He was not messing around. Yeah. Yeah. So basically, the government wants to offset that advantage. by making it so, you know, Google has to kind of share certain information. You know, they might have to, you know, license some information or make APIs to share some of the information on how it trains its search engine with that query data, essentially. And, you know, the DOJ says, like, they know that there are privacy concerns here with sharing that kind of information. But they also say, you know, we need to kind of parse out what is really a privacy concern and what is just like a big tech defense.

57:04Yep. That comes up a few times where the government is like, yeah, we know there are privacy issues. We'll figure it out. It comes up a lot. You know, Jonathan Cantor, the assistant attorney general for antitrust, has been on Decoder twice now. And he's very careful. He's very good. He's a government lawyer. He's very good at this politician. but you can hear his frustration with privacy as a defense to every problem just it's blindingly clear he's like we know apple wants to protect your data that doesn't mean they can do illegal things we can figure it out and i think that's kind of what they're saying to google here too like yes other companies need this data to compete they need to know what's going on the internet too you can't say only we can protect you like we're just not that's not a rational defense to the government right i have no idea how that's going to play out but i will say that i've interviewed kantor twice and he is very frustrated about that particular wall going up yeah yeah and they do like lauren was saying there are a few times where it's like and before you say privacy don't say privacy all right what's the fourth one there's two more there's two more yeah two She's only said two.

58:13The first was like a two-parter. I got you. So the third is about generation and display of search results. So this one is pretty much about AI. And, you know, the government kind of says, you know, Google is creating these like new AI products that are, you know, integrated in search and a feature in search that basically come from scraping data from sites that they say have, quote, little to no bargaining power against Google's monopoly. So they're basically wanting to make sure that, you know, sites can maybe opt out of having their information being trained on AI data and things like that.

58:56This one feels to me like the government being like not entirely sure what problem it's trying to solve here. because I think the thing we heard in both these trials, both in the search trial and in the ad tech trial was there's this whole group of round Google on the internet that just feels powerless. Right. And there's, there's a sense that one of the things that is monopolistic about Google is that you just have to play Google's games all the time. And so you can feel this energy from the government saying, we want to level the playing field and give people more tools and more stuff to do.

59:29And like, you've actually been able to opt out of Google for a pretty long time. It's just that no one wanted to because it wasn't a good trade for the most part. And now that trade is different and it's worse. But, like, the tools are still kind of there. So I feel like, to me, this was the least compelling part of this document. The government basically just trying to be like, we want everyone else to feel big. Yeah, this was the shortest section in the remedies. and it does feel like the one that like maybe they're gonna have to figure out how to flesh out a little bit more yeah yeah this one it's hard i mean like it's it's easier in this instance to sort of bring google down a peg than it is to bring everybody else up right and i think they're they're trying to do both and i think that that makes sense in this moment i think they're trying to push apple into making a search engine if i had to if i had to describe the shape of the outcome that everyone wants the most.

1:00:26We knock Google down a peg. We make it illegal for you to just pay the money. And Apple looks around and says, well, we should just do a search engine of our own and we'll use some of this innovative new AI technology to do it. Well, wait, can I read you a thing that might actually point at that? So one of the things in the generation display of search results section says that they're considering remedies that would require Google to make available in whole or through an API the indexes, data, feeds, and models used for Google search, including those used in AI-assisted search features, and Google search results, features, and ads, including the underlying ranking signals, especially on mobile.

1:01:03So that's, like, A, that is bananas. That's it. Give Google away for free. We need to make that you open-source Google. All right. But, like, what that clearly says is we want to spin up a whole bunch of Google competitors right away because anyone with 10 minutes of coding experience is now going to be able to build a Google-level search engine. On the back of Google. Right. Like, wild. But it does suggest that one of the things they want to do is very quickly create a lot of competitors in the search industry. Yeah. To the point of Apple, at trial, the government did kind of suggest that Google had made it in its contract so that it would make sure Apple would not compete with it directly in search.

1:01:47So I could definitely see that being something that the government would like to see, you know, opening up the opportunity for even, you know, a very well positioned competitor to just like get going here and crack open the ecosystem. them. Yeah, that was when they were talking about Spotlight, right? And there were all these internal emails where Apple was trying to decide whether the stuff they were doing in Spotlight was like too close to Google and people at Google were worried that Spotlight was becoming too Google-y. And like these two things were actively trying to not run into each other.

1:02:16And you could tell the whole time this came up in trial, the government's just sitting there being like, yeah, we got you. I can't tell you the number of times I've walked out of a WWDC, which is where Apple does its operating system updates. And I've gotten texts from Google employees that are like, they're coming for search. And my response is always like, why are you talking to me? Right? Like you're Google. And it's because Apple has the click data, right? They have the captive audience, particularly in the iPhone that is just searching in Safari. And right now that goes to Google. And the second that's diverted, Google knows it's in trouble.

1:02:49So it pays the money. And I, I think generally I've heard both Jonathan Cantor and Lena Khan at the FTC say, all these like programs where we install a babysitter to tell a company they're doing something bad and they fix it like don't work like these compliance regimes don't work we want structural remedies which means we're going to break up your dumb company and now you're two companies and what we want is actual competition in the market and the reason i'm saying i think they want apple to launch a competitor google is like that is the easiest fix to this problem yeah like without question it's google should have a competitor where can i just drag one into existence.

1:03:26It is on the iPhone with Apple intelligence. And you're talking to Siri and you've got new search results and new things to create all that stuff. Just do it. Well, and it's also the exact same logic that doesn't make it make sense for Apple to have not launched a search engine. There were a lot of negatives in that sentence. But basically, the point is, like, given all of that evidence, the only obvious reason Apple wouldn't have launched the search engine is because Google pays it lots of money. And that was like, Lauren, I think you and I both heard that was the implication at trial that, like, they have successfully with$20 billion a year kept a huge and well-funded and immediately at scale competitor from existing.

1:04:08And now we're just going to give them all of Google's other data. We're just going to fix it. Yeah. All right. I think that's three. One more. One more. One more. All right. So the last one is about kind of a different part of this case, which was Google's monopoly in general search text ads. So this is like a super specific part of the case. We love a market definition. But basically, in this area, you know, this is like the sponsored blue links that you see when you enter a search query. And, you know, the government here is thinking about maybe making Google license or syndicate its ad feed even like separately from its search results to allow for more competition in that really particular part of the market.

1:05:03You should see if you're not watching this, you should see the squinting Eli is doing. Yeah, I mean, I've been spending a lot of time talking to ad people lately. you have uh changed you because i see them you're wearing a tie oh god i'm wearing a tie because of a secret verge project that will soon be revealed and i decided to just keep wearing the tie today um uh but i've been just sort of like watching like the influencer advertising market so i've been talking a lot of people like where's this money going like what is happening in these platforms i promise i will write a story about this but the thing that they're all saying is search ads on google are not so valuable to us anymore that this all the action all the young people with the money is in like tick tock shop or whatever.

1:05:45And so the money's moving. So there's just like this last piece of the puzzle where you're Googling running shoes and Google is going to show you search results for running shoes with a sponsored link at the top. Like it's still very valuable. It's very lucrative. It hasn't moved in any meaningful way, but it's the thing that is changing all on its own without any intervention. Right. Right. Because the dollars are just going somewhere else and so this one just seems like is what i want a feed of google ads that's my that's the plan like we're fine but it goes back to kind of the same idea of like how do we undo the thing that has made google unstoppable which is that it just has this gigantic lead on everybody it has so much scale it has so much click data it has so much query data it has so much user data and it really seems like the only thing the government has figured out to do here is just give all that data to everybody else in order to level the playing field.

1:06:42I'm not a lawyer, but that doesn't seem like a real plausible. So there's this idea, Sarah John and I've been talking this a lot. There's this idea that you can't force a company to do something. You can't force someone to do anything. It's called specific performance. It's very nerdy, but it's like, it's the thing you, it's like the hardest thing to get. like I'm mad at you because your tree is hanging on my property. I'm like, I need you to cut down the tree. And it's much more likely that the judge will move our property lines than to force you to cut down the tree. Right. Like that's a, if you're a first year lawyer, I know there's a million problems with that example, but that's the shape of it, right?

1:07:23Like it is very hard to force a, force someone to do anything in an ongoing way. It's just the last thing you can ask for. and I think in this context and Lauren, I'm curious what you are reporting has revealed, it feels like the government's like, yeah, we're going to break it up. Along the way, we're going to ask for a bunch of duty to deal. You have to do these deals. We're going to force your business to do business with that business. We're going to force you to do these things, which are the other choice. Either, judge, you can break up Google. You can take YouTube and Chrome and Android.

1:07:56Just break them up. Now you've got three companies. Clean. We can all go to dinner. or we can force these companies in a slap in the face. You're going to slap George Washington in the face, the most anti-American thing you do. And so you have to do deals with your competitors. And it just feels like that's the setup. And I don't, I don't know what's going to happen, but like you have to license all of your data and your search results generations and your ad stack so that Apple can build a thing. And you have to keep that going. And where the American economy depends on your doing this deal, because we forced you to, that's tough that's a tough one yeah and it might be easier around getting that deal done correctly in the spirit of the law and it just might be easier to be like cut it in three and i i kind of think that this whole concepts of a plan thing is like just setting up the oh that seems hard we should just break up well the government does say they think that there needs to be like for the The judge needs to consider remedies from like at least most of these buckets.

1:08:56Like it can't just be like one thing. And obviously, you know, this is early days. They're asking for as much as they think they might be able to get. And they haven't even gotten into specifics yet. But, you know, I think they feel like they need to attack this from multiple angles and also attack the network effects, which I think is what licensing aspects of this get to is like, yeah. Okay, once Google has all this query information, no one else is really able to get it and get in there unless they're able to access that in some way. Do these things typically get filed as like a negotiating tactic?

1:09:33I'm realizing as you're talking that the way I read this is the government sort of vastly overshooting what it thinks it can do just as kind of a first overbid in the game to try and land somewhere in the middle. Is that actually how this works? I don't know. to whatever extent although i think that doj does not want to settle this one i think they want they want it they've won they won they want a trial they want to see what remedies they will win whatever i think the weirdness here is this was a two-part trial so they had the first trial that's just like are you bad and the answer is yes yes did you do it oh you super did and the second part is what should the remedies be and a lot of this filing um is here's what we think the remedy should be now we're going to have another trial and we're going to get more information about how bad they are to support these eyes.

1:10:22There's also going to be a whole other discovery process for this phase. So the government is going to get even more information about what's possible, what Google thinks actually gives it the power that it does and how it could get at that. So I think that will be refined as they get that information. So that's the reason you go super broad in this first one is to essentially give yourself leeway to go every possible direction in this remedies trial yeah okay that makes sense and the the and then the thing and people are probably listening to me i'm like here you just want to break up google you hate google the thing that is right next to it is google is generally terrified of all of this and has gotten itself into trouble throughout all these antitrust cases for constantly deleting emails and like saying things like antitrust take this chat to private which is weird or the putting attorney client privilege at the top of every email even when it's obviously not attorney client privileged yeah like they're like if you can't talk about your own business without having to say we shouldn't talk about this like something is going wrong uh all the way up all the way up to sooner pachai who is like we should take this offline like so there's just this overwhelming sense inside of this case in particular that like the government's going to just run it to the end yeah i don't know if that's the sense in the epic case so that's this case again there's another poor lauren and david are both gonna have to sit in dc courtrooms some more they see that coming that's just one of the cases the ad tech case we can set aside because nothing has really happened in the past couple weeks we think november right for next moves on that one november 25th is when closing arguments are happening ah sick thanksgiving present for everybody that's going to be so fun you can just be like you know the judge was like i i cannot hear about cpms anymore we're all taking a break and then you can come back and do your closing um uh that's that other case is happening over there that's google's money so that's a big deal uh and then there's the epic case which is the weird one it's like the weird outlier because it wasn't brought by the government it's brought by tim sweeney epic they lost against Apple and basically the same theory, but they super won against Google because in order to keep the Android ecosystem in line, Google had to go make contracts.

1:12:36And there's just a huge paper trail of what those contracts are and what they restrict companies from doing and how they work. And now we're at the same part where the judge is like, how do I fix it? And Lauren, it feels like the remedies in this case are their own kind of extremely complicated multi-part system. Yes, that is true. But I guess basically the high level is that the judge is allowing for other app stores on Android to have, you know, kind of more equal footing with the Play Store. And I think Google has to give the entire catalog of Play Store apps to other app stores for three years, which is just back to that.

1:13:14How do I make it fair? I'm going to force this to be fair. Yeah, Google has to give third party developers access to all the apps in Google Play and list those third party app stores in Google Play. So it's this, it turns the app store into this crazy, like, Ouroboros of apps that you're like, oh, you want to download Instagram, you can do it from 900 places now. Knock yourself out. But yeah, I mean, there's a lot of like little things also that the judge ruled here. Like there's some of the steering or the anti-steering stuff where it's now easier to link to billing outside of Android with these remedies.

1:13:54There's a lot of, I guess I would call it like weird contract-ness that's trying to be undone in terms of like how app revenue gets shared and what developers get from Google to do things or in some cases not to do things. but yeah it seems like basically what the judge is trying to do here is just say there are a lot of apps on Android and everyone should have all of them and they should all be able to peacefully coexist and that is like I think a really fascinating UI experiment we're about to have because like I just I think most people are going to have trouble figuring out how any of that is actually supposed to work but it also does mean if you run a competitive app store you have a lot of new advantages going for you.

1:14:44Well, I mean, this case is Epic's case. They're the ones who want all these outcomes. So Epic gets to start the Epic App Store, Epic Game Store on Android. Tim Sweeney has already announced they're going to do this. That's going to have Fortnite in it. The argument, as far as I can tell, and Lauren, correct me if I'm wrong, is the Epic Game Store is at a huge disadvantage if the only app in it is Fortnite. So you need some other apps. okay Google you have to give the entire catalog well and if you can't download the epic game store through the app store that comes built in right with all the warning screens right okay so to get the epic game store you got to go through the play store and so now it feels like it's on par with everybody else now you got the epic game store you go in there to get fortnight and if the only thing in there is fortnight you're never going to use it again and Google retains its advantage they've just made it hard to get fortnight so instead we're going to demand that Google give the entire catalog of the play store to epic so when you open the epic game store you can see all the apps that are available on android and fortnight and fortnight but the play store doesn't get fortnight yeah it actually disadvantages the play store in a lot of ways because now if you have an app that is so compelling that you can pull people into your ecosystem it's still going to be a lot of work and maintenance to build an app store of your own, but you now have pretty strong incentives to do it because there aren't a lot of downsides.

1:16:06But going back to the search case, the Play Store is preloaded on a lot of Android phones. So there's still that advantage for the Play Store. Yeah. It just seems like what we're going to get is Epic gets to launch the Epic Game Store and maybe Microsoft will launch a Microsoft store and maybe amazon will try again maybe amazon will notice that it runs the amazon the silk browser like and those will become more viable yeah because just by default instagram will be in them as well in a way that right now whatever like they're not going to go make those deals and no one has any incentive to chase that down right does that does this matter for anybody but Epic?

1:16:51I think it matters for any developers that want to make an app store, but I don't know how many developers are out there who want that. And I guess it also matters for developers who want options to be in other app stores that don't have the same rules as the Play Store. Yeah. So on the iOS side, this has been expressed pretty directly, right? So there's Alt Store, because the EU mandated alternative app stores in iOS. Immediately, the alt store came out. The bunch of emulators showed up, and then Apple changed the rules in its app store because of some competition. That has sort of been already available on Android.

1:17:34You could sideload all this stuff on Android. It hasn't changed the rules of the Play Store. So is it that we'll have another app store with more permissive rules about what's allowed or better payment splits? I don't know. like this one because android was already open ish it's like a weird paradox of this case yeah like because google doesn't control the ecosystem the evidence of it trying to control the ecosystem is much more available because it's just like sending emails to samsung being like we control your phone well and there were a couple of things that epic was asking for that it didn't get that i think might have potentially been a bigger deal it's like one of their things i forget exactly how they expressed it, but the idea was basically you should be able to sideload an app as easily as you can download an app from the Play Store.

1:18:19And they didn't get that. And if they'd gotten that, that becomes a big deal because now it just becomes trivially easy to distribute an Android app outside of any app store. And that becomes very powerful for lots of good and bad reasons. And then there was the one where they wanted to decouple a lot of the Android APIs from Google Play so that in theory you could buy a device that has the full Android experience, except it doesn't have Google Play at all. And so then if you're Epic, you sell a gaming handheld that is full Android, but only the Epic Game Store or something like it, right? Like you can see how you get down the road from that.

1:18:55I think the world in which we're gonna live, which is that the Play Store is still very powerful and still exists. You just have more control inside of it. That one feels a little less obvious to me. And I think one weird possible outcome of all of this is that you get some of the big companies you're talking about. Like, in theory, Microsoft and Meta and a handful of other companies are powerful enough to say, we are doing our own app store. We're not going to play the rest of your games, and we're going to offer you better terms if you come buy apps from our store instead of the Play Store or whatever.

1:19:31And then you start to have real weird tiers of competition inside of Android where like I'm going to get to the point as a user where I have to download five app stores just to have my site. And that sucks. Like that's a bad consumer outcome. And that is what Google has been railing against this whole time. And I think that is a reasonable part of its defense. But the truth is I just think Epic got what it wanted, which is we can do Fortnite on our own terms. And there's going to be a lot of fallout. But I don't think there are that many Epics. out there you know what i mean in the way that there are a million search engines that would like to be powerful i don't know that there are a million other well there's a sony there's a microsoft there's a bunch of game companies that really there are a bunch of game companies um i'm just saying that the little with a weird paradox here is because it was already open to control it google had to do a bunch of aggressive stuff that created the evidence that is like now you have to be more open which is weird and i can tell you because i had this exact reaction, a bunch of our listeners are screaming in their cars right now that it is already somewhat trivial to download an APK on an Android phone outside of an app store.

1:20:40Sure. Right? And it's weird because that openness exists. When Sonos was broken, I just got the APK of the old version of the Sonos app and my Sonos was fine for a week. It's easier. But you can't go to a website, tap install this app on my phone and it installs the app on your phone. You can, but you also have to accidentally run like a Bitcoin mining scam. That's fine. Actually, you brought up Google's responses to this. Lauren, I'm looking at a blog post from Google that says, DOJ's radical and sweeping proposals risk hurting consumers, businesses, and developers. That seems like it sums up the response, but you've been doing some reporting.

1:21:12You've read this more closely than I have. What is Google's response to all this? Yeah, that's their response to the search remedies, I believe. And, yeah, they basically think, you know, this is a big overreach. You know, this case is about, you know, a set of search distribution contracts. And, you know, here's the government going and like reaching out into all these different businesses that it has. And, you know, this is, you know, really going beyond what this case is about. So I think, you know, we're going to be seeing a lot more from them. I believe they have to file something about their response at some point.

1:21:53So, you know, I think we're not going to really see them backing down from this. And they have to go through this remedies phase before they can appeal. But I think we're going to see a big fight from them down the road. Yeah. Am I being too hard on Google to just read this blog post as Google yelling, but privacy? They do kind of yell, but China wants in here. But mostly it seems to me that they're just like, it's all the stuff that we've been saying. the judges in these cases are not finding compelling. I think it's privacy. It's, you know, we're going to hold back American innovation. And also just this is a big overreach.

1:22:31So I think those are kind of some of their key arguments here. Yeah. They also say that if Android and Chrome were their own companies, there would be no incentive to keep them open source, which is a big deal. And I feel like we could make a hard left turn in talking about WordPress right now, but we should not do that. We should not do that. But there's a lot there. Google's response to this, we'll link the blog post. You can, everybody can read it, but their, their blog post is basically like, look, we make a lot of money and then we give a whole bunch of stuff away for free. And if you change that dynamic, maybe this stuff isn't free anymore.

1:23:06Like I said, I don't know what's going to happen here. I don't really know what all the right answers are. I can just tell you with a hundred percent certainty that the Google we knew a year ago is not the Google we will have a year from now. Yeah. agreed like this the the and it's weird to me how little everyone is paying attention to it like this this company is the infrastructure of the internet like we there's a reason we've been talking on the verge for however long now we've been talking about it like when google changes this dramatically basically everything around it necessarily changes yeah that's weird and some of those points about like would another company have the same incentives to keep android as accessible and open source as it has been that's true like yeah the the whole android business is the search business and if you decouple those things android needs a business and it would it would change like i think google's not wrong about that yeah it's a pixel team wake up it's time to start selling some phones buddy all right we gotta take a break lauren stick around we want you on the lightning round with us.

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1:27:03All right, we're back. Unsponsored lightning round. It's never going to happen. We've gotten some very nice emails, but I'm not allowed to make the deals. I just walk into rooms of Vox Media demanding, and no one takes me seriously. For all you guys know, this is a sponsored lightning round. I won't tell you. That's true. That's true. Sponsored by Liam. All right, David, you're going to start with the first one. It's another Google story, but I will tell you, one, it's a palate cleanser, and two, shockingly popular story. Okay. Not shocking because it's the greatest news in years if you are a person who cares about your documents.

1:27:43And don't we all care about our documents? So Google announced this feature in April and I completely missed it, but is now rolling out a thing that basically it's the docs equivalent of the thing in Sheets or Excel where you can have sort of multiple tabs open that kind of interact with each other. It's just a pain on the side that you can open tabs and subtabs, but it's essentially like having multiple documents inside of one document. does that sound like a big deal to you that will completely change your life you're wrong because it is and it will this is as a person who creates infinite google docs for my job this is the greatest thing that has ever happened to me i knew it was a big deal when i saw wired staffers who i know and love like freaking out on threads about our story about yeah because they like immediately needed to share it.

1:28:38So the thing that's great about this is a thing that is more and more popular all the time, it seems is the like public Google document. Yes, more and more you're seeing like, there's a great newsletter that I subscribe to that the newsletter every month is just a link to a Google Doc, and you go read the Google Doc, and it's kind of a great experience. This is it's great for navigation. It's great for putting lots of docs together. There has been that table of contents thing you can do on the side where it'll let you just jump from header to header. This is just that, but like better and more navigable and less awful on big documents.

1:29:12But I think it's, Google Docs is like used for a lot of really interesting things. Public Docs are everywhere. It's a super collaborative thing. I see things where like groups of hundreds of people are like planning things together in a single Google Doc. And like, this is a kind of structure that Docs has just never had and is going to make a lot of type A people very, very happy. and they are very happy they're so happy they are just reading and sharing the story we if we did nothing but write about tabs and google docs the rest of the year we'd be set it's real and that's what we're doing it's google antitrust and tabs and google docs you can make them emojis when i was a just a pup there was this piece of software that came with almost every mac called hyper card and it was i don't even know how to describe it it was the internet but local and expressed as like virtual index cards and you could like program hype they were called stacks You can program hypercard stacks.

1:30:03Some of our audience is freaking out because they know what we're talking about. When I tell you other people think I sound like an ancient wizard. It involves hypercards in a surprisingly meaningful way. This is just hypercard. Oh, 100%. Google is making hypercard. They're turning Google Docs into hypercard. Or another less successful comparison, Google Wave. They're doing just the modular. That's good. I mean, Google has been trying to do Google Wave in various forms for an extreme long time. We've got to just Google. It's an impossible thing to Google, to Google the word Google and the word Wave.

1:30:31it's hard we'll find a link to some ancient coverage of this thing google made yeah uh years ago it was like what if we blew up all all email and docs and it was all the same thing and no one could figure it out and now we're we're just back lorna are you as excited about tabs as i am be honest i can't say i am i'm not the person who has like a million chrome tabs open at the same time you guys are the problem as someone who's somehow missed a story i'm like freaking out in the control. I'm so excited. There are workflows in my head right now that are now possible. I'm going to just share. Was that a threat?

1:31:07Liam just threatened us. Yeah, he did. All right. We're toast. It's the lightning round. We got to move on. Yeah. All right, Lauren, what do you got? Next tab. Yeah. Next tab. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure everyone heard there was a major hurricane in Florida this week. And FEMA is out there cleaning up, fighting. the storm and also now fighting disinformation about the storm as well, including some false claims spread by former President Trump. And, you know, I think FEMA kind of always knew this was going to be a problem, but the FEMA administrator said this is absolutely the worst I've ever seen about misinformation around the storms recently.

1:31:51So, you know, it's just kind of wild that they've had to do all this fact checking um while just trying to literally clean up a major disaster i think we did a link to a rolling stone story on the homepage today just about meteorologists who are getting death threats because people believe they can control the weather marjorie taylor green out there saying that they can control the weather oh great uh which is an incredible retcon of climate change. Yes, it's true we can control the weather, just not the way that you think. It just takes 40 years of burning fossil fuels. It's true. We did, in fact, control the weather in one very specific way.

1:32:34I don't know if you... We've run a bunch of stories about just moderation failures lately, like threads of moderation is way too heavy-handed. It appears to be partially AI-driven in a way that no one can control, at least all the people at Meta. x obviously not moderating any of this misinformation it is weird to be in a social media environment where i'm like they did kind of a good job during covid because they they didn't like that was a nightmare and this is so much worse and it feels like people are going even one step farther away from reality into they're controlling the weather in florida to influence the election i i i mean all of like i i don't think we were doing a great job when we were bringing jack dorsey in front of congress so that people could yell at him and then bad tweets and then people were yelling at mark zuckerberg about twitter like yeah that accomplished broadly nothing i think lauren um you covered all that uh not nothing nothing was accomplished in some weird first amendment problems there but it taught these companies that what if doing nothing was It's a more viable strategy.

1:33:43And now it feels like we're just reaping the dividend of doing nothing. Well, it feels like these companies are just very reactionary. And it's like being yelled at as a kid. And at first you're like, oh, I need to do better. I need to do what I'm being asked. And then they become adolescents that are like, wait a minute. Why am I just following what you say? It seems like it gets me in more trouble. And then they decide to back off. By the way, that is a perfect description of Mark Zuckerberg and his T-shirts and chains and flowing logs. Like he's in his adolescent phase of like, screw you. And I remember, yeah, we were talking a couple of years ago about like all of these companies, a few of them in particular, made a real show of doing their best and trying their hardest and decided that it accomplished nothing.

1:34:36Yeah. For them, for their image. And we were even wondering, we were like, okay, what's it going to look like when they decide that actually the penalty for not caring and the penalty for caring are basically the same and they're just going to decide to not care? No, but I'm saying it's worse. Right now, it is worse. The penalty for caring was worse than the penalty for not caring. In the world. But they are paying less of a penalty. They are in their bunkers. That's what I mean. And on their mega yachts. Right. And they are not paying any price for like a fake AI generated photos of like children with puppies that don't exist.

1:35:15They're like, oh, this is fine. Whereas when they tried, they got yelled at. Exactly. And the incentive structure is like totally backwards. Yes, 100%. And they're like, we have now reached the point where all of their incentives are to not try. And now we know what it looks like, right? It turns out trying and failing. And I think we all pretty much agree that content moderation is a completely unwinnable game. and all you can do is try and fail as well as possible uh that trying and failing gained them nothing and they might as well just give up and not care and wear t-shirts and here we are and it's awful it is i would say the hurricane misinformation story is it might be a defining story in in like the history of media like it's just fully out of control like the the other aspect of that that i i don't know if you guys have seen this but like all of my feeds everywhere are just creators in Florida who stayed and, and are like making a show out of not going.

1:36:10Some of them are like outside trying to sort of journalism the hurricane. But then there's one guy I keep finding who just wears a headlamp and is just like walking around his house being like, seems bad. I'm in the eye. I don't care. And he just has a headlamp. And that's, that's like 50 of his videos. We don't have the time to do David and Eli talk about journalism and really never do we have the time and nor should we on the show, but the drive the difference between that and Anderson Cooper being like, it's pretty bad. Yeah. Actually pretty hard to do. You can journalism the hurricane just by going outside.

1:36:43I get it. It's like, they're like, I'm staying here to do, to get eyeballs. And Anderson Cooper's like, I'm going there to get eyeballs. And it's a very fine line between those two things. A hundred percent. Um, I do think these, the platforms are, they've dropped the ball. And I, I don't know. I have all of every virtual listener knows. That's how I feel about the First Amendment, which is everyone else seems to be sick of it. I think that's a worrying trend. Like we're banning books and everyone has bad everyone screaming fire in a crowded theater. Tim Walls of the debate just randomly blurted it out for no reason.

1:37:16And our entire newsroom, you saw our entire slack. Everybody's like, no, like, I don't know what's going on. It's all bad. But the idea that our social networks are actually they actually have an important social function in our society to try to get accurate. information out and not amplify lies they just let go not going great just super let go yeah all right i'm gonna try to clean this up yeah i'm gonna try to end us on a high note that's my goal okay here's the high note several months ago the ceo of zoom came on decoder and he said here's my dream all of your zoom meetings will have ai clones in them digital twins you're gonna clone yourself and then that clone will go to the zoom meeting for you while you sit on a beach and drink a daiquiri.

1:38:01And I was like, how many cleanser do I have? Could I have 10 ,000? He was like, as many as you want. Unclear how any of this will work. Unclear if he was building, unclear how, if he had the technology to do it. I don't know. There were some great YouTube videos made about that specific interview. Sure. We'll link it. Zoom has announced AI avatars can talk to your team on your behalf. The first step towards our goal of 1 ,000 digital Nelais going to meetings across Fox Media demanding to have the lightning round sponsored. But now it's one digital Nelai. Yep. I feel like one's too many. Zoom announced it will soon let you create an AI avatar of yourself that you can use to send brief messages to your team.

1:38:47And the only message I want to send is when is the lightning round getting sponsored? And I would like my AI avatar to attend every single meeting at this company. this is nothing you need to record an initial video yourself that zoom's ai will use to make an avatar that looks even sounds like you from there you can write the message you want your avatar to say and then have it go to meetings and say it it's voicemail work it's the same amount of work it's just doing it could have been an email seriously and i'm gonna have my ai avatar go to every meeting and say this could have been an email okay hey that's a pretty good idea b i have come around to the idea that actually the solution to our ai problem is to just ban meetings everybody is like we're gonna make a thing so that you don't have to go to a meeting just don't have the meeting this is uncomplicated 1000 digital ai avatars all having meetings with each other while we sip daiquiris in the beach this is the future of the information economy or don't have me just daiquiris just the daiquiri parts and no meetings but then you have to have a meeting with your ai avatar to learn what happened which feels worse it i would say eric did not yeah i go from having no information to still having no information but a weird digital version of me talked to some people again you can listen to the episode of decoder we we tried to get there i would say that that was not forthcoming the answer to that specific problem you know it was a real like we'll get there when we get there kind of situation.

1:40:16Sorry, I'm just reading the quote that Eric said to you, and it begins with today for this session. He's saying this to you, by the way. Today for this session, ideally, I do not need to join.

1:40:28That's pretty rough. If the AI future is I don't have to hang out with Neal anymore, I'm in. Let's do it. I'm just telling you, I'm going to use this technology to get the lightning round sponsored. By the way, they asked Zoom's chief product officer about deepfakes doing bad things with their new AI avatars that can leave voicemails for people or whatever this is. And she said the company is handling the possibility of deep fakes with, quote, really carefully with advanced authentication, watermarking and strict usage policies. Nothing like a terms of service to keep people from doing deep fakes.

1:40:57Please don't. I'm going to make I'm going to train one of these on you. Send David to meetings. That's fine. It's coming. I'm just telling you, these ideas are coming. This is the dream. This is the last first cast where it will be real me. Never again. Just an AI avatar of David for some reason demanding that the lightning round could sponsor. I do think if you're a CEO, if you make an AI of yourself that goes to every Zoom meeting at your company and just says this meeting should have been an email, you will have done the greatest service to your company that any CEO has ever done. 100%. Just be like, why is the CEO here?

1:41:37And then like theatrically leave before they even realize it was AI. That's pretty good. That's pretty good. There it is. That's my idea. Yeah. All right. That's it. We got to wrap this thing up. We're way over. Crazy over. Lauren, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. We have lots and lots to come, including this RoboTaxi event, which is happening tonight. And then we'll cover it next week on the VergeCast, but we'll have full coverage on the site in the meantime. So go check that out. Let us know how we did on our predictions. Optimus Robots. That's it. That's VergeCast. Rock and roll.

1:42:11And that's it for the VergeCast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. give us a call at 866-VERGE-11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Liam James, Will Poore, and Eric Gomez. And that's it. We'll see you next week. Adobe Acrobat Studio, so brand new. Show me all the things PDFs can do. Do your work with ease and speed. PDF spaces is all you need. Do hours of research in an instant. With key insights from an AI assistant. Pick a template with a click. Now your preso looks super slick. Close that deal? Yeah, you won. Do that, doing that, did that, done.

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