CAUs Media.

CAUs Media.

Hello and welcome back to Better Offline. I'm your host ed Zetron.

Hello and welcome back to Better Offline. I'm your host ed Zetron.

Of course, in.

Of course, in.

The last episode, I went over why Google's monopoly is such a problem and why monopolies are a form of societal cancer. And in this episode, I'll go over want my App and next to Google after their anti trust trial. And by the time you hear this, it will have been a few weeks since Judge a Amit Meta ruled that Google was an illegal monopoly in search and online advertising. The next phase of this saga, though not including any appeals, will decide what penalties will come. Although it will be several months and most likely several years before we learn exactly what happens to Google, it's clear that the company sits on a dangerous precipice. In addition to a monetary penalty which is fairly likely and which could certainly be in the billions of dollars, Judge Meta will likely force Google to want to take some action that would effectively end its monopoly status or at the very least support more competition, and we'll get to those in the second But it's worth noting that we need to talk about how we got here. For this I'm going to be heavily relying on Judge Meta's three hundred page ruling. Judge Meta didn't concern himself with how Google got big because nanto trust law, there's nothing really prohibiting you from achieving dominance by being good and better than the competition. And to be fair, for the first couple of decades, Google was genuinely superior to any alternative. This was evidenced by its early reviews with Danny Sullivan, who now works for Google as a guy who occasionally pretends to care about what reporters think, but at the time he wrote for Search Engine Watch and he said, so how about results. I think many people will be pleased, especially for the ever popular single and two word queries. A search for Bill Clinton brought the White House site up at number one. A search for Disney top Rankdisney dot Com and sections with it like Disney World, the Disney Channel, and Walt Disney Picture. Yet interesting alternative sites like Werner's unofficial Disney Park links also made it to that list. Now let's just taken aside here. I'm just gonna go to Google dot Com as we speak. I'm gonna take Disney in I'm gonna read you what's on there. So the first things at the top are all sponsored. It's sponsored, and then tickets and tours is very big font and then there's five different options to buy something on trip dot com, some sort of vacation package, and then another thing from a company called Undercover Tourist. And then the results are Disney dot Com and disneyplasen well Disneyworld. But that those are like the They are the smallest thing on this page compared to the Disney store link in Vegas, and the four or five different sponsored pieces of content. And if you scroll down, it's Disney Products YouTube, Disney, Disney on Eggs, Disney Parks. Oh, this is all pretty good, but no original content. There's like one hundred thousand different Disney blogs that just aren't on there. Google don't give a shit, but they used to. Google also outclassed the competition on a technical level, as noted by Brian Durell, former sceening of Director of Production Operations at Alta Vista, in a hacker Use post. He blamed Altavista's demise on its failure to update its result indexes, which in turn meant that many of their front page results led to outdated or dead links, and I quote this was particularly bad because one of our earliest strong points was fresh indexes. Our ability to refresh the supplementary index on the flight was awesome. When you lose one of your primary strengths, it's noticeable, he said, adding that the decline in Altavista's index quality was due to a loss of focus within the company. Oh would hate for that to happen to Google. Google was at the time, both objectively and subjectively better than anything else, and so it grew, and like I said last episode, it became a verb, kind of like how we say photoshop instead of airbrush, or xerox instead of photocopy, and better offline listener instead of average criminal. Not only did it fend off its earliest competitors, but it also brushed past anyone that would try to steal its market share, like damp musk Acolyte Jason Kalakanis's Malhallow, which was a human created search engine, a bit like the early version of Yahoo and Kull, which emphasized its larger search indexes and privacy centric ethos as the thingishing factors. Just so we are clear, being popular or superior is not an antitrust valulation. No, no, no, no, that's not the problem. What Google did afterwards was the problem, and in the eyes of Judge Meta and the US government, was also illegal as a though, a lot of the things am about to cite are from this ruling, which makes linking to them kind of hard. Please don't be mad at me. But much of this ruling discusses something called distribution, which refers to how Google makes its search product accessible to users. The Google website is the most obvious example of that, but it also includes browser and device integrations. You ever wonder why the default browser option on Safari and Firefox is Google? I kind of said it last episode. It's because Google pays these but he's a lot of money. In the United States, half of all searches happen through an access point were Google is paid to be the default. A further twenty percent come through Google Chrome, which is made by Google. And does it follows that Google is the default search engine? Little monopoly and your monopoly hit my ride. Only thirty percent of US search queries take place in environments where Google is not the default browser, Which is not to say that all those searches are going to Duck duck go or bing, but rather that consumers have made an active decision to use whatever browser they've selected. And while you could argue that the consumers could choose to change the default on Safari or Firefox to something other than Google, the reality is, as shown by Google's own internal research and communications, that most consumers either don't know how or just don't care to. Another internal study mentioned in the judgment, this time from twenty twenty, showed that half of all US iPhone users didn't even know what search engine they were using. The ruling also points out that in some cases, there are inherent points of friction dissuade users from changing their default search engine. Switching on Android was arguably more difficult than nonios, the ruling said, also noting that the smaller screen of a smartphone and general fiddliness of things was a further deterrm. Google's own estimates show that if it lost search placement on iOS to another provider, it would lose between sixty and eighty percent of its traffic just because of how tricky it is to change these default settings. And so you're starting to get an understanding of the importance of these default placement deals for Google and how critical they are to its bottom line. In twenty twenty one, Mozilla made eighty percent of its operating budget, or four hundred million dollars, by selling default placement to Google. Two these monopolies have real consequences. Apple meanwhile, owns a percentage of advertising revenue from queries made from Safari and Chrome, even though Apple doesn't actually bundle Chrome with its devices. In twenty twenty two, this amounted to about twenty billion dollars, which was double the figure of twenty twenty and amounted to one six of Apple's operating profit from that year. Google also assigned deals with several US carriers like T Mobile, Verizon, in AT, and T, as well as other Android manufacturers, including Samsung and Motorola. The terms of these deals differ between companies, but they usually account for a percentage of revenue, with the actual percentage varying from contract to contract. While these deals are undoubtedly good for the balance sheets of these companies, they do impose restrictions on what these companies can do. Take Samsung, for example, which has around thirty one percent of US smartphone market share, second only to Apple. In twenty nineteen, Samsung wanted to integrate technology from a startup called Branch, which would allow users to search for content within installed applications, as well as to a limited extent, content from the Internet, although it was not to be clear a proper search engine in any real sense. Despite how there was a little bit of initial excitement around this, Samsung also saw h kind of become clear that the way Branch worked conflicted with their agreement with Google, and so the software had to be reworked in a way that massively limited its functionality. While the partnership went ahead, it was nowhere near as lucrative as Branch first hoped. The software was crippled and thus much less attractive. Similarly, AT and T also wanted to pre install Branch on its devices, but decided against it when it couldn't get clarity from Google whether it violated the terms of its revenue sharing deal. Google, it seemed simply stonewalled AT and T into submission. And this is again going back to the Matt Stolar interview I did. When you have rules like this, when you have monopolies, they do operate like miniature governments. And indeed, this is an example Google didn't even need to intimidate these people. In most cases, they just made enough money and they were scared enough of violating the deal that they literally made their devices worse. They didn't install cool software for fear that Google might sue them and cut off a lucrative revenue share. It's nasty even Apple, a company that is at varying times close to or the most valuable company in the world, itself constrained by this devil's deal with Google. At one point, Google insisted on altering the terms of its agreement to prevent Apple from suggesting relevant links to users through the Safari search bar, as such a feature would be and I quote, substantially similar to Google search. Apple, for what it's worth, has said that it did not feel constrained by these restrictions, which makes it fine with me. Then I'm kidding the kidding. I'd argue that they would say that because they were making twenty billion dollars each year from Google. And if I'm honest, if somebody gave me twenty billion dollars, I'd let them do whatever they wanted. Hit me with a baseball back, roun me over with your car. I don't care call me a pig. I'll oink for you. Give me twenty billion dollars. I need twenty billion dollars. Please give it to me now. But if you can't give me your money, then perhaps you'll hand it to one of the extremely well targeted advertisements that follow this wonderful message once that will make you say wow. This is definitely one that Ed wanted to follow what he just said, and we're back. And we're back with Google. As I've kind of hinted at, I don't think without their ad monopoly and with their Google Search monopoly, I don't think Google is a profitable business. And I definitely don't think Google Search is a profitable business. I think it's actually kind of a cost center. Search is in effect the vehicle in how Google gets people to look at billions of dollars of advertisements every single day, and Google doesn't allow any other competing business to show adds on its turf. It has exclusivity, and as the ruling found, that exclusivity has allowed Google to raise prices at will, looking to see how far it can push advertisers before they walk away, you know, to the other place they can advertise to this many people in twenty seventeen, the company ran an experiment where it strongly increased certain prices for a cohor fifteen percent of advertisers for six weeks. It found that half of the initial revenue getting stuck, and found that there was no significant evidence that advertisers were changing what products they don Google would later do further studies where it significantly hyped prices on advertisers, and each time it learned that it could charge more without losing them. While Google acknowledged there was a limit to how far it could push things, they believed that there was still more value to extract from its customers, and so it's set upon a strategy of gradually, though significantly, I should add raising prices across short intervals, as in the siding. Goddamn, is this company so fucking evil? They should be eradicated from existence. The fact that people like this function in good societies only prove that there are things wrong in the world. Every time I read about them, I feel poison in my veins. But there's more. These price rises Judge Meta noted were oftentimed when Google was at risk of not meeting its revenue goals, and when the company was at risk of showing some sort of slow down in its ads business. Hey remember the code yellow from twenty nineteen from the man that destroyed Google Search, that was all around raising metrics because they were worried about query growth. Google does not care. They will do whatever they need to to make revenue. They will make your products worse, they will make it more expensive for advertisers to advertise to you. And it's all thanks to their goddamn monopolies and these changes, these increases through the pricing of advertising and the way that they took money from advertisers. They were done with this insane lack of transparency and this is really stomach turning, this beer. This company. People should be in jail for this. Google didn't tell advertisers that the costs were going up, but rather they were timing these increases so that these increases could be dismissed as noise or ordinary price fluctuations generated within advertising auctions. The last point is important, by the way, as Google also tried to rig these auctions in their own favor. One way they accomplished this, by the way, is by removing the ability for advertisers to remove themselves from certain auctions. When someone buys a text out on Google, what they're really doing is selecting a keyword or keywords under which they want their ads to appear. The problem is that people may use different words for a search with the same intent. So one person might say kid's clothing where another might say children's clothing. And this is a problem for advertisers because you want to make sure that you capture the audience you want, right, And this is a problem that Google fixed by adding other relevant keywords to an advertiser's bid without telling them. Now, this might seem like a nice thing that Google did, making sure that your money goes further, right, The problem is, as the ruling showed, the Google interpreted the word relevant in the broadest way possible, so kids clothing would, as one shot shown in the ruling showed, include phrases like newborn children's clothing or kid's clothing Canada or Tjmax kids wear. And what's great is if you don't like this, you have no one else to advertise, with no other choices. And while Google initially allowed advertisers to opt out of this feature, which they called semantic matching, or use a limited version that would only include grammatical variations like pluralization, so children clothing, children's clothing, and so on and so forth, They of course remove these options. It means that unless the advertiser explicitly states what keywords they don't want their advert to appear under, they're going to be bid on search results that aren't relevant to their needs. And guess who controls what are relevant? Google? Google. Google's the one that tells you how much money to spend on Google. You don't like it, well, you can work with Google to advertise on Google, and otherwise you go fuck yourself. And this in turn increases the amount of advertisers bidding for space in an auction, which in turn results in higher prices for advertisers in a completely unpredictable way that's predictably evil. Not only does Google control the supply, they literally control the demand. And while Google at one point provided advertisers with detailed information about their matched keywords and the algorithmically selected ones at that it no longer does so. As a result, advertisers are effectively forced to guess what keywords their ad might appear under, and they have no other vendor to go to who might be a little more transparent. This in turn, by the way, pushes them to larger advertising agencies who have a better relation and ship with Google, who might have keyword banks that they know that they can cut out so that the advertising dollars are more efficiently spent. This in turn makes advertising agencies, especially the bigger ones, more powerful and hurt small businesses. It's so cool watching this happen. It doesn't make me angry at all. But in his ruling, Judge Meta found that Google's practices had degraded the quality of its text advertisements and charge super competitive prices for text advertisements. At the same time, by maintaining Google's stranglehold on the search market, they effectively limited how much rivals like Being can make from advertising. Even if Microsoft built a better ad tech platform than Google, its share of spending would remain in line with its market share and I quote here By locking in a huge comparatative query volume advantage through its exclusive agreements, Google ensures that advertisers will continue to spend ninety percent of their text ad dollars with Google, regardless of increases in price or decreases in quality. That is an anti competitive effect in the marketplace, and as Judge Metter is said that is bluddy well right, So what happens next. There's four un likely outcomes here, each with their own advantages or disadvantages and their own level of probability have come into pass and had tip by the way to Adam Kolovicik for highlighting these. Google may be ordered to cease engaging in default search deals kind of the most obvious one, leaving the likes of Apple, Samsung, and Mozilla free to sign agreements with other search providers, although these agreements would almost certainly be less favorable than their current ones, and indeed would be I don't know competitive, It's going to be a mess. As the ruling showed, both Apple and Mozilla have at times flirted with or been courted by the likes of Microsoft and Yahoo, although the terms were never as favorable as I mentioned, and guess what they didn't take them Judge Meta might although the how is pretty difficult here, as Apple and Mozilla aren't defendants in this case. Force browser developers to offer use as a ballot screen where people could choose what search engine they'd like to use. This would probably boost the market share of smaller search providers by a small degree, although I imagine most would just opt, through habit or preference, to pick Google at the very least until a viable alternative gains momentum. But this is still a start. It's still good. Well, then again, it's entirely possible that people might try something new and either because they like what they've selected or through sheer inertia, they don't go back to Google. As Google's data shows, this is a real threat, especially on mobile, which accounts for a massive portion of its search traffic and thus its ad revenue. Google may be forced to share click and query data with rivals, although again this poses its own thorny issues, especially when it comes to privacy. At the very least, it should at least tell advertisers what keywords they're buying and give them meaningful opportunities to opt out of irrelevant queries. While this sounds like a minor slap on the wrist, it has the potential to cost Google billions. Google's made so much money from forcing advertisers to buy slots on searches they don't want or care about, and by forcing people into auctions against their will or knowledge. When buyers are empowered, it follows that the price of ads will decrease commensurate with the lower levels of demand, And I don't know consumer choice is good and Google does not like consumer choice, so I assume it's less profitable to let people choose things. But finally, Judge Meta may order the actual breakup of Google, compelling the company to divest Chrome, Android, or more than likely its advertising division. This remedy is arguably the most potent and one that Google is most likely to oppose, and it's also the most funny. But let's get into why it's thorny. Chrome and Android are based on open source products, the chromeum Project and the Android open Source Project, respectively, and short of prohibiting Google from contributing code or providing funding, it would have a leading role in these developments and thus real influence. Moreover, Google's presence in Android isn't just in the operating system itself, but everything else called Google Mobile Services or GMS. GMS is the package of software that turns an Android phone into a Google phone. It includes the apps that company installed when you buy a Samsung or Gaomi phone, like Gmail, Google Chrome, Google Assistant, and so on, and also Google Gemini, as well as the APIs that allow third party applications to integrate with them. Any ruling that doesn't force Google to divest these components is for the most part, toothless, and any ruling that says effectively that Google can no longer build apps, or rather build apps for the mobile os it's most closely associated with, it's kind of hard to imagine. Moreover, Google could also just ditch Android. It's already working on its own OS called Future. It's already using Future in production devices, though it's unclear how invested they are in the project, and as I've previously mentioned in the last episode, I don't know how much staying power anything new and Google actually has. Combine this with native support for existing Android apps, which it likely already has and if not, could be implemented as others like Microsoft and Huawei have pretended to, it would effectively skirt any restrictions imposed on Google's involvement in Android proper. The biggest scariest thing for Google would be any separation of church and state between Google Search and its ap avertising platform. Doing so would be potentially ruinous for this company, which is why Google will do literally anything to stop it. But it's the remedy that would actually change things. Google's lack of competition in search is a symptom of its ability to set pricing in terms of advertising on search, and it's a problem that can be solved by removing its ability to do so. And let's face it, Google Search doesn't make that much money on its own. The thing that brings home the bacon is the ads on search and the ads you get with each query. If the ad business becomes its own separate entity, Google will have to entirely rethink how it monetizes search. And for san Da Pischai, that's a terrifying thought. I mean, what's he do? How do you rig the tables if you don't own the casino? And by the way, I'm in beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada. We they never rigged the tables here. That's sacrilegious. But it's not like there's another business for him to fall back upon. As a discussed at the end of the last episode, Google's largely lost the ability to innovate and execute on new ideas, and a new ideas that do eventually hit the market are usually and often just in a few months. Murdered, the bolt gun comes out chunk. They throw them in the open grave with Google Reader. But seriously, what does Google have other than products that directly lead to its own advertising technologies. What is there besides Cloud? And even Cloud is a marginal player at best when compared to Microsoft's Azure and Amazon's Aws. There's nothing. Before you get too excited, it is worth noting that Google will no doubt fight this ruling to the very end, using every single avenue of appeal, every dirty trick, until they're successful or they've run out of options. These little fuckers are going to go after everything, and they're going to look specifically an appeal, which, by the way, little Apple loup court session for you here, and if there's a loyalist thing, I'm sorry. Basically, Apple loop court appeals are not a retrial of the facts. It is a procedural thing. They'll be looking to see whether the judge meta messed up. And I'll tell you a little bit about how that's happened in the past and how bad that is and why I'm a little worried it might work. Sure, there's now a bipartisan dislike a big tech and I don't think any of the recently appointed Supreme Court judges other than the ones that might be on the take.

The last episode, I went over why Google's monopoly is such a problem and why monopolies are a form of societal cancer. And in this episode, I'll go over want my App and next to Google after their anti trust trial. And by the time you hear this, it will have been a few weeks since Judge a Amit Meta ruled that Google was an illegal monopoly in search and online advertising. The next phase of this saga, though not including any appeals, will decide what penalties will come. Although it will be several months and most likely several years before we learn exactly what happens to Google, it's clear that the company sits on a dangerous precipice. In addition to a monetary penalty which is fairly likely and which could certainly be in the billions of dollars, Judge Meta will likely force Google to want to take some action that would effectively end its monopoly status or at the very least support more competition, and we'll get to those in the second But it's worth noting that we need to talk about how we got here. For this I'm going to be heavily relying on Judge Meta's three hundred page ruling. Judge Meta didn't concern himself with how Google got big because nanto trust law, there's nothing really prohibiting you from achieving dominance by being good and better than the competition. And to be fair, for the first couple of decades, Google was genuinely superior to any alternative. This was evidenced by its early reviews with Danny Sullivan, who now works for Google as a guy who occasionally pretends to care about what reporters think, but at the time he wrote for Search Engine Watch and he said, so how about results. I think many people will be pleased, especially for the ever popular single and two word queries. A search for Bill Clinton brought the White House site up at number one. A search for Disney top Rankdisney dot Com and sections with it like Disney World, the Disney Channel, and Walt Disney Picture. Yet interesting alternative sites like Werner's unofficial Disney Park links also made it to that list. Now let's just taken aside here. I'm just gonna go to Google dot Com as we speak. I'm gonna take Disney in I'm gonna read you what's on there. So the first things at the top are all sponsored. It's sponsored, and then tickets and tours is very big font and then there's five different options to buy something on trip dot com, some sort of vacation package, and then another thing from a company called Undercover Tourist. And then the results are Disney dot Com and disneyplasen well Disneyworld. But that those are like the They are the smallest thing on this page compared to the Disney store link in Vegas, and the four or five different sponsored pieces of content. And if you scroll down, it's Disney Products YouTube, Disney, Disney on Eggs, Disney Parks. Oh, this is all pretty good, but no original content. There's like one hundred thousand different Disney blogs that just aren't on there. Google don't give a shit, but they used to. Google also outclassed the competition on a technical level, as noted by Brian Durell, former sceening of Director of Production Operations at Alta Vista, in a hacker Use post. He blamed Altavista's demise on its failure to update its result indexes, which in turn meant that many of their front page results led to outdated or dead links, and I quote this was particularly bad because one of our earliest strong points was fresh indexes. Our ability to refresh the supplementary index on the flight was awesome. When you lose one of your primary strengths, it's noticeable, he said, adding that the decline in Altavista's index quality was due to a loss of focus within the company. Oh would hate for that to happen to Google. Google was at the time, both objectively and subjectively better than anything else, and so it grew, and like I said last episode, it became a verb, kind of like how we say photoshop instead of airbrush, or xerox instead of photocopy, and better offline listener instead of average criminal. Not only did it fend off its earliest competitors, but it also brushed past anyone that would try to steal its market share, like damp musk Acolyte Jason Kalakanis's Malhallow, which was a human created search engine, a bit like the early version of Yahoo and Kull, which emphasized its larger search indexes and privacy centric ethos as the thingishing factors. Just so we are clear, being popular or superior is not an antitrust valulation. No, no, no, no, that's not the problem. What Google did afterwards was the problem, and in the eyes of Judge Meta and the US government, was also illegal as a though, a lot of the things am about to cite are from this ruling, which makes linking to them kind of hard. Please don't be mad at me. But much of this ruling discusses something called distribution, which refers to how Google makes its search product accessible to users. The Google website is the most obvious example of that, but it also includes browser and device integrations. You ever wonder why the default browser option on Safari and Firefox is Google? I kind of said it last episode. It's because Google pays these but he's a lot of money. In the United States, half of all searches happen through an access point were Google is paid to be the default. A further twenty percent come through Google Chrome, which is made by Google. And does it follows that Google is the default search engine? Little monopoly and your monopoly hit my ride. Only thirty percent of US search queries take place in environments where Google is not the default browser, Which is not to say that all those searches are going to Duck duck go or bing, but rather that consumers have made an active decision to use whatever browser they've selected. And while you could argue that the consumers could choose to change the default on Safari or Firefox to something other than Google, the reality is, as shown by Google's own internal research and communications, that most consumers either don't know how or just don't care to. Another internal study mentioned in the judgment, this time from twenty twenty, showed that half of all US iPhone users didn't even know what search engine they were using. The ruling also points out that in some cases, there are inherent points of friction dissuade users from changing their default search engine. Switching on Android was arguably more difficult than nonios, the ruling said, also noting that the smaller screen of a smartphone and general fiddliness of things was a further deterrm. Google's own estimates show that if it lost search placement on iOS to another provider, it would lose between sixty and eighty percent of its traffic just because of how tricky it is to change these default settings. And so you're starting to get an understanding of the importance of these default placement deals for Google and how critical they are to its bottom line. In twenty twenty one, Mozilla made eighty percent of its operating budget, or four hundred million dollars, by selling default placement to Google. Two these monopolies have real consequences. Apple meanwhile, owns a percentage of advertising revenue from queries made from Safari and Chrome, even though Apple doesn't actually bundle Chrome with its devices. In twenty twenty two, this amounted to about twenty billion dollars, which was double the figure of twenty twenty and amounted to one six of Apple's operating profit from that year. Google also assigned deals with several US carriers like T Mobile, Verizon, in AT, and T, as well as other Android manufacturers, including Samsung and Motorola. The terms of these deals differ between companies, but they usually account for a percentage of revenue, with the actual percentage varying from contract to contract. While these deals are undoubtedly good for the balance sheets of these companies, they do impose restrictions on what these companies can do. Take Samsung, for example, which has around thirty one percent of US smartphone market share, second only to Apple. In twenty nineteen, Samsung wanted to integrate technology from a startup called Branch, which would allow users to search for content within installed applications, as well as to a limited extent, content from the Internet, although it was not to be clear a proper search engine in any real sense. Despite how there was a little bit of initial excitement around this, Samsung also saw h kind of become clear that the way Branch worked conflicted with their agreement with Google, and so the software had to be reworked in a way that massively limited its functionality. While the partnership went ahead, it was nowhere near as lucrative as Branch first hoped. The software was crippled and thus much less attractive. Similarly, AT and T also wanted to pre install Branch on its devices, but decided against it when it couldn't get clarity from Google whether it violated the terms of its revenue sharing deal. Google, it seemed simply stonewalled AT and T into submission. And this is again going back to the Matt Stolar interview I did. When you have rules like this, when you have monopolies, they do operate like miniature governments. And indeed, this is an example Google didn't even need to intimidate these people. In most cases, they just made enough money and they were scared enough of violating the deal that they literally made their devices worse. They didn't install cool software for fear that Google might sue them and cut off a lucrative revenue share. It's nasty even Apple, a company that is at varying times close to or the most valuable company in the world, itself constrained by this devil's deal with Google. At one point, Google insisted on altering the terms of its agreement to prevent Apple from suggesting relevant links to users through the Safari search bar, as such a feature would be and I quote, substantially similar to Google search. Apple, for what it's worth, has said that it did not feel constrained by these restrictions, which makes it fine with me. Then I'm kidding the kidding. I'd argue that they would say that because they were making twenty billion dollars each year from Google. And if I'm honest, if somebody gave me twenty billion dollars, I'd let them do whatever they wanted. Hit me with a baseball back, roun me over with your car. I don't care call me a pig. I'll oink for you. Give me twenty billion dollars. I need twenty billion dollars. Please give it to me now. But if you can't give me your money, then perhaps you'll hand it to one of the extremely well targeted advertisements that follow this wonderful message once that will make you say wow. This is definitely one that Ed wanted to follow what he just said, and we're back. And we're back with Google. As I've kind of hinted at, I don't think without their ad monopoly and with their Google Search monopoly, I don't think Google is a profitable business. And I definitely don't think Google Search is a profitable business. I think it's actually kind of a cost center. Search is in effect the vehicle in how Google gets people to look at billions of dollars of advertisements every single day, and Google doesn't allow any other competing business to show adds on its turf. It has exclusivity, and as the ruling found, that exclusivity has allowed Google to raise prices at will, looking to see how far it can push advertisers before they walk away, you know, to the other place they can advertise to this many people in twenty seventeen, the company ran an experiment where it strongly increased certain prices for a cohor fifteen percent of advertisers for six weeks. It found that half of the initial revenue getting stuck, and found that there was no significant evidence that advertisers were changing what products they don Google would later do further studies where it significantly hyped prices on advertisers, and each time it learned that it could charge more without losing them. While Google acknowledged there was a limit to how far it could push things, they believed that there was still more value to extract from its customers, and so it's set upon a strategy of gradually, though significantly, I should add raising prices across short intervals, as in the siding. Goddamn, is this company so fucking evil? They should be eradicated from existence. The fact that people like this function in good societies only prove that there are things wrong in the world. Every time I read about them, I feel poison in my veins. But there's more. These price rises Judge Meta noted were oftentimed when Google was at risk of not meeting its revenue goals, and when the company was at risk of showing some sort of slow down in its ads business. Hey remember the code yellow from twenty nineteen from the man that destroyed Google Search, that was all around raising metrics because they were worried about query growth. Google does not care. They will do whatever they need to to make revenue. They will make your products worse, they will make it more expensive for advertisers to advertise to you. And it's all thanks to their goddamn monopolies and these changes, these increases through the pricing of advertising and the way that they took money from advertisers. They were done with this insane lack of transparency and this is really stomach turning, this beer. This company. People should be in jail for this. Google didn't tell advertisers that the costs were going up, but rather they were timing these increases so that these increases could be dismissed as noise or ordinary price fluctuations generated within advertising auctions. The last point is important, by the way, as Google also tried to rig these auctions in their own favor. One way they accomplished this, by the way, is by removing the ability for advertisers to remove themselves from certain auctions. When someone buys a text out on Google, what they're really doing is selecting a keyword or keywords under which they want their ads to appear. The problem is that people may use different words for a search with the same intent. So one person might say kid's clothing where another might say children's clothing. And this is a problem for advertisers because you want to make sure that you capture the audience you want, right, And this is a problem that Google fixed by adding other relevant keywords to an advertiser's bid without telling them. Now, this might seem like a nice thing that Google did, making sure that your money goes further, right, The problem is, as the ruling showed, the Google interpreted the word relevant in the broadest way possible, so kids clothing would, as one shot shown in the ruling showed, include phrases like newborn children's clothing or kid's clothing Canada or Tjmax kids wear. And what's great is if you don't like this, you have no one else to advertise, with no other choices. And while Google initially allowed advertisers to opt out of this feature, which they called semantic matching, or use a limited version that would only include grammatical variations like pluralization, so children clothing, children's clothing, and so on and so forth, They of course remove these options. It means that unless the advertiser explicitly states what keywords they don't want their advert to appear under, they're going to be bid on search results that aren't relevant to their needs. And guess who controls what are relevant? Google? Google. Google's the one that tells you how much money to spend on Google. You don't like it, well, you can work with Google to advertise on Google, and otherwise you go fuck yourself. And this in turn increases the amount of advertisers bidding for space in an auction, which in turn results in higher prices for advertisers in a completely unpredictable way that's predictably evil. Not only does Google control the supply, they literally control the demand. And while Google at one point provided advertisers with detailed information about their matched keywords and the algorithmically selected ones at that it no longer does so. As a result, advertisers are effectively forced to guess what keywords their ad might appear under, and they have no other vendor to go to who might be a little more transparent. This in turn, by the way, pushes them to larger advertising agencies who have a better relation and ship with Google, who might have keyword banks that they know that they can cut out so that the advertising dollars are more efficiently spent. This in turn makes advertising agencies, especially the bigger ones, more powerful and hurt small businesses. It's so cool watching this happen. It doesn't make me angry at all. But in his ruling, Judge Meta found that Google's practices had degraded the quality of its text advertisements and charge super competitive prices for text advertisements. At the same time, by maintaining Google's stranglehold on the search market, they effectively limited how much rivals like Being can make from advertising. Even if Microsoft built a better ad tech platform than Google, its share of spending would remain in line with its market share and I quote here By locking in a huge comparatative query volume advantage through its exclusive agreements, Google ensures that advertisers will continue to spend ninety percent of their text ad dollars with Google, regardless of increases in price or decreases in quality. That is an anti competitive effect in the marketplace, and as Judge Metter is said that is bluddy well right, So what happens next. There's four un likely outcomes here, each with their own advantages or disadvantages and their own level of probability have come into pass and had tip by the way to Adam Kolovicik for highlighting these. Google may be ordered to cease engaging in default search deals kind of the most obvious one, leaving the likes of Apple, Samsung, and Mozilla free to sign agreements with other search providers, although these agreements would almost certainly be less favorable than their current ones, and indeed would be I don't know competitive, It's going to be a mess. As the ruling showed, both Apple and Mozilla have at times flirted with or been courted by the likes of Microsoft and Yahoo, although the terms were never as favorable as I mentioned, and guess what they didn't take them Judge Meta might although the how is pretty difficult here, as Apple and Mozilla aren't defendants in this case. Force browser developers to offer use as a ballot screen where people could choose what search engine they'd like to use. This would probably boost the market share of smaller search providers by a small degree, although I imagine most would just opt, through habit or preference, to pick Google at the very least until a viable alternative gains momentum. But this is still a start. It's still good. Well, then again, it's entirely possible that people might try something new and either because they like what they've selected or through sheer inertia, they don't go back to Google. As Google's data shows, this is a real threat, especially on mobile, which accounts for a massive portion of its search traffic and thus its ad revenue. Google may be forced to share click and query data with rivals, although again this poses its own thorny issues, especially when it comes to privacy. At the very least, it should at least tell advertisers what keywords they're buying and give them meaningful opportunities to opt out of irrelevant queries. While this sounds like a minor slap on the wrist, it has the potential to cost Google billions. Google's made so much money from forcing advertisers to buy slots on searches they don't want or care about, and by forcing people into auctions against their will or knowledge. When buyers are empowered, it follows that the price of ads will decrease commensurate with the lower levels of demand, And I don't know consumer choice is good and Google does not like consumer choice, so I assume it's less profitable to let people choose things. But finally, Judge Meta may order the actual breakup of Google, compelling the company to divest Chrome, Android, or more than likely its advertising division. This remedy is arguably the most potent and one that Google is most likely to oppose, and it's also the most funny. But let's get into why it's thorny. Chrome and Android are based on open source products, the chromeum Project and the Android open Source Project, respectively, and short of prohibiting Google from contributing code or providing funding, it would have a leading role in these developments and thus real influence. Moreover, Google's presence in Android isn't just in the operating system itself, but everything else called Google Mobile Services or GMS. GMS is the package of software that turns an Android phone into a Google phone. It includes the apps that company installed when you buy a Samsung or Gaomi phone, like Gmail, Google Chrome, Google Assistant, and so on, and also Google Gemini, as well as the APIs that allow third party applications to integrate with them. Any ruling that doesn't force Google to divest these components is for the most part, toothless, and any ruling that says effectively that Google can no longer build apps, or rather build apps for the mobile os it's most closely associated with, it's kind of hard to imagine. Moreover, Google could also just ditch Android. It's already working on its own OS called Future. It's already using Future in production devices, though it's unclear how invested they are in the project, and as I've previously mentioned in the last episode, I don't know how much staying power anything new and Google actually has. Combine this with native support for existing Android apps, which it likely already has and if not, could be implemented as others like Microsoft and Huawei have pretended to, it would effectively skirt any restrictions imposed on Google's involvement in Android proper. The biggest scariest thing for Google would be any separation of church and state between Google Search and its ap avertising platform. Doing so would be potentially ruinous for this company, which is why Google will do literally anything to stop it. But it's the remedy that would actually change things. Google's lack of competition in search is a symptom of its ability to set pricing in terms of advertising on search, and it's a problem that can be solved by removing its ability to do so. And let's face it, Google Search doesn't make that much money on its own. The thing that brings home the bacon is the ads on search and the ads you get with each query. If the ad business becomes its own separate entity, Google will have to entirely rethink how it monetizes search. And for san Da Pischai, that's a terrifying thought. I mean, what's he do? How do you rig the tables if you don't own the casino? And by the way, I'm in beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada. We they never rigged the tables here. That's sacrilegious. But it's not like there's another business for him to fall back upon. As a discussed at the end of the last episode, Google's largely lost the ability to innovate and execute on new ideas, and a new ideas that do eventually hit the market are usually and often just in a few months. Murdered, the bolt gun comes out chunk. They throw them in the open grave with Google Reader. But seriously, what does Google have other than products that directly lead to its own advertising technologies. What is there besides Cloud? And even Cloud is a marginal player at best when compared to Microsoft's Azure and Amazon's Aws. There's nothing. Before you get too excited, it is worth noting that Google will no doubt fight this ruling to the very end, using every single avenue of appeal, every dirty trick, until they're successful or they've run out of options. These little fuckers are going to go after everything, and they're going to look specifically an appeal, which, by the way, little Apple loup court session for you here, and if there's a loyalist thing, I'm sorry. Basically, Apple loop court appeals are not a retrial of the facts. It is a procedural thing. They'll be looking to see whether the judge meta messed up. And I'll tell you a little bit about how that's happened in the past and how bad that is and why I'm a little worried it might work. Sure, there's now a bipartisan dislike a big tech and I don't think any of the recently appointed Supreme Court judges other than the ones that might be on the take.

I don't know.

I don't know.

I don't think they care about Google. Trump doesn't like Google, Harris doesn't like Google. I don't think anyone that's coming up is going to be like, we must protect the most evil tech company of them all other than Beta. They hate them, and Google Search is bad for most people. Most people realize this is a problem, and this ruling, by the way, despite it being extremely long, is really worth reading. It was very forensic in its case against Google. The facts on the ground and those obtained through discovery, they're pretty hard to argue with. On the flip side, Google also has near unlimited funds to throw out this legal bow, which, as I point out in a bit is absolutely existential for Google and their law being to try and change their fate, hope they lose, and depressingly, the US hasn't proven particularly effective at curbing this horrible monopoly bullshit in the past, and I'm going to tell you why. But before I do that, do you have money? Do you have a wallet? Are there credit cards in the wallet? Perhaps this upcoming product might be a thing that you could stick your credit card in, or maybe it's a podcast that you could download for free. I don't know. I'm not an advertiser. I'm just the guy speaking before the ads. Now, the ads that follow, they're directly chosen from my brain. They have a neuralink in Serbia. I've got the third neuralink and it's connected to the ad server with the company, and that's why all of these ads are so well targeted.

I don't think they care about Google. Trump doesn't like Google, Harris doesn't like Google. I don't think anyone that's coming up is going to be like, we must protect the most evil tech company of them all other than Beta. They hate them, and Google Search is bad for most people. Most people realize this is a problem, and this ruling, by the way, despite it being extremely long, is really worth reading. It was very forensic in its case against Google. The facts on the ground and those obtained through discovery, they're pretty hard to argue with. On the flip side, Google also has near unlimited funds to throw out this legal bow, which, as I point out in a bit is absolutely existential for Google and their law being to try and change their fate, hope they lose, and depressingly, the US hasn't proven particularly effective at curbing this horrible monopoly bullshit in the past, and I'm going to tell you why. But before I do that, do you have money? Do you have a wallet? Are there credit cards in the wallet? Perhaps this upcoming product might be a thing that you could stick your credit card in, or maybe it's a podcast that you could download for free. I don't know. I'm not an advertiser. I'm just the guy speaking before the ads. Now, the ads that follow, they're directly chosen from my brain. They have a neuralink in Serbia. I've got the third neuralink and it's connected to the ad server with the company, and that's why all of these ads are so well targeted.

Please to enjoy it, and we're back.

Please to enjoy it, and we're back.

But now it's time for a little history lesson and a story about how remarkably different the computing market could look today if legislation had actually succeeded. In the nineteen eighties, ms DOS rapidly emerged as the dominant operating system for IBM compatible computers, and by the end of the decade, it held eighty percent of the market. What its growth was in no small part due to Microsoft's chummy relationship with IBM. They also benefited from changing market conditions, some savy tech and business moves, and a few missteps by the competitors. But no, it wouldn't be fair to ascribe Microsoft's success just to its vast resources and technical chops. He also resorted to strong arming hardware manufacturers and too only selling computers with Windows or ms DOSS, or making Windows and ms DOS artificially more preferable to buying an alternative. One tactic, which started in nineteen eighty three and continued until the mid nineties, was the force manufacturers to sell an ms DOS license with each machine, even if the customer wanted something like bos Ors two. This would be done by strong arming vendors into buying licenses in bulk, and not as you'd perhaps expect by demand for the product because the product was better. Now, how'd they do this? What they did was they set the individual license price for an ms DOS license so high that buying in bulk was basically the only way to do it, and outright refused to sell to any vendor that purchased alternatives, or they just refused to sell them Windows. In the show notes, I've linked to the great paper from the summer nineteen ninety five issue of the Anti Trust Bulletin Journal about this. It's sickening. Microsoft's insistence on bulk licensing agreements meant that asking for a competing operating system wouldn't actually reduce the cost of the computer. Instead, it would increase it because the vendor had already bought a specific number of licenses, and they're incentivized to bundle the cost into each machine they sell. Buying a competing operating system like dr doss would in fact mean paying twice for an operating system. It sucks. These licenses would typically only valid for two years, which by the way, cost Microsoft. There was no price difference. They just chose this, and Microsoft didn't provide any refunds for unused licenses, meaning vendors had an incentive to aggressively offload them onto customers, like providing them for free or cheaply with anyone who a new computer, or by framing it a stars as a perk purchase. Another tactic designed to bolster sales of Microsoft's productivity software while crippling its rivals, was to use secret APIs to control windows that were only accessible to Microsoft software and not to anyone else. Microsoft's rivals claimed that these public APIs were generally speaking, not as good and meant that their software performed worse on Windows, which by the early nineteen nineties had reached near monopoly status in the PC market. The YouTube channel retrobytes goes into this practice in some detail. If you're curious, and I'll link to that in the notes. Anyway, My point is that Microsoft was a bit of a bastard back then, argue they still are, and by the mid nineties they were already facing some scrutiny from the FTC, which opened investigations and delivered a couple of little slaps on the wrist, which Microsoft, of course fought. In nineteen ninety five, Microsoft released Internet Explorer, its first entrant into the web browser market, which competed with early style works like Mosaic, as well as Netscape, which was the dominant player at the time, an opera which was rapidly gaining THEMNENTUS. Microsoft knew the Internet was going to be a huge deal, and so it did everything it could to make Internet Explorer the dominant browser. This included bundling Ie with Windows and structuring it so that you couldn't remove Internet Explorer without breaking parts of the operating system. Rivals also claimed that Internet Explorer benefited from hidden APIs, which in turn mean that competing browsers wouldn't work quite as well. In nineteen ninety eight, the US Department of Justice filed a suit against Microsoft, accusing it of breaching the Sherman Act, the same law that Judge Ammitt Meta rulled Google violated by establishing a near monopoly of the X eighty six computer market, and Microsoft lost the trial and the release of Bill Gates's deposition takes, which are hilarious. He responded with I don't recall to most questions and he asked for the definition of WI een ask anyway. It was humiliating for Microsoft. In two thousand, Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson ordered the breakup of Microsoft into two companies, one responsible for the operating system and one that would create applications. As you'd expect, Microsoft appealed, and the following year in Apple Look, Court reversed the ruling on a technicality as Judge Jackson had improperly discussed the case with the media before its conclusion. While the findings of the case stood, Jackson's ruling was overturned, allowing Microsoft to reach a settlement with the Department of Justice, and so we got another slap on the rest. Microsoft would have to share its private APIs with competitors and agreed to five years of monitoring where a Department of Justice representative could unannounced sharp up to its officers and demand access to source code and records. The Department of Justice also created a technical committee, which consisted of three experts, none of whom could be recent Microsoft employees or contractors, to ensure their compliance. Microsoft could, however, keep bundling software like Internet Explorer with its operating system, which meant that its near monopoly on the browser market would remain relatively unchallenged for another eight years until Google Chrome arrived. I don't take any pleasure in saying that I loathed Google. As someone who grew up on the Internet, it was really the product that showed me the possibilities of the Web and expanded my horizons with every search and click I used Google. Shit done, I still do. None of us like that Google's bad. I wish it was good. It was, and as I've already said, I've said this a lot of times, it was a really good product at the time, and it was good like five ten years ago, I swear. But now it's become corrupted. Now Google is just at its core rotten. This company used to say, don't be evil.

But now it's time for a little history lesson and a story about how remarkably different the computing market could look today if legislation had actually succeeded. In the nineteen eighties, ms DOS rapidly emerged as the dominant operating system for IBM compatible computers, and by the end of the decade, it held eighty percent of the market. What its growth was in no small part due to Microsoft's chummy relationship with IBM. They also benefited from changing market conditions, some savy tech and business moves, and a few missteps by the competitors. But no, it wouldn't be fair to ascribe Microsoft's success just to its vast resources and technical chops. He also resorted to strong arming hardware manufacturers and too only selling computers with Windows or ms DOSS, or making Windows and ms DOS artificially more preferable to buying an alternative. One tactic, which started in nineteen eighty three and continued until the mid nineties, was the force manufacturers to sell an ms DOS license with each machine, even if the customer wanted something like bos Ors two. This would be done by strong arming vendors into buying licenses in bulk, and not as you'd perhaps expect by demand for the product because the product was better. Now, how'd they do this? What they did was they set the individual license price for an ms DOS license so high that buying in bulk was basically the only way to do it, and outright refused to sell to any vendor that purchased alternatives, or they just refused to sell them Windows. In the show notes, I've linked to the great paper from the summer nineteen ninety five issue of the Anti Trust Bulletin Journal about this. It's sickening. Microsoft's insistence on bulk licensing agreements meant that asking for a competing operating system wouldn't actually reduce the cost of the computer. Instead, it would increase it because the vendor had already bought a specific number of licenses, and they're incentivized to bundle the cost into each machine they sell. Buying a competing operating system like dr doss would in fact mean paying twice for an operating system. It sucks. These licenses would typically only valid for two years, which by the way, cost Microsoft. There was no price difference. They just chose this, and Microsoft didn't provide any refunds for unused licenses, meaning vendors had an incentive to aggressively offload them onto customers, like providing them for free or cheaply with anyone who a new computer, or by framing it a stars as a perk purchase. Another tactic designed to bolster sales of Microsoft's productivity software while crippling its rivals, was to use secret APIs to control windows that were only accessible to Microsoft software and not to anyone else. Microsoft's rivals claimed that these public APIs were generally speaking, not as good and meant that their software performed worse on Windows, which by the early nineteen nineties had reached near monopoly status in the PC market. The YouTube channel retrobytes goes into this practice in some detail. If you're curious, and I'll link to that in the notes. Anyway, My point is that Microsoft was a bit of a bastard back then, argue they still are, and by the mid nineties they were already facing some scrutiny from the FTC, which opened investigations and delivered a couple of little slaps on the wrist, which Microsoft, of course fought. In nineteen ninety five, Microsoft released Internet Explorer, its first entrant into the web browser market, which competed with early style works like Mosaic, as well as Netscape, which was the dominant player at the time, an opera which was rapidly gaining THEMNENTUS. Microsoft knew the Internet was going to be a huge deal, and so it did everything it could to make Internet Explorer the dominant browser. This included bundling Ie with Windows and structuring it so that you couldn't remove Internet Explorer without breaking parts of the operating system. Rivals also claimed that Internet Explorer benefited from hidden APIs, which in turn mean that competing browsers wouldn't work quite as well. In nineteen ninety eight, the US Department of Justice filed a suit against Microsoft, accusing it of breaching the Sherman Act, the same law that Judge Ammitt Meta rulled Google violated by establishing a near monopoly of the X eighty six computer market, and Microsoft lost the trial and the release of Bill Gates's deposition takes, which are hilarious. He responded with I don't recall to most questions and he asked for the definition of WI een ask anyway. It was humiliating for Microsoft. In two thousand, Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson ordered the breakup of Microsoft into two companies, one responsible for the operating system and one that would create applications. As you'd expect, Microsoft appealed, and the following year in Apple Look, Court reversed the ruling on a technicality as Judge Jackson had improperly discussed the case with the media before its conclusion. While the findings of the case stood, Jackson's ruling was overturned, allowing Microsoft to reach a settlement with the Department of Justice, and so we got another slap on the rest. Microsoft would have to share its private APIs with competitors and agreed to five years of monitoring where a Department of Justice representative could unannounced sharp up to its officers and demand access to source code and records. The Department of Justice also created a technical committee, which consisted of three experts, none of whom could be recent Microsoft employees or contractors, to ensure their compliance. Microsoft could, however, keep bundling software like Internet Explorer with its operating system, which meant that its near monopoly on the browser market would remain relatively unchallenged for another eight years until Google Chrome arrived. I don't take any pleasure in saying that I loathed Google. As someone who grew up on the Internet, it was really the product that showed me the possibilities of the Web and expanded my horizons with every search and click I used Google. Shit done, I still do. None of us like that Google's bad. I wish it was good. It was, and as I've already said, I've said this a lot of times, it was a really good product at the time, and it was good like five ten years ago, I swear. But now it's become corrupted. Now Google is just at its core rotten. This company used to say, don't be evil.

I know.

I know.

One of the early jokes in the show was the Lionel Huts thing with the red marker, and it's don't comma be evil exclamation mark, But that's kind of what it is now. They just distort markets, they block competition. They don't give a.

One of the early jokes in the show was the Lionel Huts thing with the red marker, and it's don't comma be evil exclamation mark, But that's kind of what it is now. They just distort markets, they block competition. They don't give a.

Fuck about you.

Fuck about you.

They don't give a fuck about their advertisers. They know everyone's trapped in the system. They're also just boring now. I remember when Google launched Gmail, I remember the hubbub. I remember people selling the invites on eBay. It was genuinely cool, and it was far superior to everything else on the market, hot Mail, Yahoo Mail. They were dogshit in comparison, you know, I'm ray. Google Docs, Google Reader, Rip, and even Google Fiber were all ambitious, clever, and worthwhile products that actually people like and use and are happy with. Now we have Android phones with AI features that nobody wants, these horrible, dreadful generative AI tools that mislead and misrepresent, and a family of products that, while once genuinely were useful, they feel like stale and unhelpful. They don't feel like they're made for human beings. They feel like little experiments except where the rats man. That's cliche. Oh well, and there's a genuine chance here though, there really is. I know I've kind of given you a little bit of a cynical view there is a chance here that if Judge Metta truly punishes Google, that it could genuinely fix this company by destroying it. And I think that's a good thing for the future of the tech industry. Google as a company used to be symbolic of a kind of stable equilibrium and capitalism, a profitable company that made societally useful products, ones that change lives mostly for the better, with a culture that actively encouraged a kind of digital experimentation that in turn led to better, cooler products like Gmail and Google News. And let me just be really abundantly clear, that company is dead. Google as you know it is dead. What remains is alphabet, a private equity firm run by a management consolean hiring other management consultants to dump money into dominating industries and extracting as much value as possible before the market's collapse. Google is lazy, languid, ugly, bereft of innovation, and bereft of the kind of culture that made it so powerful in the first place. This isn't a company full of genius engineers allowed to do great work. It's a company run by assholes. It's a company run by management consultants, sundarp is shy. He is cancerous to innovation. He makes two hundred million dollars making products worse yet more profitable. Prabagar Ragavan is a poison in the veins of Silicon Valley, and Liz read is a class trait to so the engineers that actually care about creating great products. At sixteen hundred Amphitheata Parkway. The company Google deserves to be obliterated because in its current form, it is defaulted on its duty to the tech industry, to its customers, and even to its own mission. The only way to fix Google is to destroy it and to force it to start earning customers again. To fix the tech industry, we must obliterate every single one of these monopolies metas hold on advertising, Apples, hold on the app store, Googles, hold on Search and its associated advertising arms. Every single one flies in the face of Yu and I love technology and runs counter to the notion that Silicon Valley has a meaningful place in society. All of these people, they talk about the meritocracy, they talk about earning one's place. It's hard graft and burning that makes these great companies. But look at them. Do any of these companies really look like they're built out of hard work. No, they giant cons cons wrapped in companies, wrapped in monopolies, wrapped in bullshit that makes products worse. Big Tech had a really good thing going. Big Tech made so much money without really trying that hard, and all they had to do was not get too greedy. But they did. They always do. So we as a society should reject companies over a certain size, and we should indeed reject everything that Big Tech is saying about their hard work. The GENERATIVEAI boom is disgusting, and it's disgusting because it shows such an incredible contempt for society itself, for the creators that it's depriving of a future because bosses are lazy and don't trust their customers or care about the customers enough to provide them with real things made by real humans. Generative AI is just proof that these companies can't innovate anymore. It's proof that they don't care about the customer enough to create something useful, and honestly, it shows that they don't know how to run real companies anymore. So I challenge you, the listener, to continue to critique these companies. To move away from their software where you can, and they know how impossible that is because of these monopolies. But I also encourage you to talk to your friends, your family, especially those not super online, and tell them about monopolies. Tell them about this podcast, sure, but talk to them about monopolies. Make monopolies general parlance in good conversation. Look for the monopolies in your life. Look at how people have successful businesses, not from providing a great product, but from fucking everyone around them, from cheating. Because that's what a monopoly is. It's a cheat, a cheat by a lazy person, a cheat by an incurious person, a cheat from a scumbag. And you're not like them. I know that, and I want you to talk about monopolies in your general life. I know it sounds silly, I know it sounds ridiculous like talking to regular people about this, but these monopolies ruin your life. These monopolies are where so many pain points in your lives come from, both in tech and in regular lives. Thank you so much for listening to this, thank you so much for giving me your time. And as I've kind of hinted before, we've been renewed for a second season. You've got a few more episodes of season one before season two starts, and nothing's really gonna change. But again, I'm so grateful to have you as listeners. I really am. It's a pleasure to do this, it's a pleasure to serve you, and I will be trying to make it better. I don't really have a way of monopolizing anything, and also I don't think I have that in me. I'm just too pissed naturally, have a great week. Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matasowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at Matasowski dot com, M A T t O. S O w Ski dot com. You can email me at easy at Better offline dot com or visit Better offline dot com to find more podcast links and of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat dot Where's youread dot at to visit the discord, and go to our slash Better Offline to check out I'll Reddit. Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

They don't give a fuck about their advertisers. They know everyone's trapped in the system. They're also just boring now. I remember when Google launched Gmail, I remember the hubbub. I remember people selling the invites on eBay. It was genuinely cool, and it was far superior to everything else on the market, hot Mail, Yahoo Mail. They were dogshit in comparison, you know, I'm ray. Google Docs, Google Reader, Rip, and even Google Fiber were all ambitious, clever, and worthwhile products that actually people like and use and are happy with. Now we have Android phones with AI features that nobody wants, these horrible, dreadful generative AI tools that mislead and misrepresent, and a family of products that, while once genuinely were useful, they feel like stale and unhelpful. They don't feel like they're made for human beings. They feel like little experiments except where the rats man. That's cliche. Oh well, and there's a genuine chance here though, there really is. I know I've kind of given you a little bit of a cynical view there is a chance here that if Judge Metta truly punishes Google, that it could genuinely fix this company by destroying it. And I think that's a good thing for the future of the tech industry. Google as a company used to be symbolic of a kind of stable equilibrium and capitalism, a profitable company that made societally useful products, ones that change lives mostly for the better, with a culture that actively encouraged a kind of digital experimentation that in turn led to better, cooler products like Gmail and Google News. And let me just be really abundantly clear, that company is dead. Google as you know it is dead. What remains is alphabet, a private equity firm run by a management consolean hiring other management consultants to dump money into dominating industries and extracting as much value as possible before the market's collapse. Google is lazy, languid, ugly, bereft of innovation, and bereft of the kind of culture that made it so powerful in the first place. This isn't a company full of genius engineers allowed to do great work. It's a company run by assholes. It's a company run by management consultants, sundarp is shy. He is cancerous to innovation. He makes two hundred million dollars making products worse yet more profitable. Prabagar Ragavan is a poison in the veins of Silicon Valley, and Liz read is a class trait to so the engineers that actually care about creating great products. At sixteen hundred Amphitheata Parkway. The company Google deserves to be obliterated because in its current form, it is defaulted on its duty to the tech industry, to its customers, and even to its own mission. The only way to fix Google is to destroy it and to force it to start earning customers again. To fix the tech industry, we must obliterate every single one of these monopolies metas hold on advertising, Apples, hold on the app store, Googles, hold on Search and its associated advertising arms. Every single one flies in the face of Yu and I love technology and runs counter to the notion that Silicon Valley has a meaningful place in society. All of these people, they talk about the meritocracy, they talk about earning one's place. It's hard graft and burning that makes these great companies. But look at them. Do any of these companies really look like they're built out of hard work. No, they giant cons cons wrapped in companies, wrapped in monopolies, wrapped in bullshit that makes products worse. Big Tech had a really good thing going. Big Tech made so much money without really trying that hard, and all they had to do was not get too greedy. But they did. They always do. So we as a society should reject companies over a certain size, and we should indeed reject everything that Big Tech is saying about their hard work. The GENERATIVEAI boom is disgusting, and it's disgusting because it shows such an incredible contempt for society itself, for the creators that it's depriving of a future because bosses are lazy and don't trust their customers or care about the customers enough to provide them with real things made by real humans. Generative AI is just proof that these companies can't innovate anymore. It's proof that they don't care about the customer enough to create something useful, and honestly, it shows that they don't know how to run real companies anymore. So I challenge you, the listener, to continue to critique these companies. To move away from their software where you can, and they know how impossible that is because of these monopolies. But I also encourage you to talk to your friends, your family, especially those not super online, and tell them about monopolies. Tell them about this podcast, sure, but talk to them about monopolies. Make monopolies general parlance in good conversation. Look for the monopolies in your life. Look at how people have successful businesses, not from providing a great product, but from fucking everyone around them, from cheating. Because that's what a monopoly is. It's a cheat, a cheat by a lazy person, a cheat by an incurious person, a cheat from a scumbag. And you're not like them. I know that, and I want you to talk about monopolies in your general life. I know it sounds silly, I know it sounds ridiculous like talking to regular people about this, but these monopolies ruin your life. These monopolies are where so many pain points in your lives come from, both in tech and in regular lives. Thank you so much for listening to this, thank you so much for giving me your time. And as I've kind of hinted before, we've been renewed for a second season. You've got a few more episodes of season one before season two starts, and nothing's really gonna change. But again, I'm so grateful to have you as listeners. I really am. It's a pleasure to do this, it's a pleasure to serve you, and I will be trying to make it better. I don't really have a way of monopolizing anything, and also I don't think I have that in me. I'm just too pissed naturally, have a great week. Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matasowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at Matasowski dot com, M A T t O. S O w Ski dot com. You can email me at easy at Better offline dot com or visit Better offline dot com to find more podcast links and of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat dot Where's youread dot at to visit the discord, and go to our slash Better Offline to check out I'll Reddit. Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.