Pod Insights The Vergecast The TikTok ban and the iPhone monopoly About this episode The Verge’s David Pierce, Nilay Patel, and Alex Cranz answer questions from The Vergecast Hotline all about the TikTok ban debate and the US v Apple case.
Further reading:
TikTok ban: all the news on attempts to ban the video platform
US v. Apple: everything you need to know
The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age
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Transcript 13,495 words · 17 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:02 David Pierce? Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of super app regulation. I'm your friend David Pierce and I am what I would call desperately on a hunt for solar eclipse glasses. It's Monday morning, it's like three and a half, four hours until the eclipse and like a super genius planner that I am just didn't go get eclipse glasses. I think I sort of thought that sunglasses would work. Turns out that is not correct and terrible science and you should not listen to me about anything to do with the eclipse. So now I'm running around trying desperately to get glasses and so far it's not happening. Target was out, Staples had a sign on the door that clearly somebody had just like hastily printed basically saying like, "Leave us alone, we don't have any eclipse glasses."
0:43 David Pierce? I'm now going to every store I can think of, including some that just obviously won't have eclipse glasses, trying to convince someone to sell me these glasses. I have realized I will pay what amounts to an alarming amount of money for these glasses, but I don't think it's gonna happen. Anyway, we have an awesome show coming up for you today. I was in New York last week and took the opportunity of all being in the same city to drag Neelai into the studio and grab Alex and just talk about TikTok and Apple and all of the stuff that's been happening over the last couple of weeks. We've talked a lot about the TikTok ban and Apple antitrust and we've heard a ton from you. Questions you have for us, thoughts you have about the things that we think, feelings you have about all of what's going on and we figured we'd just spend an hour talking about it.
1:25 David Pierce? We got a bunch of really great emails and a bunch of really great hotline questions and so that's what this whole show is. It was really fun, I really enjoyed it. It got deep and kind of emotional at times in a really interesting way as all of this Apple antitrust and TikTok ban specifically stuff tends to do. Super fun, really awesome show. All of that is coming up in just a second, but like I said, I have three and a half hours to get some eclipse glasses. It's probably not gonna happen, but wish me luck anyway. This is The Vergecast, we'll be right back.
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2:20 Speaker 02 This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends. Like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra because it's not just a superior light beer. It's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.
2:51 David Pierce? Welcome back. All right, so we've gotten a lot of feedback. We have asked for and received a lot of feedback on two things that we've talked about on the show the last couple of weeks. So we're just going to dive into a bunch of it. Neelai Patel is here. Hi, Neelai. Hello. Alex Krantz also here.
3:03 Alex Cranz? Hey, what's up?
3:04 David Pierce? Neelai and I are in this small studio that I've never been in before. It's very exciting. There's a frame TV in here, I want to point out. Oh, it's not ugly. We're not doing this. We have a lot of questions to get through. I'm just letting you know. So the two things we're going to talk mostly about here are the Apple antitrust stuff, which we talked a lot about, and the TikTok ban. We're going to do Apple first, then we're going to take a break, then we're going to talk TikTok. And we got a ton of feedback, so what I tried to do was find hotline voicemails from people that were like roughly representative of the feedback. So some of them have questions that we should ask specifically. Some of them are just kind of points a lot of people made that we should talk about. We have three for Apple and four for TikTok. This is going to take us four hours. Let's go. All right, the first voicemail we got is from Harrison.
3:44 Speaker 04 Hi, David and Virg crew. My name is Harrison. I have a question about the Apple DOJ case. What I'm trying to understand is why people are going after Apple specifically. Apple has 60% market share in the United States and people like you say that like iMessage is a lock-in or that green bubble envy is a thing, which it totally is. But I feel like people are getting upset that Apple like won capitalism. It feels like they made a product that won based off of popularity and not necessity because we all use SMS and then iMessage is built on top of that. It kind of feels like trying to force Apple to be, to open that up or to open other parts
4:26 Speaker 04 of the iOS experience up would be kind of like making it so Sony has to put dot of war on the Xbox or that like I have to be able to put the brake pads from a Honda Accord on to a Hyundai Tucson or something. It feels like we're just trying to like create an argument for the sake of an argument. I would just genuinely like to know, what is it about this case with Apple that makes it a bigger deal in antitrust than something like Amazon Web Services and Amazon storefronts? Or Google with Gmail or search, I guess. Thank you. Have a good rest of your day. Bye.
5:01 David Pierce? Okay, so I want to reframe this question very slightly before we get into it, because there is a part of this premise that I disagree with, which is that we're only going after Apple, because there is antitrust action against all of these companies. But the reason I picked this one is because I would say the most consistent piece of feedback we got was that this is just the DOJ picking on Apple for being too successful. And that what is this fight if not just trying to turn Apple into Android or make it worse? And why are we mad at Apple for being so successful? So I figure that is a thing we should address here that this question is also very much about. So Neelai, you were nodding through this whole question. What do you think?
5:35 Nilay Patel? Yeah, I think those are, those are good points. I agree with you, David. If you look at the landscape of antitrust actions, the governments around the world are going after all these companies, just all over the place. So there's that. Just set that aside.
5:48 David Pierce? Including explicitly Amazon storefront and Google search. This is, all that stuff is in this in a very real way.
5:56 Nilay Patel? Yeah. And then I want to just focus on two words, winning capitalism. I am a capitalist, pretty unrepentantly so. I think, I think you should win capitalism. I think you should try really hard. I think that's a good, I think that works. The problem is you have to have a functional market for other people to try to win. And so that these cases are all premised on, once you've won in one place, you shouldn't be able to take that power and prevent anyone from winning in another place. And I think in particular with the iPhone, Apple's desire for control, or desire for quality, or desire for fees, you pick and choose in what order they're in the equation and how they're weighted. Desire for services
6:38 Nilay Patel? revenue has precluded a bunch of other kinds of businesses from existing and competing with Apple. And that's actually the problem, right? Is that you get these companies that have a monopoly in one area, and maybe they've earned it. I think iPhones are really good phones. I think their cameras are really good. All the stuff. I think they've earned that stuff. And then you take that and you say, and now we will make sure that no one else can compete in another area. Or we will make sure that we have an advantage in some other area that is unrelated to where we won. And I think that's the part where if you want a functional capitalistic market, you have to have markets. People have to be able to pick and choose freely and vote with their dollars,
7:18 Nilay Patel? which I believe is more efficient than like voting for politicians in centralized control structures. Like, I would rather vote with my dollars than vote for politicians. Like, that's just a thing that I believe. And so you just look at the iPhone and you're like, oh, it's actually pretty hard to vote with your dollars here. It's pretty hard to vote with your time. And if Apple doesn't want that to exist, it just doesn't. And I think that's the heart of these cases, and I think it gets lost. When I interviewed Jonathan Cantor on Decoder, he made a point of saying there is more interest in antitrust by young people than there ever has been before. Because people can feel that their options are being limited by a handful of big companies across the entire economy. And that's the heart of it.
8:01 David Pierce? Yeah, it seems to me that, thinking about this one compared to Amazon and Google, I actually feel like I can explain that tension very easily with Amazon and Google, because there is sort of one specific thing, right? With Google, it's, we built a very successful search engine. It is not illegal to win. But then what Google did is use all the money that it made from said successful search engine to basically buy all the real estate on the internet so that no one else could have a successful search engine. At least that is the allegation, right? Whether that will win or not, I don't know, but that is at least sort of a straightforward version of the thing you're talking about. The thing that Amazon allegedly did where it would crawl the web to find sellers who were selling stuff cheaper off of Amazon and then ruthlessly penalize those people on Amazon, same thing, right? That is, you created a big market and then you used it to punish everybody who played elsewhere.
8:47 David Pierce? I don't know that there is one thing that feels as obvious to me in the Apple suit that we've seen so far. Is there one that you can point to that feels kind of? Because I think this is part of what people are responding to. And Alex, I'm curious how you feel about this too, because it seems like the Apple thing is about sort of so many things. And I think to some extent, and Alex, we talked about this on the show, the wallet one feels to me like maybe the most straightforward version of this, where like, Apple built a thing and then didn't allow anybody else to build said thing. That is a version of the thing.
9:14 Alex Cranz? I think it's both about protecting markets and allowing markets to exist, right? Like, like, part of this case is saying, Apple has said these markets cannot exist. And the other part of it is that Apple has made the experience for consumers fundamentally worse, and it has such a large market share that that worse is now impacting people in a really real and measurable way. And that's the part I think about the most, because I think, I think Neelai is right, right? Like, they went in and they said, okay, you can't have these markets. Like, if you want to have cloud gaming, it cannot exist on this, which means 60% of Americans cannot have this unless they choose to vote with their dollars elsewhere. But all this lock-in is keeping them from doing that. And then the other part of that is, if you want to send a message to your mom with a
9:58 Alex Cranz? photo in it, that photo is now degraded, because Apple has willingly chosen to degrade its services to keep people locked in. And those two things are like, both existing at once. So it's like, Apple won at capitalism, and then made everything worse as like a victory lap is kind of part of this case. And that part, I'm like, yeah, I mean, maybe that should be illegal, maybe that shouldn't be a thing that's happening. And that's the tension of the case, right? That the tension of the case is like, is that allowed? And I think that's where it becomes almost like a philosophical argument of like, should that be allowed? And I'm on the, like, I love consumers, I want to help consumers, that's my job as a consumer technology reporter, I want to make sure that they're protected. And so I'm like, yeah, we shouldn't make things measurably worse just because we win at capitalism.
10:43 Alex Cranz? And a lot of people are like, yeah, but you win at capitalism, you get to do what you want.
10:47 Nilay Patel? Yeah, by the way, this is like a tension of the American economy dating back 100 years or more.
10:52 Alex Cranz? Right.
10:53 Nilay Patel? Like, the reason It's called railroads. Yeah, like, the reason it's called antitrust is because there was a form of business called trusts, and we like knocked them all down and built antitrust law. I highly recommend reading The Curse of Bigness by Tim Wu, which is a little, it's like a booklet, it's not, it's not even long, it's just like a fun readable history of antitrust. But this is, the idea is that you should have competition in our market, and if you don't protect the competition in our market, then you're going to end up with a handful of big companies that run everything, and they will not be as good for you. And by the way, I think a bunch of big companies in our markets right now would love to be regulated monopolies, like, just up and down. They would love it. Facebook would love to be a regulated monopoly and be in charge of everything and make all the money and not have to compete. And that's just, I don't know, it feels like he's
11:39 Nilay Patel? I think with the iPhone in particular, you're right. It's like hard to point at one thing, but I'll give you one example. There are ads in the setting screen.
11:45 David Pierce? Hmm.
11:46 Nilay Patel? That's brutal. That's brutal, right? And it's like, that's just the clearest self-preferencing that anyone can do. And it's like, this sucks. Like, fine. Okay, put ads in the setting screen, but at least let other competitor apps have as much access to the phone. It should not be that because I picked an operating system one time, or I preferred one camera, that all of these other choices down the line get made for me by some corporation that wants to extract 30%. I just, that feels icky. Like, ah, it's my money. Stay away from it.
12:15 David Pierce? Okay, what a truly perfect segue that just was into question number two, because there's more we should talk about on that point, but this next question basically asks it directly. Uh, it's from Josiah.
12:25 Speaker 06 Hi, David. My name is Josiah, and I of course have a question about the DOJ versus Apple situation. A lot of the stuff in that complaint is about like, Apple forcing companies to do things either the Apple way or just not at all. And I feel like that is an area where Apple being the bully to these other companies does result in a lot of benefits for me as a user. The nightmare scenario is like thinking about the Wallet and NFC access. And obviously, opening that up has the intent of creating a bunch of different competitors that have better features, and then that requires Apple to make their thing better. And I would love to live in that world, but far more realistically, I feel like the world we live in is one where the second the court says, "Apple exclusively can't lock users in",
13:10 Speaker 06 then every other company is just going to say, "Oh, cool", and they're going to remove their card from the Apple, like Wallet, and they're going to make their own Wallet, and then they're going to make me use exclusively their Wallet to use their thing. And that's hell, because then all of a sudden I have my Amazon card is in my Apple Wallet, and then my Delta tickets and my SkyMiles card are in my Delta-exclusive Wallet. And how does that not just like result in a worse experience for everybody on the backend? Like, how can we force Apple to open up? Is there a way to force Apple to open up that doesn't just allow all these other companies to be like, "Ooh, Apple can't be the monopoly, so I would like to", and then lock everybody else out of their new thing? Is that possible, or is by forcing people to open up,
13:55 Speaker 06 we're going to inevitably struggle with interoperability? Thanks. Hope it wasn't too long.
14:01 Alex Cranz? I got an answer for this one. So I think it is down to the idea of capitalism is that competition would happen. The idea of capitalism is that Apple would say, okay, other people can make their wallets and they can now do this as well. And then Apple has to make sure their wallet is the best wallet and force people to like Netflix was an example of this, right? Hulu were example of this. They were early movers in these fields and they said, okay, we're going to be the best and everybody else is going to come work with us. And if they don't work with us, then their product is going to be measurably shittier, i.e. Paramount Plus. And that's what's going to happen. And that theoretically is what would happen in this case, too, right? Chase may say, okay, we're going to go make our wallet app and not use
14:43 Alex Cranz? Apple's anymore. And if their wallet app is worse, then people might be like, well, it's not that hard for me to move over to Bank of America or Wells Fargo or whatever. I'm just going to move my business over there because I need the convenience of this other product that's much better.
14:56 David Pierce? So having just switched banks, I take unbelievable offense to that premise that switching banks is
15:02 Alex Cranz? So easy.
15:03 David Pierce? This is one of the things this question made me think about is like, maybe where we're headed is we're about to realize lock-in is more real, more places than anybody is reckoned with. And actually, what we're doing is we're starting down this like incredible hill of trying to get out of the holes that we've dug ourselves into over the years. But I don't know, Neel, what do you make of this question?
15:21 Nilay Patel? So specifically with wallets, I have an answer and then we can abstract it. With wallets, everybody wants your credit card to be everywhere. There's no incentive for anyone to make you use a different wallet app. The incentive is for your credit card to be everywhere.
15:34 David Pierce? Right, because they want you to use your
15:35 Nilay Patel? They want you to use your credit card. And you can see this play out on the web already, where every storefront has like 15 payment service buttons. Like, do you want to use Shop Pay? Do you want to use Google Pay, Amazon Pay, Apple? Like, whatever, just pay us. Like, pay us the money.
15:49 David Pierce? PayPal and Venmo, which are the same company. They're like, we don't care. Just do something.
15:53 Nilay Patel? Any way to get your money, they'll do it. So the incentive, at least for that one, is for payment services to make it easy for you to spend money. So I think that one will be fine. I think there are other ones where the incentives will be get over here and we'll lock you in in other ways. What I'm hopeful for is That, yep, we'll all perceive that and that'll be annoying in some ways. But then over time, that annoyance will actually reduce. How much people use some of these services or the switching costs will be obvious. Alex brought up Netflix. I think we've all gone through this now in the streaming example. Where every streamer was like, we have these exclusives, music services were like, we have these exclusives. And then people are like, but I don't care, like whatever. And then like most of the streaming companies have gone ninety and put their stuff on Netflix.
16:38 Nilay Patel? Like, I think the economy should wax and wane in these ways. And I think right now it can't, it can't because you picked an operating system, which is weird. Like, that's too many decisions to give away.
16:51 David Pierce? Okay.
16:51 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
16:51 David Pierce? Yeah, I mean, I think I buy the premise to some extent that if you give everybody access to everything. You suddenly will get a thousand ads on your setting screen and that actually that's a worse outcome than only Apple being allowed to show me ads on the setting screen. Just from a pure like user experience perspective. And I think then you have to believe that, oh, okay. People will ditch their iPhones because there are too many ads on the setting screen.
17:13 Nilay Patel? You know, there's a, there's a counter example of it. It's like sitting in front of all of us all the time, which is we use the web on our computers every day. The model for computing is not only on phones.
17:23 David Pierce? Yeah.
17:23 Nilay Patel? There's a, there's a whole other one. Like you buy any desktop computer. And then you put another application environment on it in terms of a web browser. And then you have multiple competing application layers and multiple, like all this stuff is just like pure chaos. And it, that market seems to be fine, like from what I, like all of us seem to enjoy it. It's like people make things. The browser companies seem to be doing fine. Like there's new innovative browser companies all of a sudden, like the market changes. People are selling laptops from what I understand, Alex.
17:53 Alex Cranz? Yeah, they do that.
17:55 Nilay Patel? Every day. We look at this other thing and you're like, well, that works fine.
17:58 David Pierce? Until Google comes along and ruins it for everybody. But then, but then we get another, other stuff that shows up and starts work. I think that's, I think that's largely right. I think what I wonder is how many things we're about to discover. Don't have the incentive structure of things like credit cards.
18:14 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
18:15 David Pierce? And actually, I, as you were talking about the, the Netflix stuff, Alex, I was thinking about all of these companies that have shown up. Trying to be like the the search service for streaming and Netflix sometimes works with them and is usually part of the search stuff. And there was a really funny thing recently where a bunch of people discovered you can search on the Apple TV app and get Netflix stuff. And everybody got really excited. And it's like, no, that's been there for a while. But what it won't do is show up in the continue watching stuff, and it won't show up in the recommendations. And it's like Netflix wants to own that experience. They'll take search because you got to be there. But Netflix still wants to own that experience and is powerful enough that it can get away with not being part of that. And it just makes me wonder, there are, there are more things like that that are going to be out there, I think.
18:59 Nilay Patel? The foundational premise of this question is also really interesting, which is like, Apple makes people do things the right way, which is Apple's rep.
19:06 David Pierce? Right.
19:06 Nilay Patel? Right. They're like, we have a user experience. And if you want to be a part of it, you got to do it our way.
19:09 David Pierce? Right. But this is the correct answer in some certain.
19:12 Nilay Patel? But there's a correct answer. And like, part of that's true. Like, that's Apple's history. Like, they're like, there is a correct design answer. I think that's been corrupted by Apple's financial interests. And then I think, like, actually, you look around, you're like, we made a bunch of weird decisions. Like, we all have to deal with HEICs.
19:29 David Pierce? Yeah.
19:29 Nilay Patel? Right? Like, that's weird. Like, did that was that the right answer? Like, I don't know. TikTok started supporting HDR videos, and it's just a mess. Like, it is just a mess. It looks like shit. And like, everything is too bright, and then also kind of grainy. Instagram has the same problem with HDR videos. And it's like, this is just because Apple is like, now the videos are HDR, and it forced everyone to like, deal with it. And it's like, this isn't great. And it's like, these are just choices that Apple is sort of like, making down the line. I think one piece of evidence that, you know, it's kind of the lumbering monopoly, is that the polish on some of that stuff isn't there the way it used to be.
20:03 David Pierce? Yeah. Yeah.
20:04 Nilay Patel? And it's still coasting.
20:05 David Pierce? And it doesn't matter.
20:06 Nilay Patel? It doesn't matter.
20:06 David Pierce? They get away with it.
20:07 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
20:08 David Pierce? I think that's fair. We have one more question from Peter.
20:12 Speaker 07 Hey, this is Peter in Brooklyn. Just heard the episode about the Apple lawsuit with the US government. And want to say one thing people never point out about super apps is that China has one because the Chinese government has banned everything else. And they want everyone to be in one app. It's easier to collect all the data and mess with all the information in one place. So maybe that's why China and India have one and no one else wants it. Yeah, just something to think about. Thanks. Bye.
20:41 David Pierce? So I just, I want to add one thing to this before we talk about it, which is, I think, another consistent piece of feedback we got when we talked about the antitrust stuff was people saying, why would you want super apps? Those are just monopolies of their own. And they have just as much, if not more lock-in than many of these other systems. Why are we, the three Vergecast co-hosts, standing so hard for super apps?
21:04 Nilay Patel? All right. So maybe I didn't say this as clearly as I could have because I was on a beach drinking, literally drinking a Pina Colada, and my audio is coming through AirPods. I think the DOJ is talking about super apps because that's a sexier idea than web apps. That is my fundamental belief.
21:22 David Pierce? That's what I think, too.
21:23 Nilay Patel? I think they can point to be like, we could turn Facebook into a super app. And then you would just like, leave your iPhone and buy a cheap Android phone and Facebook would take you there. And that would bring down prices of phones in the market. And that's one way, fine. But it's actually web apps could do the same thing. Right? I think of my phone in many ways as a vessel for Google services, which are also slowly degrading over time. But that was a real problem for Apple about five years ago, when people would buy iPhones and then load them up with Google apps. And Apple realized, oh, we need services that can compete with this across the board. And those services have to be everywhere. That's why Apple Music is on Android. Like, they know that some of these services have to be everywhere. So I don't know. I don't know that I want super apps either. I just, my
22:05 Nilay Patel? belief is that they, they couldn't pick web app. Like, you can't be like, Apple's hurt killing the web. Like, that is somewhat famously the argument they made about Microsoft in the 90s.
22:15 David Pierce? Right.
22:16 Nilay Patel? So I think they had to pick something new and shiny. And honestly, I think because Elon keeps talking about turning X into a super app, I think they wanted to court that particular political base.
22:26 David Pierce? You think it also might just be in the lexicon in a way that like if you say progressive web apps, everybody's eyes kind of start to glaze over, except for Vergecast listeners, which is why we love you.
22:36 Nilay Patel? Yeah, that's what I mean. There's an element of politics here. Like, the United States government is like doing a thing. I think they are communicating as political actors. You know, this is law enforcement. The cops are like doing stuff. And they need people to believe in their power as cops. Okay. Like, I'm not out here saying we need a Chinese style super app. The point is, if you had one, and in markets where there are one, you see the switching costs between iPhones to other phones are very low. And people switch between them all the time. And that is true in Europe, that is true in China, that is true in India. There are other ways to make the switching costs low. They just happen to be the web. And it's only us here in our little Vergecast club that know that and care about that as much as we do.
23:18 David Pierce? Yeah. Alex, what do you think?
23:19 Alex Cranz? I mean, ditto. It's just, I totally agree with Neelai on that. Like, I don't think anybody necessarily wants a super app, but it's a really good example to use in this thing. And it's a really good example to show, like, we could have cheaper phones. This could be a lot cheaper. And we don't necessarily need super apps for that. It could be the Google suite. It could be the Amazon suite. It could be another monopoly, like, tech company suite. Who can say? But we should have choices. And just choices at all. And to have just a whole style of app forbidden from 60% of phones in the United States because Apple doesn't feel like it, and is threatened by it, is like, bad. Even if those apps themselves maybe aren't great.
24:01 Nilay Patel? And I would point, once again, point to desktop computers, where you can just, the entire application model is the web. And that's fine. Right? And like, do people switch between Windows and Mac all the time? Because you can just use Google search and YouTube? No, they don't. They still have preferences. And the computers are still expensive. But a lot of them have gotten way cheaper, in a way that, you know, phones have not. And we have evidence of this, right? Like, Apple talks about not wanting parents to buy their kids cheap Android phones. Because that worries them. That if people can just access the service on a good enough phone... They won't buy expensive iPhones.
24:36 David Pierce? Yeah, I think that's right. Alex, we're about to get to the portion of our show where you and I get repeatedly accused of being China-loving communists. Would you like to briefly explain why you'd like WeChat to come to America? And it'll make everything better and solve all of our problems?
24:51 Alex Cranz? No.
24:52 David Pierce? Okay, good.
24:52 Alex Cranz? Yeah, I don't think it will. I don't think we need it in this country. And I don't think, I think super apps are probably, I think, to Peter's point, monopolies themselves, we probably don't need them in this company, country. But we also should probably be able to have them if we really want them. Like, the choice should be there. The whole idea of capitalism is we have choices. And it's like, okay, I would like that choice.
25:14 Nilay Patel? Yeah, also, millions of Americans routinely choose to use meta products. All the time.
25:22 Alex Cranz? All the time.
25:23 Nilay Patel? All the time. Like, we are just like a little bit away from that thing actually being real.
25:28 David Pierce? Yeah.
25:29 Nilay Patel? And it's not like, John Groover keeps pointing this out. When you give people the choice of, do you want a free service with personalized advertising? They're like, yes. And they're like, but would you, what if you didn't have that? And you could pay for it? And they're like, no.
25:45 David Pierce? Yeah, no, that's right. All right. Well, we should get to TikTok stuff. But first, we got to take a brief break. We'll be right back.
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27:23 David Pierce? All right, we're back. Alex and I are card-carrying members of the Chinese Communist Party. Oh, I've always wanted to see your card. And Neelai is the lone bastion of free speech and goodness here on The Vergecast, but is also occasionally, sometimes, a monster who believes in the opposite of capitalism and hates everything. It's really been fun times listening to the feedback to the TikTok ban stuff. We got so much feedback about the TikTok ban, including somebody who called us, I think, three times to yell at me specifically in increasingly well-spoken ways. It's like, they called. They weren't happy with how they did it, so they called again. And no, they didn't. It was unbelievable. Thank you to that person. More people should call and yell at David in increasingly polite ways.
28:07 David Pierce? No, no, they were not increasingly polite, increasingly well-argued ways. I see, okay. Yeah, I'll take that, too. Do that again. Yeah. All right, but let's get to a few of them, starting with a question we got from Brandon.
28:19 Speaker 11 Hello, my name is Brandon. I'm based in Cleveland. I have thoughts about your conversation on The Vergecast about the TikTok ban. Not to be a complete conspiracy theorist, but I feel like there's a bunch of ulterior motives for getting rid of TikTok that have nothing to do with national security. First of which is that most of Congress is funded in part or is in some significant way by AIPAC, and AIPAC is sort of losing a propaganda war on TikTok regarding the Gaza situation. Secondly, it's sort of a source of, like, unfiltered, current-ofits information that kind of gets pumped out to viewers before sort of party officials kind of get the chance to formulate talking points about it. But I think that there's just sort of a vested interest to kind of eliminate
29:03 Speaker 11 the wild card of like unmediated current events news from the landscape on an election year. But the national security and sort of like China angle of it is sort of like a convenient, sort of top level reason to use to get rid of the app. But I feel like it just sort of is, you know, one hand that's washing the other and the other hand is really the true reason why both sides of the aisle want to get rid of the app. Uh, but that's just my thoughts. Uh, thanks.
29:32 David Pierce? Okay. Two things going on here. One, we got a surprising number of voicemails that start with not to be a conspiracy theorist and then dive deep down into it, which is just delightful and is perfectly in line with this entire conversation. But I do think this question of the Israel Hamas war being sort of the catalyzing event for a lot of this came up a lot. And we talked about it a smidge in the episode that we did on it, but it's, it's been reported on a lot. And there's been this question still ongoing of like, what does the government know and why haven't they told us?
30:03 Nilay Patel? Yes, without question. They have not been clear.
30:05 David Pierce? And so, but now, a couple of weeks later, I just want to come back to this thing about like, okay, what, what do we know about what this is actually about and what's going on and what the US government believes it is actually doing here?
30:16 Nilay Patel? Okay. I don't want to talk about AIPAC too much. Like you can, you really can fall down a wild ride of conspiracy theories there. But I will point out that, uh, yesterday, as we're talking, probably last week, as people hear this, Joe Biden told Netanyahu on the phone, the situation in Gaza is unacceptable and conditioned further aid for Israel on some lasting solution to that situation. So the pressure has worked. Fair enough. I think embedded in this question and much of the feedback that we got is an assumption that the TikTok algorithm is neutral. And then what's happening on TikTok is a neutral representation of how everyone in America feels.
30:57 Nilay Patel? And people are like, the kids are speaking and TikTok is show, it's like fighting back. And it's like, maybe, maybe that's true. I also believe the situation in Gaza is inevitable and there should be a ceasefire. But I don't believe that the TikTok algorithm is neutral. There's no evidence that it is. But there's no evidence that ByteDance or the Chinese government is not like, you know what? The fastest way to break lasting Western peace would be, would be to break the United States' support of Israel. Like, that is a true thing. That's a thing that you could do. And putting pressure on that alliance in particular, like resets the world order. Can you do that through the mechanism of fucking TikTok? I don't know.
31:35 Nilay Patel? But I, I think like, if to accept that premise, that it's because of what happened in Gaza and the young people arguing against a war is what is causing the United States government to say TikTok is a problem. Like, you have to accept somewhere in there that the algorithm is neutral, that it is a neutral representation. And I think that's a huge assumption that you should not just make lightly. I also think, uh, my formative experience as a young person was the war in Iraq. And I, uh, no one listened to me either.
32:06 Nilay Patel? My friends got arrested marching down Lake Shore Drive protesting that war. Uh, and that, straight up, like, no one, like, we were loud. I wish I'd had a TikTok then, I would have made a lot of videos. Yeah. Uh, and so I, I hear that frustration, I feel it very keenly. I feel the same way about this war and all wars. Um, but I, I think the presumption that the algorithm is neutral is one that, if you want to make that claim, I would just encourage you to challenge that presumption and, and think about how much you're relying on it. But like, at least yes, or at least, you know, the pressure has worked in some minor way.
32:37 Alex Cranz? Well, and this is also a trend we see with social media every time. Like, a, a social media that is used by younger people tends to have this moment where everybody's like, why is nobody else talking about this? And it's like, well, Because you're just on this particular, you're just on Tumblr in 2016. That's why nobody else is talking about it, because you haven't left Tumblr. You're just on TikTok in 2024. That's why nobody else is talking about it, because you haven't left this app. And if you go and you look elsewhere, if you look at other media, you will see that this stuff is being covered. And I think that's a trend we see a lot. And on TikTok in particular, because of the algorithm, because of the way it is really, really good at disseminating information really, really quickly. We've seen that accelerate. We've seen that be a lot louder and a lot faster than it was in those other cases, which we have seen, like, to be clear, we've seen it.
33:22 Alex Cranz? We saw it with LiveJournal back in 2004 with the war in Iraq, 2003, 2004. You see it again and again and again. And it's a behavior where younger people who are starting to really get into media literacy and starting to really think about these things, they go, they get on an app, they find other people just like them, and they're like, why is nobody else talking about this? Why is this being held for me in these other areas? And the truth is, it's not. It's just being discussed in a different way. It's being discussed maybe with a little less heated rhetoric or whatever. But also, I do, I do kind of agree with him, not about that part, but I agree with him certainly about like, there are other reasons why the TikTok ban is being pushed. And it is, I would certainly agree, it is not just national security reasons.
34:03 Alex Cranz? I think there's a massive financial incentive for both the United States and for the many, many companies based in the United States that are direct competitors to TikTok. And those are the people that like, they do, they, Meta, Mark Zuckerberg would be delighted if TikTok got shut down tomorrow, you know? Like Elon Musk would be delighted if it got shut down tomorrow, because that means more users back on their platforms. So I think like, we can't ignore the fact that there are certainly other incentives here that are, that are encouraging this, but we also have to like, deal with the facts as we are given them. And like, when we start to think about, what if, you know, why is nobody reporting on this stuff? People are reporting on it. People are looking into this stuff. People are examining it. But if we don't have proof, if we don't have like, real quantifiable facts.
34:48 Alex Cranz? We are just like pissing in the wind, being like, maybe something's happened over there.
34:52 Nilay Patel? Yeah. Also, you know, most of Congress believes that what they're going to accomplish is a sale of TikTok. In that, like, if you believe they're gonna sell it, like, then you also have to believe that someone's gonna find the big algorithm dial and turn it like towards Israel. And that implies that that dial exists and it is currently pointing towards Gaza. Like, it can be turned. And then now you're right back at the problem of who controls that dial. And so I would just like, it's that assumption that is, like, do you believe that the Instagram reels algorithm is neutral? I do not. It mostly shows me babes. Like, it just fully believes that that is what I want from that platform. And like, I can't type trucks exploding into Instagram like more loudly. Like, that's the thing I actually want.
35:34 Nilay Patel? And the TikTok algorithm is like, you definitely want trucks exploding. And then here is some of the weirdest gadgets ever made. You should buy them.
35:41 David Pierce? So TikTok gets you.
35:42 Nilay Patel? TikTok is like, you're gonna buy so many vacuum cleaners. Here's some cut-rate anchor batteries. We're doing it this week. That's what's happening. And it's like, these algorithms, we all know that the algorithms have preferences and biases and can be shaped by the people who control them. The question for this is, who should do that? Should it exist in our country? Should it exist out? If Rupert Murdoch bought TikTok, would you be pleased about that? Why or why not?
36:06 David Pierce? Right.
36:07 Nilay Patel? And then the question is, would you be pleased that the Chinese government has the same power?
36:10 David Pierce? Yeah, I think that's fair. And then the, you know, tangential to the question of, is the algorithm neutral is, like, on what vectors can you move the knobs? Right? And it's like, that comes back to what do these companies want and who is really in charge? And it's like, that's where all of this gets so messy for me, right? Because it's like, I doubt sincerely that it would be good for TikTok's business to move the Gaza knob one way or another. I do think it moves the shop knob to move the business. That's just obviously true. Like, it feels true being on TikTok. But then, there's all of those questions next to the fact, like, you're talking about, Alex, that the three of us sitting in this room have completely different experiences of TikTok.
36:51 David Pierce? So to be, to sit here and talk about TikTok as a single thing is essentially impossible. And this is where, like, I just start running in circles on all of this, right? Like, we're essentially using different apps. I would bet 95% of what the three of us see on TikTok does not overlap.
37:07 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
37:07 David Pierce? And what do you do with that?
37:08 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
37:08 David Pierce? It's so weird.
37:10 Alex Cranz? Well, you you explain Jojo Siwa to
37:13 Nilay Patel? No, I refuse to know any of this information.
37:16 David Pierce? Yeah, Neil, I got to. I know there is a there is an entity called Jojo Siwa.
37:20 Nilay Patel? Nope.
37:20 David Pierce? That's all the information.
37:21 Nilay Patel? I refuse to even acknowledge that it is an entity. I know that there are words that people say that sound like that.
37:26 David Pierce? I see. Okay.
37:26 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
37:27 Nilay Patel? By the way, my belief is that the Instagram algorithm only shows me babes because I refuse to engage with it. And it's default is like, huh? Will this work today?
37:35 David Pierce? Neil, I know you want this.
37:37 Nilay Patel? It's like, we don't know anything about you. Eh, babe?
37:41 David Pierce? Fair enough. All right, let's get to the next one, which in the name of fairness is very mad at me specifically. But we got a lot of these that are very mad at me specifically. And as a good journalist, I feel obligated to air one. This person, they said their name in a way that I couldn't identify. So we're just going to call them St. Louis. So this is from St. Louis.
37:58 Speaker 12 From St. Louis and listening to the latest episode of the Birch Cast and taking my fist at the clouds and yelling into the ether because David and Alex are just, I don't know, I guess they've been brainwashed by TikTok or something. Just start from first principles, right? The most compelling reasons for banning TikTok and then just work your way down to the least compelling. First and foremost, what Neil mentioned, the 1922, it was communications act known for an ownership of media. Boom, right there. You don't need to go any further. That right there is justification for banning TikTok. It should have been done one time ago. We don't need to have any debate. We're done. Period. Next, China bans US social media. Why would that be? Why would they think they should do that?
38:42 Speaker 12 Maybe because if they think just being done to them, it's because they're doing it to you. Right? I mean, it's kind of a tit for tat thing. But again, you combine that with the other one. And again, I don't think we need to debate it any further. Second, you guys are talking about, well, what are they doing? This is all hearsay, blah, blah, blah. I don't know. You guys have a, have a, you know, a whole website and you seem to like to investigate, you know, shit related to technology and whatever. How about looking into the differences in content between, you know, the different platforms? I would hazard a guess, and I take a big bet, that the types of content on TikTok versus reels versus YouTube shorts
39:21 Speaker 12 is quite different. I mean, pick a controversial subject, be it, you know, the Israel Hamas war, Taiwan, et cetera, that there is a dramatic difference in the number of pros and cons posts that are presented on these different platforms.
39:38 David Pierce? So the two things in here, one, he brings up a bunch of stuff we've been talking about. And I think the question of content differences is very interesting, but I specifically want to talk about this one because a lot of people responded to our talk about the TikTok ban by saying, well, China does it to us, the end, problem solved, we should, we can do it back. And I don't find that argument credible at all, but I am open to discussion on that. And Neelai, in particular, I want to know what you think because you are the most pro ban of us, I would say.
40:10 Nilay Patel? Yeah, I don't, I've heard that argument a lot. It makes sense in like its way, like straight tit for tat, like, but China also directly controls its information economy. And it is an authoritarian government and I don't think we should do that.
40:25 David Pierce? Well, so this is kind of where I ladder up to you.
40:27 Nilay Patel? I just want to be clear, like, I, I, I believe in the First Amendment in a very real and meaningful way. What I'm saying is there's a reason in the United States, we don't allow a ton of foreign ownership of media. There's a reason that historically we have not allowed concentration of media ownership because we know that's dangerous to like the plurality that makes a democracy strong and all this stuff. And so like that, that's its own argument. That is not, they do it so we can do it too.
40:54 David Pierce? Right. Yeah. I think to me, there are sort of two inclusive questions inside of that. One is like, is China does something, we can do it back, a good argument? And I think no, for the reasons you just said, I don't want to be like.
41:09 Nilay Patel? I think that argument feels, I want to be clear, I think that argument feels good.
41:11 David Pierce? Sure, but I also.
41:12 Nilay Patel? When you like run around being like, what we want to preserve is a plurality of media, like no one gives a shit. When you're like, they do it to us, like everyone's like, yeah, like, that feels good. I understand why the argument is made and I understand why it feels good.
41:24 David Pierce? Right. And I think the, it ladders up to an argument that I think a lot of the antitrust conversation also ladders up to, which is what do we think our government's job is to do here? And I think in a lot of ways, there is this belief in America that like the, the market regulates itself and this is how we talk about this stuff and capitalism and all this stuff. But then the question of what is the government's role in that is like, it has, it has occurred to me in. Number of times that this is a thing we should spend a lot of this year talking about is what the government's job is and should be. And what that actually looks like in practice, because I think a lot of people in America feel like what the EU is doing to tech companies is like way overreaching and heavy handed and ridiculous, but it's like culturally, I think in a lot of places in Europe,
42:08 David Pierce? it is less out of bounds with how things normally work. But to me, all of this stuff sort of circles around this question of like, is the government's job to govern what I look at on my phone? I don't know.
42:20 Nilay Patel? No, I'd be very clear about that. No, like, I really don't believe.
42:25 David Pierce? But you want them to ban TikTok?
42:26 Nilay Patel? Yeah, again, I think your question about like, what can the government do and can the market regulate itself? The pendulum has swung pretty wildly over the last 40 years towards no regulation.
42:36 David Pierce? Right.
42:37 Nilay Patel? And now it might just slowly be swinging back, right? Like there's 1980 Ronald Reagan, Robert Bork. We've done that decoder episode. There's like a total deregulation of the market. You can see it. Jonathan Cantor mentioned it to me, same thing. He's like, 1980 this happened. And now the pendulum might just be swinging back, like just a little bit. And people are like, oh, that's weird. And that's fine. Like, that is inside of our market. The thing that I'm saying about TikTok in particular is if you find out they're doing the bad thing, we can't go arrest the Chinese government.
43:10 David Pierce? Right.
43:10 Nilay Patel? You can't do it. You cannot hold them accountable in specific ways. I mentioned this on the last show and I'll say it again, their kids aren't here. The people who run ByteDance, you know, their kids are there. They're in China. They're in Singapore. So there's just a thing that's different. Like our experiences here in this country are valuable to us. And our media ownership is just a part of that. Like, it really is a big part of that. Like, I said this as a joke at the end of the last episode. I think we should also break up Sinclair Broadcasting and Clear Channel.
43:40 Nilay Patel? Massive concentration of media ownership across the country is not good. It only gives you like a singular point of view and puts too many people in charge of what too many people see and feel. There's that really famous video that I think Deadspin made ages ago. It was just Sinclair news anchors all saying, all reading the same speech about the fake news. And that is horrifying, right? That's horrifying. And the reason you have media ownership rules is to make sure that doesn't happen. And so like I landing all of my like, we should ban TikTok criticism in that idea, right? Which is the people who make the media in the United States, who shape opinion in the United States, who have control of what people see and experience, they should ask it in the game here.
44:23 David Pierce? Fair enough.
44:23 Nilay Patel? And there should be more competition in that.
44:25 David Pierce? Any thoughts?
44:26 Alex Cranz? Yeah, to Neela's earlier point, I think, I think he's right that like, we took our eye off the ball for a very long time in this country. We stopped paying attention and we stopped caring to regulate companies. And historically, we did that a lot. And some of our biggest and most like vibrant economic moments in this country were when we were heavily regulating companies. And so a lot of this is just like culture shock. If you haven't done something for 40 years and you start doing it even a little bit, everybody's gonna be like, what the hell are you doing over there? But at the same time, like I see the TikTok stuff and I'm like, well, that feels kind of hypocritical of us to be like, well, we have to shut down TikTok because it has this really large control over our,
45:06 Alex Cranz? our media. And, and it has this really important impact on our media when Disney has what like 80% of American box office and, and has this enormous control. And so the only difference between those two is one is in China and one is Bob Iger.
45:22 Nilay Patel? That's a huge difference. Like Disney's here and, and Ron DeSantis is like, ah, here's a weird law about not saying that anyone can ever be gay.
45:30 David Pierce? Which is going super well for Ron DeSantis.
45:32 Alex Cranz? Yeah, my god, great for him.
45:33 Nilay Patel? Then Disney got into a political fight and they lost a tax district and they gotta get it back. There was an investor fight that Disney just had to win. Like, the consequences of Disney's speech in America are real, right? And yes, it is true. They have mostly succeeded in all of their fights, but they had to fight.
45:53 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
45:53 Nilay Patel? Right? There were, there were actual, they were held accountable for their positions. And I agree with most of their positions. Not all of Disney's positions, I would hasten to say. But some of their positions here about being inclusive, like all that stuff, like a meaningful political element in the United States tried to punish Disney for that stuff and Disney fought back. But largely has won or not won or come to some set of accommodations with the Florida government, like whatever happened there is different than whatever if we find out TikTok is doing the bad thing.
46:26 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
46:26 Nilay Patel? Right? And that's, I think that is just a massively important, like, I don't know, like Disney has employees in the United States. Like if Disney has 80% of the box office.
46:35 Alex Cranz? I'm sorry, I was reading my, I was reading my little red book that I received. I didn't hear anything.
46:41 Nilay Patel? I was just saying like.
46:42 Alex Cranz? Yeah, no, I, I think there is a, there is a fundamental difference, right? Like the, the argument here, the, the core argument of this TikTok thing is who is allowed to dominate conversations in America? And I think that argument shouldn't happen at all. Who should be allowed to dominate conversations in America? No one. We shouldn't have that. Like Disney shouldn't be as used as it is. TikTok certainly shouldn't be able to just have everybody believe a conspiracy theory or know who the what's up brother guy is with just like a little twist of the algorithm. That's bananas. No one should have that kind of monopoly on our culture and on our media. But at the same time, I kind of agree with the fact that like,
47:22 Alex Cranz? we probably don't want foreign actors in, in the United States controlling stuff, right? Like we, we, we don't necessarily want that because we've seen time and time again, but banning TikTok doesn't solve that. Russia has found many ways to get into our country and, and influence us at a mass scale using American tools. Like the tools themselves are the problem. It's not who owns them because the tools are the thing that is disseminating the information. We, we saw that in 2016 with how Russia manipulated Facebook and other social media platforms. And there's, that's just proof. Like that, that happened.
47:56 Nilay Patel? There was a bunch of reporting about how there was a Russian disinformation campaign around Kate Middleton.
48:01 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
48:02 Nilay Patel? And it's like, oh, they just keep doing it. They, oh, they're still at it.
48:05 Alex Cranz? They're, they're still doing it.
48:06 David Pierce? I'm realizing as we talk that I think I would be more compelled by your argument, Neelai, if I felt like the US was regulating anything. That like.
48:15 Nilay Patel? That we have like a functional government.
48:17 David Pierce? If we were preventing the American owned services from doing the things we're accusing TikTok of, I would be more compelled by the argument that since we can't prevent TikTok from doing it, the responsible thing to do is kick them out. I think if you draw that line, that sort of makes sense to me. But that assumes that we are capable of doing it to anybody. And there's really no evidence that we're capable of doing that to anyone.
48:40 Nilay Patel? Well, there's one huge prohibition, uh, which is the First Amendment. It really, really gets in your way. Mm hmm. Right? It's like a real problem. It's a good problem, a problem that I think we should continue to have. I swear, there will come a time on this show where I make you earnestly argue against the first time that I'm so excited about it. It's very challenging. You have to believe, and I think this is why a lot of the people who don't think TikTok should be banned or sold, who think this is all crazy. You have to believe that American companies have in some way the best interests of Americans at heart, or America at heart, and I don't think that's easy to believe. I think if I walked up to most people and I was like, Disney is a champion of American values, they'd be like, what are you talking about? Right? If I said that about Facebook, or Apple, or Google, or Pfizer, or whatever,
49:24 Nilay Patel? like, most people do not believe that that is the case. Right. I don't know that I believe that that is the case, but it is, when I talk about challenging assumptions, that is one assumption at the heart of the idea that big companies in America should have all kinds of freedoms, and big companies from outside of America shouldn't. That is my assumption, is the working assumption of lots and lots of policy. Yeah. You are free to disagree with that assumption. Like, I understand the reasons why you might, but that is the heart of it. Yeah. All right, we got one more, and then we're gonna do the other little palate cleanser, and then I'll let you two get out of here. We'll be right back.
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51:29 David Pierce? All right, we're back. One more question about the TikTok ban. This one comes from Lucas.
51:34 Speaker 13 Hi, Vergecast. This is Lucas from Virginia about the TikTok ban. I'm pretty much in the same boat as Neelai. Just, you know, I think of TikTok as digital crack. But at the same time, I think that most prohibition laws fail. So this will probably go that way. Love the pod. Have a good one.
51:51 David Pierce? Ditto. Neelai Patel, TikTok is digital crack. That's the headline here.
51:56 Nilay Patel? I'm not sure that's the answer.
51:58 David Pierce? I want to pose this as a question because I think this is kind of where we ended the last time we talked about this. And I want to end here, too. Is there a version of this that accomplishes anything?
52:08 Nilay Patel? A version of what?
52:09 David Pierce? The TikTok ban. Like, can you? A, can you ban TikTok in an actually practically enforceable way? And B, would it do anything? Because I think there's a real nihilism setting in in a lot of this conversation. That's like, ah, whatever. It's.
52:24 Nilay Patel? Yeah, first of all, just to be, I think as of today, TikTok is not banned.
52:29 David Pierce? Correct.
52:30 Nilay Patel? There is no movement on a bill in the Senate.
52:32 David Pierce? Alex and I are winning that bet so far.
52:33 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
52:33 David Pierce? Yeah.
52:34 Nilay Patel? There's no movement on a bill in the Senate to actually ban TikTok. So whatever.
52:40 David Pierce? Right.
52:41 Nilay Patel? Then there's the other reality, which is the bill would potentially force a sale. And there's a lot of people who might want to buy it. And you might just end up in that situation.
52:52 David Pierce? Yep.
52:52 Nilay Patel? So there's a lot of things that have to happen first, and many of them don't end up in the thing is banned. But I think if you do ban it, like I don't think people are just gonna be staring at like a blank screen on their phone, just like wistfully thinking about when Charli D'Amelio started dancing again, you know, like, I think they're gonna just like move on.
53:11 David Pierce? Okay, but let me posit this. So the, what this does is prevent app stores from carrying it, right? That is, that is essentially what this ban looks like. There are, what, a couple hundred million people in the United States who already have TikTok on their phones. I don't think there's any real precedent for Apple and Google reaching out and proactively deleting apps from your phone.
53:27 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
53:28 David Pierce? So that's just a lot of people who have TikTok still already. It also, VPNs exist. People have done a lot of work.
53:36 Nilay Patel? I do love the idea of like some small country, like becoming a honeypot VPN destination for TikTok, like Monaco, you know? It's like everyone is just like VPNing through Monaco and Monaco's TikTok becomes US TikTok.
53:48 David Pierce? It's like the, I forget which country it is, but the country that owns the .ai domain is suddenly, that's like a meaningful part of the GDP as all these companies. It's great.
53:56 Nilay Patel? Yeah, great. All these things could happen. And I agree, many, like, the Chinese Great Firewall works, but it's not perfect.
54:03 David Pierce? Right.
54:03 Nilay Patel? And the idea that we would put one up and it would work perfectly is like nonsensical. Like, yes, some people are still gonna use TikTok, but the app won't be able to get updated. And people won't be uploading content to a thing that looks like it's not, like, it will result in some kind of weird decline over time, and fine. But there's just so many steps from here to there. Like, so, so many steps from here to there.
54:24 David Pierce? Yeah, Alex, you and I have been on, on the same page about this, and I'm curious, where I've landed after, you know, two more weeks of this is, I think, most likely outcome, by a pretty wide margin, nothing happens.
54:34 Alex Cranz? Yep.
54:35 David Pierce? Second most likely outcome, it gets sold, in some way, shape, or form, not to Steven Mnuchin, but to somebody else. Big, giant, planet-sized gap down to option number three, which is that TikTok actually gets banned in a meaningful way. Do you agree or disagree?
54:52 Alex Cranz? It's not gonna get banned. It, it, it won't get banned. And, and I think even a sale is gonna be super unlikely, because who's gonna buy it? Who's gonna have the money and not have a monopoly as soon as they own it, right? And also, then I think we just come back to that conversation of wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. It's not okay for the Chinese government to manipulate us through TikTok, but it is totally okay for Disney or Larry Ellison or whoever to manipulate us through TikTok. Well, that's not good. Like, I think it's just such a stupid, stupid ban and for those reasons. I understand like the rationale behind it and the legal theory behind it and all of that. I get that, but at the same time, I'm like, the hypocrisy of it is so outrageous. And I'm like, don't be so dumb.
55:36 David Pierce? I've decided that the funniest possible outcome is that one branch of the government forces it to be sold to YouTube. And then four minutes later, Lena Kahn files a lawsuit against YouTube for antitrust.
55:49 Alex Cranz? That'd be good.
55:49 David Pierce? You gotta keep the government wheels turning.
55:51 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
55:51 David Pierce? We're just gonna keep a lot of lawyers employed.
55:53 Nilay Patel? Well, when I think of what the founding fathers really wanted, it was a self-perpetuating cycle of government actions.
55:59 David Pierce? It's beautiful. All right, we got one more and then I'm gonna let you guys get out of here. This has nothing to do with TikTok or Apple, but it is, it is a perfectly Verge-casty question and so I am obligated to play it. This is from Michael.
56:09 Speaker 14 Hello, this is Michael from San Francisco. So I've been loving you guys' coverage on the future of the web and I love how obsessed with the web you are. And I too am obsessed with it and I'm trying to find more and more web apps to replace the apps on my phone. So I'm wondering what web apps, not native apps, but like whether they be TWAs or just webpages, like what are the web apps that you guys use day to day? What are some of your favorite web apps? Thanks. Goodbye.
56:38 David Pierce? Okay, I just, I wanna just, we're gonna do two each. These are the rules. And neither, none of us can say The Verge because The Verge is the best web app that exists. You should download it to your home screen. It's actually very good on your home screen. Highly recommend. Everybody is furiously scrolling through their phones right now. So I'll go first. The two web apps that I use the most, I would say at this moment are, I use an app called Feedbin as an RSS reader that is fantastic on the web. It's super light and super fast. It's where all of my stuff comes into. I started piping my YouTube subscriptions into there so that I get new things from the channels I subscribe to without the rest of the YouTube interface. Love it. Feedbin.com. It's amazing. I think it's like five bucks a month. Not recommend it highly enough. And the other one, there's two I could choose from here.
57:21 David Pierce? But the other one I'll pick is a to do list app that I have started using and stopped using and come back to. Because this is the sickness with which I live my life. It's called twos, T W O S. And it is like just a perfectly made, very simple list making app with reminders and integrates with your calendar. And it is just fast as hell. And a lot of the app works offline, even in your browser. It will cannot recommend it enough. I love a good, simple, fast.
57:48 Nilay Patel? twos.com.
57:49 David Pierce? I think it's twosapp.com.
57:51 Nilay Patel? Ah, that explains a lot of things.
57:53 Alex Cranz? It's very cool.
57:54 David Pierce? Yeah. So those are my two. Alex, what do you got?
57:56 Alex Cranz? Storygraph is probably my big one. It's a good read replacement and it is, it just slaps. It is fantastic. I don't use any of the social parts of it. I just use it to track what I'm reading. And anytime somebody says, which book should I read? I immediately open that and start flipping through it because I just adore it. And then my other one is probably like a console I use on to, to, to interact with my Raspberry Pi. That it's just like.
58:20 David Pierce? Amazing.
58:21 Alex Cranz? Like it's the pie hole console and you can just like, there's like a web app version of it and, and I adore that. Like a lot of smart home stuff has web apps and I'm just like, yeah, this is great. And I, so I was looking through it. I was like, oh, I guess most of my web apps are like smart home, quick access.
58:36 David Pierce? It's perfect. I love it. And that's like, it connects to all your stuff.
58:39 Alex Cranz? It does all the stuff and it just does it.
58:41 David Pierce? Yeah.
58:41 Alex Cranz? And they work.
58:42 David Pierce? Yeah.
58:42 Alex Cranz? And it's great.
58:43 David Pierce? That's good. Yeah. Pie hole is a good app. All right. Neil, what's yours?
58:46 Nilay Patel? Well, I wish I'd gone on this question, knowing that I was allowed to say the verge.com.
58:50 David Pierce? Yeah, it's just cheating. It's like, it's a website.
58:53 Nilay Patel? It is very good on the, on the thing. I want to issue one correction. Last week or two weeks ago, I said Notion calendar on the Mac was native. That's an electron app. It just happens to be very good. And the person who wrote it was tweeting how, how happy he was.
59:05 David Pierce? He was very proud. Yeah. That you, you confused it for being a native app.
59:09 Nilay Patel? That's good.
59:09 David Pierce? Which means all the people who build bad electron apps, shame on you.
59:12 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
59:12 David Pierce? Do better.
59:13 Nilay Patel? You've got nowhere to hide.
59:14 David Pierce? Yeah.
59:15 Nilay Patel? So yeah, I have a Homebridge and I use the Homebridge web app on my phone all the time, mostly to update the plugins. But that's like a thing that I use all the time. I go to that web and then it's actually interesting that I don't think of these as web apps. They're just little web servers in my house. So the Homebridge just runs in my house.
59:32 David Pierce? That counts, yeah.
59:33 Nilay Patel? And then my Sony receiver has a little web server in it to change all the settings.
59:37 David Pierce? Of course it does.
59:38 Nilay Patel? And I spend so much time just like monkeying with the little settings on the Sony receiver.
59:42 David Pierce? That's amazing.
59:43 Nilay Patel? You know, this question like gets at the heart of something. I was looking at twos, twos app.com and you open it and the banner is like downloader app.
59:51 David Pierce? Yep.
59:51 Nilay Patel? At the top of the screen.
59:52 David Pierce? Yep. It's actually better on the web than any other platform and it still wants you to download an app, which I think is fascinating.
59:57 Nilay Patel? A lot of this question is just like, Apple does not want that thing to happen that happened to its laptops.
1:00:01 David Pierce? Right. Yeah. And, and yeah, there, there's going to come a time when I'm going to write 40,000 words about how annoying it is when you open up like Reddit or any other site. And it's like, isn't this better in the app? And I'm like, no, I'm on your website. Have a good website. If it's better in the app, it's your fault.
1:00:16 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:00:17 David Pierce? But yeah, anyway, the web is great. We love the web. Please ask us questions about the web. All right. We gotta get out of here. Neelai, Alex, thank you as always for doing this and I suspect we will have more of this to do in the very near future.
1:00:28 Speaker 01 Peace.
1:00:29 David Pierce? That's it for the Vergecast today. Thanks to Neelai and Alex for doing this with me. And thank you as always for listening and for sending in all of those hotline questions and emails. We love getting all of your feedback. There's lots more on everything we talked about, by the way, at theverge.com. I'll put some links in the show notes, but also the TikTok ban and the Apple stuff is all happening sort of constantly all the time. Even just recently, there's a huge lawsuit about the Apple Watch that is very much a regulatory question about Apple, even separately from the antitrust stuff. There's just a lot going on. Before we go, two quick housekeeping things. One, this coming weekend, April 13th, on Saturday, I'm going to be in Chicago at the Chicago Humanities Festival, along with a couple of my colleagues, doing a series of panels all about AI and creativity, trying
1:01:14 David Pierce? to figure out what does AI mean for people who want to make things? And what does it give them in terms of tools? What does it take away? How do we as consumers understand what this stuff is? Stuff is when some of it is made by humans and some of it's made by AI and that line starts to get really blurry. We're going to spend a whole Saturday afternoon sorting through all of that with some really interesting people. I'm going to put the link in the show notes. We'll put it in the description. If you want to get tickets, if you're in Chicago, you want to come hang out and talk about AI, please do. We would love to have you. It's going to be incredibly fun. Thing number two, we have been nominated for a Webby Award for Best Technology Podcast. It's very important, A, that you vote for us because we want to win this award very badly,
1:01:55 David Pierce? and B, that we beat Neelai and Decoder. It's so, so important. Neelai is nominated for Decoder as Best Business Podcast, and he can totally win that. Sounds great. Love that for Neelai. Enjoy that. I want to beat him for Best Technology Podcast so bad. Plus, he wins anyway. Great news all around. Go to the Webby's. We'll put the link in the show notes. Put the link in the description. Please vote for The Vergecast. We love particularly when we win the People's Choice Award because it comes from you all, the listeners who say you like this show. We want all your feedback. We want all your thoughts. But the Webby Award is really cool looking, and I want one really bad. That's enough for now. Please go vote for us. Come see us in Chicago. Can't wait to hang out. As always, if you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or more you want to say about TikTok
1:02:38 David Pierce? and China, you can always email us at [email protected] or call the hotline, 866-VERGE11. Truly, the hotline is my favorite thing about The Vergecast. It's so fun hearing all of the things you have to say, some of which is super mean and doesn't make it on the show, some of which is really nice and doesn't make it on the show, some of which is somewhere in between. It's great. We do a hotline question on the show at least once a week, so please keep them all coming. This show is produced by Andrew Marino, Liam James, and Will Por. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Neelai, Alex and I will be back on Friday to talk about some fun gadget reviews we got coming this week and everything else happening in tech. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.
1:03:24 Speaker 15 New and exclusive holiday decor just launched online at The Home Depot. Check out the viral Grand Duchess Collection with smart holiday lights you can control from your phone. Easily customize the twinkle across trees, wreaths, and garlands to match your holiday vibe. Create stunning light effects, then switch it up with the tap of your fingers. Even the man in red will be impressed. Shop the holiday decor you want, online only, at homedepot.com.
1:03:54 Speaker 16 Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing in wearable. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. Based on Apple conducted study of heart rate accuracy, August 2026. Visit apple.com slash apple watch series 12.
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