OnePlus 7 Pro review, the White House's censorship tool, and more streaming wars

Dieter Bohn's OnePlus 7 Pro and Pixel 3a review starts off the show, followed by Adi Robertson's coverage of everything the government is doing with Facebook and tariffs, and we end on our featured updates on the streaming wars. Stories mentioned this week: One month ago, Foxconn said its innovation centers weren't empty …Verizon’s 5G network is now hitting gigabit download speedsThe new Apple TV app launches today on iOS, Apple TV, and Samsung TVsFacebook will increase pay for its contractors in North AmericaSamsung’s Galaxy Home missed its April launch date, and the company won’t say whyGoogle Pixel 3A review: a $399 phone with a great camera OnePlus 7 Pro review: an amazing screen meets a good enough …White House launches tool to report censorship on Facebook …Donald Trump is short-circuiting the electronics industry Phones and laptops are next to be hit by Trump's China tariff hikes …White House cracks down on Huawei equipment sales with executive …FCC commissioner calls for investigation into Chinese telecoms operating in US networksHP’s new dual-screen gaming laptop lets you watch Twitch and play simultaneouslyWhat does it cost to compete with Disney and Netflix? Quibi bets $2 …Disney wants full control of Hulu, but doesn't want to lose any shows …Comcast is giving Disney full control of HuluSubscribe to The Vergecast for free in your favorite podcast app https://pod.link/430333725 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  This week on The Vergecast, Addie Robertson joins Dieter, Paul and I. We talk about the OnePlus 7 Pro. We talk about the Pixel 3A. We get deep into everything the government is doing with Facebook and tariffs. We're in it. Then we talk about the streaming wars. That's Vergecast, coming up now.

• 0:15Speaker 01

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• 1:33Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the newly reconstituted Verge Podcast empire. And I say that only because now we have two shows again, which is great. It's very exciting. I'm Neelai, your friend. Dieter's here. Hello. Hi. Howdy. Paul, Paul's here. Hello. And Addie Robertson. Hey. Twofer this week. Welcome, Addie. Hi. So if you don't know, Addie and I interviewed Mark Rifkin, who's one of the lawyers representing the plaintiffs who sued Apple for monopoly app store pricing. It was big news this week, but we did a whole episode where Addie explained what's going on. We interviewed the lawyer. What did you think?

• 2:07Speaker 03

  I think that a lot of the cases, basically, now we get to have a case.

• 2:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 2:11Speaker 03

  But he was very compelling.

• 2:12Nilay Patel?

  He was very interesting. So you should listen to that. We're not going to get into it on this show because Addy and I just did a whole show about that. But Addy's here again this week because there's, I'm just going to be honest, there's a ton of stuff going on. Before we start, though, I want to tell you that Why'd You Push That Button is back. Season four premiere, Ashley and Caitlin went for it. They just went for it and they did green and blue bubbles and iMessage, which is

• 2:34Speaker 04

  Yup.

• 2:34Nilay Patel?

  one of the trolliest ideas I've ever had, but it's a really good episode, I promise you. Dieter, you're on it.

• 2:39Speaker 04

  I am, and they managed to make me not sound completely ranty and insane when I talked about RCS, so.

• 2:45Nilay Patel?

  So something we've never accomplished.

• 2:50Nilay Patel?

  But that's out now. Season four is super exciting. Just go listen to it after you listen to the show. Okay, so there's just a lot going on this week. Just a tremendous amount of tech news. There's launches, there's 5G networks, there's our government and our president just doing all kinds of stuff. But before we start and get into it, and we're going to get into almost all of it, there's a lot of stuff that I think is worth like one or two lines of updates, just stories we've been tracking and talking about on the show forever. In a normal week, we dive into all this stuff, but there's so much going on this week that I just want to run through it really fast, just to acknowledge that these stories are moving. But I want to focus on the Pixel 3, the OnePlus 7 Pro, all the,

• 3:33Nilay Patel?

  frankly, insane policy stuff that's going on, and then make fun of Quibi. So that's always what I want to do. Okay, so I'm going to try to go through this as fast as I can. A month ago, we reported that Foxconn's innovation centers were empty in Wisconsin. Foxconn held an event like several days after we reported that where they bought another building and they promised, to laughter from the crowd, that the buildings were not empty and that they would be issuing a correction to us soon.

• 4:02Speaker 04

  Also, don't climb trees. Something about climbing trees.

• 4:04Nilay Patel?

  Josh, as our reporter, they said, "We promise there's a plan, but don't climb trees to look at the buildings and see if they're full or not. We promise they're full." So we just waited a month. If you follow my Twitter, you'll know that Foxconn never issued its correction or statement to us. About what the buildings to be used for in Wisconsin. And then, you know, it was a month, so we sent a photographer around to the buildings again. Lo and behold, not only are the buildings still empty, one of them is even emptier than before, which is incredible. There used to be like sawhorses and a laptop in one, and now they're gone. So it's just a bare concrete floor. So we still have no idea what's going on at Foxconn. The buildings are still empty. We're tracking that story. If you're in Wisconsin, you know what's going on. Get a hold of Josh.

• 4:46Nilay Patel?

  Maybe, maybe the innovation is invisibility. That would be incredible. If that was ultimately the statement, like Foxconn's like, we did it. All the people are invisible.

• 5:00Nilay Patel?

  Like the true. Gotcha, verge. What's, what's the killer ad for 5G? Invisibility. I would accept that. I would be like, you know what? I was wrong. That has yet to happen. We've been talking a lot about Microsoft and Sony, cloud games, Stadia. They announced a joint partnership on cloud gaming and AI, literally today. It's, it's very loose in the way that these announcements are.

• 5:24Speaker 03

  We don't know that much about Stadia.

• 5:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's just like, what is happening? But Google entered the cloud gaming business and then Microsoft and Sony did like the classic international relations move of immediately forming an alliance between rivals.

• 5:37Speaker 04

  Okay. It does look like Sony's going to use at Microsoft Azure to run their thing. But the, the big question is, are they gonna, you know, work together from the consumer side in some way, shape or form? Cause you know, Sony's got a great history of being open with its games Fortnite.

• 5:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, Sony doesn't like operate a cloud. You'd think they would like have called Amazon first. Like they can't call Google. Google's their competitor.

• 6:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 6:02Nilay Patel?

  It doesn't seem likely they would call the Xbox people. Did like the AWS people just blow it with Sony? Like they made the call and they were like, yeah, we're not, we just whatever games. And Sony is like, fine. And they call, right? Anyway, so that's happening. Cloud gaming is a thing. Chris Welch is in Chicago as we speak, speed testing a Galaxy S10 5G. It is getting a gigabit down on Verizon's network right now.

• 6:29Speaker 04

  It's getting a gigabit down if you're standing on the exact right block with a perfect line of sight to a microcell pointing directly at you without any rain or obstructions between you and the microcell.

• 6:39Nilay Patel?

  Fair.

• 6:41Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 6:42Nilay Patel?

  And it and the up the upload is only an LTE. So it's a gigabit down and 60 up, perfect LTE. So it's still not real. It's realer than it was the last time he was there with like a wacky Motorola phone with like a Moto mod on the back. Because this is an actual phone, not it's not a phone with like another part. It's an actual phone. Uh, I just think this makes AT&T's 5G stuff look like pure nonsense even more like Verizon can tell you that there's a real 5G network that's up and running. You can use it and AT&T is like, we shipped an icon to everyone's phone like. Anyway, so that's happening. Sprint is announced its first 5G phones are going to ship on May 31st. So the 5G stuff is up and running. Uh, this is very personally exciting to me and probably to Dieter.

• 7:27Nilay Patel?

  Google Assistant is finally like here on the Sonos one in the Sonos Beam.

• 7:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, it doesn't support multi-user, so like voice recognition stuff. Also, it's slow. It's super slow. It's way slower than a proper Google Home.

• 7:42Nilay Patel?

  Ooh. But you can, if you have a bunch of old Sonos's, you can just use a Google Home puck.

• 7:48Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 7:48Nilay Patel?

  What's it called, a Nest Dot?

• 7:53Nilay Patel?

  You can just use a regular Google Home and light up your Sonos speakers, which is great.

• 7:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, maybe that's what I'll do. I'll just stick a mini on top of one of my Sonos surrounds.

• 8:01Nilay Patel?

  Uh, Chris Walsh and I got to see the new Apple TV app, uh, which is very confusing because it runs on a device called the Apple TV and then will support a service called Apple TV Plus. So whatever that is named, uh, it looks shockingly like the existing Apple TV app. They, many of the squares are now circles is what I will say like, or I'm sorry, many of the squares are now ovals.

• 8:23Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 8:24Speaker 05

  Wait, wait, a rectangle with rounded corners is not an oval. I'd like you to issue a correction on that.

• 8:29Nilay Patel?

  Fine, I'm going back to many of the squares are now circles, which is even more wrong. I'm just going to stand by that one. Uh, yeah, they rounded a bunch of it off. The thing that's interesting is they are telling us that if you subscribe to HBO through Apple in the app, not only will it look better, like they're, you know, they're promising these, the best quality. So they're, they're saying it will look better if you subscribe to HBO and watch it through this app. But if you go to a device that doesn't have the Apple TV app. And you want to download like HBO Go, you'll be able to off it through Apple. So like, you know, right now you're like off, if you subscribe to HBO through Comcast or FiOS or like iFiOS, and you like login, it says, "Select your service provider," and you login with your FiOS credentials and it authorizes HBO, Apple is going to show it up in that list.

• 9:14Speaker 04

  So that means Apple is officially a cable company now?

• 9:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the same as like Sling TV shows up in that stuff, right? If you subscribe to the premium channels, you can off it. But yeah, Apple is basically doing the cable company off, which I don't think most people didn't expect. Uh, the Apple TV app is also, uh, out on the newer Samsung TVs, uh, which is just wild that they, there's, Apple made a Tizen app, everybody. You can get it now. Um, I asked them if they, like, if their Tizen team and their Android team and their WebOS team and their wackadoo Vizio OS team, like, we're talking and they're like, "We're not disclosing how the teams will operate." Um, so I just assume like, the, the, the team building the WebOS app is like in the basement, like, they don't get, they're not in the spaceship.

• 10:02Nilay Patel?

  You know, they're just like down the street in another, another part of the country. Anyway, it's out, you can get it, you can play with it. This is a big update. Casey wrote the big piece about Facebook moderation, contractors, underpaid, feeling bad, having depression. Facebook is giving them all a raise, eighteen dollar an hour minimum in some markets, it goes up from there depending on where you live. Facebook said they had been planning this, it's been in the works, it had nothing to do with reporting. Um, I think we all know that this is just a victory lap for Casey, like, he exposed what was happening, he got them a raise, I'm very proud of him. The Galaxy Home, you might recall this, the Bixby competitor to Alexa and the HomePod and Google Assistant devices, uh, just missed its ship date and Samsung won't say why.

• 10:43Speaker 04

  It's hanging out with the fold.

• 10:46Nilay Patel?

  I think they realized they made a Weber grill with a bad assistant. They should rethink it. So it's just not out yet. And then lastly, Dieter, you should get into this a little bit more. Last week at I O, Google announced the big role together of Google and Nest.

• 11:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 11:01Nilay Patel?

  And they said Works with Nest is getting shut down.

• 11:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 11:04Nilay Patel?

  Dan wrote a great piece being like, this is bad for a variety of reasons. And then Google today issued a big blog post saying, actually, we're walking a lot of this back. What's what's going on there?

• 11:14Speaker 04

  Nest had this thing where a bunch of their passwords were insecure because they didn't have two factor because a bunch of people were using passwords. The solution was, well, let's just use Google's login infrastructure. In order to do that, they have to like, figure out how to authenticate everything through like your Google login. Google looked at Works with Nest and said, this is really scary because all your personal home data can get out, so we're shutting it down. And now, everything has to work with, you know, works with Google. And, you know, it turns out, if you'd like, if this and that, there's a Google Assistant routine just waiting for you. And a whole lot of it was going through the Google Assistant. But they had a very aggressive timeline for shutting down the Works with Nest program. And it was unclear what was going to happen to a lot of stuff that actually really mattered to consumers, like, I don't know, using Alexa or some like Smart Light integrations that

• 11:59Speaker 04

  hadn't connected up to Google yet.

• 12:02Speaker 04

  So there was an uproar, there was a fur roar. And so they now are saying they're not going to shut down Works with Nest's connections beyond August 31st. But if you do switch to a Google account to get the higher level of security, then it will get shut down and you'll need to switch some stuff. And in the meantime, they're going to work really hard to make sure that all the stuff that people actually care about will work with the Google version of Works with Nest instead of the Amazon version. And I'm just going to say, this is two Google I Os in a row, where Google made assumptions about how people felt about private data privacy and just whiffed it. Last year was duplex. And this year was, yeah, no, Nest, we're going to lock down security because people

• 12:45Speaker 04

  really don't want their data shared via if this, then that. And nope, everybody got mad at that. So like, they're, they're, I don't know, they're vain, they're way they're vain for how most people actually feel about their privacy moves is a little bit off, I think.

• 12:59Nilay Patel?

  Well, and the lesson here is they should have phased it from the start, right? I mean,

• 13:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 13:03Nilay Patel?

  There's a lot of people in the world who tell their Alexas to turn the thermostat up and down.

• 13:08Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 13:08Nilay Patel?

  And they should have been like, we have a plan to continue this, not we're shutting it down and everything will be fine.

• 13:14Speaker 04

  Right.

• 13:14Nilay Patel?

  So on the on balance, I think it's good, especially because the Google Home ecosystem is starting to become a better competitor to Alexa. But it's not there yet. So this could have been the forcing function the whole way along, but they like went too fast.

• 13:29Speaker 04

  Well, the the thing is like, long term, like having stuff work with Alexa means that it sort of gets connected up to a bunch of other stuff Alexa does. And if all that eventually goes away, then it really is a forcing function to have you start working with Google stuff. Right? If you want those like extra hooks and extra like, you know, integrations to work.

• 13:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 13:51Speaker 04

  Routines and whatnot.

• 13:52Nilay Patel?

  I just want to say it's 2019 and what we're fundamentally talking about here is thermostat ecosystem lock in.

• 13:59Nilay Patel?

  And that's horrible.

• 14:00Speaker 04

  Actually, what we're fundamentally talking about is like thermostat macros.

• 14:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, thermostat macro lock in.

• 14:06Speaker 04

  This is, yeah, who gets to run the macro is essentially what we're talking about here.

• 14:09Nilay Patel?

  If we did episode titles of that style, I would say the episode title for the show would be thermostat macro lock in.

• 14:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 14:16Nilay Patel?

  I'm just putting it out there. Okay. That's enough updates. Let's talk about some phones. So Dieter, you, we obviously talked about the Pixel 3A a lot last week with Hiroshi and Steph. And every episode that was great for coming, but you actually reviewed the phone and reviewed the OnePlus 7 Pro. So let's let's talk about those. What did you think of the 3A?

• 14:34Speaker 04

  Uh, the 3A is remarkable because it's $400 and like, or I think it's 480 for the bigger screen one. It feels like a $400 phone. Well, maybe a little bit better, but the camera is amazing. And so the the only question is, how much do you care about it being fast? And how much do you care about it being fast for like two or three years? Uh, and I don't know. That's that's a hard one to answer.

• 15:01Speaker 04

  But like in terms of like quality and will you miss out on stuff? And does it feel like a phone that does phone stuff and doesn't annoy you every day? Like it's totally there.

• 15:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 15:08Speaker 04

  I will say I, you know, sent one to Dan Seifert and he is less optimistic about its its speed and less happy about its large bezels.

• 15:18Speaker 04

  But I think the consensus is like, yeah, no, it's, it's fine. If you, if you want a fast phone or a more expensive phone, like you won't be happy with it. Uh, but if, you know, you've got $400 to spend on a phone, this is absolutely the phone you should buy.

• 15:30Nilay Patel?

  So Dan's point to me repeatedly is that most people aren't spending for, at least in the United States, are not spending $400 on a phone, right? They're either spending like $150 on like a weird blue phone on like a Metro PCS or whatever, or they're paying a monthly fee. And then the, the sort of step change between a $400 phone and $800 phone is minimal, right? Cause you're looking at dollars per month.

• 15:54Speaker 04

  Right. So there's, Google's would have two responses to this. Um, one of which I'm not sure about, one of which I'm really interested to see if it works. Um, so the first response is, uh, nobody buys a phone in a market unless there's a good phone in that market. So like, nobody bought $1,000 phones until there were $1,000 phones. And so there weren't any really truly good four to $500 phones out there. So it's possible that they could actually change consumer behavior with this phone. That's what they're trying to do. And their lever for doing it is the other thing, which is they're finally distributing this phone for real, instead of it being in a sad kiosk in the corner of a Verizon store and having, you know, weird billboards up on the, you know, the freeways that compared to PhoneX,

• 16:37Speaker 04

  which by the way, those billboards are so cowardly. Um, just call it the iPhone. Anyway.

• 16:44Nilay Patel?

  Apparently some of the billboards have small print that say the, the PhoneX is an iPhone 10. And that's just like, what are you doing?

• 16:51Speaker 04

  It's just the most stupid thing.

• 16:52Nilay Patel?

  Like you didn't even hide the ball. You like hit the ball, then you're like, the ball is behind me.

• 17:00Speaker 04

  Anyway, uh, the big question is now that you can get these in basically every carrier except AT&T, cause AT&T hates, I don't know, this phone. Um, that it's now being sold on Amazon of all places. Google and Amazon made up for that somehow.

• 17:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 17:15Speaker 04

  And they're like, it's already being discounted by like a hundred bucks basically everywhere. So it's actually like a $300 phone. Um, and so will that final actual real distribution for Google phones and not a sad kiosk in the corner of a Verizon store actually convert into real sales for these phones that matter in terms of market share?

• 17:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I have no idea. Like,

• 17:38Speaker 04

  Right.

• 17:38Nilay Patel?

  There's not in, I don't, I think it comes down to like, is Google gonna market the hell out of this phone in a way that they haven't before? And I think maybe that won't happen until it's on every carrier.

• 17:48Speaker 04

  Right.

• 17:48Nilay Patel?

  Right. I think we're anticipating that AT&T will like fall into line at some point. OnePlus 7 Pro, which is fundamentally more interesting, because that's a flagship phone at 700 bucks that it looked.

• 17:57Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 17:58Nilay Patel?

  The only, the only complaint that I think people have is like, it's kind of big.

• 18:01Speaker 04

  It's pretty big. It feels bigger than like a S10 Plus. Like you, it's big. Uh, it looks exactly like a Samsung, like, except for like, except for the strip of cameras on the back, like the way the glass curves. It's just like Samsung, Samsung, Samsung. The screen is amazing because it's got that high refresh rate. Uh, there is some Twitter back and forth because Mark has said that it is not a variable refresh rate. But I had said that it will change its refresh rate depending if you're watching a video. Turns out we're both right. It doesn't do the thing that like an iPad does where if you stop scrolling, the refresh rate slows down. So it's always at 90 hertz killing your battery. But it does know if you're watching a video that's like 24 frames or whatever, and it'll slow down for the video. That's the only thing it'll slow down for.

• 18:43Speaker 04

  Anyway, uh, to me, the, the big story with the OnePlus is like, there's two things that's screen and the camera. OnePlus managed to have the best screen you can get on a phone. It's pretty big, but it is the best screen on a phone right now, period. So that's cool. But then the question is, did they make a good camera? And, um, man, the answer is they made a good enough camera. Um, and you look at all the other reviews, uh, I think it, the, the opinion is basically saying it's pretty mixed and which is a pretty good sign. Like, I think it's more than good enough, uh, unless the camera's like your number one priority. Um, but like you can make this thing fall down really easily.

• 19:21Nilay Patel?

  Really?

• 19:22Speaker 04

  But, oh yeah, like portrait mode's a mess, dark mode is nowhere as good, or sorry, night scape is nowhere as good as other, other night modes. The contrast is soft, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah. But, you know, you just like take a shot and put it on Instagram, it looks good every time. Um, you know, when you've got good light. So you can make it fall down a little bit easier than you can make other cameras fall down. But it is not like, oh, well, if the camera didn't suck, I'd tell you to buy it. It's like, the camera's good enough.

• 19:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I have to say, I, the more time I spend with a 10s camera, the more I'm like, oh, this camera's not good.

• 19:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:53Nilay Patel?

  That, I mean, it, it's just, I, I think I'm at the point where I think all smartphone cameras are bad. Like, I've just arrived at that point where I use a DSLR consistently enough now where I'm like, oh, this is disappointing. And I think the thing that happened was everyone stopped using real cameras. And our entire point of reference changed to basically, what can the iPhone 4 do and is this better? And I'm, I'm just reminding everyone that real cameras are still significantly better. I'm more willing to trade off on camera performance in my phone because I, I carry a real camera on so often now. It's because I produced spawn. Like, that's it.

• 20:28Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 20:28Nilay Patel?

  That was like the only, the only reason I added a camera back to my life is like the baby.

• 20:33Speaker 05

  I was wondering how noticeable screen is because it's, it's tough when you hear 90 hertz. Like, I can't watch you on YouTube sell me 90 hertz.

• 20:42Speaker 04

  Yeah. You would notice it, Paul. You, you would immediately notice it. Like, you can feel it when you scroll. Uh, it's just, it just feels better. Animations are smoother. Um, but it like scrolling, which, you know, Android has a particularly spotty history of being good at.

• 21:00Speaker 04

  Uh, feels very, very good. And it's, it's really subtle though, right? You know, I went back to my iPhone XR and, you know, it's fine. Um, like it's, it's the sort of thing that like screen people will notice and nobody else would. Now, if that screen made the phone cost an extra $200, I would be like, yeah, but don't spend the money on it. It's not worth it. But you can get a phone with 256 gigs of storage and 12 gigs of RAM and the fastest processor available on Android for $750.

• 21:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 21:27Speaker 04

  And it has the best screen on any phone ever. Like crazy town.

• 21:31Nilay Patel?

  I think you forgot to mention that one very important thing that it has.

• 21:34Speaker 04

  Pop-up selfie camera.

• 21:35Nilay Patel?

  Which is a pop-up selfie camera.

• 21:39Speaker 04

  Yep. By the way, if you like, if you just like lower it and raise it over and over and over again, it finally pops up a warning saying, yo, chill out. You're like, I wear this thing out.

• 21:49Nilay Patel?

  How much do you use the pop-up selfie camera?

• 21:52Speaker 04

  I mean, as much as you use any selfie camera. It's, it loads up about as, like, if you, like, I don't know, even on my iPhone 10R, like, if you hit the button to, like, rotate the screen, it takes, like, a second.

• 22:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 22:05Speaker 04

  Give or take, that's about how long it takes. By, by the time the software's like, "I'm taking a selfie now," the camera's up there.

• 22:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 22:12Speaker 04

  So it didn't bother me. Now, I didn't use it for face unlock, because, you know, anything, it's just insecure, so whatever.

• 22:18Nilay Patel?

  Fingerprint reader on the screen's pretty fast?

• 22:20Speaker 04

  It's so fast.

• 22:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 22:22Speaker 04

  It's stupid fast. And they made it big, which matters, because it's way too small on the S10.

• 22:26Nilay Patel?

  Maybe this is my next.

• 22:28Speaker 05

  And the battery, the battery life is, that's a surprise.

• 22:32Speaker 04

  It's, well, so, uh, there's a little bit of mix there. Most reviewers are, are getting what I got, which is more than a day, but a couple are getting less. Uh, you should be able to expect screen on time in, like, the six to seven hour range, if that means anything to you as an Android user. I think it's fine. But I've also been using small phones for a really long time. Like, I've been using a Pixel 3 for the past couple of months, and, like, it has atrocious battery life. So maybe I was too impressed. But, like, just, like, using it like a phone, I got more than a day, which is pretty rare.

• 23:01Nilay Patel?

  I'm buying this phone.

• 23:02Speaker 04

  You should, like, grab the review unit from Dan that, that's in New York and give it a try.

• 23:07Nilay Patel?

  Okay. I, I didn't buy the last Pixel on the show, so I feel like I have to make up for it. All right, Paul.

• 23:12Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 23:13Nilay Patel?

  There's a PC that folds now.

• 23:15Speaker 05

  It's so cool. I'm so glad you asked me about it. Okay, Lenovo, uh, in an effort to endlessly dilute its X1 brand, has a ThinkPad X1 prototype foldable PC. It literally has nothing in common with the DNA of ThinkPad. Uh, it's a screen that folds. So imagine, like, Samsung's phone without a screen on the outside, just a big screen on the inside, but it's a laptop. It's a 13.3-inch, 4.3...

• 23:49Speaker 05

  2K OLED display inside a book sized form factor. And you look like a dork if you put a software keyboard up on it, but you could theoretically type on it. Apparently they're gonna, they're thinking of shipping it like 2020, it sounds like. Maybe, maybe Intel will have some better processors by then. But ideally, I think this is, this is a form factor that if, if it's operational, right? And it doesn't break and the crease isn't bonkers, which in, you know, Heim did a video. You should definitely check it out. So you can see it in action.

• 24:32Speaker 05

  There is a noticeable crease when it's open. But you, you could open it up, set it up on its, with a kickstand and then you use an external keyboard, right? So my ideal situation is like a BYOK, bring your own preferred Bluetooth keyboard, right?

• 24:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 24:56Speaker 05

  And now you have, sure.

• 25:01Speaker 05

  And but it just, I, I feel like I could use a computer like that at, at a coffee shop, you know? You put the, put the tablet up on its little kickstand, you've got a Bluetooth keyboard. It's like the iPad form factor.

• 25:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 25:14Speaker 05

  But it has a lot more flexibility because you can use it like a tablet, you can use it like a book.

• 25:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I just like the idea of you saving the space of the laptop by folding the screen, but then carrying like a full extended keyboard with you and like a wired mouse. Like that to me is like, I've made all the wrong trade offs confidently. Like this screen is a lot easier to carry around than a laptop, but here's my full size Apple extended keyboard too.

• 25:40Speaker 05

  The thing I've realized with laptops, that if you're smaller than 15 inches and you're lighter than a MacBook Pro and you're less than like an inch thick. It just literally does not matter. Or you have like two of those three specs. It just literally doesn't matter anything else. It's completely portable in your backpack. Like I, and, and maybe that's just my personal metric because I have accustomed myself to carrying a 13.3 inch MacBook Pro from 2015. So anything, any improvement on that, I'm completely fine with putting in my backpack. But I feel like I could put this and a little, little, little slice of Bluetooth keyboard. Completely fine.

• 26:20Nilay Patel?

  You have to have a full sized keyboard, Paul. That's a, that's the law. I'm making it the law.

• 26:25Speaker 03

  I want a pop out keyboard. I want this to be like a razor phone where they have like a, it's a tablet. It's a book, but there's also a keyboard and the keyboard pops out and it's a hardware keyboard.

• 26:34Speaker 05

  Wait, pops out from where?

• 26:36Speaker 03

  Eh, back somewhere.

• 26:37Nilay Patel?

  Like it slides out. I get it.

• 26:39Speaker 03

  Like it's a, the side of it, that's the battery and that is also the place where you would type is also as like a little extra layer. That's a thin hardware keyboard that you can kind of slide out.

• 26:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 26:49Speaker 04

  And fold over or something.

• 26:50Speaker 05

  They could fit it because like when it slid in, they could have the keys compressed. So it wouldn't have to be that thick. And then they'd like pop out, they'd like, when you pull the keyboard out, that'd be pretty exciting.

• 26:58Nilay Patel?

  This is both a sci-fi dream and a nightmare of moving parts.

• 27:02Speaker 04

  By the way, Lenovo would totally make this. Have you noticed that whenever there's a crazy new like PC form factor, Lenovo is like on it right away. They had the Yoga Book with the thing and the e-ink. And then they did the dual screen thing and they like were the first to clone the Surface. And I think, I don't know, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like if you said the, the new trend in, in PCs are computers with razor blades that shoot out the sides, Lenovo would be like, yep, we'll make that. You bet.

• 27:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's our new brand. It's called Think Death. We, uh, we just kill you when you use the computer.

• 27:32Speaker 04

  Before we move on, I just, Chris Welch, we said is on the ground in Chicago testing 5G. He asked us what he should test and I said, you should see what blocks the signal with increasingly hilarious or creepy things like start with paper, move to water balloon, then maybe a tree. He just sent me a video, a street mime effectively blocks a 5G signal.

• 27:55Speaker 05

  Now, what is the, what material is the street mime pretending to hold?

• 28:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, is it a fake brick wall?

• 28:03Speaker 05

  Or is it lead?

• 28:08Nilay Patel?

  Perfect. All right. Well, I cannot wait for that post. It's all happening. All right. Gadget time is over. We're going to take a break and come back with some Frank policy talk. I mean, it's gonna get, let's just be honest. Who's Frank? Frank is the mime. All right, we're going away. We're having an ad. We're coming back. We're gonna get into what's going on here.

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• 29:37Nilay Patel?

  Okay, Addie, we're back.

• 29:39Speaker 03

  Yes, the fun part is over.

• 29:41Nilay Patel?

  The fun, the fun is over. The fun is just beginning. I would say the action around regulating our social platforms increased substantially over the past like week and a half. So I'm just gonna do some context and I want you to explain what's going on this week. So last week, Chris Hughes, who is a co-founder of Facebook, that I think people who work at Facebook don't take very seriously. But indeed, he was Mark Zuckerberg's roommate and thus a co-founder of Facebook. Put an editorial in the New York Times calling for Facebook to be broken up. Bernie Sanders today said he agreed that Facebook should be broken up. He's joins Elizabeth Warren. So there's a lot of like breakup Facebook activity. Facebook, they put out a response.

• 30:22Nilay Patel?

  Basically, their response was, well, we're very rich, so we can protect democracy. And if you break us up, those companies will be less rich. One third is rich, in fact, and thus therefore, one third is able to protect democracy, if I'm doing my math correctly. So that's like, that was the context of last week that led into this week. You wrote a piece saying the Hughes plan to break up Facebook was particularly problematic about speech, I want you to explain that. But then, the White House launched a tool so that people could report if they'd been unfairly censored by Facebook and Twitter. There's an entire new wave of conservative bias accusations. And then there's the fact that the social media bias reporting tool is like fundamentally a collective about you as well. So just walk us through what's going on.

• 31:06Speaker 03

  Okay. So yeah, like you said, last week, call to break up Facebook, those have been kind of constant for a long time. And then Bernie Sanders comes out in favor of it. And that's kind of where we are with that, but it's just kind of gaining momentum. Having Sanders and Warren on board here is...

• 31:24Nilay Patel?

  They don't like each other.

• 31:25Speaker 03

  There's gonna be a lot of pressure.

• 31:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It's a debate topic. You can see it coming. It's, everyone's gonna, it's gonna come up in every sort of policy conversation with those two leading the charge.

• 31:37Speaker 03

  And Warren's plan is granted to break up basically every big tech company, so that's gonna be a much larger debate, too.

• 31:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And that actually ties into the conversation we had earlier this week. That's like an App Store monopoly plan. So that's all happening. But the, the other part of Hughes's editorial was like, there should be a regulator for speech on the internet, which you think is pretty problematic.

• 31:56Speaker 03

  I don't know what exactly he's talking about, because so much of it was that there is kind of a broadly accepted, eh, we should have somebody to kind of regulate speech on the internet. And that's really problematic. His, uh, the phrase he used was, quote, "The agency should create guidelines for acceptable speech on social media." Which, like, we already have that. That is the exceptions to free speech that exist now. And it is bizarre to say that we need either an extra agency that's going to make all of these extra, sort of, enforcement rules that will either be super toothless or weird.

• 32:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 32:32Speaker 03

  Or that he literally wants there to be more categories of speech that are regulated on the internet than offline, which is also really bizarre.

• 32:38Speaker 04

  Yeah. Uh, Addy, can I, can I be a straw man for this free speech thing and then you can, you can light me on fire and knock me down? Disclosure, my wife works for Oculus, which is a division of Facebook. Uh, if one of those free speech rules that we've got right now is you can't yell "fire" in a crowded theater.

• 32:53Speaker 03

  That is not a free speech rule right now.

• 32:55Speaker 04

  Aha! Okay, what is a free speech rule?

• 32:58Speaker 03

  Um, you can't make threats of, credible threats of violence against people.

• 33:02Speaker 04

  Okay. And do you think that there is, there's no difference in, like, the, what the rules should be online than offline at all?

• 33:09Speaker 03

  I mean, there are differences, and they come up in case law. Like, the difference, like defamation law, say, online, people can make the claim that you don't take stuff online very seriously, so defamation has a lower burden. But if you're actually going to write whole different laws that protect completely different categories of speech, I mean, I guess you could do that, but that's a really huge step. And that's a step that you should not just throw in midway through your "let's break up Facebook" manifesto. Also, fire in a crowded theater is not a, it's not like there was a case where someone yelled "fire" in a crowded theater. It was an out, an analogy that someone made in a case that was overturned many decades ago. It would probably still, like, there are cases where if it went to trial, it would probably be illegal, but it's not like that's a settled issue. And people use that a lot, and he used it, and it's really terrible.

• 33:54Speaker 04

  Yeah. There are no police monitoring theaters at this time for people improperly yelling "fire."

• 34:02Nilay Patel?

  So there's that, and then there's sort of the like conservative bias moment, right? Which is, in my opinion, based on a misreading of the governing law, which is Section 230, which is, from what I understand, conservatives want to make it so that we're making this false choice between whether Facebook is a publisher or a platform. But, just explain, explain 230 real quick, so we all have it right, because I want to lead into the conservative bias argument, which is happening at a very high level right now, literally at the president's level.

• 34:33Speaker 03

  So, to really oversimplify, 230 is that if you run an information service provider, if you run a website or a web service, basically...

• 34:43Nilay Patel?

  We run a website.

• 34:44Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 34:44Nilay Patel?

  This applies to The Verge.

• 34:45Speaker 03

  The Verge. So if we post something on our site and it's illegal, you can, or it's defamation or something, you can sue us. If someone else posts something on the site, then you cannot sue us.

• 34:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so, just to, there's like our webpage, and there's like the byline, like Dieter wrote the 1+7 Pro review. I did. You can sue him for that, you can sue The Verge for that. Oh, good. You just can, like, you work here, you posted it, then below that... Please don't give anybody any ideas. Well, just, Dieter, I regret to inform you as your counsel that you've been sued. Below that is our comment section, which is user-generated content. Anybody can like post in our comments, but 230 gives us the power to, well, 230 shields us from liability for what's in those comments. So if you want to sue us for something that's in The Verge's comments, you can't, because we're protected.

• 35:39Nilay Patel?

  But it also importantly gives us the ability to moderate those comments, right? So that's like very important to us, that's the thing that enables us to have a comment section. We're able to moderate them, if you spell it biased and not biased, I will ban you, that is still true.

• 35:52Speaker 03

  You can moderate it without being called a publisher, is kind of the important thing.

• 35:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Right. So even though we are a publisher, we are not the publisher of those comments, and we still get to moderate them. Facebook, Twitter, Reddit are giant comment sections, right? They don't even have the other bit. So like, the same law applies, 230 applies, so that they're not liable for what users do on those platforms, and they have the ability to moderate it. And I think the false dichotomy is...

• 36:22Nilay Patel?

  Particularly conservatives are saying, "You're biased against us. You're making moderation decisions against us. And if you make enough of those, eventually you become a publisher, and you're now liable for the whole thing," which is just flatly wrong in my reading.

• 36:36Speaker 03

  It seems like they're not totally sure whether that is already the law or whether that should be the law.

• 36:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 36:41Speaker 03

  Ted Cruz believes it is the law. He asked a bunch of really terrible questions about whether Facebook was a, quote, "neutral platform." They don't even call it publisher now necessarily. It is also the, they have added the idea that you can be a platform, but you have to be a neutral platform to receive these protections, which is just something that's not even there.

• 37:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It's not in the, I mean, Ted Cruz went to Harvard Law School. It's infuriating. So that leads into the White House launching this tool, which...

• 37:13Nilay Patel?

  Is it a tool?

• 37:15Speaker 03

  It's a web form.

• 37:16Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's a thing. I mean...

• 37:17Speaker 03

  It's a web form.

• 37:18Nilay Patel?

  Dieter, what is a tool?

• 37:23Nilay Patel?

  The White House launched an instrument of state control. But explain what it is.

• 37:27Speaker 03

  It's a web form that starts with, in all caps, "Social media platforms should advance freedom of speech. Yet too many Americans have seen their accounts suspended, banned, or fraudulently reported for unclear 'violations,' in scare quotes, of user policies. No matter your views, if you suspect political bias caused such an action to be taken against you, share your story with President Trump." And what follows is a, like, 10-question questionnaire. It asks whether you're a US citizen. It asks you to describe which platform you were censored on. What was your account? Is there a screenshot? To tell if you're not a robot, it asks you to put in the year that the Declaration of Independence was signed.

• 38:05Nilay Patel?

  That's great.

• 38:06Speaker 03

  And then you can submit it, and it goes...

• 38:07Nilay Patel?

  By the way, any robot could have that information pre-programmed into it, correct?

• 38:12Speaker 03

  Or you could just ask Alexa when the Declaration of Independence was signed.

• 38:16Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying, if you were, if you, if, Paul, just to be clear, the state of robotics is such that you can program one number into a robot, right?

• 38:24Nilay Patel?

  What is the point of this forum, do you think?

• 38:27Speaker 03

  I'm hesitant to impute like, good or meaningful intent to a lot of things that the government does, because I think a lot of the time, they just kind of throw something up. Like, Trump might have been just, "I'm really mad about my Twitter follower count", which is a thing he says all the time, and someone was like, "Here, we'll put up a web form." But the thing it might be used for is that there are all of these hearings about whether tech is biased against conservatives, and they talk about how all they have are anecdotes, which is correct, because tech companies don't really release a lot of data, and now they get to get a lot of anecdotes, which they can turn into some form of data.

• 39:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 39:03Speaker 03

  And because this is Trump talking and trying to get people to fill things out, that's probably gonna have sort of a political skew.

• 39:10Nilay Patel?

  I'm like, already imagining the horrible debate moment where they like, every candidate does this on both sides of the aisle, they're like, "I met Sally from Kansas. Sally was censored by Twitter, and now she's dead." Right? And like, you can just see it coming, because they're gonna collect this this set of unverified stories of how horrible it is.

• 39:28Speaker 03

  And they're also just, it's really, this is not Trump's fault, it is really hard to tell why anything happens on social media.

• 39:34Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 39:35Speaker 03

  Like, why your search ranking is the way it is, why you got down-ranked in something, sometimes why you get banned, and then it fosters a lot of really conspiratorial thinking, and then this just plays into that.

• 39:48Nilay Patel?

  So, one way to read this, if you were to be maximally uncharitable towards the administration, is that this is the first step towards directly regulating speech on platforms, and saying, "This is what you can and can't post", this sort of Chris Hughes model, like, we're whitelisting this stuff, we're saying it has to be allowed, this type of political speech, regardless of its consequence. That's really hard for them to do, that has massive First Amendment, like, problems associated with it, so maybe they'll do that, but that seems very, very difficult. The other thing they could do is, the thing that it seems like Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, who we interviewed about this stuff, have already threatened to do, which is write more exceptions to 230. So like, the big one that just happened was FOSTA and SESTA, which says...

• 40:33Nilay Patel?

  Okay, you can't have like sex trafficking on your website. It led to entire companies like going out of business because Backpage had a lot of ads for prostitution and sex work on their website.

• 40:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, and Backpage was taken down under laws that had nothing to do with Fossa and Zesta.

• 40:48Nilay Patel?

  And yet, the law passed, right?

• 40:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:50Nilay Patel?

  That's a big recent exception to 230 that was passed. It had this set of consequences. You could carve out more exceptions to 230, which basically would mean the platforms are liable for more things. It's like the mechanism of it. And if you go all the way, they're liable for everything on the platform, which is an impossibility and they would just go out of business.

• 41:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, if you go down the Ted Cruz sort of fairness doctrine for the internet, as some people have called it, way, then you also end up having some situation where they're trying to define bias in law. And that's going to get just really bizarre.

• 41:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and this all just to me seems unworkable on its face, right? Like, I don't know how you would engineer such a situation because you have to, you have to make definitions about things that are basically impossible to define for any moment in time. But then on top of it, like, that's a lot of government intervention into private companies for conservatives. And what drives me crazy about this is that if you're very interested in the internet being neutral, you maybe should break up Facebook so there's more competition, right? Like, that's the problem is that these are like monopolies and there's only two big social platforms they care about, three if you count YouTube.

• 42:06Nilay Patel?

  And if there was just more competition in the system, you wouldn't be so mad if Facebook banned you because you might go to someplace else with different rules. And I just don't, it just seems like those ideas are ships passing in the night and no one quite gets it. It's driving me crazy.

• 42:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I don't know how much anybody who's talking about this cares about logical consistency or hypocrisy is the thing. Like, it feels like I'm kind of walking into a trap by caring about that. But yeah, it's really frustrating.

• 42:33Nilay Patel?

  And then the other thing that drives me crazy is that the Republicans all oppose net neutrality, where there is even less competition and more control. By our cell carriers and by our wired broadband providers. And so if you are really mad about bias in the news, you would look at AT&T that now has the ability to zero rate CNN, which it owns, and charge you data prices for Fox News. But that just, like, totally over the heads of everybody.

• 43:01Speaker 03

  No, no, that's the thing. It's not, is that they actually, there is, Ajit Pai makes this connection. Like, when he was talking about net neutrality, he's like, well, Twitter can censor what you say. So they're clearly aware that there is, like, a connection here.

• 43:14Nilay Patel?

  Right, well, his thing is, you shouldn't worry about net neutrality, it's fine. We should worry about Twitter, which can actually censor you. And I just don't, if you want it to be neutral, the whole stack should be neutral. Like, maybe you're right, maybe we should not worry about logically, logical consistency in the government. But that, to me, is the craziest thing, is most people only have but one or two choices for the core pipe of information in their house. And that, we're just, like, totally willing to let, like, every broadband company decide what it can throttle or not, or block or not. We've literally wiped out those rules. The broadband companies are buying media companies that they're going to treat preferentially. That's their business strategy. But we're worried about individual accounts on Twitter being blocked seems absolutely disconnect from reality crazy.

• 43:59Speaker 03

  If they were going to actually try to draw a distinction, I would say that there's, that they, people who don't worry about net neutrality think that they are fine with commercial speech being controlled, but that they are particularly worried about a category that they think of as political speech. I don't know that that actually makes legal sense, but if you're trying to talk about sort of a coherent strategy or theory, I can see that.

• 44:19Speaker 04

  I mean, isn't the coherent strategy or theory that just simply people get angrier about it because it affects them directly and personally as, like, an individual that could get banned? And it's a better strategy to get people paying attention to the thing that they're most angry about than be consistent in how you apply policy across the entire tech stack?

• 44:39Speaker 03

  Look, I'm trying to be charitable.

• 44:41Nilay Patel?

  We're trying to assume that all these arguments are having good faith. Like, yes, is the thing that's fundamentally happening here, a lot of, a lot of Trump riling people up? Yeah, that's what he does. Like, I don't. Do I think Trump has ever heard of Section 230 of the Communications Secrecy Act? I do not. Like, I just fundamentally do not believe that he's ever been briefed on it or how it works. I think someone has told him that he can threaten Twitter and Jack Dorsey will show up wearing a, like, a rumpled suit and a bat hat and like he'll have a conversation with him. And that's indeed what happened. But I just, to me, the answer to these problems fundamentally is the introduction of competition at every layer of the system,

• 45:21Nilay Patel?

  such that we are not making government policy determinations about whether AT&T can zero rate HBO, because you could buy it if you want. But like, there's just not enough competition for that. There's not enough competition for Facebook because it owns its two biggest competitors. Like, it just doesn't count. Like, Instagram is not meaningful competition to Facebook.

• 45:44Speaker 03

  But does that mean logically we need to institute net neutrality for Facebook if we don't break it up?

• 45:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 45:50Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 45:51Nilay Patel?

  Right, I'm just saying, like, if you, if you go down this road where you just have one powerful actor that is a quasi-state, which Facebook thinks of itself as, then you should, it should have all the transparency requirements of the state. It should have all the regulations of this, it should be the state. It might as well just be the state. Like, I would rather have that than this weird dance where we pretend it's a private company operating in a real market. I feel like Paul's going crazy. Paul's like ready to yell at me.

• 46:19Speaker 05

  There is a big, I mean, I follow a lot of conservatives on Twitter and it is, it is a, a, a debate in the conservative movement. And it's kind of a, I would call it a debate mostly conservatives and libertarians versus what I think of as Republicans. Some people call them rhinos.

• 46:40Nilay Patel?

  Oh, no.

• 46:41Speaker 04

  Oh, boy.

• 46:42Speaker 05

  But there is a big difference of opinion on how the government should handle this perceived censorship that is happening on the social networks.

• 46:52Nilay Patel?

  Well, I think first you have to prove it.

• 46:54Speaker 05

  Well, I will say that people have experienced enough of it and they see that all the people that they follow on YouTube, all the people they follow on Twitter, all the people they follow on Facebook have encountered serious censorship, like the major voices that they're following are being suppressed in some way, that when these tech companies try to convince, or if you could write an article on The Verge and giving 100 reasons why it's not true, people have experienced it themselves and so they know it's true. And so this this gaslighting is not going to convince this the right that they have not been censored.

• 47:36Speaker 03

  Wait, the question is whether they like whether if you follow people on the left, they will also tell stories of getting banned for no reason. Like, it's not whether people don't get banned on the right. I don't know. That's the thing that I feel like never gets addressed in the hearings and I just really would love to know if that's a thing that

• 47:52Speaker 05

  Right.

• 47:52Speaker 03

  that there's an argument against.

• 47:54Speaker 05

  It's so hard to figure out that ratio, but I'm just saying that the subject, the subjective perception from the right is that they are far and away out and out get an outsized amount of censorship.

• 48:06Nilay Patel?

  Right. So I just want to challenge you on that, right? Yes, it is true that we could write an article and we could say it's not happening using the data that we have, which to Addy's point is not sufficient data, right? Like, the platforms are not nearly transparent enough about how the algorithms work, about what gets censored, when it gets censored, about any particular decision conceded, right? I wish the platforms were transparent. But we have some data and we can write articles and say, this actually isn't true. That is not gaslighting, right? To like state the fact. It is perhaps not compatible with the experience that these people are having, but it is not insisting that a thing is right. Like, it's not, it doesn't need to be persuasive. So Casey makes the point, he made it in the

• 48:48Nilay Patel?

  newsletter yesterday, he makes it newsletter almost every week, that the top stories shared on Facebook.

• 48:53Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 48:53Nilay Patel?

  are routinely from conservative publishers. So like, if there's this like systematic bias in the system.

• 49:02Nilay Patel?

  You would not see that.

• 49:03Speaker 05

  This Casey argument, I haven't had an analogy until today, but I thought of one today. If I was playing basketball against LeBron James and you jumped on LeBron James for a piggyback ride, LeBron James would still destroy me at basketball. The score at the end would be 75 to like two, you know, but-

• 49:25Nilay Patel?

  First of all, we have to do this. I'm not a small man, Paul, and I do not believe this is correct.

• 49:30Speaker 05

  So, so just because you, the outcome does not dictate what has been happening. Casey's argument would presuppose that the amount of voices who are trying to say things are exactly 50/50 on each side, and the amount of audiences who are trying to hear things are 50/50 on each side.

• 49:48Speaker 03

  No, I think that's a lot. Like, I understand what you're saying, and I think that makes a reasonable amount of sense, and that you could draw an analogy. I think there are analogies that you don't want to draw with, like, say, there are successful women or something, and you can say there's a successful woman. That doesn't mean women don't face discrimination. But I still just don't think that answers the question of whether this is confirmation bias, because especially everyone agrees that social media platforms are awful and constantly ban you for no reason and do terrible things.

• 50:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they're not, none of these companies are well-run, right? Like, just to be clear. Like, I don't think anybody listening to Verge Chats believes that I think Mark Zuckerberg is like a great leader of his company, or that Jack Dorsey is anything but like a shared spectral hallucination we have instead of like an effective CEO. But they are private companies, and so it is extremely weird that they're not allowed to just do stuff, right? In a place where we're pretty, pretty aggressively deregulating every other kind of private company.

• 50:51Speaker 05

  That's why it's a debate, because some people think it is so damaging that we have to get the government to intervene. Other people like myself would say the government is garbage at doing anything, and so if it intervenes, it will make everything worse. So that is not a solution. But just because you don't want government intervention doesn't mean you can't say that Facebook is garbage and, and should stop censoring people.

• 51:13Nilay Patel?

  Again, my proposed intervention is that you introduce competition into the system, and maybe there's a better version of Facebook that more is competently run, that is more transparent, and that is a thing that it can compete on. That just, it doesn't seem, that seems, that seems like an idea that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have. And not an idea that has as much traction on the conservative side. Although it's, antitrust enforcement of that kind is like fundamentally a market solution. And it has its roots in conservatism. So, that, that to me is like, what is the Vergecast about? It's about competition, like ultimately, like, I wish there were more choices, I wish there were more flippy phones. This to me seems like the lack of competition is leading us to extremely, extremely weird conversations about speech online.

• 51:58Nilay Patel?

  And extremely weird flip flops of regulatory intent, right, on these parties. You would not expect free speech regulation to come from the right wing of the policy spectrum. Break them up. Okay.

• 52:15Speaker 03

  We didn't talk about the Christchurch call.

• 52:16Nilay Patel?

  Walk us through that. Yeah, that's actually a huge one as well.

• 52:18Speaker 03

  Okay, there was also a very large coalition of governments and social media platforms that signed something, the Christchurch Called Action, that's supposed to rally them to limit extremism on platforms, to take a whole raft of other, again, somewhat nebulous, measures to promote non-extremism. And to basically stop something, like stop hate content from spreading online. The US did not sign.

• 52:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It's, we support, we support it, generally.

• 52:48Speaker 03

  But we don't support, support it.

• 52:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we're not, not all the way. You guys are doing great, is basically, I think, our, the government statement. Why do you think they didn't sign it?

• 52:57Speaker 03

  It's hard to say, Ken. Their statement is that they have free speech concerns. And this is one of the weird cases where, yes, it is entirely possible to read this as, we don't want to condemn something that someone might think of as a political ideology that's too close to their own, because there's a fine line between white supremacists and like, certain parts of the Trump's political base. It's also possible to genuinely read it as, it's weird to have governments and social media platforms talking about creating ways to like, police speech on their platform that is still legal speech.

• 53:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Casey talks to us a lot, the concept of the splinter net. That eventually governments around the world are going to create their own little internets because of their own little laws. Little laws.

• 53:40Speaker 03

  The little laws of Europe.

• 53:43Nilay Patel?

  And I just, it seems like that is just ever, it's hurtling towards us. And our, our free speech sort of doctrine is way more permissive than lots of other places. So, yeah, you could, there's like one logical argument, it's like, that's incompatible with how we think about it. It's not incompatible with how Germany thinks about it.

• 53:59Speaker 03

  Right. Or New Zealand, which, which did genuinely ban sites after the Christchurch shooting.

• 54:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. All right, there's, there's, there's yet more Trump, I apologize. Uh, but we, we can't actually miss this. The trade war continues.

• 54:11Speaker 03

  Trade war expands.

• 54:12Nilay Patel?

  Trade war expands. Trump imposed a bunch of tariffs, China retaliated. Addie, walk us through what's going on there.

• 54:18Speaker 03

  Roughly facing, the sort of important takeaway is that there's a huge category of devices that could face, or of products that could face 25% tariffs. And that includes a lot of stuff that now people interact with every day and are very, very cognizant of the price of, like phones and tablets. And that it's possible that people will not see these price increases if it's someone like Apple that has reasonable profit margins. But if you're looking at the low end, or you're really lots of companies that aren't Apple, um, then we could end up seeing higher prices or sort of other problems. And that still has not quite gone into effect. There's going to be public comment, there's going to be meetings, and categories could get dropped. But it's potentially a very big deal.

• 55:00Nilay Patel?

  I mean, Apple is like $130 billion in the bank.

• 55:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, but Apple's gonna be fine.

• 55:04Nilay Patel?

  But like Walmart today, so they couldn't, they couldn't necessarily eat all of the hit to their margins and consumers would see prices. So, it's happening. But I think like phone chargers being more expensive is going to be more real for more people than anybody expects.

• 55:19Speaker 03

  I think those are also, these are things where everybody kind of knows how much this should cost and everyone, and they're also big ticket items where you're like, yeah, I can spend X amount of money on this phone. And you will notice if the price jumps a really substantial amount.

• 55:32Nilay Patel?

  This is a really good time for Google to be putting out like a $400.

• 55:37Nilay Patel?

  Can he move, Google?

• 55:39Speaker 05

  This is horrible and shallow of me, but my first thought is that the, you know, uh, Intel is coming out with ninth gen, uh, processors in, um, the summer.

• 55:53Speaker 05

  And I'm thinking about getting a new laptop and I don't want it to, I don't want it to cost 25% more is what I'm saying.

• 56:01Speaker 03

  I've thought about this with like building, yeah, building a PC or buying anything, buying a new phone. My phone's almost three years old.

• 56:07Nilay Patel?

  Oh, man. It's coming. Everybody stop what you're doing and start shopping. That's how you boost that consumer confidence index. Okay. Last one. The White House also basically issued an executive order by the end of it all, ban Huawei from selling networking equipment in the United States.

• 56:24Speaker 03

  It gives them the ability to ban companies in general, but it is probably going to be Huawei.

• 56:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 56:29Speaker 03

  Which people are worried about because of somewhat nebulous concerns over the government, like the Chinese government basically having a way into US infrastructure.

• 56:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. But as I say, I mean, the reason people in this country want to buy Huawei equipment is because it's cheaper than the competition. Yep. And so hilariously, we've written this story, you can go read it. It's rural broadband providers who are going to be most affected. So like the tariffs and the trade war is literally like farmers won't be able to sell their crops and then they'll have slow internet. Like just feels like a, like a bad combo platter for everybody. But the Huawei thing is like happening. It's like moving along.

• 57:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 57:09Speaker 05

  There is a novel that I read came out in 2015. It's called Ghost Fleet and it's about a war between China, well, the United States versus Russia and China. And it kicks it all off because China built all our microchips and they hacked all of the America all at once, right at the start. So I think what happened is that somebody in Congress read that book.

• 57:37Nilay Patel?

  That's Peter Singer. He just wrote a new book. Like I bet Peter Singer just like slanging copies of Ghost Fleet.

• 57:45Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 57:46Nilay Patel?

  Peter, by the way, you should read Wired for War, which is a great Peter Singer book. That book's pretty good. Yeah, you're probably right. Like Mattis read Ghost Fleet and like here we are. Like we're just like going for it. It's probably true. Like given this administration, that is more likely true.

• 57:58Speaker 03

  It's happened in other, I think under Clinton, we had a whole bio warfare division that basically happened because he read a novel about.

• 58:04Nilay Patel?

  He read Outbreak.

• 58:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:06Nilay Patel?

  All right. We're taking a break. Enough policy talk. We're coming back. Paul's gonna do his thing. Then we're talking about the street wars, a much less heated war.

• 58:21Speaker 07

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• 59:43Nilay Patel?

  Okay, Paul. Every week, you wow America with your platform.

• 59:49Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 59:50Nilay Patel?

  Called?

• 59:50Speaker 05

  Dongle Town USA, Bringing It Back. Anchor has created a Lightning to USB-C adapter.

• 59:59Nilay Patel?

  Is this segment called Dongle Town USA, Bringing It Back? Anchor has created a USB-C adapter?

• 1:00:06Speaker 05

  Well, actually, I'm sorry, but I have to interrupt this regularly scheduled segment of Dongle Town USA.

• 1:00:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:13Speaker 05

  To bring you a breaking update from the keyboard in the front club. HP Omen X two S, right? They, so you've seen those laptops where they have a track, the trackpad turn is actually a screen?

• 1:00:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:31Speaker 05

  And you're like, that's garbage because the keyboard's not on the front. HP thought the same thing. So they put the screen up above the keyboard. So it's a two-screen laptop with a keyboard in the front, trackpad on the right. It's for gamers.

• 1:00:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I love it. I mean, I looked at a picture of this thing and I was like, that's, I don't know what that screen is for, but I need it. And then I, I did not buy it.

• 1:00:55Speaker 05

  Well.

• 1:00:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I should buy it now before it goes up in price for 25%.

• 1:00:59Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 1:01:00Nilay Patel?

  All right. I just have a quick update from the stream wars. By the way, here's my belief. Disney Plus is going to launch in June, right? Is it that soon? Really? It's, it's coming right up. June or July, they're going to launch Disney Plus. It's, you know, gonna have all the Star Wars, additional Star Wars, we waged on Disney Plus. Yeah. Uh, you know, it's got all the Marvel movies. They're saying Endgame will only be on Disney Plus. It's like, it's coming. It's the big competitor to Netflix. Yeah. The streaming wars are upon us. Apple TV Plus is going to launch to compete with Star Wars and Endgame. They will have a series of shows from Oprah and Aquaman in a world where everyone is blind. Okay. It's true. That's what they announced, but they're here.

• 1:01:45Nilay Patel?

  It's, it's happening. You, you can just like make a list of verge buzzwords and put them in a sentence around stream wars. They will make a real headline that we could write like. Yeah. T-Mobile zero rates 5G HBO on Apple TV Plus is a nonsense sentence, but by the end of this year could be a real verge headline. So I, I think it's very important that we track this up. So Disney Plus is coming. That means a lot of stuff is happening in the run-up. So AT&T, which owns Game of Thrones, just a reminder for everyone, that is the outcome of the world that we live in. AT&T owns Warner Media, which owns the rights to The Office and Friends. They're going to launch the Warner Media streaming service and they're going to pull

• 1:02:28Nilay Patel?

  The Office and Friends off of Netflix when the deal expires in 2019 and force you to subscribe to Warner Media, the streaming service to watch Friends.

• 1:02:38Speaker 05

  Which is like a nuclear level move.

• 1:02:40Nilay Patel?

  I feel pretty good about Netflix. They've got like good like brand equity with me. I I feel pretty good about Disney. Like Disney feels like it's a good brand that I trust and I'll, you know, much happier to have children watch that than, you know, YouTube kids and it's creepy stuff. But neither of those compare to how much I dearly love in my heart, how important to my life Warner Media is. I cannot wait.

• 1:03:03Speaker 03

  This is where we're gonna lose antitrust.

• 1:03:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:06Speaker 03

  Everybody wants one company to own everything.

• 1:03:08Nilay Patel?

  That's true. Actually, someone tweeted me today that.

• 1:03:10Speaker 05

  Holding the still wet with dripping blood knife that murdered film struck that got way darker than I thought.

• 1:03:22Nilay Patel?

  A thing that is true is that Friends in the Office are still to this day the most popular shows on Netflix. So they're gonna they're gonna take this thing that everyone just sort of, you know, you turn on Netflix, you don't know what to do. You just like watch Friends. People do it. They're gonna say, you want to do that? Go, my theory is that Friends piracy and Plex usage is about to skyrocket. Because you don't need anything else that's on the Warner Media streaming service. So that's one thing. Disney bought out all of the assets of Hulu from Comcast. So now Disney is in full control of Hulu. So that's happening.

• 1:04:00Speaker 04

  It's isn't it they're like they're gonna be like they they could now or they're gonna be or like it's clear they're gonna but they're still like they're still involved in some way for another couple of years, stock, blah, blah, blah, blah.

• 1:04:09Nilay Patel?

  They get some rev share. Oh, I should say, disclosure. Comcast does not own Vox Media. Everyone who tweets that at me, just please stop. It's not true. Comcast is a minority investor in Vox Media, which is a parent company of The Verge. Also, they hate, they just personally hate me. So that's just, that's the disclosure. Comcast is giving full control of Hulu to Disney. They're launching, this is true, an NBC Plus streaming service. They you can pay $10 a month for it. But they don't want you to do that. They want you to still have cable. So if you have cable or, you know, satellite or whatever, you can log into NBC Plus and get everything, including YTV and video on demand. But if you pay the $10 a month, you get less than that.

• 1:04:50Speaker 04

  Oh, my God.

• 1:04:51Nilay Patel?

  That's their plan.

• 1:04:53Speaker 05

  Here's my solve for all this.

• 1:04:56Nilay Patel?

  Buy cable?

• 1:04:57Speaker 05

  Watch, no, I'm gonna watch less television.

• 1:05:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it seems right.

• 1:05:01Speaker 05

  If you don't watch an hour or two television a night, you get, you freeze up time to do other activities. This is not fun. I don't need this in my life.

• 1:05:10Nilay Patel?

  Well, Paul, let me see if I can interest you in what I believe is the future of television, which is the short form mobile video service known as Quibi, which has already raised $1 billion. And now the information reports is on the hunt to raise yet another billion dollars, giving them $2 billion to put six-minute videos on your phone. And this is what they can do. They can rotate from portrait to landscape.

• 1:05:42Nilay Patel?

  The contrast is off the charts. But when you watch it in portrait, you see one stream. And when you rotate it, you see another stream, adding a frisson of interactivity and also double the bandwidth usage to your video usage.

• 1:05:55Speaker 05

  I gotta say, one of the best parts of any week is when YouTube has the temerity of plugging another YouTube original in my feed. And I love just hitting that the triple dot button and saying, hide this. I would, I would sign up for Quibi just to thumbs down every garbage piece of content. I'm sure they.

• 1:06:17Nilay Patel?

  But then there'd be nothing else there. You're paying the money just to thumbs down all of the content.

• 1:06:22Speaker 04

  This, the, the, the name of this company stands, it's a, it's a, it's a smash up. Portmanteau, I think is the word. Is that right? Is that the word portmanteau?

• 1:06:30Speaker 05

  Uh huh.

• 1:06:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, of two words, quick bytes. Say the word quick.

• 1:06:35Speaker 05

  Quick.

• 1:06:36Speaker 04

  Que. Now say the word bytes.

• 1:06:38Speaker 05

  Quick.

• 1:06:38Speaker 04

  Queek.

• 1:06:39Speaker 05

  Quibbe.

• 1:06:39Speaker 04

  Que. It's, it's, it's quibi.

• 1:06:42Speaker 05

  No, quibi.

• 1:06:43Speaker 04

  Quibi.

• 1:06:44Speaker 05

  Well, okay, now if, if bi is pronounced by, then that means $2 billion. That's a billion dollars per quib.

• 1:06:54Nilay Patel?

  This is horrible. Anyway, they're still, by the way, and this service is still a year away. So the wars are off and running, right? Like, you got 10 extra dollars to spend, you can buy a cut down version of NBC, you're paying for Disney Plus, you're paying for Hulu, you're paying for Netflix, and then you're like, you know what I don't have enough of is six-minute videos that show me a different video when I rotate to landscape, now I'm gonna pay them too. But they have Guillermo del Toro involved. They do have, I mean, they're, I mean, it's Jeffrey Katzenberg, right? Like, the, the sort of like word on the street in media is, don't bet against Jeffrey Katzenberg, who ran Disney and then left Disney and then started Dream, like, right? Like, he has this track record of success. Like, dude, made Trek, I believe.

• 1:07:39Speaker 04

  Ants. Ants' dream works.

• 1:07:41Nilay Patel?

  Smash Mouth owns their, like, continuing existence to Jeffrey Katzenberg. So like, yeah, everyone is like, don't bet against Jeffrey Katzenberg, which is a fair thing to say. I just, my fundamental thing is like, the reason anybody has an app on their home screen is because there's user-generated content in that app, right? Like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Reddit, very, like, very few of the apps on your home screen that your phone maker didn't put there, or that aren't like your email messaging, are not user-generated content apps. The New York City subway time. Well, sure, but that's like utility. I meant like content apps. Do you have Netflix on your home screen? No. Like, I know very few people who have Netflix on their home screen.

• 1:08:24Speaker 04

  I have New York Times, The Verge, and my RSS reader Newsify.

• 1:08:29Nilay Patel?

  Okay, well, you're, you're like, living a healthy life. Oh, yeah, I have Feedly. I have Feedly too, but I've, I replaced Facebook with Feedly, in an effort to like, be a better person. Paul, what do you got?

• 1:08:39Speaker 04

  Audible, Spotify.

• 1:08:41Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah, I got Spotify. Yeah, me too. All right. Well, my theory is breaking down in front of this, like, media elite circle that I'm in. Oh, yeah, I have the Times, too. The most popular apps in the world, the most popular media apps in the world are all user-generated content and Netflix, right? And so if you're making this, like, weird competitor to YouTube, but you're not gonna have this, like, vibrant library of people doing stuff, I think you're, like, like, do you know what didn't cost $2 billion in content costs? TikTok.

• 1:09:09Speaker 04

  Are you building up to an argument that creepy will fail? Where are they on the go 90 scale?

• 1:09:16Nilay Patel?

  80, holding at 80 is my theory. By the way, the NBC plus app, I'm giving a incomplete, did not finish. If you're trying to charge 10 bucks a month for not everything. And your CEOs out in the world being like, we'd rather you subscribe to cable, like you didn't. Like you showed up at the test and you just like drew a dinosaur instead of the answer. Like that's where that's where they're at.

• 1:09:39Speaker 04

  Here's why I'm mad about the streaming wars. If you want to watch video that is made by a professional on the internet, there's no opting out. When we first cut the cord, you could like opt out of paying for cable. And if you really wanted to watch a TV show, you could just go buy it on iTunes for 30 bucks or whatever the season cost. But now, if you want to watch a bunch of these shows, you have no choice but to subscribe. And then try and quickly unsubscribe. So if you're diligent, you could theoretically like you like pick and choose your shows. You're going to have to set up a schedule for the year. And I'm like, all right, March is my CBS All Access Month. And in March, I will turn up, flip on my CBS All Access subscription.

• 1:10:21Speaker 04

  And I will watch every show that I want to watch that Star Trek Discovery, I watched Twilight Zone. Great. And at the end of March, it gets shut off. So I only paid, you know, seven bucks for it. And then April, April, that's, that's my NBC month. And you'll flip that on, watch all your NBC shows.

• 1:10:35Nilay Patel?

  Well, not all of them.

• 1:10:41Speaker 04

  But there's no way, if it like, I just want to opt out. I just want to be like, you know what, guys? I'm happy to pay you money for your content. Just let me just buy it and put it in my like online catalog of TV shows. And then I will not deal with your subscription and you can't do that.

• 1:10:57Nilay Patel?

  Here's my, here's my counter proposal, which is, you know, the very first cable systems in America. Community access TV, that's why it was called cat TV. You know, friends, neighbors, literally countrymen, gathered together to put up one big antenna. And then they ran wires to their house. Collective action. I'm saying we form roving bands of shared subscribers.

• 1:11:20Speaker 04

  Ooh.

• 1:11:21Nilay Patel?

  Right? And you will forever be known as like CBS All Access.

• 1:11:24Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:11:25Nilay Patel?

  And you will walk the streets bartering your CBS All Access login for Netflix.

• 1:11:31Speaker 04

  Oh, so it's like, it's like the end of Fahrenheit 451, but instead of representing a book, I represent a streaming service.

• 1:11:37Nilay Patel?

  Yes, exactly. That's exactly what we're getting at. You will have to memorize all of CBS All Access's catalog.

• 1:11:46Nilay Patel?

  And you will, you will literally walk the streets being like, I'm looking for a Hulu. And then what we will do is we'll start like a paid matchmaking service. So that the Hulus can find the Netflix's and we'll just sit back. Wait, how do we work dating into this?

• 1:12:02Nilay Patel?

  You don't wanna, you don't wanna see what happened. The sparks fly when a Hulu meets a Netflix. Okay, that's the Vergecast. Thank you, Addie, for joining us. We gotta, we gotta get you on the show more often. Addie Robinson, how can I tweet at you? Uh, the dextrarchy. Paul?

• 1:12:16Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:12:17Nilay Patel?

  You had future Paul.

• 1:12:18Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:12:18Nilay Patel?

  Dieter?

• 1:12:19Speaker 04

  I'm Backlon.

• 1:12:20Nilay Patel?

  I'm at Reckless. You can listen to the show anywhere you want. You can subscribe in your favorite podcast app. You can look at the show notes. We have been asked by the Vox Media Podcast Network to make this request, so I'm making it. Please go on Apple Podcasts and leave a rating and review. I subscribe to The Competition Theory, but they're asking that you monopolize your review activity towards the Apple Podcast platforms. Do that. Check out, why'd you push that button? Season 4 is here. It is very, very good. If you want to know more about tariffs and how they're impacting small gadget makers, Ashley actually just made a great video. It's on our YouTube channel. You should watch that. Okay, that's it. Rock and roll.

• 1:12:56Speaker 04

  Paul.

• 1:12:56Nilay Patel?

  Promo code.

• 1:13:16Speaker 06

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• 1:13:47Speaker 09

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