What you need to know about Google's search antitrust case

This week we brought TechCrunch’s own Rebecca Bellan onto the podcast to help us better understand Google’s search-related anti-trust case that is currently ongoing in the United States. There are a number of major legal cases involving tech giants and their in-market heft and behavior, from Google v. Epic to what’s going on in the EU and the U. S. government’s adtech-related suit against Google, but our focus is search. Catch up on the state of affairs with Bellan’s reporting here. Now, the startup angle. Why is this a topic for Equity? A few reasons: If Google’s current methods of maintaining its domestic search market share are forced to change, it could create a more competitive search market, full stop. That could change up where startups advertise, and how much they pay for those ads. More competitive search results amongst emboldened rivals could also lead to search results that lean more towards organic information instead of paid insertions. That would be good for startups looking to get the word out, without having to get their wallet out. We could go on. But hit play and hang out with Rebecca and Alex for more. We’ll have her back on when the verdict comes down. Talk to you Friday for our news roundup! For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website. Equity drops at 7 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders and more! Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:11Speaker 00

  Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and the nuance behind the headlines. My name is Alex and this is our Wednesday show where we sit down with a guest or a topic and think deeply about what is going on. And today we are going to do something a little bit different. I have dragooned and press-ganged Rebecca Bellan for the TechCrunch team to come onto the podcast to talk to me about Google and antitrust. Now, this may not sound like a startup topic at heart, but it absolutely is because the case before us will set the tone for what Google can and cannot do. And it will tell us how much competitive space the market will retain in key areas that startups may want to play in. Essentially, can the big companies use their heft to maintain dominance? Or do we have to let the little guy get a crack at things?

• 0:56Speaker 00

  That's what I think's at play. And now I'll learn how close or far from that I am. Rebecca, hi, welcome to the show.

• 1:01Rebecca Bellan?

  Hey, Alex, thanks. Wow, what an intro. How are you doing?

• 1:04Speaker 00

  You ever have like a Tuesday that feels like a Friday? And then suddenly you realize that it's like almost done with November and that means it's essentially January. That hit me today.

• 1:11Rebecca Bellan?

  I keep waking up and thinking, oh, my God, I can't believe it's mid-November or mid-whatever we are. And it's like, how did we get here?

• 1:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, my spouse last night was like, Thanksgiving is next week. And I was like, no, it's not. And she was like, yes, it is. And so I looked it up. I'm like, oh, yes, okay, well, I guess I'll make rolls. Like, it was just shocking to me how much time had gone by.

• 1:27Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, I hear you.

• 1:28Speaker 00

  But speaking about being stuck in time, I feel like this Google antitrust case involving search has been dragging on since time immemorial, but does seem to be very much of the moment. There has been some news out recently involving Apple and some disclosed information. So I was hoping we could start with the data point that was disclosed in the case regarding how much money Apple makes from Google in its search case. And then from there, we'll kind of back into how we got here and where we're going. So first, what's the news?

• 1:54Rebecca Bellan?

  Okay, so the big news this week is that we learned that Google is paying Apple 36% of the revenue it earns from search advertising made through the Safari browser. So apparently, Google's main litigator visibly cringed when the lawyer said that number because Google is, of course, trying to keep out as much of the public domain as possible, arguing, in this instance at least, that it unreasonably undermines Google's competitive standing in relation to both competitors and other counterparties. So that's the big news right now.

• 2:22Speaker 00

  But Google's complaint there is bullshit, right? Like, they're not going to get harmed by this. I mean, now we can do kind of a natural test because the number is out there and we'll see if Google falls apart immediately

• 2:33Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33Speaker 00

  from the disclosure of this small fact between two large public companies.

• 2:37Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, I mean, the big thing about this case that I find interesting is that there's there's things that we knew, right? We knew Google was paying Apple. We knew Google was paying to be default, but we didn't know the numbers, right? The scale of this. So earlier, earlier during this case, when Google's CEO Sundar Pichai testified, we learned that in 2021, Google paid a total of 26 billion to multiple browsers, phones, and platforms, including Samsung and Mozilla and Apple, the majority of which went to Apple. That year, it was around 18 billion to Apple alone. So that partnership's been going on since 2002, I believe. And it's really just proves how much worth Google sees, how much value Google sees in being the default search engine.

• 3:22Speaker 00

  And a lot of the case centers around this because as far as I can tell, the argument is that so long as Google is able to pay to maintain its status as the default search engine across phones, devices, and browsers, then it can drive the most volume and therefore collect the most data and then refine its searches thereof. And Google's view seems to be, as far as I can tell, that, look, it's all about consumer choice. Companies can make a deal, we can show them things. And then the government thinks that this is essentially Google using its checkbook as a way to purchase and maintain dominance. Is that a fair summary of kind of the two sides here?

• 3:57Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, I mean, I think that's part of the summary for sure. Google has argued that it's not doing anything illegal, it's just doing good business, right? It pays to have the default search engine because that means it can, as you say, get more data on its customers, which allows it to be a better search engine. There's one piece of interesting data that we have on this that was revealed during testimony. It's a bit old, but they said in 2007, there was an email from a Google Product Strategy meeting that said when people switched their homepage to Google, they did 15% more searches. And when they switched away, that dropped 27%. So clearly, it's interesting because it seems like the Justice Department is arguing that Google is using this kind of dominant position. To be able to own the search and get all of the data.

• 4:39Rebecca Bellan?

  And Google is like, yeah, we, we are, but that's kind of the way the cookie crumbles. And we couldn't make a better product if we didn't have all the data. Nobody's trying to use the fifth best search engine, are they? They want to use the best search engine because it has all of everyone's data and is, they're able to innovate on that. So that's one part of the argument.

• 4:59Speaker 00

  I just, I just find that part to be particularly ironic because, you know, no one uses the fifth best search engine. I don't think more than what? 1% of the population in the United States to pick a group could name more than two. For example, I mean, I don't think Hugh.com is really out there burning up the charts. It's pretty much just Google and then, oh yeah, that Microsoft thing as well. And so there's not five, there's two. And so it feels weird that the government's almost arguing in favor of like a slightly more equitable playing field between an oligopoly versus a more actual democratic setup of the world. But I guess some competition will be better than none is kind of how I feel about it.

• 5:37Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, it's interesting because at once, Google is saying, well, sorry. Like, sorry that we're popular. Everyone loves us. We're really good. But at the same time, they're like, but hey, like, don't look at those billions in revenue that we're doing. We're also kind of not the dominant search engine anymore. I mean, if you look at young people, they're not turning to Google right away. They turn to TikTok and Instagram for answers, product searches, they go to Amazon. There's some decent arguments overall, but like, really, Google is a verb, right? It's a household name. Like you, you say, I'm going to go Google that.

• 6:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, that actually came up in the government's case. I was going back through the initial filings before our show and I was like, they brought that up? It felt like they were bringing the whole kitchen sink to the argument to that point to kind of quote something in that cliche. It felt like bad writing, I guess. I don't know how much that holds up in a legal context, but that was my impression, reading that at least.

• 6:21Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah.

• 6:21Speaker 00

  I think though, that the government's case about denial of other companies being able to see enough searches to drive enough volume to make a better product does kind of work well with me. That seems to be a reasonable complaint. And the way that I kind of see that working out is if Google was really so much better than everyone else, it wouldn't have to pay for default status. And then it would have to compete and then other search engines might be able to get more searches, more data and do better. So it kind of comes back to Google using current half in the market to ensure primacy of its search engine long term. And that does feel to me unfair because how could a startup today compete? I don't see how they could possibly take on these companies.

• 7:05Rebecca Bellan?

  No, no, I can't imagine a startup competing. But yeah, I mean, that's one of the Justice Department's arguments, right? They talk about how Google has essentially rested on its laurels and not improved its product. So it's weird. They're both arguing two sides of the same coin. Google will say, well, we have all this data that makes us more innovative. We update Chrome every six weeks. I don't know what Bing does, but it's probably not that fast. But then the government is saying, actually, you're not really innovating that much and you require competition. The only time that you've been pushed to innovate has been when you've gotten competition, like you're you're getting sluggish. So, you know, there was pressure from OpenAI and ChatGPT that lit a fire on Google to get on the AI thing. Now they have Bard, they're integrating it to Google Assistant Workspace. But would they have gone on this route if they didn't have competition? The answer is maybe not. There

• 7:47Rebecca Bellan?

  were developers and researchers, like AI developers and researchers who were leaving Google because they didn't feel like they were getting pushed enough to work on new product. Similarly, the Justice Department brought up a 2019 EU antitrust case or fine against the company that spurred Google to be more competitive in France and Germany. They had this whole go big in Europe kind of plan to make the homepage better because they had to compete with other search engines. And so they wanted to kind of boost the product that they were offering. And this was a direct result, the Justice Department argues, of this fine. So, yeah, I mean, they're not as powerful as they used to be. They're not as good as they used to be. Whether the court will look at the current state of Google and how competitive the landscape looks now, or the

• 8:32Rebecca Bellan?

  history of how much Google paid to reach its position, it's still a massive force making billions of dollars a year.

• 8:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, I gotta admit, Apple looks like an absolute genius. They don't have to do any work. They get paid enormous amounts of money, which they then get to use to invest in building other stuff they want to do well. And honestly, Google's essentially paying for, as far as I can tell, iPhones development and iOS's development to whack Android. So Google is essentially funding its competition. And that, to me, that willingness to send that much money to an arch rival in some ways, is indication that this is about more than just providing the best thing to consumers. It's about maintaining control. And Apple is happy to get paid twice, essentially, whereas Google has to shell out. But I don't want to cry for any of these companies, because never cry for something worth more than a trillion dollars.

• 9:19Speaker 00

  But I will say, looking at the Microsoft historical example, if Microsoft can't do the bundling it wants to do to the extent that it wants to do, I kind of don't see how that doesn't apply to other devices and other products that come with a pre-installed set of applications to them. But at the same time, I don't want it to be set up in such a way that anyone who builds a platform can't provide services on that platform. Like, what are we gonna say, having a calculator in iOS is anti-competitive against calculator apps? Eh, that seems too much. So I don't know where to draw the line, other than to say that it does seem that Google is not exactly competing on a level playing field. But I don't want to make it so hard to compete that no one can. Does that make sense? I've been thinking this through a lot in the last 24 hours.

• 9:59Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, I mean, well, I mean, it's interesting you talk about bundling, right? Because Google, they have a deal with all smartphone manufacturers that use Android OS, like Samsung, Oppo, I think Huawei, right? Like, there's a ton. And their deal is to preload a bundle of, I think it was 11 Google apps on the device, so including search, Chrome, Play. There are also some revenue share agreements with the smartphone makers and wireless carriers like Verizon, right? AT&T, that require them to set Google Search and Chrome Web Browser as default. So again, it's not really a fair playing field when Google, on one side, owns Android operating system, and thus its search and all of its, you know, all of its products are kind of already on those phones.

• 10:43Rebecca Bellan?

  And then the other side, it's like, if you're not using Android, you're using an Apple, and you're not exactly pre-installed on Apple. In fact, I believe that Google did try to get the Google app pre-installed on Apple iPhones, and they were like, yeah, nah.

• 10:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, we're not going to give you that. We're going to use your search products buried inside of our browser, but we're not going to give you that much brand mind share.

• 11:03Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, and Google had to promise not to promote Chrome on Safari as well.

• 11:09Speaker 00

  Sounds kind of like a sweetheart deal between two companies to lock up competition in a key part of the digital world.

• 11:13Rebecca Bellan?

  I mean, I'm not a lawyer, Alex.

• 11:15Speaker 00

  Just thinking out loud.

• 11:16Rebecca Bellan?

  But, you know, so it'll come down to the judge.

• 11:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, I want to get to the startup angle in this because I think it's incredibly important for all the founders out there. But before we do, a very, very short break.

• 11:31Speaker 00

  To me, I'm always torn between letting companies do what they want and trying to have a reasonable amount of regulation to prevent monopoly. But there's a big startup angle to this because when I think about these major agreements between large tech companies, I view it as companies that have enough gravity in the market to bend the universe to their will, defending themselves and creating bigger and deeper moats around them and their existing cash flows, making them harder for startups to attack. And so if I was just having my startup hat on, I think I would want Google to get slapped on the wrist for doing this and to force companies to be a bit more open in a competitive sense, and then therefore better crack open a door for a upstart company to build a search engine that may do better or at least take away some market share from Google. But right now, with defaults and

• 12:16Speaker 00

  big payments, it just seems impossible for that to happen. And so I guess, you know, if you're a VC or a founder, maybe you should take the Department of Justice's side here and say, hey, you guys are too big and too powerful and you need to step back and stop cheating with money.

• 12:29Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, I can't, I, it's really hard for me to imagine a new startup with a new search engine. Well, I guess ChatGPT is kind of.

• 12:37Speaker 00

  Neither tried.

• 12:39Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, it's hard. I mean, you know, if we look at the Microsoft deal, right, that happened in the 90s, what ended up happening from that? So Microsoft lost a similar case in the 1990s. They were required to change their behavior, share its APIs with third-party developers. They were banned from making anti-competitive and exclusive deals with computer manufacturers. Similarly, we might see that Google have a similar outcome to that, but they might also end up having to turn over all or most of their data that they've collected to other search engines, so those can improve their products and attract more users. That would be really compelling because the data is the big thing, right? We have everything on Google, right? Your pictures, your, your notes, your Google Docs, your, you trust them with all the things, right? I don't even, sometime, I can't even think about how much

• 13:19Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 13:20Rebecca Bellan?

  data Google has on me. So if they had to turn over all of that, then I can see others having a competitive advantage.

• 13:25Speaker 00

  Well, on the data front, we're not talking about handing over your actual, like, Google documents, but like, maybe your search history as a way to provide information to other companies could train their own search engines against, right?

• 13:36Rebecca Bellan?

  Yes. Yeah.

• 13:37Speaker 00

  Okay. That makes more sense. I'm like, stop reading my email. There was a whole campaign about that. Scruggled.

• 13:42Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah. It's just that, you know, people trust. I guess the point I'm making there is that people not trust, but they seem to want to go to one place for all the things. So another search engine would have to probably do a really, really good job to get you to be like, okay, well, I'm not going to use Google for everything. I'm going to use Bing for this and Google for that, you know?

• 14:01Speaker 00

  That's why the Amazon point you made earlier actually doesn't fly with me. Cause I, when I first heard that, I'm like, that's actually pretty compelling. People do product searches on Amazon, therefore it's a search engine. Erico, Google has competition. But I don't actually. What I do is I go to Amazon to buy something off of Amazon's e-commerce delivery system. And I do search there, but it's a search inside of like Walmart's app versus a search engine. It's not quite the same thing. It's not as open. There are different rules and it's quite a lot of it's ad-based to the degree. It's not really a search product. It's more of an advertising product. So I don't think it actually fits in that mold. But back to the Microsoft case, there's a historical irony I just realized. The Microsoft antitrust case in the nineties involved the bundling of Internet Explorer, right?

• 14:43Speaker 00

  Which then afterwards, Microsoft had to make it easier to build other browsers. And then it lost to Chrome, which came from Google and did very well on Windows originally, which helped grow Google's search share. And now Google Is using Chrome to defend its search share and trying to argue that its default status across different things is actually okay, even though Microsoft could get in trouble for the same thing back in the days, but opened the door for some of that to happen. So it turns out every single company really does become the villain in the end. Once they have enough to defend, they'll just throw their ethics in the corner and say, fuck you, it's our money.

• 15:15Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, well, it's funny you say that because, you know, there was during some of the testimony, it came out that, you know, when, when around 2005, when Microsoft's Internet Explorer was the default search engine, back then, Google's legal chief sent Microsoft an angry letter saying that making Internet Explorer the default was anti-competitive. And it's funny that like this letter, it's, it's almost like it establishes the hypocrisy of Google today, right? The letter declared that problems with default settings are made worse by how changes to defaults are handled and that most end users do not change defaults. And these are exactly the arguments that other search engines are making against Google, being anti-competitive with, you know, by making deals with Apple and other companies.

• 15:56Speaker 00

  The difference, though, between 2000, whatever, and 2023 is that Google's worth about 200 times as much and therefore has entirely put on its Steve Ballmer hat.

• 16:05Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah.

• 16:05Speaker 00

  It's just funny to me, like, I've been around tech long enough now to have seen a couple of cycles, and this is what always happens. The company with like a really firm ethical position and a great product eventually ends up sucking other consumer surplus out of it and then essentially going out into the market to rent seek to maintain dominance. And then they try to pretend like they're out there helping the little guy, when in reality, they're just trying to execute more share buybacks and boost their dividend. Tech loses its startupy charm once companies become incumbents to the point to which they're almost monopolies, or in the case of the DOJ's view, actually are de facto monopolies in the world. And I want to put on my, my new argument in this case to you, Rebecca. We talked about OpenAI and how ChatGPT has shaken up search a little bit. Bing puts out its chat feature using OpenAI technology.

• 16:50Speaker 00

  Everyone gets really excited about it. Google starts breaking out search generative experience. Satya Nadella says, we made Google dance. And then it seemed to fizzle away and Bing didn't actually manage to grow that much, even though it had a technology lead on Google there for a little bit. Doesn't that augment the point that Google has a position in the market that is almost unassailable?

• 17:11Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, I think it does.

• 17:12Speaker 00

  Ah.

• 17:13Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah.

• 17:14Speaker 00

  Sorry, I just wanted to try that one out because I wasn't sure if that was going to work.

• 17:17Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, I mean, gosh, yeah, it's complicated.

• 17:20Speaker 00

  Very.

• 17:20Rebecca Bellan?

  I think Satya Nadella also argued during his testimony that as we look forward into the future of AI development and natural language processing, that while, you know, OpenAI is doing really well right now, Google, because it has, again, all of the data, all of the data, is going to have an unfair advantage in future industries as well as current industries.

• 17:41Speaker 00

  Data having accumulated impact as a way to almost train, well, I mean, if you think about AI models in general, people will discuss how having more data is effectively a way to make better tech. So I can see that. But at the same time, I don't want a company that does well to not be able to keep doing better. I don't want to penalize success. I think that's the struggle here is people either view antitrust as we have to go out there and get these companies and show them who's boss, or everyone else is a communist, keep your hands out of our business. And trying to find that middle balance between letting companies succeed and also maintaining an open marketplace is really tough. And I think that's why this case, you know, as we kind of chew on it, is going to be going on for some time. Do you have any visibility into how long it's going to go on?

• 18:23Rebecca Bellan?

  This one's a 10-weeker, I believe.

• 18:25Speaker 00

  10-weeker, okay.

• 18:25Rebecca Bellan?

  The one that started in September, yeah. So we're nearly there. But to your point, like, about not stifling, we don't want to stifle competition, we also don't want to stifle progression. What would be interesting to me, and maybe I'm naive about this, is as we established, data is really important when you're making AI and tech products, right?

• 18:41Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 18:41Rebecca Bellan?

  Like, having a lot of data is important to innovate. What would be interesting to me is if all of the data that a dominant company like Google had was just available to everyone, because then you really could say, our product is better, because look what we're doing with it, right? That's when competition gets interesting, in my opinion, but I could be speaking from a place of naivety.

• 19:00Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, if we could have one bucket of data that everyone could then build something against, and then we could see which was the most competitive, that would be very interesting. And that is what we're seeing with AI today, not in search, but we are seeing like different AI products out there trying to compete against the same kind of benchmarks to see which does best. When Musk announced Grok, his new AI LLM, there was a series of tests that showed that it was better at some than, oh, I'm reaching back into my memory here, Rebecca, was it GPT-3.5, I think, right?

• 19:27Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah.

• 19:27Speaker 00

  Something like that?

• 19:28Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, 3.5.

• 19:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, but in search, we don't have the same information. So you can't really execute that test. Although I think people would say Google is definitely better than Bing, in part because they have different data sets. I struggle with this. When I was on parental leave after we had our kiddo earlier this year, I really kind of, I did a little bit of writing for fun because I was going insane, sitting in the house all the time. And I really did kind of come around to the idea that startups should be in favor of antitrust because it means there's more chances for them to win. And, you know, I just wonder what the sentiment out there really is. Because I bet you that's not the case. And so, I don't know. I always feel like it's weird to be cheering on an incumbent if you're a startup, but that does seem to be the ethos in tech. So I'll be curious to see when this does shake out at the end of the 10 weeks, what reaction is amongst the community of kind of like the TechCrunch audience, if you will.

• 20:12Speaker 00

  Because I think we're going to, I think my view is not going to be the popular one, which is, I mean, that's fine.

• 20:17Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, yeah, that's a good point to make. I mean, I think there's a lot aside from just search engines that you can see come out of this in terms of new startups emerging, right? If we open up those APIs to third-party developers and we can see, you know, of course, new approaches to search algorithms, personalized advertising, different ad tech solutions. But I would be curious to see what other parts of Google's business open up, right? Like, cloud tech, hosting, storage, data management, developing alternative mobile operating systems, new solutions to existing platforms. Like, there could be, there's a whole world out there.

• 20:48Speaker 00

  You're getting me all giddy at the idea of having actually these big tech companies broken up into little pieces that compete. But given that we just let Microsoft buy Activision and Blizzard, I don't think we're really moving in that direction. In fact, it seems like antitrust in the US is occasionally going, maybe not, oh, just kidding, okay, fine, go for it, do what you want. That's.

• 21:06Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, and Google does have that other, I mean, I guess they settled with Match recently. And now they have another one that just started against Epic.

• 21:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:15Rebecca Bellan?

  That's a bit different, though, a bit of a different beast.

• 21:16Speaker 00

  That's the App Store 30% cut issue that Apple's also run into, right?

• 21:21Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, something about their App Store.

• 21:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, but on the Google front, though, the other kind of antitrust thing about ad tech is similarly interesting to me because I think it just goes to show, and I don't want to dig into the nuances of that per se because that would take us, you know, another half an hour to kind of chew through. But the fact that Google has so many complaints. Against it kind of at one time is either indication that governments think that it's just easy to go after the biggest companies in the world, or that they have a pretty strong case. And so I wonder if we will have a landmarkish ruling here in one of these Google antitrust cases. But on the flip side, Microsoft lost and 25, 30 years later, right back here. So even if Google does lose, I don't think they're going to fall off their perch or pedestal. And I don't think in 2055, we won't be having a similar conversation about a different company. But it

• 22:07Speaker 00

  still matters to me to have a fair market. And I don't think corporate power should be everlasting.

• 22:12Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, I mean, I think that these things kind of happen in swells, right? And then you need to consistently every few years kind of clean house and, and check the balance of power and everything. But you know, the outcome could, I don't know how much of a super long term effect it could have to the point that you just made. But there are other cases going on right now that if this case doesn't go well for, for Google, then it could have ripple effects to other big tech cases, right? The FTC sued Amazon in September for using anti-competitive and unfair strategies to illegally maintain its monopoly power. The DOJ is investigating Apple over, again, the third-party apps on its devices, whether unfairly favors its own products.

• 22:48Speaker 00

  Of course.

• 22:49Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, there's an ongoing.

• 22:50Speaker 00

  Sorry, I just, I, I, I'm dying. I'm dying when people say things like that. Like, does Apple favor its own apps? Of course it does.

• 22:57Rebecca Bellan?

  Of course it does.

• 22:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, people are like, whenever Adobe is like, us buying Figma is not anti-competitive. I'm like, you are not paying that massive premium to engender more competition, are you? Could it be perhaps to lessen competition? Ergo is, see, you have to just say obvious things that may not hold up in court, even if they're true. But like, of course, of course, Apple favors itself. Of course.

• 23:19Rebecca Bellan?

  Yes.

• 23:20Speaker 00

  Of course.

• 23:21Rebecca Bellan?

  But that's the problem, right? So does that harm by favoring its own products? Does it harm competition and thus harm the consumer? That's what the DOJ is trying to prove here, that there is harm from that. And then Google needs to prove, yeah, maybe, like, maybe we are doing that, but the harm is worth it. The juice is worth the squeeze because we are providing a better product.

• 23:38Speaker 00

  You know, there are some markets where if you provide an e-commerce platform, you can't sell on it. You have to pick either platform or participant. And I think until we clarify that in the US market where these cases are that we're talking about, I think we're getting constantly in this muddle and corporations are pretty good at holding on to power once they get it at a certain scale.

• 24:00Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah.

• 24:00Speaker 00

  And so that's why I think we'll be back here again in 20 years. But narrowing back down to just this case, the 10-week trial and so forth. Is there anything coming up that people should have their eyes out for? Big news clips that could be coming down? Basically, I'm trying to give people a kind of a here's what to look for, if you will.

• 24:14Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, I mean, I guess we just look for the outcome, right? Or just more juicy details. There's going to be probably another, I don't know, two weeks or so of testimony. So the judge of this case, Judge Amit Metta, he is definitely pushing for a lot of information to join the public domain. For example, we saw the other day some of the most lucrative search terms from 2018.

• 24:42Speaker 00

  I saw that.

• 24:43Rebecca Bellan?

  Which was really, really fascinating, 20 most lucrative search terms. A lot of them were iPhone related because the iPhone like eight had come out that day. I guess it was a week's worth of data, I think. Yeah, I think we'll continue to see some more like pretty surprising, not nothing that we didn't already know, but just kind of like, wow, that's how much or something to that effect.

• 25:02Speaker 00

  More like filling in the details of images we already kind of saw, but were slightly fuzzy versus entirely whole cloth new revelations about the way the world works.

• 25:11Rebecca Bellan?

  I think so.

• 25:11Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 25:12Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, I would be surprised if we were really surprised by any of the, any of the information that came out. But yeah, I think, I think that's what we need to be looking out for. And then in the future, just kind of how the follow-on effects of this will roll on to other cases.

• 25:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, and we're going to be talking a lot about that once it does come out, because it does have a pretty big startup angle. This is how one of the key functions of the internet works across all the devices that we use. So how this case shakes up could really change what the market looks like. So we will, of course, dig more into that. Rebecca, can we have you back on when that happens? So we can pick your brain some more about the final results.

• 25:45Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, absolutely. I'm hooked in. I'm, I've got the popcorn. I'm, I'm watching.

• 25:49Speaker 00

  Okay. And then just before we go, last thing, there are so many cases out there, DOJ, FTC, different companies. Are we in a like regulatory moment? Or does it just feel that way because many things are happening or kind of coming to head at the same time? But it's more of a coincidence. Has there been a sea change essentially?

• 26:04Rebecca Bellan?

  I think that enforcers or regulators, they want to show that even though these companies are basically gods, they still have the power to kind of kneecap them. They want to prove that we're at an inflection point, it feels like, that these companies are so massive, so untouchable, that the US government is going to say, "We want to show that we are the ones who still have the power. The government still has the power to regulate you." And I think that's an important kind of check and balance that we need to, I don't know, encourage in the US.

• 26:37Speaker 00

  If these companies get any bigger, they're going to be nation-states unto themselves.

• 26:41Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, well, I'm sure certain people, who won't be named, who own a lot of things, would really like that. Yeah, what's the word for it?

• 26:50Speaker 00

  That's what New Zealand's for.

• 26:51Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, right. The sovereign individual.

• 26:54Speaker 00

  Well, you know what?

• 26:55Rebecca Bellan?

  Have you heard of this? It's horrifying.

• 26:57Speaker 00

  I have, in different contexts. But I'll tell you this, I had my libertarian phase when I was 15 and I thought I was invincible and the god king of the world. And then I discovered caring for others and I moved on from being so solipsistic.

• 27:08Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, that's good. That's a good, that's a good character redemption arc.

• 27:13Speaker 00

  No, I think everyone should have a libertarian phase. I think it's good to think about yourself as an individual actor. I just think it's also good to realize then that you're not.

• 27:20Rebecca Bellan?

  Hmm. Yes. Yeah, we all work in the same system. Yeah.

• 27:23Speaker 00

  But Rebecca, we'll leave it there. Thank you so much. We'll have you back on when this case wraps up and probably again and again in the future, because there's nothing I love least than reading lots and lots of government legal cases. So we're going to make you do it and have you explain it. Thank you very much.

• 27:36Rebecca Bellan?

  Happy to help. Thank you so much for having me.

• 27:38Speaker 00

  And if folks want to find you online, what is your X or LinkedIn, whatever you prefer?

• 27:42Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, X is at Rebecca Bellan, pretty standard.

• 27:45Speaker 00

  And that's, sorry, B-E-L-L-A-N, in case you wanted to find her there.

• 27:48Rebecca Bellan?

  Yes, sir. That's me.

• 27:49Speaker 00

  All right. Thank you very much. Talk to you soon.

• 27:50Rebecca Bellan?

  Thank you.

• 27:51Speaker 00

  A big thanks to Rebecca for her time. If you need even more equity between now and the next time we land in your favorite podcast app, we are EquityPod on both X and Twitter. And in the meantime, we'll talk to you soon. Goodbye.

• 28:04Speaker 00

  Equity is hosted by myself, editor in chief of TechCrunch Plus, Alex Wilhelm, and TechCrunch senior reporter, Mary Ann Azevedo. We are produced by Teresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our illustrator. And a big thank you to the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch Audio Products. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll talk to you next time.