Epic wins for Epic and Threads

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz discuss Apple responding to Beeper's iMessage for Android and the various other text-based platform news from this week. Sean Hollister joins the show to discuss his time covering the Epic v Google trial, and what we learned from it all. Further reading: The year Twitter died: a special series from The Verge Beeper vs. iMessage is a fight about how tech works — and who's really in charge Apple responds to Beeper’s iMessage for Android: ‘We took steps to protect our users’ Beeper says Apple is blocking some iMessages, but there’s a fix Google Messages might let you edit texts after they’re sent Threads is officially starting to test ActivityPub integration Threads launches for nearly half a billion more users in Europe Adam Mosseri’s Threads account is rocketing up the Mastodon followed lists. An X outage broke all outgoing links, again Epic win: Jury decides Google has illegal monopoly in app store fight Epic CEO Tim Sweeney: the post-trial interview 20 things we learned from the Epic v. Google trial The Apple TV app now looks more like an all-purpose streaming hub E3 is officially over forever Opera’s gamer browser now has a ‘panic button’ for when you’re caught in the act Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. 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.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 1:11Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, America's number one source of Cybertruck wiper news. Breaking news on The Vergecast today, the Cybertruck wiper is one blade. It will cost $79 for a place and the entire assembly, I believe, will cost 169,420. I actually don't know the second one.

• 1:28Speaker 01

  That sounds right, though.

• 1:28Nilay Patel?

  I fully believe that.

• 1:29Speaker 01

  I was like, yeah, that's, that sounds like accurate.

• 1:31Nilay Patel?

  Oh, God. What have we become? I'm your friend Eli. That's David Pierce having existential crisis. Alex Krantz is here.

• 1:41Speaker 01

  I'm your friend that also believes that's the right price. It sounds right.

• 1:44Nilay Patel?

  I don't think you can price something at 420 cents. I just want to, there's a tell in there.

• 1:49Speaker 01

  You can. You just like, you put an asterisk next to it.

• 1:53Nilay Patel?

  All right, two things about the Cybertruck wiper before we begin the show. There's a lot to talk about. There's a huge week for low stakes apple drama, I will say.

• 2:01Nilay Patel?

  Threads officially launched activity pub support in minor ways. You can, we should talk about that. It's a big deal. And then big news of the week, maybe the year, maybe the century. Google lost the antitrust case with Epic. Epic won the antitrust case against Google. Sean Hollis was in the courtroom every day. He interviewed Tim Sweeney at the end of it. He's going to join the show. We're going to talk all about what happened there and what it means. And then, of course, we're going to have a lightning round. But let's begin. With the Cybertruck wiper, which is why-

• 2:28David Pierce?

  That's good. Do the most important news at the top.

• 2:30Nilay Patel?

  Which is why the people are here.

• 2:34Nilay Patel?

  So, many, many, many people sent me Jason Camisa's video of the Cybertruck on launch day. I think I've mentioned Hagerty on the channel before. This is like a great YouTube channel. Jason's really good. That video is very controversial because it is fawning. It is just a fawning look at the Cybertruck and you can, whatever. You can have whatever feelings about that and that video in that moment. Sure. In that video, he waves around a Cybertruck wiper on his lap. It shows that it's one blade, but it's all flo- it's like, I just didn't want to, I couldn't engage with it. You know what I mean?

• 3:07David Pierce?

  Did you just almost say the phrase floppy blade and decide to run away from that?

• 3:14Nilay Patel?

  Do you see, do you see where I'm at with it?

• 3:16Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 3:17Nilay Patel?

  So the evidence that it was one single blade was there at the launch day when the videos from Marquez and Jason came out and I think Motor Trend had one too. I just couldn't, I couldn't be like, this is what solved the mystery. I just, in my heart, do you know, do you know?

• 3:32Alex Cranz?

  A floppy blade can't solve a mystery. I understand. I understand.

• 3:36David Pierce?

  After all this work, it's just a floppy blade.

• 3:39Nilay Patel?

  So then this week, and people are sending to me and I appreciate all the Cybertruck wiper detectives out there. This week, the parts manual for the Cybertruck went online. What's interesting about it is some people can see prices in it and we cannot.

• 3:54David Pierce?

  Oh.

• 3:55Nilay Patel?

  So, Umar Shakir and our staff has a Tesla Mon 3 logged in with his account, can't see the prices. On Twitter, people are going through it and they can see the prices. There's a discrepancy there. We're digging into why. Well, if you know why, please email us at [email protected]. But in there, Cybertruck wiper, single blade, $79, which in the grand scheme of luxury vehicle wiper blades is not that high, but I would just ask you to look into your heart. Imagine a triangle and decide if you think the Cybertruck wiper should cost as much as like a BMW M3 wiper. You just tell me. I don't know the answer to that question.

• 4:34Alex Cranz?

  I mean, a BMW, yes, it should.

• 4:37David Pierce?

  Wow.

• 4:37Alex Cranz?

  Same kind of person.

• 4:39Nilay Patel?

  Rough. And that's the Vergecast, everybody. That's Alex Trans. It's [email protected].

• 4:46Alex Cranz?

  You all read idiots in cars on Reddit. You know what I'm saying.

• 4:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. How much does the turn signal stock cost to be all right? I do read it. Anyway, that's the Cybertruck wiper news. We believe based on the available evidence. And it is a single floppy blade.

• 5:04Nilay Patel?

  I don't know, man. I just, I, you watch the video. There's a video of Marquez driving it through the rain and his video is really good, but you should watch them all. It's fun. Even though Jason one is really fun, though. The production value is very high. Um, he's, he's wiping and you can see it bending as it wipes. And then you're like, if anything, if there's something other than rain, for example, snow or ice, is the thing just gonna bend at the halfway point? I don't know, man. I, I don't know.

• 5:33Alex Cranz?

  It's like a scoop.

• 5:34Nilay Patel?

  I don't want to review this truck at all. I understand there's four wheel steering under it and it's 48 volt. I understand it's steer by wire. There's technology. You can hit it with a hammer, whatever you want. I just want to use the wiper. If anybody can, Alexis Ohanian, I'm talking to you, bud. One, can I meet your wife? Two, can I, can I try your Cybertruck?

• 5:54David Pierce?

  This is once again getting into, uh, Neelai's forever vision of reviewing cars without ever going anywhere in them. Neelai just wants to sit inside of a car that is not going anywhere and review it that way.

• 6:06Nilay Patel?

  Just push, push all the buttons sequentially. It will be great. All right. That's the Cybertruck update for this week. Once again, The Verge is your number one source of Cybertruck wiper news and it's all thanks to listeners like you. Vergecast at the verge.com. All right. Big week for low stakes Twitter drama, or yeah, big week for low stakes, Apple drama. Although I think if you're on Apple's security team, maybe this isn't so low stakes for you. David, tell the people what is going on with Beeper Mini and iMessage.

• 6:34David Pierce?

  Okay. So last week, uh, you guys that were on the pod talking about this new app Beeper Mini that came out from this company Beeper that if you listen to the Vergecast, you've heard us talk about a few times. It's like a universal messaging app. And they had come out with a new app called Beeper Mini for Android that made you completely seamlessly a blue bubble on iOS. Big deal meant you could send native iMessages to iPhone users. It would fix your group chats, like huge win. Everybody got very excited. Uh, Apple. Didn't say anything when it came out, has not really said anything over months about these apps in general. Like Beeper's been kind of making noise about how it's hacking iMessage for a while. Text.com is a thing that exists. Sunbird and Nothing did that weird thing not

• 7:18David Pierce?

  that long ago. Apple really hasn't said anything. And I and others on our team have been pestering Apple for weeks to say something about this. Like this, if Apple is the security-focused company it believes it is, it should have something to say about whether these are a good idea or not. We didn't hear anything for a long time. And then last Friday, right after you guys published the Vergecast, because the news is a fun and fickle thing, it started to become clear that Beeper Mini was not working anymore. People couldn't send messages. And the ongoing assumption was that Apple had found a way to shut it down. The Beeper team starts like furiously trying to fix it. Eric Majakovsky, the founder, is talking to everyone he can find who will listen to him about why Apple should not shut this

• 8:03David Pierce?

  down, why it's good for the world, why it's making things more secure, even for iPhone users, on and on and on. On Saturday, as I'm sitting in the HyperX Esports Arena in Las Vegas, waiting for the World Excel Championships, which is a thing I'm sure we will talk more about in the future, I get a note from Apple saying, finally, we have something to say. And basically, what Apple did was confirm that they took steps to shut down Beeper Mini, and kind of without saying in exactly those words, said they intend to keep doing so. And that has sparked this whole fight, where Beeper then spent the next few days trying to get back up and running. Apple seems to have kind of taken steps to shut it down

• 8:44David Pierce?

  again after it got up and running. Beeper got a version of it that was still functional, but less impressive, where you still had to use an Apple ID, and you were only messaging from your email, not your phone number. So it's kind of a half measure. And basically, we're now in this like cat and mouse game, where Beeper is both like on principle and for the sake of its product, deeply committed to the idea of getting iMessage working. And Apple has made very clear that it is not going to allow that to happen. And it's perfectly possible that things will change eight more times between when I am saying this and when you hear this podcast. But as of right now, that's where we stand. Like, two sides fundamentally at odds, and neither one really has even a move to back down at this point.

• 9:24Nilay Patel?

  Let me just read this statement from Apple, because I think it's fascinating. And again, this was sent to David while he was at the Excel World Championships and he messaged me at what I believe was 9:00 PM on a Friday night saying, can you edit this? I'm at, I'm in Las Vegas. Just an incredible message to receive. All right, here's the whole statement from, from Apple. At Apple, we build our products and services with industry-leading privacy and security technologies designed to give users control of their data and keep personal information safe. We took steps to protect our users by blocking techniques that exploit fake credentials in order to gain access to iMessage. These techniques pose significant risks to user security and privacy, including the

• 10:05Nilay Patel?

  potential for metadata exposure and enabling unwanted messages, spam, and phishing attacks. We will continue to make updates in the future to protect our user. So this is a really interesting statement to me. One, it exists. That's, that's something. It's not nothing, right?

• 10:26David Pierce?

  We, people should know, this is worth saying out loud. I'm sure we have said this in the past, but like, we ask Apple to comment on things that happen in and around the Apple world all the time. And the vast majority of the time, we get absolutely nothing. Occasionally, we will get a, like, we declined to comment, and then you get that, like, canned statement that Apple says every once in a while when they acquire a company. That's just like, Apple acquires companies from time to time and just generally a comment on the merger for acquisitions. So yeah, the very existence of a multiple-sentence comment from Apple is unbelievably unusual.

• 11:00Nilay Patel?

  So that's just one thing, like, the amount, the amount of pure signal from this statement existing is very high. Apple felt like it needed to shut this down. It felt like it needed to explain why. And, you know, everyone knows about our background rules. We said, put a name on it, and they put a name on it. Great. Then it explains how they blocked it, which is super interesting, right? There's a level of technical detail in here. They block techniques that exploit fake credentials in order to gain access to iMessage. I'll come back to that. Then it explains why Beeper is dangerous in Apple's view.

• 11:37Nilay Patel?

  They don't have to do that, right? There's something in there where Apple felt like they have to say there are risks to security and privacy and what those risks are. Metadata exposure, enabling unwanted messages, spam and phishing attacks. This is vastly more information than anyone actually needs, or that honestly, that Apple was like, these are their servers. You can feel however you want to, but one totally legitimate avenue for Apple to take here is to say, we locked down access to our servers or our servers go away. And Apple has done things like that a million times. Yeah. Like, we're having this conversation in the context of Epic v.

• 12:22Nilay Patel?

  Google, which was preceded by Epic v. Apple. You will recall, Apple responded to Epic launching an app billing system on iOS by shutting down access to Unreal Engine. Yep. Like, this is not a company that acts lightly when it acts. So I want to talk about the why just really quickly, and then I want to go back to the how, because the how is important, especially with how Beeper is getting around it now. The why here, I think they have to say why, because there was demand for Beeper Mini. There were people, lots and lots and lots and lots of people were excited about it. They want this product.

• 13:03Nilay Patel?

  So for Apple to take it away from them, they had to provide some reasons for why it's being disallowed, why an experience is being broken that people liked and people wanted. And those reasons have to be good. And in general, when it comes to large companies and their servers, the thing they turn to is security. Yep. And the security argument might be valid. I'm just saying, in general, when they're like, what's a morally unimpeachable reason for doing whatever we want? The answer is always security. And so I don't know what the actual potential for metadata exposure is. That's a weird one, especially because Apple right now is in a bit of crisis over the cops just asking for push notification data and getting it without warrants.

• 13:46David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 13:47Nilay Patel?

  That's a, that's a real problem in iOS. Apple's plugging that hole, changing some policy, but that was a real problem. Like if you're worried about metadata exposure, there's, there are bigger fish to fry. But this is really interesting, right? They're, they're laying out metadata exposure, which is basically the cops asking for metadata from companies that don't have the resources to fight back like Beeper, and then all this enabling a bunch of stuff. So that's the why. And you can, you can evaluate the why on your own, but big companies often turn to security, Apple turn to security. Then there's the how. We block techniques that exploit fake credentials. So Beeper was coming up with what fake serial numbers of?

• 14:24Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they were using like serial, they were spoofing serial numbers that already existed for, for like Mac products, Apple.

• 14:31Nilay Patel?

  And this is the thing that enabled them to just register any phone number, time message, right? You did not need an Apple ID. So now you do need an Apple ID and it's tied to an email address. And I truly wonder if there is still a fake credential or an old serial number in the mix and whether Apple will be able to stop it.

• 14:51David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's hard to know because I think Eric and the Beeper team have gotten maybe not surprisingly less open about how all of this works. They were very confident 10 days ago. They put out a whole big like white paper about how the tech worked. A lot of it was open source. They're like, this is what we did and how we did it. And the assumption was we're, they're only being dishonest because there's nothing Apple can do about it. Right? So that was like the line going around was if Apple wanted to stop this, it would have to shut down a huge portion of iMessage. Turns out not the case. So Beeper has definitely like locked down some of its explanation, but what it used to do in the early days of Beeper was just sign you into your Apple ID on a Mac Mini in a server rack somewhere.

• 15:35David Pierce?

  That is, in every way you can think about it, insecure, right? Like, it meant, it meant your messages and your Apple ID information was sitting on a computer that you did not own, like straightforward insecurity. What Beeper says now is that it's figured out kind of a good middle ground, how to take some of that on-device encryption and added security in Beeper Mini and applied it back to, to some extent, the old way of doing things. It's not on a Mac Mini anymore, it's still on your device, but they're going, it seems like, through the same old login through your Apple ID stuff as they used to. So they found kind of a, a half measure that seems to solve some problems, but it, it screws up the main thing, which is it no longer works with your phone number.

• 16:18David Pierce?

  Like Eric has been texting me this week from his Gmail account, which is not the same as your phone number. It's just not. And so Beeper Mini is like, kind of a kneecapped version of what it once was, but it does seem to have, at least if you believe Beeper, and that is kind of the open question, is it, it is back in a lot of the right security practices here, which is good.

• 16:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. The one thing that I think is fascinating about this entire ordeal, and then we should just move on, because this is just gonna be a cat mask game for a long time. Beeper is very confident in their technical solution, right? And that turned out to not be the case. And now they're very confident in this technical solution, maybe they'll get back to phone numbers and whatever. That is the technical side of this. Can Apple defeat this exploit? Maybe they can, maybe they can't, maybe it will be cat mask forever. Feels like it'll be cat mask forever. There is a gigantic legal problem here, right? Like Beeper users are now just accessing Apple servers without permission. And Apple has lawyers, I don't know if anybody is aware of this. There's, there's quite a few of them. They are not shy.

• 17:26Nilay Patel?

  And I think that this is probably, that's probably the last resort here. Again, just the presence of this statement indicates to me that Apple knows it has to explain its behavior in blocking this on a technical level. If they can't do that and they have to resort to a legal level or a contractual level, right, to say, okay, if you, on RealEngine, if you are using, if you're using our servers in an unapproved way, we're just gonna turn off your Apple IDs. You're done. You're out. That's just a contractual thing they can do. You broke our Terms of Service. You're done. No more, no more access to your photos. They could do it, right? Other platforms do

• 18:08Nilay Patel?

  stuff like that all the time. Do you want them to? Like, I don't think they want to do that to people. If they go ahead and sue Beeper for a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which is a very controversial statute, like, that's not like a cut and dry, you're morally correct when you invoke the CFAA. Do you want to have that fight? Do you want to go to court again? I can send Sean to that courtroom, too. Storystreams are great, you know? I just think Apple would prefer to defeat this on a technical level, and I think Beeper would prefer to fight this on a technical level. There is a whole set of other levels that is vastly more complicated that Apple has not touched yet. And I'm actually kind of shocked. They haven't even sent the letter to Beeper yet that's like, stop it.

• 18:51Alex Cranz?

  I mean, they

• 18:52Nilay Patel?

  Like, that to me is

• 18:53Alex Cranz?

  They could have. They just haven't told us.

• 18:55Nilay Patel?

  I think, I think Eric would happily publish that letter.

• 18:58David Pierce?

  Yeah, I agree with that. That would be out there. Well, I think, on the one hand, I think the reason Apple hasn't done that yet is the thing that Beeper is holding on to, which is that people want Beeper. Like, I think if you just subtract all of this away, and it's like, okay, what should the world look like? Beeper's right, right? Like, the, I want to live in a world where Beeper Mini exists. It is better. Interoperable messaging is better. Cross-platform messaging is better. The whole green bubble, blue bubble thing is stupid, and we should do whatever it takes to get rid of it. I believe all of those things. I also believe Apple is absolutely within its right to shut it all down, right? Like, both of those things are true. I think Apple

• 19:38David Pierce?

  Has started to pick a public fight here that Beeper can make very ugly for it if it wants to. And Apple will fight those fights if it comes to it. It will, it will pick a privacy fight in the court of public opinion or in literal court when it comes to it. But that's a pretty big battle. And Eric and Beeper have proven they're willing to be very loud about this and they're willing to be very principled in their argument for an open internet. And that's just a hard fight to fight if you're Apple without looking like the bad guy.

• 20:09Alex Cranz?

  Well, they have an obligation.

• 20:10David Pierce?

  Yeah, because they kind of are the bad guy. They're allowed to be the bad guy. They're well within their right to be the bad guy, but they will look like the bad guy if they pick this fight.

• 20:19Alex Cranz?

  But Apple kind of has to pick it a little bit, right? Because it does have the regulators in the EU. It has regulators looking in the United States. And one of its big defenses for all of its really like, kind of bad practices is that it's security, security, security. So anytime there is like these security moments, they, they have to do it. Otherwise, that argument falls apart in all those other places, right?

• 20:41David Pierce?

  Right. But I think the, the more aggressively and loudly Apple

• 20:48Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 20:48David Pierce?

  picks a fight with Beeper, the worse it's going to look doing so, right? Because it's one thing to say, we're doing something to protect our users. It's another thing to say, we are out to destroy this startup full of people who just want to make messaging better.

• 21:02Alex Cranz?

  Well, it's very similar to jailbreaking where like they, they weren't necessarily always going out and, and sending letters to jailbreakers. They were usually closing those holes quietly. And then people would get upset and then they would just slowly start taking all of the good stuff from jailbreaking and put it into, to Apple, to the point where like, nobody really jailbreaks phones as often anymore because you don't have to like, you don't get anything of real value for the majority of people. And it feels like that's kind of the same thing here where they can just like, keep making like this, if the solution for Beeper becomes like unwieldy enough, then Beeper goes away because nobody wants to just be sending texts via their, their email. And, and Apple wins in kind

• 21:44Alex Cranz?

  of that similar jailbreak way of just like, well, if the other, if the option's crummy enough, do you really want to do it? And most Apple users are like, Nah, I'll just go to Android.

• 21:53David Pierce?

  Totally. And we're kind of headed down that road now, right? Like even the Beeper team has been tweeting as this has all gone back and forth. Like, we understand this is a pain. We're, we get it if you want to bail while we try to figure this out. Like, we will figure this out. Like, they're clearly feeling the hit of how complicated Apple is making their lives.

• 22:11Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 22:11David Pierce?

  But at the same time, Elizabeth Warren is out here tweeting about Beeper and what is happening to green bubbles and blue bubbles, which is like...

• 22:20Alex Cranz?

  It's hysterical.

• 22:21David Pierce?

  This, this might be a fight coming for Apple in a way that it doesn't want and is probably not likely to try and look like the heavy on more than it has to. I don't know. I don't think this is anywhere near over.

• 22:34Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 22:34David Pierce?

  I, my guess would be Beeper Mini never gets back to being what it was, but this fight gets louder and uglier in other directions. And I have no idea where it lands.

• 22:43Alex Cranz?

  That feels right.

• 22:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I, I get the feeling that Apple is gonna just end up leaning on RCS support to solve all these problems, right? This is why they're doing it. They, they basically made this horse trade with European regulators. We're gonna support RCS and you're not gonna make us open up iMessage in exactly the way that Beeper is trying to open up iMessage. And eventually, they will kill Beeper. It just seems like the question is whether they can do it on a technical level or whether they have to resort to the more aggressive legal level. I, I, I think the fact that they already conceded the RCS question means that they're not gonna hesitate to kill it. They're gonna maybe hesitate in how fast they kill it and hope and probably assume that they will do it on a technical level

• 23:28Nilay Patel?

  with what feels like an unimpeachable security rationale rather than a legal level and what feels like a, you know, much less fun business rationale.

• 23:38David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 23:39Nilay Patel?

  This thing preserves our lock-in, right? That's the answer.

• 23:41David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 23:42Nilay Patel?

  Like, we have the emails from Eddie Q to Phil Schiller, where Eddie Q is like, "We should open up iMessage to Android." And Phil Schiller's, I believe it was Phil Schiller. Uh, it was Phil or Craig, uh, writes back, "This is the thing that parents hand down their iPhones to their kids for."

• 23:57David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 23:58Nilay Patel?

  So, no. And that's just as dead on as it gets. And I, a lawsuit based on that seems way less fun than a bunch of engineers fighting. Alex, by the way, to your point about jailbreaking, a huge number of members of the jail, a huge number of the jailbreak community was Apple engineers.

• 24:16Alex Cranz?

  Oh, really?

• 24:16Nilay Patel?

  And I think there's a, I think, I think, I think Apple knew this.

• 24:22Nilay Patel?

  There was, there was a lot of, yeah, there's some, there's some stories in the Engage, you guys, but we'll set those aside. That's what I'll say. I don't remember how off the record stories are. That's what I'm trying to tell you. They're so long ago that I don't remember if they were secrets or not, but it is true, just on its face. If you go back and dig through it, a substantial amount of the jailbreak community was reliant on Apple engineers, which is fascinating.

• 24:48Alex Cranz?

  So Beeper, that's, that's your answer?

• 24:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, jailbreak the iPhone. That's your answer. All right. Let's talk about other messaging news, which is much more exciting, but also about interoperability, which is Activity Pub had a big moment today. Mastodon had a big moment today. Threads had a big moment today. David, what's going on there?

• 25:06David Pierce?

  So the biggest thing that, well, two big things happened to Threads this week. One is that it's now available in the EU. So to everyone who has gotten a bunch of new followers putting u's where there should just be o's, that's why. There's tons of those people. And the other thing is Mark Zuckerberg kind of out of nowhere posted on Threads that Threads is now starting to integrate with Activity Pub in a very small way. Basically, you can now read Threads posts from a couple of accounts. It's like Adam Misery and a couple of other meta people right now, but ultimately it'll be everybody who's on Threads. You can read their posts on Mastodon

• 25:45David Pierce?

  or in any other Activity Pub app like that. So this is, this is the first real step in federating Threads with the rest of the Activity Pub universe. And for months, there's been this debate, is Threads ever going to do this? Now that they see it's such a big potential business and it's so successful, maybe they'll walk away. And they have said over and over and over, like, no, we plan to do this for real. And it appears that work is like very seriously underway. People are starting to see Adam Misery's Threads posts in their Mastodon clients, which is kind of mind bending in the coolest way. Like, it's happening. It's the best.

• 26:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, he's at Misery at at threads.net. I saw, I followed him from my Mastodon social account using the Mammoth app. And then I opened my regular Mastodon client and looked at my account and it was there. And I was like, oh, this is the future.

• 26:29David Pierce?

  Yep, that's it. That's the stuff.

• 26:31Nilay Patel?

  Like I'm using multiple clients to access one account and content from another server entirely that is owned by Meta is showing up here, including a video, right? The first thing he posted was a video.

• 26:41David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 26:43Nilay Patel?

  And then a bunch of other threads, folks, including their engineers, are posting like little jokes, like it went from 404 to 200. And you can tell they're just like playing with it. Now, the the cool stuff is not there yet, right? Like, this has been enabled on the level of what you might think of as RSS right now.

• 26:59David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 27:00Nilay Patel?

  So they publish something on the thread server. Another server can pull it in. There's no interactivity. There's no true interoperability, right? You're just kind of pulling some content down.

• 27:10David Pierce?

  Right.

• 27:11Nilay Patel?

  That's still a big deal, right? And for a company like Meta to be like, we will publish a syndicated feed of content from our platforms, our social platforms, still like a big deal, but it's not the thing.

• 27:22David Pierce?

  Well, and the beauty of it is, this is the part that Meta has the least incentive to do, right? Like, all of the rest of it is better for Meta. Like, the thing where, in theory, like you described, you can read Adam's posts on threads in your Mastodon app that is a third-party app. What Meta wants, and what's ultimately good for Meta's business, is when you can like or reply to that stuff, and it funnels all the way back through that whole stack to threads. Right? So Adam can be in threads, and you can be in Mammoth, and you can have a conversation with each other. That's where all of this wins. So you wouldn't do the thing where you just let your content go other places without real commitment to building all the stuff that brings it back and all the account sharing stuff they're going to want to do because it'll bring people to threads, because threads is the best platform for it.

• 28:06David Pierce?

  Like, this is not the one part of it you would do if you weren't committed to doing the rest of it.

• 28:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and I agree with you. I think what I had pointed out is the other part's way harder. Building an RSS feed is pretty easy, right?

• 28:18David Pierce?

  Way harder.

• 28:18Nilay Patel?

  The part, the part where you're like, okay, someone hit like in Mammoth or Ivory or whatever Mastodon client, that like funneled to their server, which then talked back to our server, and that like showed up on the Threads app for somebody. That's very complicated. There are real security challenges there. There are real content moderation challenges there. It's not just likes. It's also comments and replies, reposts, like all that stuff. As you bring it back on to your server, you have to moderate it, you have to care about it, whatever. And I think that's the stuff that's yet to build. But you are correct that that is the stuff that accrues value back to Meta. Cause it makes their community ultimately more vibrant.

• 28:58Nilay Patel?

  And I think what Meta thinks it's going to sell is better product design, better user experience, better advertising, all this stuff. Which, you know, if you're Meta, it's a pretty good bet to make that you will outdo a handful of Mastodon server admins on things like content moderation and advertising integration.

• 29:15David Pierce?

  Yeah, it was really interesting. I went back and when I was writing the post about this was just pulling some of Meta's old quotes about this stuff from the last six months or so, as they've been talking about this. And they've been surprisingly consistent in a way I didn't even realize. Like Mark Zuckerberg in particular has talked about this as a creator play. The idea is that this network of open systems is what creators are going to want. Because they've understood too many times that if you build an audience in one place that is captive to that one place, people will eventually leave or that place will fall apart or whatever. And then you have to start from nothing and nobody wants that. And so what Mark and Adam Mosseri have continued to say is the future is these more portable, more interconnected systems. And what Meta is betting is that it can build creator tools, right?

• 30:00David Pierce?

  It can build the best stuff to use to post. It can build the best AI things. It can like bring Tom Brady into your life in a weird AI way. It can monetize you better. Like Meta is actually sort of divorcing the idea of social networking is a good business, which it turns out it's not, everybody has figured this out. And leaning into, we're going to outsource all of the like hanging out with your friends bits of this. And we're just going to win at how people make money on these platforms. And I actually think if I'm Meta, that's a pretty good bet. Because Meta has proven over and over, it's better at that than everybody.

• 30:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and I think it also creates opportunities for those creators or media companies in different ways. Like, everyone knows what I, we're gonna do it somehow. I don't know how we're gonna do it, but.

• 30:43David Pierce?

  If you keep saying it, it'll eventually happen.

• 30:45Nilay Patel?

  It's, I'm just gonna horsepower this thing into existence. Look, we had, I'll just give you some inside baseball. Our company had an all hands today just before we're recording. And our CEO said the word Fediverse during the all hands. And I was like, I did it.

• 30:56David Pierce?

  He did kind of say it like it was written on a piece of paper in front of him, but he'd never seen it before.

• 31:00Nilay Patel?

  Like I was standing behind the curtain with a knife, you know, like say it.

• 31:08Nilay Patel?

  That just means I've said it enough. The other people think they should say it, which is victory one. But I'll just use another example. Threads lately has been very thirsty for sports threads.

• 31:19David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 31:19Nilay Patel?

  I don't know if you know this, they started, there are a bunch of F1 fans over there. So they, even in Mousary's video about launching in Europe today, he's like, we want to bring, sports communities are deeply rooted in Europe, like F1.

• 31:29David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 31:30Nilay Patel?

  Which is an amazing way to say F1 is kind of fussy.

• 31:33David Pierce?

  They did a whole thing with the NBA at the in-season tournament, the other thing that was happening in Vegas while I was there, they were like, they were a big sponsor, they brought in all the ESPN people. ESPN's having this fight with Elon Musk and Twitter. So they're all kind of like, it's a, it's a thing that's happening.

• 31:47Nilay Patel?

  So if I was running ESPN today, I would not be like, you can have my reporters for free. Right? You, Woj is not going to tweet scoops for free on threads, the way that he's been doing for Twitter. I'm setting up a Mastodon server and you can federate with us if you pay us the money for access to the people. And that is just a new way of thinking about these businesses that it, I, you know, a bunch of media executives like, don't like thinking in new ways. They're like, what if we make YouTube videos? Like, that's like how they all think. Have you heard of this platform? It's called TikTok. Like, these are the dinners I go to. But they are all starting to think now, okay, well, how do we actually get paid

• 32:29Nilay Patel?

  for the stuff beyond just being like, we can make it go viral better than anybody else? And so there's just new opportunities for companies, for creators, to stand up their own services and say, look, if you want access to us, like, we need some revenue sharing terms, or you need to let us put advertising into our feeds. The same way that you let Instagram creators put advertising into their feeds. And I just said, I don't know if any of that's going to work. I truly do not know if any of that's going to work. I know that it's new. And no one has actually like, I can't point to anything else that has ever worked like that. And I can't point to anything else that could work like that. And so like, new things are just like fundamentally exciting to me. Cause I think the way it shakes out

• 33:08Nilay Patel?

  will be different, or potentially better, or potentially way worse. But it's new. Like, I'm just on a hunt for new, like, we've been doing, we've been doing it the platform way for like 10 years. Now, we just ran our big package on Twitter being dead, which. I don't know if people caught, but Twitter is dead.

• 33:26David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 33:26Nilay Patel?

  It's not that we called it dead. Elon Musk killed the company and he renamed it X. Linda Iaccarino was on our stage at Code and she's like, Twitter is dead. It's called X now. Okay, Twitter's dead. This is it, whatever. But inside of that, I wrote a big piece about just like what the platform era of media did to all of us. And it just Ezra Klein is in that and we talked about it on the Wednesday show. But I just repeat this. He's like, Twitter increased the scale of our communication and it reduced our ability to communicate. And what if we just like did some other stuff? And I, I promise you this activity pub stuff. It's at least the thing that creates the opportunity for people to think in new and different ways.

• 34:08Nilay Patel?

  It might not be the thing, it might not work, but I just, I just have not seen so many people having new ideas about the internet in a long time.

• 34:17Alex Cranz?

  Well, about social media in particular, but I kind of have one big question about this whole integration. What happens for people who have like a lot of followers on Mastodon and also have a threads account? What do they do?

• 34:32David Pierce?

  So this is, I would argue, one of the most fun conversations about this right now because no one knows the answer to that question. Because there, there is a way of thinking about it that is like, I have one omnibus Fediverse account, right? That it is, it is my, it would be the equivalent of having one account that worked across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok and everywhere else, right? Your single account. You can actually make a really good case that that doesn't make any sense, that actually what you're going to want is a couple of different accounts in different places. And that the upside is that you choose where you post and to what. And so like you could use your Mastodon account for just like tweeting about the cool new glasses that you got. And your threads account could be your work account and that maybe those things being separate is useful.

• 35:15David Pierce?

  But the upside of it is that if I want to read your work account where I have my personal account, I can, right? So it's all sort of platform agnostic, but there might be a world in which people want lots of different accounts for different uses. But that just gets bonkers.

• 35:31David Pierce?

  Like, oh, I have 10 accounts for 10 different things, but you can access any of them from anywhere. It's like the UI of that totally falls apart if we don't do it correctly. So I don't know. My guess would be if I had to bet on something, I would guess that a lot of people will get threads accounts because threads is going to be, it's going to be the Gmail of this space for a while. And then it'll just be sort of the default one to have. And then we'll get to see how it plays out in lots of different directions. But right now, like, I think a lot of us, we've talked about this on the show, we sort of bet on threads, betting A, that it would eventually integrate with Activity Pub, and B, that it was probably going to be the biggest platform for a while. And there are real values to being on the biggest platform. So like, I've spent more time on threads than Mastodon.

• 36:16David Pierce?

  So when it comes to it, I will probably end up investing more in my threads account over time than my Mastodon account. But will I keep the Mast... I don't know. This is all so weird. And this is why it's fun. Like, to Neelai's point, like, this is a new thing we've never actually had to figure out before.

• 36:30Alex Cranz?

  I've been talking with other friends about this too, because like, I don't, I never really used Mastodon. I've got like an account there, but it just is like a placeholder of more than anything else. But I know people who are like very, very active on Mastodon. And as they started seeing threads getting bigger, they're like, okay, I'll go start an account there. And so now they're active on both. And one, how do you have the energy?

• 36:48David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 36:49Alex Cranz?

  But two, like, I was like, well, what's the calculus then? Like, when, when, when this all interacts, do you maintain both accounts? Do you kill it? And they're like, I genuinely don't know.

• 36:59David Pierce?

  I don't think anybody does.

• 37:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 37:00Alex Cranz?

  And I go, oh, yeah.

• 37:01Nilay Patel?

  I think there's some real value to having different places for different things.

• 37:08Alex Cranz?

  100%.

• 37:10Nilay Patel?

  And I agree with you. I do not know how people are like being goblins on Blue Sky and then being whatever LinkedIn version of themselves they are on threads.

• 37:18David Pierce?

  Also goblins. Different kind of goblin, but still pretty goblin.

• 37:21Alex Cranz?

  There were like a little tie on, on threads.

• 37:26Nilay Patel?

  But like, I can see a world, again, I don't know if any of this will work. I don't know if this is a good idea. I don't even know if we can build any of this. But I can just see a world where my work personality tweeting about tech and silliness happens at, you know, [email protected]. And you can follow that on threads. And that shows up in our homepage. And those are quick posts. And those get federated. And you can, you can just follow me where you are. And then tweeting about Aaron Rodgers happens somewhere else, right?

• 37:55David Pierce?

  Right.

• 37:55Nilay Patel?

  Um, and that just seems better. And maybe, maybe you want to slam all that stuff together. Maybe some people will, but it just feels like for too long, we have just slammed too many things together.

• 38:09Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 38:09Nilay Patel?

  And actually being like, okay, I've built one distribution channel for one kind of audience that I can cultivate and grow. I can build another distribution channel for my friends or my family that isn't like a wholesale platform shift. Like I'm this person on Instagram in the format of short videos. I'm this person on Twitter in the format of deeply snarky text posts.

• 38:34Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 38:34Nilay Patel?

  Like I'm the most nihilistic version of myself on Twitter and I'm this person on threat. Like that, having the format dictate what kind of thing you're doing, I think has forced, just, it just caused a lot of weird shit to happen.

• 38:48Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 38:49Nilay Patel?

  And I think saying, okay, you can have lots of different feeds, you have lots of different accounts and you can add, you're kind of format independent, but you're chasing different things. It got new. I don't have any of that's gonna work.

• 38:58Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Well, I, I think the thing that, that trips me up there is, is you know, this kind of stuff, we've been doing more than one account for a while now, right? Like Finsta accounts and stuff like that. But what happens is people inevitably go and have that one account because that's where they have the most interaction.

• 39:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 39:14Alex Cranz?

  And so like, are you really gonna want to take your reckless at green bay packers dot social account and, and only use that when you have like 50 followers who are there who also have the same feelings about Aaron Rodgers? I assume more than 50 people have those feelings.

• 39:33Nilay Patel?

  They do.

• 39:34Alex Cranz?

  But like, is, you know, are you gonna want to do that? And then when you have this much bigger mouthpiece over here? And I'm just really curious how people are gonna do, feel about that.

• 39:42Nilay Patel?

  I feel, I just want to say this now, and this is, I apologize.

• 39:46Alex Cranz?

  Is it about Aaron Rodgers?

• 39:47Nilay Patel?

  I've given him even more attention. Let's talk about Jordan Love, or as I call him, Flagheart. He's great. I need an account just for that, just to make Flagheart. Flagheart dot social. When you, when you type Jordan Love's name into the iPhone to text your, for your group chat about it, it replaces it with a Jordanian flag and a heart icon. So now we just call him Flagheart. It's very good. We can make this happen together.

• 40:11Nilay Patel?

  Jordan, if you're listening, and I know that you are. Alexis, can I meet your wife and Jordan Love and drive your truck?

• 40:19Nilay Patel?

  That's a road trip I would enjoy. I would go on that trip in a heartbeat. Just the weirdest four people in a Cybertruck.

• 40:28Nilay Patel?

  Dead quiet. So two of you are world-class athletes.

• 40:37Nilay Patel?

  Both of us were very active on Reddit when we were young.

• 40:47Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, I'm excited about it. I think it's really fun. If you have a massive account, just like, do it. Do the thing. Follow. Messer is already the third most followed person in the Fediverse by one chart that I saw. Which is wild. Yeah. Follow some people on threads. Like, just try it out. Like, it will change your brain a little bit, right? It's like a follow button that you just don't expect to exist. And you're like, oh, this is better. Like, there's just something better about it. Being like, oh, I'm in much more control of this situation. I don't know. I think it's gonna be, I don't know about great, but it's gonna be different, and I'm definitely in the market for different. Yeah, agreed. Same. All right, we gotta take a break. When we come back, Sean Hollister's gonna tell us all about Epic versus Google. We'll be right back.

• 41:35Speaker 00

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• 42:36Nilay Patel?

  We're back. Sean Hollister, welcome to the Rich Cast.

• 42:39Speaker 06

  Thank you for having me yet again.

• 42:41Nilay Patel?

  I'm very excited to talk to you. You spent every single day in the courtroom for the Epic v. Google trial. You were there when the verdict came in, which was very fast.

• 42:50David Pierce?

  Was it like a month was the whole thing, Sean? How long?

• 42:52Speaker 06

  I spent a fortnight in Fortnite court because it was, it was 14 actual days of big in court. I know a fortnight includes nights too, whatever. But yes, the trial lasted like four weeks, plus like one day. We had Fridays off, but I spent 14 actual days in the courtroom. And on this last day, we expected the verdict might come in quickly for Google. And it came in quickly for Epic and none of me, not myself, not any of the other courtroom reporters expected that. That was a huge surprise.

• 43:29Nilay Patel?

  So I just want to congratulate Sean here inside baseball. Sean beat everyone by minutes, if not hours, to publishing the story of the verdict. So congratulations, Sean. Well, well played.

• 43:40Speaker 06

  The power of a pre-written stuff.

• 43:42Nilay Patel?

  Don't tell the people how we do it.

• 43:45David Pierce?

  Sean wrote 65 stories for every possible outcome.

• 43:48Nilay Patel?

  Sean Hollister in the multiverse.

• 43:50Speaker 06

  It was, it was four, a pre-wrote four stories.

• 43:55David Pierce?

  So there's a version where Google wins, one where Epic wins, one where like the courtroom explodes. And then one where the judge is just like, never mind, get out.

• 44:03Nilay Patel?

  All of you buy iPhones. Get out of my face.

• 44:06Speaker 06

  Exactly.

• 44:09Nilay Patel?

  So Epic won. It was a runaway victory that Google found for it on every claim. That's the headline. Let's back up here. A lot of people are very familiar with Apple v. Epic in which Apple won on virtually every claim. There are some key differences in the trial. What were these cases about and what were those differences?

• 44:31Speaker 06

  Oh, my gosh. So I actually have an outline of the differences because this is the question on everybody's mind. How could Google possibly have lost this case when Apple won? Isn't Apple the obvious monopolist with the walled garden and everything like that? But a whole bunch of things that I'd heard and read told me that these were very different. First off, the lawyers for both sides were telling me before we began, these are logistically different cases with different evidences, different judges. The Apple verdict doesn't carry any weight here. And not only that, they were not able to bring up the Apple case in the courtroom. The judge said, you don't talk about this. So carries no weight

• 45:14Speaker 06

  at all. The next big thing, of course, is that Google controls its ecosystem with all these third-party business deals, whereas Apple is its own OEM. There are more unfair looking documents in more hands because Google had to like hand out all these contracts to these different companies.

• 45:32David Pierce?

  Well, it just has to like send more emails with more attachments. Like literally, it feels like that was a big part of this.

• 45:38Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 45:39Nilay Patel?

  Emails.

• 45:40Speaker 06

  Absolutely emails.

• 45:41Nilay Patel?

  I'm just telling you, it's one word that means everything and you can buy a shirt.

• 45:44Speaker 06

  We've known this for like ages now. We wrote a piece in what 2011, 2012, one of the first years of The Verge about the Skyhook case where we saw how Google tries to control the ecosystem through all these contracts. But so many of them came out in this moment and so many of them looked unfair. And I don't know if like unfair would have swayed a judge, but I think it may have swayed a jury who looked at these like blatantly unfair. Spotify gets to pay, you know, nothing to Google to be in the Google Play Store while other companies have to pay 26 or 30%. Like that seems blatantly unfair. The jury saw that. They saw Google trying to keep it secret and they didn't like that. Jury in front

• 46:26Speaker 06

  of a bench. That's one of the big things here. They saw that Google had a lot of things to hide. Especially all of these chats between various executives that were being auto-deleted by the corporate policy at the time for document retention. The judge is like, what the fuck, Google? You're supposed to keep the documents for us so that we can look at them in the courtroom. And Google was like, nah, we never change any of that stuff.

• 46:54David Pierce?

  So wait, can I just say one thing about this, actually? Because I was in court for USV Google when Sundar Pichai was testifying, and they brought this up to him, too. And he absolutely won that interaction, which was so fascinating to me because the case that he made essentially was there was this one thread that they brought up with him in which the last thing you see is him saying, can you turn off history, please? And so they turn off history, and that's obviously the end of the thing because they stopped showing it. So they bring this up, and they give Sundar this whole long spiel about, you know, you're destroying evidence, this is a disaster. And his response is essentially, well, did you find any more versions of that happening? And they were like, how would we know? You deleted it. And he was like, well, you found this one because I asked them to turn off history. Did you find any other times where I asked them to turn off history?

• 47:39David Pierce?

  And the lawyer goes, no. And that's the end. And Sundar, just like victorious, sits back. And that immediately went away in USV Google, and it was such a non-issue. But in this one, it just kept being part of the trial.

• 47:51Nilay Patel?

  I want Sean to get into this. I just want to point something out that I think is often forgotten when we cover the legal system. One, we have an audience of tech people, and people believe the legal system is deterministic, like it's an algorithm. Like, you put in some inputs, and you get an output, and you can predict the output. It's not true. I think we've learned over and over again in America over the past couple, not true. Almost completely random, especially when there's a jury involved. And then, I'm a lawyer, and I'm married to a lawyer, and I have a lot of friends who are lawyers, so I'm just going to say this, and we can all just react to it however we want. Some lawyers are better than other lawyers.

• 48:31Nilay Patel?

  And if you're epic, you can afford really good lawyers. And if you are the United States government.

• 48:40Alex Cranz?

  Hire better.

• 48:42Nilay Patel?

  It's just, right, like prosecutors, like you, you just see it. I, you know, it's like, I'm just like, you could just react to that however you want. But you can just see that some lawyers are better than other lawyers. And there's, that's a real difference in these cases for sure.

• 49:01Speaker 06

  Epic afforded some really good lawyers here. I, I was very impressed with how, just how much and how often they put the witnesses on edge and, and turned Google's witnesses against Google and all the, all these things. I was surprised that Google's lawyers didn't have a better defense, but they were in a very difficult position here because Epic spun this whole thing as this tale of good and evil with all of these unfair documents on the table. And Google was left to explain away all these complicated business deals, which might make sense and might, it might've even convinced a judge, hey, this is just normal business practices. You've seen this in your courtroom a thousand times, but the jury hasn't,

• 49:44Speaker 06

  the jury hasn't seen all these unfair deals. And Epic constantly, every Google executive that came into the stand, every Google witness that was there got grilled hard about their emails and about these deleted chats, you know?

• 50:00Alex Cranz?

  Oh, I love it.

• 50:00Speaker 06

  How, how will we ever know what's in your, what's in your chats? You'll never know. So Sundar though, the judge was willing to let Sundar pass the buck. Epic's lawyer was all like, you know, you're, you, you agree that you're responsible for everything that goes on at Google, right? But after the jury filed out of the courtroom, Judge Donato was, you know, okay, okay, Sundar. I, I, I accept that you got bad advice from your lawyers, maybe. But I want the buck to stop with somebody. Bring your chief legal officer into court. So the judge hauled in Google's chief legal officer for over, I want to say over an hour of questioning about how the heck this happened.

• 50:43Speaker 06

  And he did not look good on the stand. Google CLO. Judge was not buying it.

• 50:50Nilay Patel?

  Kent, his name is Kent Walker.

• 50:51Speaker 06

  Kent Walker, yes. Kent Walker, um, uh, uh, uh, Google's, Google's attorney, who's, who's, sorry, Epic's attorney, whose name is escaping me right now, uh, but she was amazing. And, and, and she just, just completely threw him off balance. The judge double teamed Kent Walker with this, with this, this, this attorney and like, you know, I don't understand this either. Can you, can you explain those things you just said to me again, uh, Mr. Walker? And, uh, and he wasn't having any of it. And he ended the, the judge, judge, uh, almost the, one of the penultimate things that Judge DiNata did in the case is he said he's going to personally investigate Google.

• 51:28Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 51:29Speaker 06

  For deleting all these chats and for, for abusing, uh, what, what one, uh, one, one Google lawyer, uh, internally called fake legal privilege. Um, we, we saw a whole bunch of documents during the case that were marked, you know, confidential and privileged, uh, and Google executives, including Sundar Pichai, agreed that the only reason some of these things were marked confidential and privileged was so that they wouldn't be forwarded around the company internally and potentially fall into their hands.

• 51:56Nilay Patel?

  It's not a good sign when a judge, uh, vows to personally investigate your company after the trial is over. So here's what I want to know, Sean, uh, and then we can, we can dive into some of the merits of the case. This was happening, the judge is furious about this. We, we talked about this a couple of weeks ago. We're seeing all these documents. You wrote a great recap of all the documents, all the deals. The judge instructs the jury, like, you can interpret the lack of documentation and the hiding any way you want, which is a big wink, wink on how to interpret them. And yet everyone thought Google would win. Why? Like, that's the part that does, why, why was the vibe in the courtroom that Google would win quickly here?

• 52:37Speaker 06

  I think the vibe in the courtroom was that Google would win because of the key question that we always ask in an antitrust trial. Market definition. Google's been arguing since the very beginning of the case that whatever it did, it was justified because it does all these things to, so that Android can compete with the iPhone. And if you say the market definition here is iPhone versus Android, Android is competing with iPhone, consumers are choosing to buy an iPhone versus an Android phone.

• 53:12Speaker 06

  How is Epic going to say, hey, Google, you have a monopoly on phones? Hey, Google, you have a monopoly on apps. Epic wanted everybody to think that Google has a monopoly on Android app distribution, very specifically, and on Android in-app payments, where it kind of does. I mean, yes, there's a Samsung App Store, but Epic convincingly showed that Samsung's App Store accounts for barely any downloads compared to Google's. You know, everybody wants to use Google's.

• 53:39David Pierce?

  Well, and that it's all of that is because of Google's abuse of the system. Right? That Google has done the work to ensure that Samsung and others can't play nicely.

• 53:50Nilay Patel?

  That's the substance of it. I just, for one second, I just want to sit on why everyone thought Google would win. So I read that, right? Okay, that's market definition. Apple just won. Android is technically more open than the iPhone, even if contractually it is not more open, as we've learned. Of course, Google's going to win, right? The phone's more open on its face.

• 54:10Speaker 06

  And in so many ways, too. I mean, it's, yes, you can have your other app store on the phone, but you can also sideload apps since the very beginning of Android. I was holding up my T-Mobile G1 phone. I would download an APK off the Internet and I would put it on there. I don't know if any of us in this room do that these days. Exactly. I don't know if anybody, any of us do it these days because so many things are on the Play Store already, and why wouldn't you go there? But like, the idea that you can put an app on Android's phone so many different ways you can't put on the iPhone, how could Google have a monopoly on Android app distribution?

• 54:44Nilay Patel?

  The other thing that I think is just sort of reverberating here, and I think we all noticed it, was the lack of interest in the Google case compared to the Apple case. Like, the Apple case was like a star-studded, you know, our traffic charts are off the charts every single day. Google burbled along and Sean needed a great, like, a lot of people covered the Google trial by just following Sean in the story stream.

• 55:03Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 55:04Nilay Patel?

  Uh, which is, you know, great, that's the service we provide. But we could see there was a different level of interest. And the thing that I'm honing in on is, one, I think everyone assumes that the companies will always win their antitrust cases, which is wrong. Uh, and then, two, I think people thought it was boring, and it appears that the jury did not think it was boring. Right? This is like the key thing that everyone missed, is the jury was like... Oh, this is pretty exciting and interesting and dramatic, actually.

• 55:32Speaker 06

  Yeah, not only was the jury paying attention throughout almost the entire trial. We saw some yawns and like when a couple of the expert economists came in and spent a while explaining, you know, basic market theories, there were a few yawns, but most of the time they were extremely attentive. They were looking over at the person asking the questions. They were looking over at the witness to see what the answers were. They were looking at the judge. They were looking down at their monitors, looking at all the documents, trying to follow along with some of the slide decks. And they asked questions. Literally today, we got to see a few of the questions that the jurors asked during the case. They wrote notes to the judge and said, hey, can you ask Google how many of the devices

• 56:15Speaker 06

  are in the RSA 3.0 premier tier, which by the way, is the contract that decides whether a OEM can preload another app store or not onto a phone. So they're like, oh, yeah, did Google actually keep anybody from doing that? They cared.

• 56:29Nilay Patel?

  So now let's get to the substance of it, which is the market.

• 56:34Nilay Patel?

  I think everybody thinks the market is iOS versus Android. But here, I think what we are really talking about is Google runs Android. It's a platform. It's open. Anyone can use it. And there actually is a market for Android app distribution. There are other stores. There are other ways to get Android apps on Android phones. There is not a market for iOS app distribution, which I think was a real problem for Epic. They couldn't argue that Apple was unfairly dominating market because no market existed.

• 57:05David Pierce?

  Well, that's why that one became all about payments, right? That was fundamentally the thing. And like the win that Epic got was the anti-steering stuff where you could start to tell Apple users that other ways to pay for things exist. But yeah, in that case, I went back and read a bunch of this and there's so much of it that it's like, Apple was able to get away with so much because specifically it is so incredibly locked down. And Google, we thought Google's relative openness was going to be a reason it was harder for Epic to win. And I think it actually went the other way and gave Epic like a chance to make a case against Google that you just can't do because you have to pry open Apple as a company to do it. And that's not going to work.

• 57:41Speaker 06

  I think that's absolutely right.

• 57:43Alex Cranz?

  We talked about this with the, with the Beeper stuff in the first segment where, where like Apple kind of has an obligation. Their whole brand is we shut everything down. We lock it down and it wins them trial after trial. Like if you look at this and say, oh yeah, if. The minute Google started saying, well, sure, we have a monopoly here, but it's Android and we're competing against iPhone, Google was kind of in trouble because that was never the argument the other side made. And they just kind of like, it felt like almost they ignored the argument that Epic was making to be like, no, no, but see, we're competing against Apple. And it's like, well, why would you make that argument when you really can't bring up Apple that much here? And two, that's not what the people suing you are complaining about.

• 58:27Speaker 06

  Yeah. So, so, so when I was reporting on this case in the courtroom, what I did not understand until the very end, and I don't know if it's always this way, but what I didn't understand until the very end was who is going to decide the market definition and how in a jury trial? In the Apple case, the judge said, well, you know, Epic, we don't, we don't think it's about, you know, iPhone versus Android. It's going to be about mobile game transactions because that's what you're actually suing over, right? V bucks and where they're, where people can buy them and how. And that meant that Epic had to be competing there with other game stores like Nintendo and Sony and Microsoft where

• 59:11Speaker 06

  it already pays the 30%. So why shouldn't you pay 30% here on Apple too? But in this case, the people who got to decide the market definition were the jurors. They got to write it in on the verdict form themselves. And they were steered by the jury instructions and by a lot of the case towards the idea that it would be Epic's chosen market definition of Android app distribution and in-app transactions, in-app mobile payment systems, I mean. And so when they were confronted with that, and the judge was very skeptical of any other theories, like Google, I'm sorry, really wanted you to think that this was not only just about Apple versus Android, but also they had one of their expert economists come

• 59:56Speaker 06

  onto the, under the stand and suggest it was going to be about the facilitation of mobile transactions. And the judge was not having that. The judge was like, isn't what you're saying, doesn't that apply to any transaction on the internet? How does any of that have to do with mobile apps specifically?

• 1:00:15Nilay Patel?

  How do you get a job as an expert economist? You get paid so much money just to be like, look at this chart. It means whatever who's paying me wants it to mean.

• 1:00:26Nilay Patel?

  It just seems like such a good and lucrative gig, right? It's like.

• 1:00:29Speaker 06

  Yeah, we heard like $1,600 an hour for this person to be on, to be delivering their, their statements in court, $1,200 an hour for this person. And it was funny that.

• 1:00:38Nilay Patel?

  The chart is all you.

• 1:00:39Speaker 06

  Every time it was this back and forth between Epic and Google. Hmm, I wonder if we can point out how much their expert is making. Let's point out that they're biased. Bit of a double edged sword there.

• 1:00:50Nilay Patel?

  But, but just to be clear, the market on its face, because it exists, is Android app distribution. It is, there could have been a better and richer Samsung app store, but Google paid some money. There was this idea that, what was it? Epic and Valve and a bunch of other companies, Activision Blizzard, Activision Blizzard would start app stores and compete against Google.

• 1:01:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, they wanted to build the steam of mobile was to compete against Valve. But Epic, Activision Blizzard, I think was Supercell was going to be part of that. They're going to build a steam of mobile, they claimed, and, and, and put that on Android. And then, you know, you'd, you'd buy your games there, maybe.

• 1:01:30Nilay Patel?

  And then Google, Google responded to this with something called Project Hug, where it went and hugged people with money to make them not do it. That's a smooth move. That's what you want to do. It's a hug and you're like, is that getting to be, it's a weird little, oh no, it's just cash.

• 1:01:44Speaker 06

  Well, they hugged them and then slipped the money into their back pocket. Maybe the jury would, would, would, would get that it wasn't exactly a bribe because it's, it's all like these co-marketing arrangements. Here, we'll give you some Google ad credits. And here, here's some revenue sharing over here. And here's, you know, the only, the only company that I think Google directly paid, it was like, here's money for doing the thing. It's just a bribe. Is Motorola and LG. But yes, I mean, it all comes down to, it's harder for anybody else to build the thing because Google is paying someone. It's a bad bribe, but it's a bribe.

• 1:02:14David Pierce?

  And this is why I think the, the fact that it's a jury trial is so fascinating because it's like, there's a series of things in here, right? And I think Project Hug, which you just described, and then the Spotify deal that Google gave Spotify, where it essentially doesn't, actually, can you just explain that really fast? Cause I, I confess, I got hung up on like, what the numbers are about here, but essentially Spotify got a sneaky deal from Google where it essentially didn't have to pay anything to be in the Play Store, right?

• 1:02:40Speaker 06

  That's, that's it. I mean, Spotify, okay. Normally, an app developer pays, what, 30% to be on the Play Store. They pay 15% for their first year or something like that. If it's, and then it's, and then there's a 15% for subscriptions. There's a bunch of ways that Google discounts the rate. But some app developers said, we want to have our own payment system. And Google first said, no, you're not going to have your own payment system. And then they said, well, maybe we'll do this experimental trial thing where some companies get their own payment system and we'll give you a 4% discount. And they called it something choice billing. So if you, if you were on the choice billing, you'd have, Spotify would theoretically

• 1:03:23Speaker 06

  have one system where it pays its 15% to Google for subscriptions or it's 30% for one-time purchases, if that's a thing on Spotify anymore. And then on the, on, on, if it wants, if Spotify wants to use its own payment system, it would get a 4% discount on that. So 11%.

• 1:03:40David Pierce?

  Which is nothing. And like, this came up a bunch, right? That like, by the time you pay another payment processor, you're going to be back at 15%, so you might as well just give it to Google because it's simpler. So like, that's not a deal at all.

• 1:03:50Speaker 06

  Over 15%, Google calculated to be paying more than that 4% to get your own payment system. They thought it wasn't even going to be a choice.

• 1:03:56David Pierce?

  So it's a fully fake deal.

• 1:03:58Speaker 06

  You'd go with Google because you'd be saving money that way. Completely fake. But what we learned is, Google, Spotify secretly had an arrangement to pay not 11%, but 0% when it used its own billing.

• 1:04:09David Pierce?

  Which is a deal.

• 1:04:10Speaker 06

  And that's, that's quite a deal. But Google listened to offering that to anyone else that we're aware of. Google also said, hey Netflix, you don't want to pay 30% anymore or 15% anymore? You can pay 10%. Want to pay 10%? Netflix said, no, we're going to just bypass the store. We're not going to let you buy a thing, buy your subscription to Netflix through Android. You'll go buy it on the web, you'll buy it somewhere else. We know you'll find it elsewhere.

• 1:04:34Nilay Patel?

  That's like when one monopoly hits another monopoly. Like Netflix is like, what are you going to do? Not have Netflix?

• 1:04:40David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:42Nilay Patel?

  We don't, we're not paying you money to sign up for Netflix. No, you'll just have it at birth.

• 1:04:48Alex Cranz?

  That's Netflix's approach.

• 1:04:49Speaker 06

  Here's my question. That is also what Spotify said. What are you going to do? Just not have Spotify? And Google said, okay, you can pay nothing. And at what point, at what point, Google said they were going to do this to us if we didn't give them a deal. I didn't realize at that point that it was a 0% deal. I thought it was, you know, maybe they get 6% or something. 0%. What do you do at that point if you're Google? Do you say, okay, you get the special deal? Do you say, let's treat everybody fairly like we pretend we're going to do? And, and, and, you know, make that real and just give everybody the 0%? What do you do?

• 1:05:24Nilay Patel?

  So Google has to make the deal because there's the other, there's the out. Right? Apple just says, we're going to not have Netflix, which is fascinating. Like their view, and it's played out in different ways for Apple and different platforms. So on the iPhone, they're like, we just want to have Netflix. Everybody caves. Like the idea of not having your app on the iPhone, completely out of bounds. Apple tries to pull the stuff with the TV app on the Apple TV. And Netflix is like, no, we're just, no. What are you going to do? Not have Netflix?

• 1:05:57David Pierce?

  But at the same time.

• 1:05:58Nilay Patel?

  And Apple's like, okay, you don't have to put your app.

• 1:06:00David Pierce?

  Can you sign up on Netflix through in-app purchases? I don't think so. Netflix, Netflix has held pretty fast on that stuff. And, and there's, but the thing is, there's only a handful of companies that can get away with that. Right? Like, I'm actually surprised Spotify rises to that level for Google or anybody. But like, I think if I'm Google, my worry is like, okay, Spotify's not in the Play Store. Spotify is going to be in the Galaxy Store. And you know what? Like a hell of a lot of people might do to get Spotify on their phones is open the Galaxy Store.

• 1:06:26Nilay Patel?

  That's what I mean. There's a market there. They have an out. They can go and say, open this other app store. We were going to partner with Samsung directly and preload Netflix on the phone. In a way that Apple is just like, no, no other choices shall exist. And Sean, you interviewed Tim Sweeney right after the trial, and I thought this was the most important thing that he said. He said, I wish Apple wasn't so like clear cut on what you can't do. And I think the exact words he used were thou shalt not have another app store. And it's like, oh, that's the, that's why you lost against Apple. Because there wasn't even the possibility for Apple to unfairly foreclose. Right? Like, Google's like, oh, there's all these outs they can take. It might result in some fragmentation.

• 1:07:11Nilay Patel?

  You can assign noble intentions to Google here, by the way. You can say Android had a big fragmentation problem. You don't want all these different ways to get apps, especially the big apps. Like, if you get a new phone and to get Spotify and Netflix and TikTok, you need to download three different app stores. This is a bad outcome for Google. It's a bad outcome for users.

• 1:07:31Speaker 06

  I think it's important to remember that we at The Verge spent several years writing reviews of Android phones where we were like, I wish this just had pure stock Android on it. Instead of layers of blood.

• 1:07:43Nilay Patel?

  Bone stock, I believe.

• 1:07:44Speaker 06

  Bone stock. That's right. That's right. Like, I want that for my phone. Motorola testified on the stand that it helped them sell phones. Like, I get why Google wants to crack down on fragmentation. We've written the editorial eight times here at The Verge. And these contracts are how it does that. But these contracts have also helped them make the Google Play Store a profit center for the entire company that makes ridiculous billions in revenue, would be a Fortune 100 company all by itself and has a 72% or something like that profit margin.

• 1:08:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And one, by the way, one way you could cut down on fragmentation is by being more competitive. Right? Like, this is actually really interesting.

• 1:08:26Speaker 06

  Make better phones.

• 1:08:27Nilay Patel?

  You right, you can make a better phone. You could, you could make the pixel really competitive. There are a million ways to do it and Google chose to do it by taking a bunch of money, firing it into the market and making sure that no other competitors existed. Which, by the way, David, to come back to DOJ versus Google is exactly what they do in the search market. And I don't know how that case is going to go, but the parallels are right there.

• 1:08:48David Pierce?

  The parallels are right there. And I think the difference, like back to the thou shalt not thing, like you can accuse Apple of many things, but you cannot accuse Apple of being inconsistent. Right? Like it is, it has been what it has been for a very long time and you can dislike it. But I think one of the reasons Apple keeps winning is because it just keeps saying the same thing. And it's not unclear about what you are signing up for when you buy an iPhone. And when that happens, it might be different. Google, on the other hand, I think the sketchiness of all of these deals, I think really worked against Google, especially in a jury case where like you can, you can sort of talk yourself into some of these being like reasonable things

• 1:09:30David Pierce?

  that reasonable businesses do. But like, there's no question that they just feel gross. And I think to, to a jury, especially over time, and I wonder how it felt even just sitting in the courtroom. Like my sense was even just like following your stuff in the story stream, Sean, like you kind of got more and more of like an ick over the course of the trial, watching all of this go down. And you just go from thinking like, oh, Google is a company that makes deals to ensure to just being like, this just sucks. And I think like, I get the sense everybody sort of felt that over the course of four weeks.

• 1:10:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think maybe, maybe I was a bit of a proxy for, for helping our readers live vicariously in the, in the position of the jurors. So they could see it kind of like that. If you were in the courtroom, would you feel the same way if you were one of the people on the nine jurors making these decisions? I do want to challenge what you said earlier about Apple being consistent. It has been compared to Google incredibly consistent.

• 1:10:23David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 1:10:23Speaker 06

  But Apple made sweetheart deals over private email too. I mean, Netflix had a unique relationship with Apple to do a 15% revenue share, which was not enough for Netflix. And Netflix eventually did go its own way. But they did try and broker that similar kind of arrangement.

• 1:10:41David Pierce?

  That's true.

• 1:10:42Speaker 06

  There were a number of things like that that we saw back in the day.

• 1:10:44Alex Cranz?

  But not at this trial because you weren't allowed to talk about Apple at the trial for the most part.

• 1:10:49Nilay Patel?

  Exactly. Yeah, we had another trial. Alex, you're gonna say something.

• 1:10:52Alex Cranz?

  No, no, I think mine was just an anecdote because when I was like reading all of your coverage, Sean, and a friend of the family is a former judge, and I'd be like, okay, I have a question for you as a former judge. If someone has been going out of their way to like hide a lot of documents and stuff to the point that it keeps coming up in trial, how would that case probably go for them? And that friend was like, not well. Just as a judge, don't do that. And then I was like, and then there was also a bunch of proof that they were doing these sweetheart deals. And like, other people do it, but they were doing it. And they're like, no, you're kind of boned in that respect. They

• 1:11:34Alex Cranz?

  used more polite terminology there, but they were very much like, oh, like, I think for anybody who wasn't kind of in that tech space and had seen the Apple case, but it has like any kind of grasp of this stuff. It was just like, oh, no, you, Google was was gonna get wrecked. Like, you can't piss the judge off that much and expect to to win generally.

• 1:11:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, where the judge is like, I will personally investigate you. That was a long night for Google's lawyers. Like, they, a lot of McCallum was concerned. That's what I, that's what I think Google's lawyer strength. Two things that I want to bring up. One, Alex, to your point, I think having the jury, you know, there's that phrase, like, you don't want to know how the sausage is made. And I think a lot of judges are like, oh, that's some sausage.

• 1:12:17Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:18Nilay Patel?

  And the jury is like, this is gross. Like, I'm never eating a hot dog again. Right? Like, I think there's just that element of it. And then I think, and this, Sean, I kind of wanted to bring this together and wrap this up a little bit. There's just the element that all business works like this. And if you just like, see how it happens, like, maybe that's bad. Right? Like, Google's an advertising company and they do a lot of deals and they're really good at making sharky deals. And that version of Google is very different than the version of Google. It's like, the new Google doodle is in different colors today, right? Like, they, they maintain that quirky, silly image. And then the backend of Google

• 1:13:01Nilay Patel?

  is a sharky advertising company. And when you see it, it's like, really bad. And there was one moment that I still think is most fascinating, where Tim Sweeney and Sundar Pratibhav met for settlement and they couldn't get there. And you talked to Tim about it, he wouldn't tell you about it, but the specifics. But it seemed like Google tried to make another deal at the last minute and Tim said, no.

• 1:13:25Speaker 06

  That's what, that's certainly what Tim Sweeney was implying. He certainly implied that Sundar tried to offer me personally, something again. And frankly, to your point about like, maybe this is just how the sausage is made, business deals happen like this. The judge also thought that Epic might take its own deal. In the courtroom, after the jury had gone home for the day, Judge Donato was like, hey, Epic, Google, have you tried settling yet? And when Epic's attorney, lead attorney, said, no, we haven't actually really tried that yet. He was like, what are you asking for? And Epic went off on some

• 1:14:06Speaker 06

  like, we want this for us and all developers. And the judge came back with, well, Spotify got this special deal for itself. I'm sure you could get that special deal for yourselves too. Go talk about it. And so the judge was under the implication that this wasn't going to be a blank thing for all developers. Maybe Epic should go get a special deal for itself.

• 1:14:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. By the way, most cases settle. This is a thing we should note, like 70 or 80% of cases settle. And judges want the cases to settle. Right? The idea is that the American legal system should not resolve conflicts between two right priorities themselves. You should go work it out. And that's fine. So I think the judge has to say that. But like, the idea that he asked Epic, what do you want? And Epic responded with some... Potentially self-serving, but yet very idealistic screed. Perfectly in character.

• 1:14:53David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:53Nilay Patel?

  Totally in character.

• 1:14:55David Pierce?

  That was the other thing I was wondering, Sean, is for what, three years now? Tim Sweeney has been trying to kind of white knight his way through all of these processes. Like, he really wants to be seen and have Epic be seen as the good guy here, right? And he even said to you, he's like, "We would never take a deal. We're doing this for all developers. We've always done this for all developers. Even when Google offered us a deal, we said, 'No, we want to do it for all developers.'" He dug up an email that they offered the deal that he didn't want, like... But then he sits on the stand and is like, "Yes, if this happens, we're probably gonna make billions of dollars."

• 1:15:29Speaker 06

  Okay, so a little story about that. A little story about that. I thought, I thought that maybe Tim Sweeney is just that kind of personality where he walks up there and he doesn't necessarily know what he's saying is truthful, but maybe not the best thing to be seen publicly saying. Maybe, maybe this just kind of came out of him. But then afterwards...

• 1:15:55David Pierce?

  Just testifying on vibes.

• 1:15:56Speaker 06

  Maybe it just came out of him that he's laughing about how he could make billions of dollars by paying Google nothing. But no, but no. I ran into him later in the hallway, I think it was the next day. Because, by the way, he's been there every single day of the trail save one. I ran into him the next day and he walks up to me and he says, "You got the number of exclamation points right." And he's referring to this post where he's laughing about making billions of dollars off of Google.

• 1:16:26David Pierce?

  Interesting.

• 1:16:27Nilay Patel?

  How many exclamation points was it?

• 1:16:28Speaker 06

  Just one, actually. But one for that phrase and another one in another sentence. Awesome, awesome. It's awesome that he could avoid paying Google anything. So one there and then one for the billions of dollars. Two exclamation points total.

• 1:16:39David Pierce?

  So is, is Tim Sweeney still the white knight for all developers everywhere? Like, at the end of this, if, as they appear to be winning this fight, which will get appealed and God only knows, but like, does he still seem like the champion of all developers? Or do he just like line his pockets and laugh all the way to the bank?

• 1:16:55Speaker 06

  God, I don't know. I feel like... A question in the back of my mind for, for, for three years now has been, does he actually think he'll ever win any of these lawsuits all the way through appeal? Or is he doing this to grossly embarrass Google and Apple? Because all of these documents and contracts are coming out and because he's decided he wants to personally make his company's wealth go towards this, this effort.

• 1:17:25David Pierce?

  Which by all accounts would not be out of character for Tim Sweeney. Like I've, I've never met the man, but everything people who know him say makes that seem like a perfectly plausible explanation.

• 1:17:33Speaker 06

  Absolutely.

• 1:17:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, like a very funny Tim Sweeney fact is a, you know, we, we have like lots of ideas, but on the record, off the record and background, Tim Sweeney only talks on the record. That's just the thing. He just like, won't, he won't even entertain the idea that he should talk to you in the background. That's him coming to us. That's usually the other way around. Uh, and I know people have like lots of issues with him as a personality and like what Steam does and whether that's Steam. Uh, I know people have like a lot of issues with Epic and what Epic does and whether Epic is ruthless on the PC and when they're buying exclusives from the Steam, like whatever. Um, but I, I do think there's an idealism there. Like it's, it's actually like a really interesting thing for a company of, of Epic size to be

• 1:18:15Nilay Patel?

  idealistic or to have a CEO who's idealistic. Like most CEOs are like, Sundar Pichai offered me billions of dollars.

• 1:18:22Speaker 06

  He even tried to be idealistic about the billions of dollars thing. I mean, the very next thing that happened was, uh, in that moment, he said, I think it'd be billions of dollars. It'd be awesome if I could avoid paying Google anything. Uh, Google was very satisfied with that and they said, pass the witness. Epic came back on and Epic said, you know, so why do you want, you know, why, why, where do you think you get this same kind of deal where you avoid paying anybody else anything? And he said, that's how it's been on the PC with Windows. That's how it is on the Mac. You can put apps on there and not pay somebody to put your apps on there. So he may believe that this is part of the idealistic thing that he's trying to do. And I think that he has supporters who also believe that.

• 1:19:07Speaker 06

  I'm not quite sure which side I'm on of that.

• 1:19:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think that's an open question, especially because what's going to happen next is both of these cases are on appeal.

• 1:19:18Nilay Patel?

  And I don't know if this is true, this is just my interpretation of the Apple case. I think the judge ruled the way she did in the Apple case to set up an appeal. Right, there's a reason that the judge in California felt very comfortable saying, "The state law in California allows me to do a prohibition on anti-steering." But the federal antitrust law does, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna run into that fight. I'm gonna let a higher, I'm a trial court judge, I'm not gonna reinterpret the antitrust law of the United States. I'm gonna kick that upstairs, because she knows this appeal is coming. So that has always been my read of that. I think she's a very savvy judge. She developed a trial record, she kicks it upstairs. This judge had a jury. The jury doesn't give a shit about being overturned on appeal.

• 1:20:04Nilay Patel?

  You know, like, it's a, it's a different case, the facts are different, the markets are different. Both cases are gonna get appealed. Sean, based on your talk with Tim, you're covering the trial, what do you think Epic is doing next here?

• 1:20:16Speaker 06

  I think Epic is still gonna wait, quote unquote, "a little bit," because we have until the second week of January before Epic's lawyers and Google's lawyers come back together and say, "Hey, Judge, what is actually going to happen now that Epic has won?" Because we don't know what the judge can or will actually grant Epic now that the jury has said, "Yes, there is, you know, this is an illegal monopoly as far as we're concerned." So there's that. Tim was like, "Oh, yes, we'll keep fighting everywhere. We've got all these other cases going on around the world." They're waiting, I think there were a couple of Australia cases that were kind of on hold because they wanted to see what was going to happen in the US before Australia weighed in.

• 1:20:56Nilay Patel?

  Classic Australia.

• 1:20:57Speaker 06

  And, and of course, the Apple one is being appealed. They're, they're, both sides, both Apple and Google, are hoping the Supreme Court will take up the Apple decision, which has already been through the appeals appellate level.

• 1:21:08Nilay Patel?

  We'll see. All right, we have, we have another year of sending Sean to courtrooms.

• 1:21:11Speaker 06

  I'm so sorry, Sean.

• 1:21:12Nilay Patel?

  Potentially in Australia.

• 1:21:15Speaker 06

  I, I have wanted to visit Australia for a while.

• 1:21:17Nilay Patel?

  Sydney's beautiful. All right, we gotta take a break. We're gonna do a lightning round.

• 1:21:28Speaker 00

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• 1:22:30Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. Sean's sticking with us for the lightning round. Sean, you're the guest of honor, even cooped up for a Fortnite in Fortnite court with Tim Sweeney.

• 1:22:38David Pierce?

  One of the best headlines we've run in a while, by the way. A Fortnite in Fortnite.

• 1:22:42Nilay Patel?

  People got mad at us. They're like, you're too gleeful about Epic Women. I'm like, the company's name is Epic.

• 1:22:46David Pierce?

  What are we supposed to do here?

• 1:22:47Nilay Patel?

  There's not a journalist in the country or world that can stay away from epic victory in this moment. What are you talking about?

• 1:22:55Speaker 06

  Epic win, epic victory. For a while, with the Apple case.

• 1:22:58Nilay Patel?

  It's the name of the company.

• 1:23:00David Pierce?

  It's not even like anyone who's reading that as an adjective is wrong. Epic, epic win. It's a fact.

• 1:23:06Alex Cranz?

  Can you imagine the other way? Google win. Google victory.

• 1:23:09Nilay Patel?

  People just started searching, what did they win? And Bard's like, I don't know.

• 1:23:13Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:14Speaker 06

  During the Apple case, we called the judge Epic Judge fairly often. That was fun.

• 1:23:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's very good. All right, Sean, you're the guest of honor. You get to go first. What's your lightning round item?

• 1:23:22Speaker 06

  Opera's gamer browser now has a panic button for when you're caught in the act.

• 1:23:27David Pierce?

  I knew you were gonna pick that.

• 1:23:28Speaker 06

  And I, I don't, I don't want to talk about the panic button. I want to talk about how Opera has a browser that has to go to these incredible, ridiculous, gamer centric extremes in order to differentiate from Chrome, the dominant browser. Because nobody else can compete. We've just been talking about Google competing with things like.

• 1:23:52Nilay Patel?

  No, this is, but this is the competition. This is. You need a browser that can set limits on CPU and GPU usage so you can keep gaming at your full frame rates and that has a panic button. So if someone walks in while you're gaming.

• 1:24:05Alex Cranz?

  Hmm. It's very resource intensive.

• 1:24:08Speaker 06

  And there's a, there's a little known feature in Opera GX where if you die, hopefully you pressed the button that told it to delete all your history so that they won't see the things that you were looking at.

• 1:24:18David Pierce?

  If you, my favorite thing about this is that it, it, when you press F12, which jumps you out of whatever you're doing into a quote unquote safe tab, one of the options they give you is to go to Twitch, which is like, is that better?

• 1:24:31David Pierce?

  Like, oh, I'm playing a video game. I don't want my boss to see me. Let me go to Twitch.

• 1:24:35Alex Cranz?

  Does it auto mute too?

• 1:24:39David Pierce?

  Uh, I have not.

• 1:24:40Alex Cranz?

  Does it have auto mute? It should. I was gonna say.

• 1:24:43Nilay Patel?

  Alex asking hard questions. If you, you know what? I don't want to linger on this for one second longer.

• 1:24:50Alex Cranz?

  Rest of the round.

• 1:24:50Nilay Patel?

  If you're in a situation where you need a panic button in your browser, fucking volume should be off.

• 1:24:55David Pierce?

  Headphones, people. Headphones.

• 1:24:58Alex Cranz?

  Freshmen in college, get this browser. You share in a dorm room, you get this browser.

• 1:25:05Speaker 06

  Can't wait to see their market. Oh, boy.

• 1:25:08Nilay Patel?

  Thank you, Sean.

• 1:25:11Nilay Patel?

  Why? Why did I do this? All right.

• 1:25:15Nilay Patel?

  Pierce, can you just, just clean, clean us up some?

• 1:25:19David Pierce?

  Mine is the Apple TV app, which has a new panic button where when.

• 1:25:26Alex Cranz?

  Takes you to HBO Max.

• 1:25:29David Pierce?

  Apple.

• 1:25:30Nilay Patel?

  The dark recesses of HBO Max.

• 1:25:32David Pierce?

  You hit a button and you go to HGTV, just like that. It's like, no problems, whatever you were watching. Uh, no, the Apple.

• 1:25:39Nilay Patel?

  Somewhere David Zazal is like, ship a panic button.

• 1:25:43Nilay Patel?

  This is how we win.

• 1:25:45David Pierce?

  Yeah, you can have that for free. No one can know you watch Gilded Age. The Apple TV app just got a redesign on the Apple TV. Apple has had this like, I don't know, 15 year long obsession with like trying to solve the interface of television. And I think it's like the most quixotic thing Apple is trying to do. It's either that or build a car, like one, two equally impossible.

• 1:26:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:05David Pierce?

  Goals. But the new TV app actually looks really nice. They redesigned it. It has easier ways to get to some of the channels you can get at through Apple TV. It has some easy ways to get to like buying stuff from a bunch of different platforms. Apple's big idea is to be like the TV guide for all your streaming stuff. So it pulls all the stuff you're watching, all the recommendations, all this stuff into one place. It notably does not have Netflix, which like immediately destroys its utility for a large number of users because.

• 1:26:30Nilay Patel?

  This is what I'm saying about Netflix. When one monopoly hits another one.

• 1:26:33David Pierce?

  It's also bad at a lot of other ones, too. It is. Apple, Apple, I like, I think is on the right path here. I just think it's impossible to do what it's trying to do. But I admire Apple for just continuing to believe that it is Apple. And so it can eventually bully every other company into being part of this. But the new app is very nice. I suspect we'll get a lot of this stuff on other platforms as well. And like, the streaming interface that we have sucks and somebody should fix it. And like, I don't care if it's Apple. I don't care if it's like just watch, like pick a company. I don't, I don't care if it's Plex. No one can. I actually want it to be Plex. I would like for it to be Plex. Plex, could you please?

• 1:27:09Speaker 06

  I just want to say that Steve Jobs did not tell Walter Isaacson on his deathbed that he wanted to build a car. He said he'd cracked the TV and it's about time they cracked it.

• 1:27:18David Pierce?

  It's exactly right. It's exactly right.

• 1:27:21Nilay Patel?

  Really, the whole company chased this like deathbed comment for too long.

• 1:27:26David Pierce?

  Do you think Steve just meant like he, he cracked his TV? He like threw something at his television and cracked it? And Walter just like. He threw a remote.

• 1:27:37Nilay Patel?

  So we bought a new house, we're like, I'm building a home theater down there. It's like a whole thing. There's speaker wire everywhere. The poor electrician just keeps looking at me like I'm crazy. It's great. So two, two things. One, in the meantime, we have a Samsung Frame TV, which will eventually be the bedroom TV. And I have used Tizen now.

• 1:27:58Alex Cranz?

  A moment of silence for Neelai.

• 1:28:00Nilay Patel?

  Tizen Support Club. Please help me. But Samsung does one very smart thing with Tizen on this TV and built-in software. When you're watching YouTube TV and you click out of it and you're like, go back to any other place where there should be media playing, it just starts playing it again, as though you are just watching TV.

• 1:28:19Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:20Nilay Patel?

  It's just very, it's just very clever. It just restarts your streaming app and it just has media playing while you're like goofing around in the menus or whatever. It makes it feel like a TV and not like the Apple TV, which very much feels like a tiny iOS device that is very upset that you are not watching Apple TV plus.

• 1:28:38David Pierce?

  Or like all the Fire TVs now, which are like, oh, you turn on your TVs. Here's some ads. Do you want to watch some ads? How about some ads?

• 1:28:44Alex Cranz?

  As soon as you turn it on.

• 1:28:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So there's something there, which I think is just really clever and smart in Tizen. But it's part of the turn you're talking about. These interfaces suck because they're all trying to get you to do something you don't want to do, or they're all trying to keep you away from watching TV. Or they want to show you ads. Particularly like Alex writes about fast all the time, right? Like, free ad supporting TV is a big thing, which means they're desperately trying to get you to watch free ad supported TV. That's weird. The second thing, I've been thinking about this a lot with just Apple TV and like, what will be my primary device? And here's what I've settled on. I'm going to buy a Sony A95L.

• 1:29:22Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 1:29:23Nilay Patel?

  They're not in stock anywhere. And I'm just going to watch Bravia Core, Sony's proprietary streaming service that has the highest bit rates in the entire industry.

• 1:29:30David Pierce?

  Oh, boy.

• 1:29:31Nilay Patel?

  In that.

• 1:29:32Alex Cranz?

  Spider-Man's gonna look so good on that TV.

• 1:29:34Nilay Patel?

  It's gonna be, it has like four movies. It's, yeah. Yeah. Look, it has, I think it has 444.

• 1:29:42Alex Cranz?

  See, see, you're gonna, that's, they love to be like, look how good Spider-Man looks with our high bitrate.

• 1:29:47Nilay Patel?

  Red is, red, red is famously the hardest color to compress. And Spider-Man's a great demo. I'm gonna watch the hell out of Spider-Man.

• 1:29:55Alex Cranz?

  That and red buses in England. They're like, look at it. It's beautiful. You're like, it's fine.

• 1:30:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I don't know. It just like all of my stuff. I bought a lot of movies in Apple. And now it's like this thing does not want me to, they shut down the movies app and the TV app, which I never use, but they shut down the movies app. And it's like, oh, I just wanted to see what was out and like, watch a movie. And now it's like, I have to contend with the morning show. Like, here it is. Here's just, do you want the morning? Pay for this.

• 1:30:25Alex Cranz?

  Watch it.

• 1:30:26Nilay Patel?

  And I'm like, I just want to see what movies are out. I don't know.

• 1:30:29Speaker 06

  Are any of us holding on to discs?

• 1:30:30Alex Cranz?

  I just bought a bunch.

• 1:30:31Speaker 06

  I've still got my 4K discs. They go on my PS5. That's how I watch my, my good looking movies.

• 1:30:36Nilay Patel?

  I was gonna do that, but bravia cor dog.

• 1:30:39David Pierce?

  Sean, I will say, history is increasingly proving you right.

• 1:30:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:43David Pierce?

  I was not here last week to be furious at what Sony did, removing all the stuff that people had bought on, on their Playstations. But that shit sucks. And we are rapidly nearing a point where legitimately, if you want to make sure you can watch something, you're gonna have to buy it on disc, which is like a dumb place to end up, but feels like we're headed.

• 1:31:01Alex Cranz?

  I'm now got Michael Dudikoff's American Ninja from the eighties on DVD. And like, can't find that on streaming.

• 1:31:10Speaker 06

  All right. Well, there's Alex's.

• 1:31:11Alex Cranz?

  What are you gonna do? You wanna watch that horror show? Like, only one way to watch it.

• 1:31:16Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:31:17Alex Cranz?

  If my sister's listening, I'm sorry. You now know what your Christmas presents.

• 1:31:23Nilay Patel?

  All right. I'll do mine and we'll end with Cranz. Mine is a weird week for electric cars just around the board, but Cadillac announced the Cadillac Vistique, which is their next electric SUV. It looks pretty good. It looks like a little baby Escalade. Cadillac, I just want to point out Cadillac's prices for EVs are completely out of control. So this one is going to cost $90,000. And I will remind you, it is called the Vistique with an IQ because that is Cadillac's branding.

• 1:31:56David Pierce?

  What is Cadillac? There's like the, the lyric, which I assume is now pronounced lirique. And the optic and the, there was like the sintique and the celesteique. Like, who at Cadillac keeps being like, you know, what's dope is our Q names that are unpronounceable? Like, no, stop it.

• 1:32:13Nilay Patel?

  So yeah, they they start with a lyric, which sort of

• 1:32:16David Pierce?

  It's actually pronounced Larique. Sorry, I don't know if

• 1:32:20Nilay Patel?

  The the Larique is actually kind of reasonably priced. It's like you can get one in the 60s, which our Cadillac is like in the zone. They have a cheaper one that's coming out. And then they have the Escalade, which starts at $120,000. And then they the Celestique is 340,000.

• 1:32:41David Pierce?

  It's Escalade with a Q.

• 1:32:42Alex Cranz?

  Sorry, sorry.

• 1:32:44Nilay Patel?

  You know, the Escalade, it's the Escalade IQ. They could not figure out how to jam the Eek onto Escalade. So like, whatever, it's the Escalade IQ.

• 1:32:53Nilay Patel?

  Like, we're just, here's an Eek, you can have it. $120,000, please.

• 1:32:58David Pierce?

  I will say that these cars are hot. Like, I'm very into the styling they have for these.

• 1:33:03Nilay Patel?

  I have, I don't, I don't need a car. I moved back to civilization. I don't live in the woods anymore. I live in a very walkable place. I'm like, I should buy a Lyric. All the time. I'm like, I should buy a Lyric. And I'm like, why? I would never drive this car. We have a hybrid with 25 miles of all electric range. I haven't bought gas in three months because that's all we need.

• 1:33:23David Pierce?

  Yeah. How's the pickup truck?

• 1:33:25Nilay Patel?

  Pickup?

• 1:33:28Nilay Patel?

  I love it so much and I need to get rid of it and I

• 1:33:33Speaker 06

  Still waiting for the Ioniq, which is a Hyundai vehicle, to get some NACS charging.

• 1:33:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, also, I shouldn't buy any of this stuff until they, until they have the chargers.

• 1:33:46Speaker 06

  We need the chargers.

• 1:33:47Alex Cranz?

  One day.

• 1:33:48Nilay Patel?

  All right, I'm gonna buy a Cadillac for Steve. All right.

• 1:33:53Nilay Patel?

  It does look pretty good.

• 1:33:54Alex Cranz?

  All right, this one, this one's a little sad. I've been, 2003, I was in college and I met a guy and he said, he said, he panicked, he said, hey, my uncle's a producer at like Today Show or something. He's going to E3. Do you want to go? And I went in college to E3. And then I went for the next 10 years. Not always with with his, his family and and the the hosts of the Today Show or whatever. It's great. And and then I never went again because it got really bad. And it continued to get bad.

• 1:34:33Alex Cranz?

  And E3 just got less and less and less useful. And that is why this year, E3 is officially dead. It was the trade show for video games. Like Sean, did you ever go to E3? I feel like you went to E3.

• 1:34:47Speaker 06

  Did I?

• 1:34:48Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it was like, like, it was kind of fun.

• 1:34:50Speaker 06

  Should I tell the story?

• 1:34:51Nilay Patel?

  Sean's like, I was born in the dark.

• 1:34:52Alex Cranz?

  It was fun. You saw cool stuff.

• 1:34:55Speaker 06

  Oh, so good.

• 1:34:56Alex Cranz?

  I went the year that they they moved it all to Santa Monica and you had to see all the video games in an airplane hangar. And otherwise you just had to know a lot of people and I did not. So I spent a lot of time on the beach that E3. It was great. But, uh,

• 1:35:10Speaker 06

  That's what I should have done.

• 1:35:12Alex Cranz?

  Really, really nice.

• 1:35:13David Pierce?

  Sean, what's your weirdest E3 story? I feel like there I can just see on your face, you have a weird E3 story that you don't want to tell and I would like you to tell it.

• 1:35:20Speaker 06

  A weird E3 story I don't want to tell, or do you want, or do you want the good one? The one about, the good one?

• 1:35:25David Pierce?

  Give us the good one. I love the good one.

• 1:35:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you gotta go good one.

• 1:35:28Speaker 06

  Yeah, I'm just gonna read from my CNET article because because I haven't rewritten this and I'll just do my voice. It'll be great.

• 1:35:36Speaker 06

  I was playing Warhawk, the first game for Sony's just announced PS3 motion controller, where you could fly a heavily armored warplane just by tilting a gamepad. Believe it or not, those simple motion controls were revolutionary at the time. This was before the iPhone was announced, before Twitter existed, and even before the Nintendo and PS3 were released, to give you some context. Yet on the show floor, there wasn't much of a line. I only had to wait a few minutes before I got to try this potentially groundbreaking title. The longer I played, the more people crowded around me. Soon I felt like a star, I was on fire, playing Warhawk like a champ in front of my very out audience. The more people watched, the better I played flying that deadly warplane with precision. Then it was over. I turned around and handed the controller to Shigeru Miyamoto.

• 1:36:24David Pierce?

  This is a dream you had, right? This is not an E3 story.

• 1:36:27Speaker 06

  The father of Barrio Zelda was behind me the whole time. The crowd had been there for him. Because they were watching the man who developed the Wii's motion controller, try his competitor's product for the first time.

• 1:36:41Alex Cranz?

  And you're just like, wow!

• 1:36:42Speaker 06

  And so I just stood there, dove found it, watching Miyamoto play this game, and his face had no expression on it. None. Stone cold.

• 1:36:51Alex Cranz?

  He was not as impressed with your playing.

• 1:36:52David Pierce?

  Fantastic.

• 1:36:54Alex Cranz?

  Was he? Oh, I just saw like,

• 1:36:58Nilay Patel?

  Well, Sean didn't know. He wasn't paying attention. He was locked in.

• 1:37:00Speaker 06

  I was in the game, playing for my audience.

• 1:37:02Alex Cranz?

  I just saw Paris Hilton in like, those, those TV, or the, the t-shirt cannons. She had t-shirt cannons of...

• 1:37:11Nilay Patel?

  Everything, I never went E3, I've never been once.

• 1:37:13Speaker 06

  Weird stuff.

• 1:37:13Nilay Patel?

  Every instinct I ever had was to stay. And I feel like it collapsed on itself, right? Like, it was a trade show, the three big companies were there, I think in COVID, sort of like Microsoft pulled out, then Sony pulled out, and there was like a question of whether we'd come back. And I think those companies all were like, wait, this sucked. Like, we can just do our own events, which is what all the tech companies have realized over time. And there was no, there was no chance it was ever coming back.

• 1:37:39Speaker 06

  For years, I heard people say, oh, E3 is going to die this next year. We don't need it, particularly after that Santa Monica show where it got like really tiny. They were like, oh, we don't need E3. But what I kept hearing, um, smart people in the room say was that the executives at the video game companies would always need a stage so that they could go glad hand each other. And they needed to have like some place where the meetings would happen. And now we have Jeff Keighley with the Summer Game Fest and all those things. And he'll gladly let people, executives glad hand each other on stage, even if they have nothing to show.

• 1:38:13Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I mean, that's, that's exactly what happened. Like, that 2008 Santa Monica show was, it had gotten too big, right? Like, 2007 was enormous. It was really, really unwieldy. It was not a great time. And so they said, okay, we're going to shrink it down. And then they reopened it. And they were like, well, we need more people, so we're going to let anybody come. And that just made it like, not a trade show anymore, but this weird hybrid that didn't make anybody happy. And then finally, COVID came. And like, COVID, COVID effectively, like, they realized, oh, all, yeah, everybody realized, oh, wait, I don't need this. I don't actually need the glad hand here. Jeff Cleve, just Jeff Keighley and, uh, you know, a web broadcast is enough for me.

• 1:39:00Nilay Patel?

  All right, well, that's the Verchass, we'll be back next week.

• 1:39:05Alex Cranz?

  The vibes are different for CES.

• 1:39:07Nilay Patel?

  Speaking of. Such a downer. Are they? Eh, will we? Things, things that did not stop.

• 1:39:16Nilay Patel?

  Back with a vengeance, CES. Uh, no, that's it. Sean, thank you so much for coming. This has been really fun. Oh, thank you.

• 1:39:22David Pierce?

  Can I just say one more thing before you, before you take us out? Um, I just, I just want to shout out a, a person on threads named Mark Praggrano, who decided that what he would do is post at me every single day until I mentioned him on a Vergecast episode, which I had no intention of ever doing. And then he did it for two weeks to the point where threads throttled him and wouldn't let him post for a whole day because they thought, threads thought he was harassing me. Uh, he's allowed to post again, but I just want to say, I hear you and thank you. And also please, no one ever do that to me.

• 1:39:54Nilay Patel?

  Very good. Very good. Uh, site looked great this week. Yeah, you go read Sean's coverage of the trial. Uh, all sorts of other good stuff.

• 1:40:03David Pierce?

  The Twitter package is amazing. Like truly, if you haven't been on the scroll back of Alexandria, I spent 90 full minutes just scrolling, reading tweets. And it is the single best way to kill time on the internet right now.

• 1:40:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Uh, that's it. That's Vergecast.

• 1:40:24David Pierce?

  And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-VERGE11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. This episode was mixed and edited by Xander Adams. And that's it. We'll see you next week.

• 1:40:56Speaker 07

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