Google lost its first antitrust case, so what happens next?

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, Alex Heath, and Lauren Feiner discuss a federal judge ruling that Google violated US antitrust law, X suing a group of major advertisers over an “illegal boycott”, and the rest of this week's wild tech news. Further reading: Judge rules that Google ‘is a monopolist’ in US antitrust case All the spiciest parts of the Google antitrust ruling X files antitrust lawsuit against advertisers over ‘illegal boycott’ The Global Alliance for Responsible Media is 'discontinuing' after Elon Musk's X filed an antitrust lawsuit against it Disney’s password-sharing crackdown starts ‘in earnest’ this September Disney’s streaming business turned a profit for the first time The price of Disney Plus is about to go up Logitech’s ‘forever’ mouse isn’t happening Google is discontinuing the Chromecast line The Google TV Streamer might be the Apple TV 4K rival we’ve been waiting for Humane’s daily returns are outpacing sales Samsung’s Frame TV is finally getting the knockoffs it deserves Microsoft says Delta ignored Satya Nadella’s offer of CrowdStrike help Hands-on with Google’s new Nest Learning Thermostat OpenAI won’t watermark ChatGPT text because its users could get caught 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

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends. Like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra because it's not just a superior like beer. It's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 0:33Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to Vergecast, the flagship podcast of pointing out that Elon Musk doesn't know what a contract is, how they work, or if they exist.

• 0:40Nilay Patel?

  That's it, I'm going with it. That's, that's gonna be a big part of today. I just want to be clear about that. And if you need to do something else, that's fine. We're also gonna talk about TVs later. So real, some real classic Vergecast stuff will be here, but I'm, I'm not gonna shy away from knowing what a contract is because I, I know.

• 0:59Nilay Patel?

  Pass the bar in two states, people. I know what a contract is and that guy doesn't. Hi, I'm your friend Eli. David Pierce is once again not here, which means there's literally no check on my power or authority. Although Alex Cranz is back. Welcome, Alex.

• 1:11Alex Cranz?

  Hey, I'm here and I'm your friend who is gonna sue you because I, I want money and you said no, so to court.

• 1:19Nilay Patel?

  It's a lot. It's a lot. We have an additional Alex. Alex Heath is here.

• 1:23Speaker 03

  Hi, I'm, I'm also not using Bing. You couldn't pay me to use it either.

• 1:28Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah. We could have, I want to be clear. We could have also been the flagship podcast of you can't pay me to use Bing. Another thing we're gonna spend a lot of time on today. It's a big week. Lauren Feiner is also here. Hey, Lauren. Hello. There's a lot of news this week. I thought it was gonna be a quiet week. We, we really thought it was gonna be a quiet week. And then on Monday, the court released a gigantic ruling in the Google search antitrust case, finding the Google searches a monopoly. We gotta talk all about that. The Assistant Attorney General for antitrust Jonathan Kanter was on Decoder. We had just a lot to say about that case. Lots about Apple in relation to that case. Google was paying Apple for default placements. So we gotta spend time on that. Then we're like, huh, all right, we know what's gonna happen this week.

• 2:12Nilay Patel?

  Then Elon Musk filed, X filed a lawsuit against advertisers claiming antitrust violations because they refuse to advertise on X. I would say not is clear cut a victory for that case as maybe in the Google search case. We got to talk about that. We have a lightning round. There's a bunch of stuff to light around. Talk about actually. And then of course Disney plus is raising prices. A real, a real ver chaste. Oh, and I judged a TV competition, which I thought I was going to get a chance to write about, but didn't because everyone's suing each other. I read so many PDFs this week.

• 2:44Speaker 03

  Wait, you judged a TV competition?

• 2:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 2:47Alex Cranz?

  Like?

• 2:47Nilay Patel?

  The, the, the 20th annual TV shootout.

• 2:51Speaker 03

  What?

• 2:52Alex Cranz?

  Was it actual TVs?

• 2:54Nilay Patel?

  The actual TVs. They put, they put a bunch of OLEDs and micro LED TVs in a room. Uh, and I went into that room with a bunch of like, like high end Hollywood colorists and compression engineers. Uh, and it was, that was like all of them. And then me as the judge. And we, and we looked at the TVs. We had long worksheets to fill out as we watched different like scenes of movies. And then we like rated, I was going to write it. I was like, this was my week to finally let go of talking about the government and talk about what I love instead, which is how TVs look. And I didn't get to do a lick of it.

• 3:30Speaker 03

  What did the frame TV rank?

• 3:31Nilay Patel?

  The frame TV was not, uh, it did not make it to the competition.

• 3:35Speaker 03

  What?

• 3:36Alex Cranz?

  Immediately like booted.

• 3:38Nilay Patel?

  It wasn't even in the mix. Like it didn't even get, there were six TVs in the, in the finals. And the frame was not among them. Um, uh, they're not really finals. They just picked the six best TVs on the market. And then I will tell you the two brands, we'll talk about it, but the two brands specifically said, do not include us in this competition. Just looking to thank you. We'll get to it and I'll talk about it. I promise I will write about it for next week. But that's what I thought I was going to do this week. Like really and truly, I thought I was going to argue with people about whether micro LED TVs can compete with OLEDs. And I didn't do that because our, the, the sheer number of PDFs generated by the judicial branch for our government was out of control.

• 4:21Nilay Patel?

  Like, talk about a good time to buy a Buks Palmer, just yesterday.

• 4:26Alex Cranz?

  Just forever.

• 4:27Nilay Patel?

  Let's start with the Google search ruling. Um, yeah, this case has been going on since, what, 2020? It was filed under the Trump administration, uh, in the sort of like classic Trump administration, like, I don't know, let's sue Google. Like, we're mad at them.

• 4:40Alex Cranz?

  But then it was actually Biden, right, that, that took it home?

• 4:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and then obviously the Biden administration with Lena Khan and specifically Jonathan Kanter at the Department of Justice, who runs the antitrust division. Um, you know, Lena Khan is the chair of the FTC. Kanter runs the antitrust division at the DOJ. They even sort of like debating, arguing even who gets to take which antitrust enforcement action? And Google ended up at the DOJ. Lauren, you have some color, like, even watching that, how do they decide who gets to do what?

• 5:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, so generally how it breaks down is it's somewhat based on just like the expertise of each agency. Like, I think there's certain, um, industries that DOJ tends to take and certain industries that FTC tends to take. And it also, uh, maybe they'll consider like, is this something where we might bring in the FTC Act? Um, which obviously the FTC would use, um, and maybe that, uh, feeds into the determination. But I think generally it's just based on, is this an industry that typically is a DOJ or an FTC industry?

• 5:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Uh, so the DOJ had this one, again, started under the Trump administration, the Biden DOJ carried on with it. There was a trial, we covered the hell out of the trial. Eddie Q was on the stand, Tim Cook was on the stand. Nadella was on the stand, talking about whether Bing could compete with Google.

• 5:55Alex Cranz?

  Was this the trial where they like, just wouldn't let us see a lot of it? Is a lot of it was closed off?

• 6:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's right. Yeah, there was a period where the judge, um, I, I think it was a result of some of the third parties in the cases that didn't want, you know, their business information just aired out in front of the press and the public. Um, kind of pushed for, um, you know, more behind closed doors elements of the trial. And the judge conceded to a lot of that in the beginning. And then there was a lot of pushback from the press and it became a bit more open. So, yes, that was this trial.

• 6:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and like the judge was like, well, I believe Google when they say these are trade secrets. And there was a lot of criticism. Lauren, from what I understand, the judge took the criticism to heart. Like, he was pretty stung by it. And then he opened up, and we got to cover more of it. We did, we did cover the trial in an ongoing basis. And then it was pretty quiet while he was writing this opinion, which is 286 pages long. He was writing a book. It is, it is a book about search.

• 6:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was interesting because I was just looking back at my stories from the days of the closing arguments in May. And I remember walking away from that thinking like, you know, he kind of was holding his cards close to the chest. But, you know, made a few comments that seemed to dig at Google. But reading it back now, having seen the opinion, I can see like, oh, he really was kind of probably already drafting this and thinking about a lot of these sections of the opinion even back then.

• 7:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so the, the, the ruling in the case, 286 pages. Yesterday, I said to Sarah Jong, I thought it was readable. And she was like, you don't, you don't know what readable means. That's the lawyer. You can read it. It's not like, at one point, there he's talking about how ad auctions work, and there's literally mathematical formula in it. It's, there's a lot in 286 pages. But the main holdings are Google search is a monopoly. And he found that there's a market for general search engines. Alex, you and I have talked about this. Whenever there's antitrust cases, the tech companies try to argue that markets don't exist. Like, Facebook has basically held off an antitrust action by insisting that there's no such thing

• 8:07Nilay Patel?

  as a market for social networks. And Facebook is not in it, even if there was. And that has worked until kind of now, when the judge found, okay, general search engines are a thing. People understand what they are as distinct from TikTok search or whatever. So he found general search is a market, and Google is the only competitor. And there's a line in there, he's like, these are Fortune 500 companies, Apple and whoever else, and they can only turn to Google. There's nowhere else for them to go.

• 8:30Speaker 03

  I really like the way that he defined that. It seemed like it was actually the clear way to say it, which is just a general search engine encompasses a lot of the web. It's not a silo like TikTok. TikTok, you can, I mean, I've used TikTok for search to find things that I'm looking at, but it's only TikTok content. And I thought the way he just kind of clearly defined general searches being an aggregation of a lot of different sources of content was helpful. Even like following the trial, not as in the weeds as Lauren, but like I, the definition stuff was always pretty wonky to me, how they were defining different corners of search. And I thought he actually did a pretty good job in the opinion, the final ruling here laying it out.

• 9:09Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, that was something that during the closing arguments, I remember the judge, I think Google was trying to make the case that, you know, Amazon is a potential competitor and all these other things. And I remember the judge saying something along the lines of like, well, you know, Amazon doesn't like index the web, like it is a different thing. So I think that's something that he really took to heart.

• 9:29Nilay Patel?

  He points out that he had expert witnesses in the case who testified that the biggest advertisers on Google and Bing are vertical search engines. So like flight search engines or travel search engines or whatever, they advertise a lot and because that's where the audience for their searches are. And he's like, well, this is, they're obviously not substitutes. Like if you're, if you're trying to acquire audience for your vertical search engine and travel or whatever on Google, Google is obviously not substituted for that. So he lays out this case and, you know, if you want to get into the nitty gritty legal analysis of it, you should just listen to Decoder with Cantor because we got into it. And part of it is understanding how the government is getting better at defining these markets because this is where they have gotten tripped up and where

• 10:14Nilay Patel?

  the tech companies have really won and pushed off a lot of this enforcement for years by just, by just tying these like deep philosophical knots of like, what is even the market that Google is in? Even in this case, this is one of the funniest counter arguments that Google made. They said that Google is not in the market for search engines. It's in the market for answering queries. Just like broadly, just like if you have a question, that's the thing that Google does. And like, they're like, every place you might answer a question is a place that competes with Google. And the judge was like, no, like, that's not true. If you search Amazon, you only get products, you don't get answers to questions. Google is just like very general search engine. So the government one there, they said, a search engine.

• 10:58Nilay Patel?

  And they said that they're anti-competitively protecting the monopoly in search that they have with the deals with Apple, which we should talk about at length. And so Apple pays Google $20 billion a year on the order of $20 billion a year to be the default search provider on iOS and the Mac and other Apple products. There are some conditions which are the thing that make those deals anti-competitive. It's not just the money, we should talk about those. And then they found that there's a monopoly for search text ads, which is just the text ads in search, not general search ads, because there you do have competition from TikTok and Amazon and all this other stuff. But search text ads, the ones that show up on the search engine results page, the judge said, hey, there's a monopoly here and Google has acted anti-competitively.

• 11:43Nilay Patel?

  And this is, I think, the shadiest part of the whole trial. Google just slowly raises the prices of those ads without considering what competitors might do or rivals might go, and they hide those price increases in the auctions.

• 12:00Alex Cranz?

  What the judge said, like, that was why he found that to be a monopoly, right? Was because they just didn't have to care about anyone else and they could just raise prices whenever. And he's like, yeah, that's just a monopoly, guys. I don't know what to tell you.

• 12:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, he did this in both in the advertising part and in the search engine part, where he pointed out, Google does stuff and it doesn't care that people might leave,

• 12:21Nilay Patel?

  which is, as we have noted on the show many times, like, the most essential truth of the Google experience right now. It's like, boy, you just blow stuff up, you cancel stuff, you shut it down, you make it worse, and there's nowhere else to go, and Google doesn't seem to care. And the judge pointed out, he was like, this is only a firm with monopoly power can get away with some of the stuff that they do, including raising prices by making it appear that the auctions, you know, when you buy an ad on Google search, like, buy a keyword, you buy like... Airline flights or whatever keyword hotels.

• 12:52Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 12:52Nilay Patel?

  These are like hotly contested keywords. You want to put advertising on those keywords in search. And so Google is raising the prices of those auctions, making it appear as though it's like noisy, like there's more demand or it's fluctuating, but really over time, it's just raising the price. And that the judge found was that that was evidence of monopoly behavior and also just like wrong, right? So this is a huge decision. There's stuff where they didn't, the government didn't win. There's no monopoly and like, um, there's no monopoly in general search advertising. The Google didn't get sanctioned for the way it treats its like ad tech stack, which you probably know is called double click and now has another name. Uh, and then Google deleted a lot of its chat history and the government wanted sanctions for that. And then Google deleted a lot of internal records and the government wanted sanctions for that. I didn't get that. So that's all cast aside.

• 13:37Nilay Patel?

  But the main ones, the important ones are Google search monopoly, Google's acting anti-competitively, Google text ads are a monopoly, Google is raising their prices anti-competitively. Those, that's, it just feels like a huge deal. Uh, Cantor told me this case goes on the Mount Rushmore of antitrust decisions, uh, which implies there's a Mount Rushmore of antitrust decisions.

• 13:55Alex Cranz?

  Like, I want to talk about a lot of the Apple stuff here, but you talked to Cantor. Did he explain what they're gonna do next? Did he, did he say, oh yeah, we're gonna get him for this?

• 14:04Nilay Patel?

  Oh, so this is, uh, yeah, this is important to note. Lauren, I'm, I'm curious if you've heard anything here, but the, the trial is what's called a bifurcated trial. So there's this part, which is, did you do it and is it wrong? Yes, Google search monopoly. Then there's what's called the remedies phase, where the court lays out a process for how it will basically hold a second trial, uh, where they will figure out what the punishment is and how they will fix it. And that could be anything. Um, the government could ask for anything, the court could impose anything. It could be fines, uh, it could be structural, that's breaking up Google. It could be behavioral. In other cases, you know, there's like oversight of a company's behavior to make sure it doesn't do the bad thing again. All of their, kind of all on the table and, uh, Cantor just, I mean, like, he's a government lawyer. I was like, answer the question. He's like, I'm not gonna answer your question. Like

• 14:49Nilay Patel?

  very directly, very farbingly. It was like, I'm super not answering your question. Um, but you can, you can look back to history. Um, you know, the Microsoft case comes up over and over again in this, and that was like a lengthy remedies phase, also bifurcated trial. They negotiated a settlement. Then there was a second trial to see if the settlement was fair. And then Microsoft was under the microscope, uh, with oversight for a long time to make sure it didn't do a bunch of Microsoft stuff. You can, you can see that potentially happening in here.

• 15:18Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Lauren, did you get any sense from like, I guess, there in DC of people and how they're going to react to it, what kind of punishments they might want to do? Seeing as Cantor was like refusing to give Neelai any of the good stuff. He was just like nah.

• 15:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I think that I know that a lot of the rivals to Google who have been, you know, really cheering on this case from the DOJ side, they, you know, I think they're really cheering this decision, but at the same time are holding back a little bit because they know that what really matters here is what Google is made to do to respond to the finding of liability. So I think, you know, there is a little bit of hesitance that, you know, maybe there's going to be some sort of remedy that doesn't fully fix the problems, you know, maybe something like a search screen that we've seen in Europe that like doesn't really seem to do too much. So I think there's just a feeling of like, all right, we're

• 16:15Speaker 04

  really happy about this, but also we know it's not done yet.

• 16:18Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 16:19Nilay Patel?

  We should note, Google has already said it's going to appeal the ruling. The statement from President of Global Affairs, Kent Walker, is, it's actually pretty funny. It says, "This decision recognizes that Google offers the best search engine, but concludes we shouldn't be allowed to make it easily available." He's basically saying, "This is nonsensical." I don't know if that is what the decision actually says. It is true, the decision says over and over again, "Google is the best search engine," but then is like, "It's also the only one."

• 16:45Speaker 04

  I think it's also that, you know, I think the judge bought into this argument that the DOJ was making that like, there's kind of this flywheel effect where like, Google, you know, it gets all these defaults, like gets all these people to use its platform and, you know, make all these queries and then it has all this really good data. And then it uses that data to just make the search engine better and monetize that. And so I think, you know, he's saying, "Yeah, it is a really good product," but that's also because of these exclusive contracts that have gotten it to that place.

• 17:25Alex Cranz?

  Which like, I think maybe you pointed this out, Neelai, or maybe it was Sarah Jong online, that Apple is going to have to like, like, Apple could have taken that $20 billion it gives Google every time and gone and made. Its own competitive search engine for less than that. And that was kind of factored into the judge's reasoning.

• 17:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we should really, we should generally talk about Apple, but

• 17:47Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, let's talk about Apple.

• 17:48Nilay Patel?

  Google pays Apple $20 billion a year and Google has also internally estimated that for Apple to build a search engine will cost Apple $20 billion. Right? So there's only so many companies that can compete with Google. One of them is Apple, one of them, and then, you know, and there's like lots of reasons for, and there's lots of reasons for that. One of them, the most important one, is that Apple can set the default on an iPhone. So it can collect all of this data. And like a huge percentage of Google's queries for search come from default placements. Right? It's like 50% of all Google's search queries come from default placements on mobile or desktop, whether it's Android phones or iPhones or whatever.

• 18:30Nilay Patel?

  So Apple has a massive share of those default placements, particularly on mobile. And so it could build a search engine and it can compete because it has all that. And Google pays the money to keep them from doing it. And inside of that services agreement, it also puts in conditions that Apple agrees not to make things that look like search better at search. So Siri can't get better. Like the, I think the agreement says it can't get better than it is today, or it can't be meaningfully improved password to stay. Spotlight search can't get better. There's some documents that are, you know, as part of the exhibits, Apple considered putting some advertising into Spotlight search on the iPhone. And they just like, well, we gotta talk to Google about that, but we don't want to renegotiate this Google deal. I guess we don't do that.

• 19:15Nilay Patel?

  And you can just see them, they're just held back by the existence of this deal and its conditions with Google. Like, we've asked a million times, why doesn't Apple just build a search engine? And the answer is $20 billion a year. That's just fully the answer. And that's actually the thing that's anti-competitive, not the default placement. Right? Not buying the default. It's the conditions that say you also cannot compete with us.

• 19:36Alex Cranz?

  But Apple doesn't want to, right? Like, like they said, no, we don't want to use Bing. We don't want to put something else in.

• 19:43Nilay Patel?

  So one of the absolute funniest conditions of the agreement with Google is that Apple is required to defend the deal against regulatory actions.

• 19:54Nilay Patel?

  So like, yep, Apple said a bunch of stuff in this trial, but they're legally obligated because of their contract with Google to co-defend the deal in the face of regulatory efforts.

• 20:04Alex Cranz?

  That's not shady. That's, that's totally normal way to do business. That's fine.

• 20:09Nilay Patel?

  Uh, so yeah, I mean, it's true that Apple says that I want to, that I need to, Apple repeatedly said that Google's best. There are some incredible quotes here. Eddie Q testified, uh, they said, would you ever use Bing? And he said, there's no price Microsoft could pay to make us set Bing as the default. And then he said, they could give us the whole thing for free. They could give us the company and we wouldn't use Bing. Like Microsoft, you could just have Microsoft. And he's like, no, Google's the best. And it's like, maybe you believe that, but maybe you have a contract that says you have to say it. Like, I don't know. But if you rolled up to Tim Cook, you're like, here's what we get. Microsoft. I feel like he'd be like, we should talk.

• 20:45Alex Cranz?

  I mean, Bing is notoriously awful. Maybe just like Eddie was trying to like, find some good polite deals.

• 20:54Speaker 03

  Obviously, he has to say that. Um, I think it's interesting that this contract was also done in 2016. So Apple and the, the most recent search contract between Apple and Google, which means that they knew in 2016 that this deal looked bad. And they put a clause in saying they both needed to defend themselves against regulators. That's just a massive red flag. I don't know about you guys. Um, I always felt like Google was going to lose this case just because of how mafia like this arrangement has been. And the problem with Google's core argument at a very high level is this inherent contradiction of their argument was we're winning because we're the best. We're the best search engine,

• 21:38Speaker 03

  right? That was their, at the highest level legal argument. But then you're also paying a lot of money to win. So what is it? Is it actually because you're the best or because you're paying money? And Google was never able to address that contradiction because I think they know that this contract is anti-competitive. I think all sides know this. And I don't think it started that way. Like, I don't think it's an overexaggeration either to say that this contract has shaped. Silicon Valley, maybe more than any other contract between two companies in the sense of how Google and Apple grew together and have been kind of weirdly joined at the hip. Since, you know, the iPhone with Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt coming on stage together.

• 22:21Speaker 03

  And they've kind of let each other grow and not, you know, there hasn't been a turf war because of this very lucrative deal. So you've got things like Apple uses Google Cloud a lot. We found out that Apple Intelligence was trained exclusively on Google's TPUs instead of Nvidia hardware. Google helps serve advertising through Apple's integrated iOS placements. That's been happening for years. They've just like become very interjoined in a way that, um, yeah, Eddie could say, you know, we, we're not going to like do this for the whole company, but it's also like, that's, that's because they kind of already are doing this with, with Google.

• 23:06Alex Cranz?

  So they really did just kind of carve out and say like, okay, you get this. I mean, not on paper, but they really did just kind of carve things out and say, okay, you get search, we're going to take phones.

• 23:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:18Nilay Patel?

  Well, I don't, I think there's like teams inside of Google who do not know that.

• 23:21Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 23:24Nilay Patel?

  But, you know, it's fascinating. The, the phone piece is really interesting, right? Because obviously Android exists and I agree with you, Alex. I think the contract with Google has shaped a lot of thing that I agree with you, Alex. I think that the Apple Google contract in particular has shaped a lot of things and it's like a black hole. It's like just distorted the fabric of tech space time around it for a long time. But Google has these same deals with tons of other companies. It has these deals with carriers. It has T-Mobile and AT&T and Verizon all have similar default placement deals. Because, you know, the carriers provision apps and services on the phones they sell. And Google knows that's like a very powerful mechanism of distribution. And if they didn't pay, Microsoft would, and then Microsoft would have slightly more distribution.

• 24:10Nilay Patel?

  There's a study in the case, uh, the, the judge cites from inside of Google. It's very small. I'm going to warn you now, the sample size is tiny. It's like 26 people, but Google did a study of 26 people and they found that half of them did not know when Google was switched out for Bing on their iPhones. They just like didn't notice because no one notices.

• 24:29Alex Cranz?

  That seems real.

• 24:30Nilay Patel?

  Right, and like, these defaults are super powerful. The government, Cantor told me, he's like, "The thing we did for the first time in any access case is we put a behavioral scientist on the stand to point out that no one changes the defaults and habits are powerful and the judge bought it." Like, he comes back to the testimony from this behavioral scientist several times. At one point, I think this is like the most Verge-est thing ever, you might recall that Verizon owned Yahoo? They did. That was a real thing that happened inside of a company called Oath that they made that combined Yahoo with AOL. This isn't important, except to say, like, The Verge was born out of AOL's bullshit, so it's very personal to me

• 25:09Nilay Patel?

  that Verizon made Oath at one point. But Verizon owned Yahoo, and it wanted to preload Yahoo search on its phones. And they looked at the opportunity cost of doing that, how much it would work, how much it would cost and what it would take, and they looked at the check from Google, and they picked the check from Google. Right? They took their own product that they had bought, and they're like, "We could make this good." But putting it in front of more people and getting that clickstream data and making the search engine better, or we could just take Google's money. And Google's like, "What if it was more money?" And then Verizon caved, and they flipped Yahoo. And you're like, "Whoa, why didn't anyone ever try it with Yahoo?" It's because Google just made sure it couldn't get the distribution. Also, very Verge-est, one of my favorite parts of this whole decision, there's a lengthy conversation about bloatware and Android phones.

• 25:55Nilay Patel?

  And I don't know if I believe this, but there's all this evidence that people won't accept three browsers on their phones. Or three search widgets, but they will take two because Samsung has two. Right? So there's like internal Google emails and evidence and like meeting notes where they're like, "We're not so worried that our deal with Samsung for distribution, where there's our browser and Samsung's browser."

• 26:23Nilay Patel?

  Is under threat from Microsoft because no one would ever accept three browsers. And it's like, I don't know, man, I feel like Samsung is like one minute away from doing three browsers.

• 26:30Alex Cranz?

  Samsung is a hundred percent. Is it Samsung is going to do like four different browsers?

• 26:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's like, we're very close and like no one, they're like, absolutely not. Two search widgets on the home screen. Heaven forbid. And it's like, I don't know. Have you met these carriers?

• 26:42Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 26:43Nilay Patel?

  Like, if not for your exclusivity contracts, like they would put two search widgets on the home screen.

• 26:47Alex Cranz?

  I think.

• 26:48Nilay Patel?

  They're minutes away from doing this.

• 26:50Alex Cranz?

  They just forgot bloatware. They just like forgot how bloated phones were before Apple.

• 26:54Nilay Patel?

  It's a, there's a lengthy discussion of bloatware in this decision and how Google sort of like use the threat of bloatware. To, to make sure they were an exclusive provider of search on, on these devices. And you just see it up and down the stack. They, they find their angles to make sure there isn't competition and then press their advantage on those angles. And I, to me, it's, well, that's why we don't have other search engines. Like there's Bing and Bing just isn't good enough. And like the judge basically says Bing isn't good enough. Apple maybe has required to say it says Bing isn't good enough. Google is out there running benchmarks saying Bing isn't good enough. And then sort of knowingly making their product worse. And it's fine.

• 27:32Alex Cranz?

  What was the number? There was one number in the, in the decision that was like, it would take Bing 17 years to get the same amount of click data that Google gets in a day or something?

• 27:42Speaker 04

  So basically in this opinion, the judge says that 13 months of user data acquired by Google is equivalent to over 17 years of data on Bing.

• 27:53Nilay Patel?

  Right. And that's like the amount of, the amount of use Google gets in 13 months is it would take Bing 17 years.

• 28:01Nilay Patel?

  And all of that feeds back into the ranking model. It's like a really interesting thing. In this opinion is the stuff he dismisses. Right. He says TikTok is not a competitor to Google search. And then he's like, I know you all want me to talk about AI and how AI might like dethrone Google search, but we're not there yet. It hasn't happened yet. I don't see it. And I've got all this evidence and testimony from Googles on people saying they need the user data even when they try the AI tools. Even when they will put its AI models up to make the search results. It's the click data that actually helps them refine the search.

• 28:34Speaker 03

  They need the feedback loop, right?

• 28:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 28:37Speaker 03

  And this is what I hear talking to like Meta and other companies like they really think that the people who win at large scale network effects businesses like this just have the feedback loop. And AI search, if it just gives you the answer, you're not learning a lot about is the answer good? How can we improve it? Because you don't have an interface where people are browsing, clicking the links, going from pages. And yeah, it's smart of Google. You know, they recognized early that search was a network effects business, an aggregator business, and they went out and bought all kinds of distribution. They did Android purely to get Google search out there on phones.

• 29:19Speaker 03

  They realized they didn't own a phone, so they made an, they bought an OS and scaled it and did all these like funny business, you know, deals to basically bundle. And this is like, this is a tale as old as time. I mean, Microsoft, we'll get into this, I'm sure, Microsoft 20 years ago got its hand slapped by the DOJ for doing almost the exact same thing. And the characters that come up in this case have a fascinating background in that case. Like Kent Walker, who's running legal at Google, was the general counsel for Netscape during the Microsoft antitrust trial. Like, he understands, like, he understands bundling and what it does to the smaller players. You can't see this, if you're listening to this, but I'm wearing a Microsoft logo shirt

• 30:03Speaker 03

  from the early 2000s.

• 30:05Nilay Patel?

  From the trials.

• 30:06Speaker 03

  In honor of this. So yeah, I just find it interesting that like, if you look back at the last time a case like this was brought was Microsoft and Microsoft was so dominant, so ascendant. And the question was, will Microsoft control the consumer endpoint to the internet, right? And now, 20 years later, as a result of that decision, Microsoft didn't get broken up, but it changed a lot as a result. We've got Eddie Q in court saying, you couldn't give me all of Microsoft to use, right? And it's like, what does that mean for Google in 20 years?

• 30:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 30:37Speaker 03

  That's what these cases do, and this is why it's such a big deal long term.

• 30:41Nilay Patel?

  So this is what Cantor said to me on Decoder. Again, I won't get too into the weeds and legal stuff, but his takeaway, his big consumery takeaway was. This case is a continuation of the Microsoft case. The opinion itself, the judge makes endless references to the Microsoft opinion. He says, I'm using the same analytical framework as the Microsoft case. And Cantor's point to me was that case was about the application model moving from Windows to the web, which it definitely did. Now, whether or not you want to ascribe that to antitrust action or not, a lot of people have a lot of arguments. But a thing that really happened is we run apps and web browsers now and not natively on Intel processors on Windows. Like, we just run web apps. We're making this podcast a web app right now, a very cranky web app, I would add, that only runs in Chrome.

• 31:26Nilay Patel?

  There's your antitrust problem.

• 31:31Nilay Patel?

  But the application model moved to the web. It allowed a company like Google to exist because Microsoft wasn't able to bundle Internet Explorer and force out other browsers. So you had browser competition, which meant you had application model competition, on and on and on. And now you get to Google. And now the government has cases against not only Google, but also Apple, basically alleging the same thing. And Cantor's like, we have to make sure the next generation of applications is allowed to exist. And it's at these moments when everyone can see the change that the incumbents try to crush the insurgent models. And his point is Google is trying to do that potentially with AI search. They see it coming, so they're trying to lock down their advantage and make sure no one else gets distribution. And they can capture that market. And he thinks Apple is trying to do that on the iPhone, too.

• 32:15Nilay Patel?

  I don't know if they're going to win the Apple case, but that's the sort of his theory of the situation is a direct continuation from Microsoft. The Microsoft case is generally interesting because, you know, it's been 20. They started that investigation in 1990 and they reached resolution in, what, 2001? So that took a long time. And, you know, Bill Gates is out there being like, yeah, that distracted me, so I didn't do smartphones. And it's like, yeah, like, that's one way of thinking about it, but you also made Windows phone, which was bad.

• 32:44Alex Cranz?

  That's what he likes to say. Like, he's just like, it distracted me. It's like, no, it didn't distract you that much because you made a phone. You just made a crummy phone and you don't want people to know, talk about it.

• 32:54Speaker 03

  Well, it it makes these companies, especially at this scale, just super skittish, right? And you're, and I do think there is an argument that Microsoft missed the mobile wave and didn't do it right because it was skittish, because it was on, it was on its back foot. It was subsumed by litigation or regulatory response internally. And it's hard to not see that maybe playing out with Google here. And you can see Google already reacting this way in that, like, they're, the way that they fake bought at Character AI last week, for example. Which is totally wild. It came out after the Vergecast last week. I'll just quickly recap it. They basically bought this AI company without doing it and they paid all the investors and the employees as if they bought the company.

• 33:38Speaker 03

  But they only took the AI people and are leaving the husk, the flaming husk of what they left behind. And saying, good luck. But not a, not a M and A event because they didn't buy equity. But they're doing deals like this because they already feel this antitrust scrutiny. And they're not able to take the kind of big swings that they took to get to where they are now, which is buying YouTube, buying DoubleClick, buying these things that fortified their monopoly. And there's a really strong argument to be made that in the same way this kept Microsoft from being able to be so aggressive in the early 2000s. That could happen again with Google here.

• 34:16Nilay Patel?

  Okay, but here's a counter argument to that. Microsoft was distracted and lost in compliance efforts and I don't know, Bill Gates was drinking tequila and screaming at the moon about the Department of Justice or whatever he was doing instead of inventing the iPhone.

• 34:29Alex Cranz?

  Jumping over chairs.

• 34:30Nilay Patel?

  Do you believe that? Fine. Maybe you believe that's 100% true. Google exists. Apple was allowed to be resurgent because they put out the iMac. With the web browser on it, like the the iMac running OS nine when it came out was not like there's a suite of great OS nine applications for the Mac. It was this is the computer that's easiest to get on the web with. That's how they marketed it because the web was the application environment was the thing everybody wanted. It wasn't a bunch of weird Intel CD ROM Windows applications or whatever was happening before. And Carta was not the thing, right? It was the web and that worked. Like I, here we are in 2024 and we're like, Apple and Google are dominant companies.

• 35:16Nilay Patel?

  Because Microsoft was forced or coerced or distracted away from foreclosing that competition. And it's pretty hard, like you can look at that in hindsight and I promise you a bunch of old head VCs and investors will like and ex-Microsoft executives in particular will litigate and relitigate whether it actually happened or whether Apple was just better or whatever. But it is true that Microsoft was turned away and the web was allowed to be dominant. And the dominance of the web is what enabled the iMac to be successful. And now we're here with the iPhone, right? Like, that's the line.

• 35:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think that's what a lot of advocates for antitrust enforcement would say is just like, yeah, maybe, you know, with Microsoft, we saw Microsoft bog down and it's legal woes for a while. But, you know, what would have been a bad outcome was like never getting the rise of Apple and Google in the first place, never getting those products, not that Microsoft wasn't the one to invent those.

• 36:14Alex Cranz?

  And also, Microsoft is doing just fine.

• 36:17Nilay Patel?

  They figured it out.

• 36:18Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, right, like, like it forced them to be competitive. It forced them to think that's why they they invested in Azure and and they built up this this huge cloud computing business.

• 36:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Microsoft is like, I want to make a dance.

• 36:30Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 36:31Nilay Patel?

  Like having a good time of his life.

• 36:32Alex Cranz?

  Like, competition is in fact good. And when these companies get so big that they don't compete, we do see things like this. And I'm I'm not just saying that because I just bought a car with Google inside and it's hot garbage. And I can really feel how their their monopoly is affecting me personally. But you do feel it, like everybody feels it.

• 36:50Speaker 03

  Oh, you feel it. Google's stock price in the last five years is up 177%. Do we feel like search has gotten 177% better in the last five years?

• 36:59Alex Cranz?

  It's actually.

• 37:00Nilay Patel?

  No, they they just canceled 177% of their products.

• 37:05Nilay Patel?

  They've just, they've just end of life 177% of the things they invented. But I think this is the part that's really hard and I, you know, you couldn't have guaranteed in 2001 that Apple would be resurgent or that Google would come to be dominant in the web that they're dominant. And I think it's really hard to sit here in 2024 and predict that OpenAI will now have a chance to become the next Google. OpenAI, which I will remind everyone, Microsoft owns 51%.

• 37:33Speaker 03

  Forty-nine.

• 37:34Nilay Patel?

  You can't predict that, it's 49, you can't predict that Microsoft will, or you can't predict that TikTok will actually turn into a search engine because it has some designs on like larger search applications who might get banned. Like, there might be some startup that, you know, next year is going to take off and grow at the scale. It's really hard to make the forward-looking argument, especially when we don't know what the remedy is going to be, right? If the government shows up and says, "Break up Google", and the only way to fix this is to, I don't know, break up YouTube and Google, and the first thing YouTube is going to do is build a general search engine, because it's obvious that that's what they should do. And the first thing newly broken up Google will do is build a video platform, because like, sure, but is that what they're going to ask for? We don't know.

• 38:19Speaker 03

  Lauren, yeah, I was going to ask Lauren this. Do we think the DOJ actually wants to break up Google? I think they actually just want Google to not be able to spend 30 billion a year buying their distribution.

• 38:31Speaker 04

  I mean, I think the strongest signal we have is just the statements from Cantor himself about how he thinks about remedies generally, and that's that he prefers structural remedies, AKA breakups. And so I think, how, how sweeping will that structural remedy be that they ask for? I don't know, but, and you know, will they, is there a chance that they decide it's better to go with a behavioral remedy, AKA like ask them to stop doing something, ask them to stop putting certain terms in their contracts? Maybe they think that's more appropriate in this case. But I think we have to seriously consider that, you know, this structural remedies are something that Jonathan Cantor tends to like.

• 39:15Speaker 03

  Well, sure. I guess my point is like negotiating 101 is you always ask for more than you know you're going to get. I think

• 39:21Nilay Patel?

  Give me the whole company. Give me all of Microsoft.

• 39:24Speaker 03

  They will obviously ask to break up Google. I think in Cantor's heart of hearts, he would actually be okay if all that came out of this case was what happened in the Microsoft case, which is the government went for a breakup. They didn't get it. But Microsoft was foreclosed from doing these bundling anti-competitive contracts for distribution. I have to think the DOJ would be happy with that. And that would be just as, I think, impactful on all of tech if Google just can't buy out its distribution.

• 39:53Alex Cranz?

  But would it?

• 39:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think so.

• 39:56Alex Cranz?

  Because I think, like, if you think about, okay, how do they do that? How do they change that? Well, then, first thing, how do you change it on the iPhone? How do you change what that default is? Because there's always a default.

• 40:07Nilay Patel?

  Well, so one inside of that question, I think, is a very weird thing, which, so inside of that question, I think, is a hard problem to grapple with, which is right now, Apple collects $20 billion here from Google. If it can no longer collect that money, will it spend money to make its own search product?

• 40:27Alex Cranz?

  It's not spending it on Bing.

• 40:29Nilay Patel?

  Right? It's, yeah, it's not going to take the money from Bing, as we know, at EQ won't, there's no sum. It's unbuyable. Integrity is unimpeachable by Bing specifically. But, you know, Cantor told me that he thinks that AI turn is a big inflection point. And he wants the remedy to be forward looking. Right? He's not like, he's like, I can't fix 15 years of anti-competitive behavior. I need to make it so the future is, has competition in it. So if you prevent the money, if you prevent the $20 billion from going to Apple, does Apple invest more in Apple Intelligence? Does it start answering more questions directly? Does it make, you know, right now, it's OpenAI is the, the sort of general search product built into Apple Intelligence, but we know they're going to make a deal with Google

• 41:11Nilay Patel?

  too. Maybe there's more choices there, right? And like, Apple's going to, to more providers. And you can see, like, maybe that creates a different outcome.

• 41:22Alex Cranz?

  Like, for me, it's like, is it going to make Siri better?

• 41:25Speaker 03

  I think we're underestimating the power of money and the power of when you're so yes, it's 20 billion, but it's actually more than that. It's it's a meaningful percent of Apple's profit margin because the Google check is 100% margin. So when you subtract the Google money, Apple services business, which is the narrative for the future growth of the stock that Tim Cook has been spending for 10 years collapsed by a quarter. It's significant. And I think we're underestimating the just capitalistic inherent drivers here of when you are not getting a check to not do something anymore, you may go do that thing. And for the last, you know, 10 years, Apple has been getting paid an ungodly amount of money to just like, don't look over there.

• 42:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Just to end on this, we've talked a lot about the decision and the mechanics of Apple and what might happen next. Heath, you're, you know, you're sourced inside all these companies. What's the vibe inside of Google right now? Are they afraid? Are they worried? Are they watching their stock price? Like, what's happening?

• 42:24Speaker 03

  They're always watching the stock price. I think that what will really start to change things is when we get closer into this remedy phase and there's an actual sense of, is it a breakup? Is it Apple can no longer, you know, just be our default? Do we have to like make this a fair playing field? We have to open up our distribution lanes? We can't bundle Android and search. When that stuff starts becoming more concretely explained, which Lauren, correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like will be this fall. This is happening pretty soon. Right? So I would say by this fall, what will happen if the Microsoft case is any indication is there

• 43:06Speaker 03

  will be a ton of scrambling inside Google. There'll be a whole division spun up to address this, whatever structural changes they need to make should they lose this on appeal. And it's going to be messy because it's it's hard to, I've been thinking about this, like, who does this hurt more in the short term, Apple or Google? Because Apple gets the money, which will hurt its stock price, but Google's not going to have its distribution, which will also hurt its stock price. Um, I have to think that Apple already has the scenarios mapped out of what it will do should it lose this case. The vibe I've gotten inside Google is that they've actually been kind of gritting

• 43:46Speaker 03

  their teeth and just praying that this won't happen. Um, which was the Microsoft approach 20 years ago.

• 43:53Nilay Patel?

  Microsoft had other businesses, though.

• 43:57Speaker 03

  Google does too. Like, Google Cloud is huge. Like, Google.

• 44:00Nilay Patel?

  And not huge compared to search.

• 44:02Speaker 03

  I think YouTube and Google Cloud together are as big as search, if not bigger.

• 44:08Alex Cranz?

  Neil, you don't think the Pixel is gonna come around? XR is about to like blow us all away.

• 44:14Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying, Google has, all of its eggs are in this basket.

• 44:18Speaker 03

  Well, all of its eggs are in Gemini. And I think, you know, we saw this this week with like Gemini in the new Nest lineup, right? They are putting Gemini everywhere. I thought it was really interesting how we were at I O and Gemini was such a big part of the Pixel Android experience, and it's only going to be on Pixel. I think they really are betting on Gemini being the thing that kind of makes them, uh, something that consumers willingly pick again. Um, because they didn't have to worry about this for the last 10 years with search. Um, and Gemini for them has to work as a thing that makes people interested in Google as an actual innovator again. And I think that is their big bet to survive this change, should they lose the Apple deal.

• 45:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. All right. We'll see. Again, we're not at the remedies phase yet. If you want to read all 286 pages of the opinion, it's in the show notes. If you want a deep dive onto like the legal mechanics of it, uh, we'll link to that episode of Dakota Richon and Cantor, because he, we got very nerdy. At one point, I think he was like, what are you doing? So I stopped it. Uh, but we'll link all that in the show notes. We gotta take a break. We're, we're, we're well on our way to going over already. We'll be right back.

• 45:32Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends, like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest, or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra. Because it's not just a superior light beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 46:04Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. I apologize because we have to talk about another court case. We're going to keep this one short because it's stupid.

• 46:13Nilay Patel?

  I feel very confident in saying that this case is stupid.

• 46:18Nilay Patel?

  X, formerly known as Twitter, has filed an antitrust lawsuit against the World Federation of Advertisers, a number of giant advertising X platform formerly known as Twitter, has filed an antitrust lawsuit against the World Federation of Advertisers, which is a marketing trade association and a bunch of big companies like Unilever and Mars, which makes candy bars, for, quote, withholding revenue.

• 46:46Nilay Patel?

  Keith, can you quickly, I can't even get through it. Can you quickly explain what's going on here?

• 46:51Speaker 03

  X, what's really going on is that X's revenue has collapsed under Elon Musk in North America. I think The Times recently reported it's collapsed by more than 50% year over year. And I think there's a lot of pressure on Linda Iaccarino, the CEO-ish of X, to find revenue. And Elon hates this trade group and probably said, we just need to sue them like he did with OpenAI, etc. And it's a trade group. So, you know, it's not the companies that spend the money. It's a thing that, it's an entity that is a middleman that helps

• 47:31Speaker 03

  them decide how to spend the money. But the idea that any trade group has the ability to keep Unilever from spending on a platform is, shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the advertising ecosystem.

• 47:46Alex Cranz?

  Well, isn't X also a member of the?

• 47:49Speaker 03

  And they are a member. And they tweeted that they were proud to be a member last month. So.

• 47:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, I Linda Yakarino posted a very, um, I'm just gonna say hostage.

• 48:03Nilay Patel?

  Well, she's not hostage. No, no, she's just bad at making videos.

• 48:07Speaker 03

  Well, it could have been AI. I don't know. The necklace saying mama and then free speech makes me think it wasn't AI.

• 48:13Nilay Patel?

  These are all choices she made in her dumb bubble where people think that shit's cool. There's nothing about her that's a hostage or unwitting. Like we have, she was at Code last year. We saw her. She like.

• 48:25Speaker 03

  She's real.

• 48:25Nilay Patel?

  She's doing this because she wants to.

• 48:27Speaker 03

  Yes, I think so. I think there's a big part of where people at X, this is just from like my sources and Kylie's like, really feel the fading of their relevance as a company. It was really funny, like Linda held an all hands after filing this lawsuit that our Kylie Robinson was was getting info from from a source and

• 48:51Speaker 03

  when journalists started like posting what was happening to this all hands, she said in the all hands, like, look, this shows that we're important, which I think is just like a sign of the vibe, which is like X is thrashing around trying to be important. And I think litigation is a very classic Elon way of feeling important.

• 49:13Speaker 03

  And this is also has like, it has Jim Jordan wrapped up in it. Lauren, I just, I, this makes me just want to like roll my eyes.

• 49:21Alex Cranz?

  He was upset, right? Like he, he did a thing last.

• 49:23Speaker 03

  Yeah. Lauren, can you explain the, the Republican Congress Jim Jordan aspect of this? Because it's, it's, it's like brain worms, but it's probably important to explain.

• 49:33Nilay Patel?

  They are important brain worms.

• 49:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:35Speaker 04

  Yeah. Um,

• 49:38Speaker 04

  well, oh yeah, I forgot that Jim Jordan did send this letter to companies in this group asking about this boycott. Um, and you know, this is like the kind of thing that Jim Jordan likes to get involved in. You know, he did a whole thing around the, you know, what he has termed like censorship or collusion between the Biden administration and and tech companies. Um, so I think this is, you know, right in that sweet spot of like.

• 50:12Speaker 04

  X being this like free speech platform in his eyes that's being harmed by, you know, this group of other corporate entities. So I think like this is just like right in that kind of wheelhouse.

• 50:27Nilay Patel?

  And I think I just want to say something very clearly. And look, I know I went to law school. I'm not saying I'm an expert on every aspect of the law. I just know this one thing.

• 50:34Speaker 03

  Wait, you went to law school?

• 50:35Nilay Patel?

  There's no constitutional duty to spend money on advertising. You don't have to do it. And in fact, most of our speech law, like depends on the functioning of a market, right? We're like, actually, like, you know, there's a cliche phrases, like the cure for bad speech is more speech that we use. We're like, oh, we'll just like shovel more into the market and people will make their own choices. And one way you can make choices by spending money. Famously, our Supreme Court has held that money is speech.

• 51:08Speaker 03

  Disclosure.

• 51:09Nilay Patel?

  The holding in Citizens United.

• 51:10Speaker 03

  Disclosure, The Verge makes money through advertising.

• 51:13Nilay Patel?

  Right. I'm confident we're a part of whatever like GARM initiative. So like, big platform companies, it's hard to hold them to account. So the advert, it's a crazy that Unilever can't roll up to Meta and be like, don't put our ads next to racism. And Meta's like, yeah, I don't know. We'll take it. We'll like have another meeting. So they form these trade organizations to be like, hey, together, we have enough power in the market to make you build the tools for ads don't show up next to racism. That's like, that is the thing that is happening here. And underlying all of this is this, and I'll just say it, it's like, the Jim Jordan committee and the Elon Musk and the Linea Carino, they're like,

• 51:57Nilay Patel?

  we should be able to do racism. And like,

• 52:00Speaker 03

  You can't.

• 52:01Nilay Patel?

  You should, you should put the money near the racism.

• 52:03Speaker 03

  Well, no, they're not.

• 52:04Nilay Patel?

  They're mad that you don't. They're mad these companies won't do it.

• 52:07Speaker 03

  No, there's, yes, they want to do that, but they also think they deserve money for it. And what you're drawing the distinction on is X has every right to operate its platform in the same way that GARM has every right to tell its clients, this is what we think, and these are the platforms you think we should, we think you should spend on, etc.

• 52:26Nilay Patel?

  Until we got to this extremely weird point in American history where people are like, What if, what if racism? Like, what if, what if we did some more racism? This is, it's a weird moment. Up until recently, a thing like GARM that was like, we know these platforms are open and anyone can post whatever they want, but we want the advert, like, they're very relevant for the advertisers. So we want all the platforms, the advertisers to come together in a committee and have boring meetings and talk about brand safety guidelines, and then we'll all make money together. Like, that is, I don't know, probably a lot of our listeners have been to like, marketing conventions. Like, I've been, I've talked to a lot of advertisers in my time, like, they're the money, they're

• 53:07Nilay Patel?

  very boring and safe. Like, advertisers do not want to be near a bunch of Nazi stuff. So they're like, we're gonna go work with the platforms and we're gonna build these guidelines, and Twitter was in it. And what you're finding out now is like, Twitter doesn't want to offer those controls. The owner keeps tweeting weird racist stuff, which makes the platform seem not safe, and then boosting his own reach. But you don't have to spend money next to that. And it's, you know, they filed it in this, in Texas, we're gonna get a favorable judge, I'm sure they're gonna get some weird favorable ruling, but eventually you're gonna have to contend with the idea that not spending money somehow harms the free speech of racists on Twitter. And like, I don't think you can get that far. I think

• 53:53Nilay Patel?

  you can force a lot of people to spend a lot of money defending that action. I think you can scare a lot of advertisers, the way that people have scared Bud Light, right? You can scare the World Federation of Advertisers, the trade organization, into dissolving GARM, which is two people in a conference room, and they just, they're done with it now for a while.

• 54:12Alex Cranz?

  Their Slack room is closed.

• 54:14Nilay Patel?

  You can do a bunch of weird, threatening stuff, but at the end of the day, the thing you are arguing for is platforms should have racism on them, and advertisers should be okay putting their ads next to that racism. And if you don't offer those controls, You still have to spend the money. If you don't, it's like a problem. Uh, right. Under this, I would say, um, under this notably rumble also filed an antitrust lawsuit alleging that Garm.

• 54:38Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they're trying to get other people to do it. And the only ones who want to do it are the ones who want to do racism and are mad that nobody will fund their races.

• 54:46Nilay Patel?

  I would just point out that Twitter before all of this was not like Disneyland.

• 54:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. There was some racism.

• 54:54Nilay Patel?

  YouTube makes a lot of money. There's a lot of weird shit on YouTube. Uh, Meta, a notable provider of Facebook to old people. Weird shrimp Jesus all over, all over Facebook today. Right? Like they're, the money's still flowing in because they're playing the game in the market. And Mark Zuckerberg is like, you know, he, he might be cozying up to Peter Thiel and saying Donald Trump is a badass. But his public persona is like, I grew up my hair and I'm drinking a beer on a surfboard. We should all make money together. And that's more or less all you need to do. Not Elon Musk sit at the Deal Book Conference with Andrew Asorkin and tell Bob Iger to go fuck himself. And so you can't bribe me with money. And now he's like, wait, you're not spending the money? I'm going to sue you.

• 55:38Speaker 03

  Exactly. And that's what, that's what this is totally about is it's a denial on Elon's part that he has been self-destructive. He has been destructive to X's business and he wants to blame everyone but himself. I think that's ultimately what this comes down to.

• 55:52Alex Cranz?

  He's just a litigious bully. He's just like, how can I bully people legally? He's done it plenty of times before. This isn't the first time he's done it. This is probably just one of the stupidest times he's done it. Like.

• 56:04Nilay Patel?

  You know, okay. So that's like on the, on the top level, it's done, right? You, you don't have a constitutional duty to spend money. You just don't.

• 56:14Nilay Patel?

  Then there's the lawsuit itself. And I don't, I don't want to pull, it's, it's dumb. They, he didn't even get his usual lawyers to file it. He had to go get other lawyers like Quinn Emanuel. His usual law firm is not.

• 56:23Speaker 03

  Oh, they aren't.

• 56:25Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Yeah. This is like a real rando.

• 56:27Nilay Patel?

  He had to get someone else to do it. In classic Elon Musk fashion, this complaint centers around a contract that doesn't exist.

• 56:36Nilay Patel?

  He just loves to find contracts that don't exist. So you will recall when he sued OpenAI, it was for a contract that didn't exist. He has withdrawn that lawsuit, he refiled it in federal court recently, and now he's claiming it's fraud. There's, he took out the contract claims because he realized you can't sue over a contract that doesn't exist. In this case, he's saying there's antitrust, there's collusion, and the way he finds it is by inventing an enforceable contract with this ad trade organization. And he has to go find it somewhere, he has to say that it's a contract and it's enforceable, and it doesn't exist. But there's no penalty if you know whoever spends the money. Like, they might get an angry call from someone, but like, there's no penalty because there's no contract.

• 57:18Nilay Patel?

  So he says, "The agreement binding among GARM's advertising agency members to enforce brand safety standards is memorialized in a number of places other than the FAQ and the Charter." So if you're like, "This contract isn't an FAQ," you're already in your bed, you're wrong. And you're like, looking at other places. And then it says, "For example, in new member applications, GARM explains that members must agree to work with industry partners and category peers in a collaborative, non-competitive way." That's the application. There's no contract. So you have this like, big collusion and underlying it is nothing. And I'm telling you, this is just there to threaten people.

• 57:56Nilay Patel?

  And then there's a devastating, what can only be described as a devastating cellphone. "The advertising boycott of Twitter, now X, is contrary to the economic self-interest of the boycotting advertisers. Due to the boycott of Twitter, prices charged for advertising declined substantially in November 2022 and remain well below those charged by X's closest competitors in social media. By refraining from purchasing advertising on X, boycotting advertisers are foregoing a valuable opportunity to purchase low-priced advertising."

• 58:31Speaker 04

  This just sounds like an ad for X ad.

• 58:34Speaker 03

  Well, also, that's hilarious. It's also hilarious that Linda posted this video on X, where the advertisers she's trying to talk to are not there. They're purposely not there.

• 58:45Alex Cranz?

  Well, she was, she was there saying it's your voices, right?

• 58:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:48Alex Cranz?

  Like, calling on the, the users to effectively attack.

• 58:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 58:53Alex Cranz?

  All of these folks. So there's like.

• 58:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and that's like the Bud Light moment, right? Like, we're mad at Unilever. Go, weirdos.

• 58:59Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 59:00Nilay Patel?

  And like, I don't know, I, I personally think there's a lot, on the other side of this lawsuit is a lot of powerful advertising money. And they're gonna say, actually, we don't think your platform is brand safe. And it is, our money is our speech, and we can do whatever we want. And there's, there's no contract here saying we can't do these things. There's a trade organization that we rely on, so that we all act in a collective way to prevent the monetization of racism, and that's fine. And I, it's really hard to gin up a lot of.

• 59:29Speaker 04

  It's a really strange concept that, you know, it's like Linda is asking users to be mad that they're not getting advertisements from specific companies. Like, I don't think anyone's ever been mad to not get an ad.

• 59:42Alex Cranz?

  You need to be furious the Charmin Bear is not in your feed right now.

• 59:47Speaker 03

  God.

• 59:47Alex Cranz?

  Is what she's saying.

• 59:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 59:48Alex Cranz?

  It's just goofy.

• 59:50Nilay Patel?

  Uh, it's also funny that they've gone X premium. They're now advertising it has no ads.

• 59:57Nilay Patel?

  Cause you don't, it's cause you don't have any ads.

• 1:00:00Nilay Patel?

  Alex, how longer, how much longer do you think this iteration of X has to go? Like, to be clear, it is popping off during the election. Like, cause in the election year, there's a lot of activity on the platform. There's a lot of people coming to threads because Elon keeps posting insane nonsense. But it's, it's still vibrant in its way. Is it gonna be able to sustain itself over time?

• 1:00:23Speaker 03

  I think it's very hard for a platform with this level of scale and network effects in social media to just die quickly. I think it's like, we're talking like. Or Elon pulls the plug, right? Elon could have a episode and decide to fully pull the plug or sell it for parts. But barring that, I think it continues to live on. It dwindles in influence. If I had to guess, their percentage of users who are regularly posting has gone way down based on just scanning it. Like, my feed is just a lot of the same accounts now. It's just less interesting, less varied. But it still has that twitchiness. It's still, oddly, like

• 1:01:05Speaker 03

  in the tech community, the AI world especially, it's just still where everyone is and hanging out. And like, the OpenAI people are like, they're just feeding training data to Grok every day. It kind of blows my mind. But, so, yeah, Threads doesn't quite have that kind of real-time juice. And it's like, yeah, it's missing that still.

• 1:01:31Alex Cranz?

  It's gonna tell us about the lawsuit next week. Don't worry.

• 1:01:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, we'll find out about it last week or next week. I think, you know, he's betting big on payments. I think we're gonna see that relatively soon, this whole banking play, where you can exchange value with other Nazi supporters on the platform. I mean, I don't know what that's, you know, I think they're building that stack from scratch. I would hope so, because I could imagine Stripe turning that off after a while when you realize like, what's happening with that. But yeah, it's kind of just turning into this like, it's a reflection of Elon. It's a reflection of his psyche. It reminds me a lot of like Rupert Murdoch and Fox, and especially how he's using it in this election

• 1:02:14Speaker 03

  cycle. It's in stark contrast to Meta and Zuckerberg. Yes, you've got Zuckerberg on the edges with the Trump stuff, but Meta is like, we're out of politics. We're not recommending it even, right? And so it's just very different.

• 1:02:29Alex Cranz?

  Murdoch is successful with Fox is like the most successful news network. And he's really good at it. But Elon's not, he's

• 1:02:39Speaker 03

  Well, I think X will start to look more like that. I think it becomes his media empire.

• 1:02:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's, I mean, it's already become that, right?

• 1:02:46Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:02:46Alex Cranz?

  It's already become his place where he can go and spout the most transphobic racist stuff imaginable. And not get yelled at and then sue people because they don't want to advertise next to that transphobic racist shit.

• 1:02:58Speaker 03

  It's just very

• 1:02:58Nilay Patel?

  He's a free speech absolutist.

• 1:02:59Speaker 03

  Well, yeah. And that's, that's the thing. Like he said, we need the, the internet needs its digital town square. And that's what X was gonna be. And it turns out like, no one wants to be hanging out with a bunch of people yelling crazy, insulting vile stuff.

• 1:03:14Alex Cranz?

  It turns out digital Times Square sucks.

• 1:03:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, Times Square is like, you never want to be there, unless you're a tourist and you got conned into a guide thing there. So like, yeah, I, I, um, I feel like it's just reflecting him more and more. And that's going to make it smaller. But it will, it will live on. I think it stokes his ego. And I think he likes having a platform that has a media element to it that also feeds his other businesses.

• 1:03:39Alex Cranz?

  Which gets acquired by the other one first, Truth Social or X?

• 1:03:45Alex Cranz?

  I just summoned that, I'm sorry.

• 1:03:46Nilay Patel?

  I feel like after, we gotta wrap this up. We had a whole lightning round, but I feel like that, that is like a supernova of garbage. That after this election, we will see, right? Those things will collide into each other after this election. But yeah, there's just a, there's a moment happening here where it feels like whatever platform, we've talked about this so much on the show. Whatever platform era we are in with big search in Google, with Twitter dominating public discourse, with Instagram being where all the influencers are, like, all of that is just sort of winding down. Like, people are tired of a lot of it. And like, we'll see what happens next. But you can, you can feel it, like, oh, a bunch of stuff that we took for granted is changing.

• 1:04:27Nilay Patel?

  And one of them in particular is the dominance of Twitter in the conversation. Because he's just tearing it to shreds. I will end by reminding everyone, you do not have a constitutional duty to buy advertising.

• 1:04:41Nilay Patel?

  I don't like, it's not, you know, like, I don't know if I can make this argument to Clarence Thomas, like George Washington never said that out loud. You know, it's like

• 1:04:48Speaker 03

  Except if you have a lightning pun with your business and you are going to sponsor the lightning round, then you have a constitutional duty.

• 1:04:53Alex Cranz?

  Only reason, only reason.

• 1:04:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:04:55Nilay Patel?

  That's true. George Washington did say that. All right, we gotta take a break. We'll be right back with lightning round.

• 1:05:04Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends. Like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra because it's not just a superior like beer. It's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 1:05:35Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. And it's true that the lightning round is once again unsponsored. And I believe most of our founding fathers should be disappointed in you.

• 1:05:45Alex Cranz?

  We're talking to lawyers right now.

• 1:05:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:48Alex Cranz?

  The lawsuits are coming.

• 1:05:49Nilay Patel?

  We're going to sue every Vergecast listener for not sponsoring the lightning round. This is good. We have, there's just like a lot in lightning round. Cranz, let's just start with Disney real quick because all that's really happening here is they figured out that the way that you make money in streaming is by raising prices.

• 1:06:03Alex Cranz?

  They did. Yeah, Disney is doing fine. They, they figured out that it does cost money to, to put content out on the internet and, and, and that in order to get that money back, you have to increase prices. And they're also for some reason kind of copying Peacock and Paramount, even though they are famously not very as popular by adding in like ABC News is now going to be live. You'll be able to watch ABC just on Disney plus. And I'm like, that's really smart. I'm really excited about that as someone who doesn't pay for cable, but yeah. Disney's just jacking the prices up and it's going to keep happening. I'm sorry, folks.

• 1:06:39Nilay Patel?

  And they're going to do, they're cracking out password sharing in September. So they've just figured it out. They're like, we're going to charge everyone a lot of money.

• 1:06:46Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they're like, like everybody knows exactly what to do, which is make everybody pay you a lot of money for things, which is what they were all doing before streaming. And they're just like, oh my God, what if we did what we did with cable? But now we

• 1:06:58Nilay Patel?

  It turns out there is a constitutional duty to pay a lot of money for Disney.

• 1:07:02Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:03Nilay Patel?

  And that's just baked into the fabric of America.

• 1:07:06Alex Cranz?

  There is, I, I, I still wait with bated breath for the, the lawsuit, um, or the antitrust suit against Disney for just buying all of pop culture. And owning all of it, except for like Taylor Swift.

• 1:07:19Nilay Patel?

  Hey, I'm gonna go see the Wolverine movie tomorrow. Don't, it's, we're close to spoilers already.

• 1:07:23Alex Cranz?

  I don't want to spoil it. I don't want to spoil it, but it is the entire Disney oeuvre is like in that movie.

• 1:07:28Nilay Patel?

  All right. Uh, so that's Disney. Um, Lauren, what's your lightning round?

• 1:07:34Speaker 04

  Yeah. So I've got, um, Microsoft and Delta just going at each other for, you know, who, who was the issue with Delta having to cancel a bunch of flights after the CrowdStrike issue? And this whole story is basically the Spider-Man meme. They're just pointing at each other. Uh, and it seems like maybe Delta, Delta CEO missed an email from Satya Nadella, um, offering help and so

• 1:08:02Nilay Patel?

  It's very good.

• 1:08:04Speaker 04

  It's just a lot of really mundane things like missing emails, except that.

• 1:08:08Nilay Patel?

  Well, Delta wifi does suck, so I'm not

• 1:08:10Speaker 03

  It's really bad.

• 1:08:12Nilay Patel?

  I'm not surprised that he missed an email. He's probably on one of his planes.

• 1:08:15Speaker 03

  Yeah. Delta wifi is horrible lately. Yeah.

• 1:08:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, actually it seemed like maybe the CEO was like flying to the Olympics. Um, so yeah, it definitely could be, could be the Delta wifi.

• 1:08:28Nilay Patel?

  Um, so CrowdStrike went down, uh, Delta went down catastrophically. And then Ed Bastian, who's the CEO of Delta, was on CNBC and he said, when was the last time he heard of the big outage at Apple? Which apparently just made everyone mad. Like everyone got, except for Apple. I think Apple was thrilled to hear that. Um, and so Microsoft sent this letter and they're like, our software didn't cause your problem. CrowdStrike did. And CrowdStrike is kind of like, don't, we're, can you guys fight?

• 1:08:55Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:56Nilay Patel?

  It's all very good. Um, uh, and they keep saying they've been offering to help Delta. Delta apparently had it worse, like other airlines came back faster.

• 1:09:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, Delta was like days later. They were canceling, like they just canceled their, um, unaccompanied minor program during all of this. They were like, uh, yeah, minors, you just don't travel anymore. And so kids were like stranded in random airports and stuff. They shit the bed and, and are looking for someone to blame.

• 1:09:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So Microsoft is saying, uh, Delta has apparently not modernized its IT infrastructure. And that said, it's rapidly becoming apparent that Delta likely refused Microsoft's help because the IT system is having most trouble storing, crew tracking and scheduling was being serviced by other providers such as IPMs. And it's like, I've never seen an IT vendor look at a client and be like, no, no, absolutely not.

• 1:09:48Speaker 03

  Well, didn't South, wasn't Southwest not impacted because they were still running on like such an old version of Windows?

• 1:09:53Nilay Patel?

  No, that's a meme. That's right up there with JD Vance and the couch. It's like, it's so good. You don't want to check it, you know?

• 1:09:58Speaker 03

  Wait, JD Vance and the couch isn't real?

• 1:10:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:01Speaker 03

  Damn it.

• 1:10:02Nilay Patel?

  It's, it's like, there's a long list of too good to check and Southwest wasn't affected because it's running on Windows 3 is like right up there.

• 1:10:10Speaker 03

  You just ruined my week.

• 1:10:11Nilay Patel?

  I'm sorry. That's fine. Southwest is great. Um, all right. Alex, what's yours? Uh, Heath, what's your lightning round?

• 1:10:17Speaker 03

  Yeah. So mine is a great scoop that Kylie had on the site about Humane, a company that we obviously have been obsessively chronicling since the dirt disastrous debut of its AI pen. Uh, she found out based on some internal sales data that she got that more pins are being returned than sold.

• 1:10:35Nilay Patel?

  That's very good.

• 1:10:36Speaker 03

  Which I'm not running a hardware business, but I think that's bad. And, um, the piece is great. She's got a lot of color. Um, I just want to call out Humane spokesperson Zo's cookies' statement to us where she said, uh, we do not comment on financial data, but will refer it to our legal counsel.

• 1:10:59Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 1:11:00Speaker 03

  And, um, It's just ridiculous. It's a ridiculous response to a story like this, but Humane is very much on the defensive. There's talks, rumors of them, you know, trying to sell themselves to HP. They raised over $200 million and sold 9 million worth of products-ish. So not good for them.

• 1:11:19Nilay Patel?

  And wait, you do the math at $9 million, whatever, the pin was 700 bucks. So he sold like 12,000 units.

• 1:11:25Speaker 03

  They wanted to sell 100,000 in the first year.

• 1:11:27Nilay Patel?

  Right. So he sold like 12,000 and I think Kylie has it, there's only 7,000 left in the lot.

• 1:11:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:11:32Nilay Patel?

  That's bad. That's just generally bad.

• 1:11:34Speaker 03

  But if you have one, you should save it and put it in a box. It's going to be a great, honestly, it'll be a great collector's item.

• 1:11:39Alex Cranz?

  If you have one and haven't returned it and actually use it, just, just hit me up. I want to know everything about you. I want to understand your world.

• 1:11:47Nilay Patel?

  Someone right now, someone is touching their pin and be like, email Alex. Alex. Email Alex.

• 1:11:53Alex Cranz?

  Nope, no, the pin's on fire.

• 1:11:56Nilay Patel?

  Oh, that was everything Kylie's piece, which I think is one of the worst pieces of the puzzle. They haven't figured out how to refurbish the pins.

• 1:12:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:12:05Nilay Patel?

  Because some limitation with T-Mobile, which I'm guessing is related to reprovisioning the eSIM inside the pin. So they're just stuck with this and they hope they can figure it out. We, just bad all around. I will say to Heath's point, once you tell, once you start waving lawyers at me, I've learned something about you.

• 1:12:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:12:27Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:28Nilay Patel?

  I'm not gonna say what.

• 1:12:28Speaker 03

  It's the ultimate tell.

• 1:12:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's just like, it's like, oh, oh, I know something. And we, we do this a lot. People, a lot of lawyers have emailed me. The verge still exists. That's all I'm gonna say. We're, we're better at it than you might think. All right. I'm gonna talk, can I, can I quickly talk about the TV competition?

• 1:12:47Alex Cranz?

  Tell us everything.

• 1:12:48Nilay Patel?

  A story that I didn't write, a thing that no one knows that I did. There's a very famous TV store in Westchester, New York called Value Electronics. They've been doing it forever. They sell a million TVs. Robert Zahn, the guy who owns it, runs it with his family. It's just a little mom and pop. And they sell more high-end TVs than anyone. Like Sony allocates high-end TVs to this one store. And so every year they run, and he's a former broadcast engineer. So every year they run this thing called the TV Shootout. They've been doing it for 20 years. And like, literally, like, the CEO of compression houses and like, the head colorist for movie studios, like, A Warner Brothers Discovery encoding person is like, they're the judges. They have master calibrators come and calibrate all these TVs.

• 1:13:34Nilay Patel?

  And then there was me, because I'm a consumer reviewer. Which is great. So I was honored to do this. I felt completely out of my depth. I think my scores are in line with everyone else. And I will write this up over the weekend, but I will say one. My TV, the one I bought, the Sony A95, it won.

• 1:13:50Alex Cranz?

  Yay, congratulations.

• 1:13:52Nilay Patel?

  That was the winner. And then the mini LED TVs, I think I said micro LED earlier, but the mini LED TVs, the new Bravia 9, there's a Samsung one, there's an LG one. They're not even in the running yet. You can just obviously tell, like, they're gonna get there. But there's so much more to go on the mini LED side before they compete with the OLEDs. The OLEDs are just like, it was like a sigh of relief going and looking at the OLEDs after the mini LEDs. I will write all this up, but it was fascinating to be a judge in a TV picture quality. Like, first of all, I was in heaven. Like, pure heaven, just joy. For two days, I did nothing but look at TVs with other TV nerds and talk about things like posterization and like fields of color.

• 1:14:36Alex Cranz?

  Did people, who brought the like colorimeter? Did anybody bust it out?

• 1:14:42Nilay Patel?

  So that we were, I gotta write about this, but we were judging the TV. It wasn't a subjective evaluation. They had $40,000 Sony reference monitors. By each bank of three TVs.

• 1:14:56Alex Cranz?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:14:56Nilay Patel?

  And the judging was how much the TVs were deviation, how big of a deviation from the reference monitor those TVs were.

• 1:15:04Alex Cranz?

  Oh, so of course the Sony won.

• 1:15:06Nilay Patel?

  Right, because it was a Sony reference. It's like, does the Sony look like its own Sony reference monitor? But the reference monitors were like, this is what the mastering people wanted the movie to look like or wanted the contents to look like. And then if you calibrate the TVs, how closely can you calibrate the TV to the reference?

• 1:15:22Alex Cranz?

  This is what I want.

• 1:15:23Nilay Patel?

  It's not like a what looks better, totally subjective thing. It was how close is this to the reference? Which made it like a very different kind of exercise. And then obviously, everyone's like a huge nerd. Like, people were up there, like staring at pixels and like intently, and we had to be reminded, the judges were like, you can't collude. Purely in heaven. No anti trust here. For two days over a weekend.

• 1:15:47Alex Cranz?

  How many times did you have to watch Harry Potter?

• 1:15:50Nilay Patel?

  Or Avatar. Oh, man. So we watched a movie called Doctor Sleep several times, which is insane. So you had to find things like we were judging things like low light performance.

• 1:16:01Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 1:16:02Nilay Patel?

  Fast SDR motion or like bright HDR sports. So they had to find clips to play. All of the clips were being run off an Oppo Blu-ray player.

• 1:16:13Alex Cranz?

  I'm so happy.

• 1:16:14Nilay Patel?

  Out of you or off or off a Kaleidoscope, which is really high bitrate.

• 1:16:17Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:18Nilay Patel?

  Streaming. So there were all these like specific clips that were there to show like specific things that we were to judge. And I had like 60 numbers per sheet and there were like four sheets of scores. And it was it was a 10 point scale and I was like world of no sevens.

• 1:16:41Nilay Patel?

  It was great. The study you can go look at the press release. You can see the scores. The Sony won. The LGG four came in second, more or less. And the Samsung came in third in the OLEDs and then the mini Sony mini they came in first.

• 1:16:55Nilay Patel?

  So the scores are public. I'm not revealing anything. You can just go look at that press release. I will write up the whole thing because there's more to say. But I have to say like, I thought I was going to spend this week arguing about TV stuff with people. And I super did it. I was very much distracted by other stuff. But I had the time of my life. It was really fun to be a judge. I hope I get to do it again next year. And yeah, I'm like, I, I, and I, the interesting thing is that the headroom for those mini ladies to get as good as OLEDs is obvious, but it's it's nowhere close. Like, yeah, not even in the same ballpark.

• 1:17:27Alex Cranz?

  Was it the brightness and just like that, that, that difference in?

• 1:17:31Nilay Patel?

  No, it's like, it's called, I mean, they're LCD TVs.

• 1:17:33Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:34Nilay Patel?

  So they're still, they're, they're like washed out. The colors are all wrong. Like the LCDs are all pinker than the OLEDs. It's, it's like bananas. I will post up my scores like my my score sheets.

• 1:17:44Alex Cranz?

  Like Neil, I just want you to file this story. I just really want to read that story out.

• 1:17:48Nilay Patel?

  That's what I thought I was gonna do this weekend. I had to read PDFs all day long.

• 1:17:50Alex Cranz?

  Please, no one else release a major lawsuit.

• 1:17:53Nilay Patel?

  I started in this whole career to not be a lawyer and to look at TVs all day long.

• 1:17:57Alex Cranz?

  No more lawsuits. We're done for the week.

• 1:18:00Speaker 03

  Also, justice for the Frame TV. I'm really sad.

• 1:18:02Nilay Patel?

  The Frame TV was not even in the picture. Like, I brought up the Frame TV with a bunch of people. Oh, the manufacturers all had representatives there. So I met a bunch of very nice, like, Sony engineers and product managers and all the companies were there. And I kept asking, like, do you think the Frame TV is a harbinger of doom? And they'd be like, no, no comment. I don't, who are you? Are you a professional color calibrator?

• 1:18:22Alex Cranz?

  Well, we got more of them now.

• 1:18:24Nilay Patel?

  We, yeah, there's, there's a competition for the Frame TV from, who is it?

• 1:18:29Alex Cranz?

  It's TCL and HighSense. So like, like, race to the bottom. On TV quality there. No disrespect.

• 1:18:37Nilay Patel?

  It's a real something. TCL and HighSense, by the way, opted out of the competition. They declined to purchase. It's pretty good. All right, Kranz, what's your lightning round?

• 1:18:47Alex Cranz?

  All right. So my, my lightning round is Chromecast is dead, but Chromecast is not dead. Just the dongle is dead. I, I saw there was some confusion out there in the world. Chromecast is like the protocol that you can go and like, cast things to your TV or whatever. That still lives. The little dongles are gone. They're done.

• 1:19:05Nilay Patel?

  It's all over. The picture we have in our Chromecast is gone is a picture I took of the first generation Chromecast in 2013, plugged into my Pioneer Kuro. And in the background, you can see my three component cables plugged into it because it was 10 years ago.

• 1:19:21Alex Cranz?

  Component ruled.

• 1:19:23Nilay Patel?

  Pretty sure my cable box is plugged in with RCA cables via a component. It's very good.

• 1:19:28Alex Cranz?

  It's very good.

• 1:19:29Nilay Patel?

  It's kind of, you know, the, Google's whole idea of the Chromecast was you, you're just gonna use your phone to watch video and send it to a TV.

• 1:19:37Alex Cranz?

  And we all realized that sucked.

• 1:19:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it didn't work. And then the TVs all have the software in it. And the new streamer box, Alex, I'm very curious for your perspective on this. They told Chris Welch that their North Star, what they were competing with, is the Nvidia Shield.

• 1:19:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Look, we love to rip on the Nvidia Shield. I personally still use the Apple TV myself. But the Nvidia Shield is the most powerful set-top box. It is the highest quality. It is the one that like, if they had been using a streaming box at the shootout Neil I went to, that's what they would have been using.

• 1:20:10Nilay Patel?

  They use Apple TV.

• 1:20:11Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. But Apple TV is, that's the one that installers all like to use because that's what the clients more prefer.

• 1:20:16Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 1:20:17Alex Cranz?

  So those are three, like the two. So like, chasing the Nvidia Shield is awesome. The Nvidia Shield could probably do to chase itself a little because I don't think it's had an update in like, two years. But it's like,

• 1:20:28Nilay Patel?

  I think Nvidia has different priorities now.

• 1:20:30Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, right now they're like, we're just gonna like, generate buckets of money with AI. We don't care about these little.

• 1:20:36Nilay Patel?

  If we ever interview Jensen Wang in the decoder, I'm gonna be like, Jensen Wang. If we ever interview Jensen Wang in the decoder, I'm gonna be like, AI, whatever. Tell me about your plans for the Nvidia Shield. And then we're gonna see if he even knows it exists.

• 1:20:48Alex Cranz?

  He's just gonna be like, pocket sand, throw it at you and then disappear out of frame. Absolutely not.

• 1:20:54Nilay Patel?

  Run away. Oh, Alex, I gotta tell you, one of the tests we did at the TV shootout was an ATSC 3.0. We watched the Olympics broadcast from NBC New York in 1080p HDR to something called the Zapper box, like a tuner box, with Atmos Audio. It was like ba- ba- like barely compressed because it was just full quality broadcast. It looked incredible.

• 1:21:16Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:17Nilay Patel?

  I was like, I gotta get an antenna. And I was like, no, I don't.

• 1:21:19Alex Cranz?

  You don't even.

• 1:21:20Nilay Patel?

  I truly do not have to get.

• 1:21:21Alex Cranz?

  That's the only station, and you won't get, you won't get any joy out of it once the Olympics are over.

• 1:21:26Nilay Patel?

  Uh, there was a very funny mis- like, miscommunication moment where I was like, where is this coming from? And someone very earnestly was like, it's in Paris. And I was like, no, that's not what I meant at all.

• 1:21:39Alex Cranz?

  Bonjour.

• 1:21:40Nilay Patel?

  I was like, no, what station is br- fine, whatever. Uh, it was very good. All right, we are way over. I'm sorry that we talked about Elon Musk, but he's not good at knowing what a contract is. I'm just telling you that's the truth. Uh, Lauren, Pete, thanks so much for joining us. This is great. Thanks for having us.

• 1:21:57Alex Cranz?

  Thanks.

• 1:21:59Nilay Patel?

  I think David Pierce is back next week. We'll see if the show gets back. We'll see if the show gets back on the rest. It won't.

• 1:22:07Alex Cranz?

  We're gonna be too busy suing each other.

• 1:22:09Nilay Patel?

  Uh, all right. That's it. That's our chest.

• 1:22:17Speaker 05

  And that's it for The 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. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it. We'll see you next week.

• 1:22:35Speaker 06

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