Month: August 2023

U.S. Judge Narrows Scope of Google Antitrust Case ⇥ nytimes.com

David McCabe and Nico Grant, New York Times:

In the decision, which was unsealed on Friday, Judge Amit P. Mehta of U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia dismissed four claims in the lawsuits and allowed government lawyers to move forward with three.

Judge Mehta wrote that a trial was warranted to assess whether Google’s exclusivity deals for web browsers and preloading its services on Android devices illegally helped the internet company maintain a monopoly. But he said the government had not “demonstrated the requisite anticompetitive effect” to prove that Google broke the law in other ways, such as by boosting its own products in search results over those of specialized sites, like Amazon and Yelp.

The authors of this article do not link to the judge’s decision (PDF). This is not difficult. In addition to what has been mentioned above, the judge found merit in trialling an accusation that Google delayed adoption of features for Microsoft Ads in its Search Ads 360 product for anticompetitive reasons.

Apple Says Users Have Deposited $10 Billion in Its Savings Account as Reports Suggest Goldman Sachs Wants to End Its Partnership ⇥ apple.com

AnnaMaria Andriotis, reporting for the Wall Street Journal in June:

Goldman Sachs Group is trying to end its partnership with Apple.

The Wall Street firm is in talks with American Express to take over its Apple credit card and other ventures with the tech giant, according to people familiar with the matter.

This story was followed by a deeper investigation published by the Information behind its paywall, and summarized by Malcolm Owen at AppleInsider:

The entire operation was costly for Goldman, to a considerable level. Apple Card was apparently responsible for at least $1 billion in pre-tax losses at Goldman between 2021 and 2022.

For Goldman, the deal is also very low-profit, as it doesn’t take a cut of interchange fees paid by merchants for transactions. The lack of other fees also limits Goldman’s other revenue sources from the operation, unlike other cards that include late or annual fees.

I am certain you are as heartbroken as I am that Goldman Sachs, of all companies, is struggling to cover the costs of a credit card program which charges between 16–27% interest but does not have an assortment of hidden fees.

Apple and Goldman have not commented publicly on the future of this relationship beyond the latter’s partial retreat from consumer banking. But Apple yesterday trumpeted the success of the savings account feature tied to Apple Card:

Today, Apple announced that Apple Card’s high-yield Savings account offered by Goldman Sachs has reached over $10 billion in deposits from users since launching in April. Savings enables Apple Card users to grow their Daily Cash rewards with a Savings account from Goldman Sachs, which offers a high-yield APY of 4.15 percent.

[…]

“We are very pleased with the success of the Savings account as we continue to deliver seamless, valuable products to Apple Card customers, with a shared focus on creating a best-in-class customer experience that helps consumers lead healthier financial lives,” said Liz Martin, Goldman Sachs’s head of Enterprise Partnerships.

In January, a couple months before this savings account was launched, Goldman said it had over $100 billion in deposits like these.

This CBC Article About the Online News Act Is a Real Stinker

Today, Meta announced it is beginning the process of ending Canadians’ access to news publications as a consequence of Bill C–18, now known as the Online News Act. This is an entirely predictable consequence of the Act, which requires big tech companies like Google and Meta to decide between having an unpredictable bill for all their news links, or having a fixed cost of zero dollars. In the fullness of time, we will find out if fewer Canadians are using their services because they cannot use them for news coverage, but it seems to me like a safe gamble on the part of Meta and, soon, Google.1

When I tried finding third-party coverage of this announcement, I turned to Google — DuckDuckGo’s news results are filled with articles syndicated at MSN and Yahoo — and had a hard time finding a non-wire report from a Canadian publication. Many were either from Canadian Press or Reuters. Happily, CBC News’ Darren Major filed an original report, but it did not take me long to find problems with both the reporting and the subjects it profiled:

Social media giant Meta says it has officially begun ending news availability on its platforms in Canada starting Tuesday.

Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, has been signalling the move was coming after the government passed its Online News Act, Bill C-18, in June.

Those “signals” include the company stating outright that “news availability will be ended on Facebook and Instagram for all users in Canada”, which is not so much a nod as it is a direct confirmation. The news here, as it were, is that Meta followed through on things it said repeatedly.

The law requires big tech giants like Google and Meta to pay media outlets for news content they share or otherwise repurpose on their platforms.

This is not accurate. It requires operators of large social media businesses and search engines to pay for news links either shared by users or which publishers have permitted to be indexed. The tech company does not meaningfully share links itself. This is more fuzzy around links found through search engines, but publishers have control over whether they want their articles to be included in results.

Major’s introduction to this story is not great. Perhaps even more objectionable material can be found in quotations from various elected officials. For example:

Newly appointed Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge said Meta has refused to participate in the regulatory process.

“This is irresponsible,” she said in a statement. “They would rather block their users from accessing good quality and local news instead of paying their fair share to news organizations.”

This legislation demands preposteriously that publications are owed some kind of “fair share” of revenue from referral sources, but nothing about that reflects how the web works. This feels like the “Mad Men” clip where Don tells Peggy “that is what the money is for”, except it is links.2

The Canadian media landscape sucks. The online ad marketplace sucks. I concede that publications regularly post links to their own work on social media and permit search engines to index their websites out of an expectation that we will find them there, and that it is currently hard to know the true value of these third party referrals to the revenue streams of publishers. But this legislation is a bad way to address that imbalance, and the dichotomy St-Onge presents is wrong. Canadians are not being blocked from accessing news, and there is no “fair share” to be had.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre put the responsibility squarely at the feet of the Liberal government.

“It’s like Nineteen Eighty-Four,” he said. “Who would ever have imagined that in Canada the federal government would pass laws banning people from effectively seeing the news?”

Predictably, Poilievre is just plain wrong. Even the most charitable reading of this statement — one which moves the word “effectively” to between “would” and “pass” — is a ludicrous bad faith reading of this Act and it is embarrassing that political rivals use this sort of language instead of trying to navigate the nuances of a particular topic.

Martin Champoux, heritage critic for the Bloc Québécois, accused Meta of trying to intimidate parliament into rescinding the law.

“This deplorable decision serves no one. In fact, the big losers are the users who will be deprived of their news on social networks,” Champoux said in a statement in French.

It is no secret that Meta has been arguing against the Online News Act since it was first proposed. But what is missing from this criticism is that Meta has actually been making good points all along, and the law is very bad. I am obviously no fan of Meta’s and I trust policymakers more than seemingly most people in the technology commentary space, but even I can acknowledge this Act is poor and these are reasonable concerns:

“In order to provide clarity to the millions of Canadians and businesses who use our platforms, we are announcing today that we have begun the process of ending news availability permanently in Canada,” Rachel Curran, Meta’s head of public policy in Canada, said in a statement.

[…]

“In the future, we hope the Canadian government will recognize the value we already provide the news industry and consider a policy response that upholds the principles of a free and open internet,” Curran said in her statement.

This is completely fair. As Casey Newton wrote earlier this year, there are plenty of other ways the government can support Canadian media without resorting to a link tax.3 But they decided to go after a fundamental component of the web in a way that will, as the Liberal Party acknowledges, create a precedent:

St-Onge said the government will continue to “stand its ground” and suggested other countries are considering drafting similar legislation.

This is a dangerous piece of legislation — one which the government has dug in its heels for and pushed through despite protests from open web activists and major corporations alike. You do not have to be a fan of Google or Meta to recognize how flawed it is. You only need to see the obvious conclusion that requiring sources of web traffic to pay up is going to make them less likely to play that role.

  1. This is entirely unrelated to the topic at hand, but I think it is fascinating how successful the “Meta” brand has become compared to, say, Google’s attempt to introduce Alphabet. To be fair, the commitment to the “Alphabet” branding is pretty weak; the Meta website is more than just a landing page for investors. But something I noticed last week is how Meta still uses “Facebook” branding on its quarterly earnings statements (PDF). Place your bets now on whether “X” takes off. I think everyone except the Elon Musk fanbase will keep calling it Twitter, and keep calling posts “tweets”. ↥︎

  2. It is truly unfortunate that crappy Instagram gurus of business and men’s advice take “Mad Men” literally. ↥︎

  3. A paid link, unfortunately, but I believe you know where to find a workaround. ↥︎

Apple’s Engineering Choices and Repairability ⇥ ianbetteridge.micro.blog

Ian Betteridge:

Apple doesn’t have to create modular phones that are incredibly easy to repair, although it would be fantastic if it applied its undoubted engineering prowess to doing so. There are a lot of things it could do which aren’t as radical as that. Apple could publish its calibration processes, which would make third party repair easier. It could publish the schematics for its devices, as for example Fairphone do (but other phone makers don’t). It chooses not to do these things. Everything about Apple’s behaviour here is a choice, one that it could and should change.

I think this is entirely right. We do not know why Apple has made individual engineering decisions, some of which impact repairability, but it should not affect how the company could choose to respond. It is the right choice for the planet and, increasingly, Apple itself.