Google and Apple Avert Disaster, More on Kpop Demon Hunters and Hollywood, Mail on Microsoft, Adobe and ASML
Episode publishedPodcast: Sharp Tech with Ben ThompsonSharp Tech with Ben Thompson
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Hello, and welcome back to another episode of Sharp Tech. I'm Andrew Sharp, and on the other line, Ben Thompson. Ben, how you doing?
I'm doing okay, Andrew. Doing okay. Not as good as Apple's doing right now, but but boy. Okay.
Yes. Breathing the biggest sigh of relief in the entire world earlier this week. Happy for the folks out at Cupertino. That's where we're gonna begin, Ben. We're gonna be hitting a lot of mail with the second half of this episode. The news has been too busy the past few weeks, so we've been slacking on the mailbag. We're gonna try to remedy that today. But speaking of remedies, Ben, we're gonna start
What a segue. Wow. Look at you.
Indeed. Indeed. Here we are. The resolution of what many were calling the most significant tech antitrust case of the twenty first century, on August 5, judge Amit Mehta ruled, quote, Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly. And then on September 2, after the wheels of justice spent twelve long months churning away, Meta issued the remedies holding in that case. We have a lot to go through with this opinion. I'm gonna put on my anti monopolist pants though and just skip to the question that has been bothering me for the last several days. How in the world did J
Well, there's a really excellent website that has written about some of these topics. And a year ago, this site had a really good post, in my estimation, talking about Google and their overall strategy of kind of like overt generosity, sort of building what I think the site recently referred Google Patronage Network, where everyone just sort of gets money from Google all the time, which always sort of confused the anti monopolist. They held this up as evidence that the fact that Google is paying for this placement shows that they obtain their power via payments for placement. Because if someon
Why would they give Apple 36% of their search revenue in that scenario? Yes, it's a fair question.
Right. And the reason why they would pay is because of this ruling. I mean, the first reason, first and foremost, is it just locks out any potential competition. But number two is you get to a ruling like this where Google is held to be a monopolist. And generally speaking, the court has leeway in its remedy to not just stop the bad behavior, but to undo the gains from the illegal behavior. And the most obvious way to do that is to end these payments. And is that unfair to Google because other companies can pay? Yeah. But that's sort of the punishment that you get.
The price of being a monopolist and enjoying like massive No.
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