Apple files emergency motion to become defendant in US vs. Google [pdf]

Or at minimum, any such deal should be illegal unless explicitly approved by a regulator as not harming competition.

Now, it may not be that black and white. If the ruling comes down to a negotiated settlement rather than a court judgment, then Apple very well may want some say in what that looks like.

They're also your primary care doctor! Amazon OneMedical!

https://health.amazon.com/onemedical

Scroll down the page a bit.

> I think the valuation of a broken-up Google and Apple would exceed the monolithic conglomerates that they have become. So many of their business units and products don't even monetize because they're going for an intangible "platform value".

I think a lot of these products aren’t monetized because they’re actually bad businesses or failed ventures and companies have the free cash to support them. A lot more of Google’s (for example) random side projects seem to be getting subscriptions or collapses into existing ones. I also think that vertical integration creates unique value sometimes. I think spinning off these random side businesses could destroy the side businesses, but that this may still raise stock prices as the companies get better margins. I think a lot of these products are bad businesses because big tech salaries are high and that makes labor costs hard to account for.

I think the breakups obviously rectify consolidated power. 100%. But I don’t see more mobile phone operating systems coming from a breakup of Apple, for example. Gmail isn’t going to be replaced by a new email provider. Nor would we see a new YouTube, or other dominant businesses. Disrupting these massive aggregators won’t come from direct competition, but rather new product and service experiences. TikTok has shown that tech is already not impenetrable.

Finally, I totally agree that this would be a feeding frenzy for VCs, but VCs learned in the last decade how to rip off ICs even more through delaying IPOs and more aggressive dilution. So I wouldn’t be holding my breath as an IC that breaking up Google (or others) will make jobs better.

When a large subset of people only care about culture war, this isn’t easy.

Changing the law for highly politicized situations is damn near impossible today.

DoJ asserts that owning a browser gave Google an unfair advantage in building a search engine to the degree that it prevented meaningful competition.

I don't think Google losing Chrome is too harmful to Google. I would say it's probably equal to Apple losing billions from the default search deal.

(Obviously a President caring about popular opinion is a feature and not strictly a bug, but I think it's reasonable that a President should also care whether said popular opinion is ill-informed and wrong when it comes to national security.)

1. Alter the rules so the thing is under threat

2. Intervene to protect it from the harm you initiated

3. Now you're encumbered by one fewer rule, and you're a known protector of the thing

Executive Heist? Tyrant's Gambit? The Ol' Feudal Switcheroo?

My local school district did it with school days just this year. On the books they're now "online learning days" but thanks to the largesse of the very people who took them away, we can have them still... as a gift.

It's kind of like the D&D alignment chart: Sure, Lawful-Evil might still be feeding orphans to the doomlord, but at least they are constrained by their own dang rules instead of a playing Calvinball.

As in attorney generals, judges etc. should be appointed by a non political process. I think any rebuttals of the form ‘the other side did it too’ just add weight to this viewpoint.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/musk-aides-lock-government-...

In no world is a startup going to unseat Apple, Amazon, or Microsoft. Google and Facebook maybe.

VCs don’t want to touch hardware with a ten foot pole (Apple), competing with Amazon would be a money sink to duplicate all of the infrastructure as would Microsoft (who cares about desktop operating systems and the enterprise will never leave MS).

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in...

I guess ideals are a nice tool to compare something against to measure something's relative value. But they can also be used as a whitewash. Maybe the difference is how engaged an informed citizen body is with the government.

https://theyesmen.org

Let's just call corruption corruption.

BTW, the Orange One has now modelled himself after Adolf Hitler, a man who's political accomplishments no other has yet to achieve in human history. If you don't have time to read Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, watch Hitler: A Career. It is quite clear that they (Trump's team) are applying the lessons from that era and are aiming at retaining power.

So I mean, he's not "big tech" in the sense of working with or for the few huge corporations that control what we see and read and how we do it, but he's "big tech" in the way of being highly influenced by Silicon Valley billionaires and their "government just gets in the way, down with regulations and laws so I can get more wealth and power" ethos.

Vance’s circle has never been in the business of disrupting Big Tech. They’re looking to sell to them. (Also the White House pigeons have more influence than Vance inasmuch as they might shit on Trump and thus catch his attention.)

There's a difference?

(I'm joking... but only half joking)

Now, over the past few decades this has been slowly relaxed in practice (IE courts willing to try to do it), but the underlying precedent has not actually changed on this. Hence my comment elsewhere that the supreme court has been looking for a case in which to reassert this precedent (They have).

Where it starts to get weird is when you ask the more generic variations of this question: Can a court ban Google from doing business with companies with market cap more than 1 trillion?

Can a court order Google to have an independent master approve any contracts it enters into?

etc

Generally the remedies are limited by applicable law, and in turn by congress's authority in the first place (in the case of federal lawsuits like this).

Trying to enjoin apple when they are a non-party runs into the latter more than the former.

Trying to say who Google can contract with runs more into the former than the latter.

Keep in mind civil remedies are also much less expansive than criminal ones because of constitutional limitations.

Unfortunately, for any mildly novel remedy, it's hard to predict what will happen - they are just uncommon enough that without running it through appeals/etc, you just don't know what will happen. It's total guesswork in practice.

Even things that were once considered not novel have changed - for a long time, the FTC sought money damages in antitrust cases and unfair competition cases, but that was ruled "not okay" 5 years ago. Whatever one may think of the court, this was actually quite right, as the statute goes - they were abusing a statutory provision that granted them the ability to get injunctions to basically "enjoin" companies into paying them fines. This was clearly ridiculous. But it went on quite a while.

This is one time where there is much more on the line than money. At least for Apple. Maybe for everyone if the Supremes were to say this is OK. (Unlikely in the extreme, but still.)

> In a declaration filed with the U.S. District Court in Washington, Apple Senior Vice President Eddy Cue said creating a search engine would require diverting significant capital and employees, while recent AI developments make such an investment "economically risky."

https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/zgvoalybovd/... declaration.pdf

"Encumbered"? Apple wants a deal with Google search. Apple is 'self-encumbering' themselves: Apple wants the deal so they don't have go through the rigamarole of building it themselves.

Building would cost a lot and they'd also not be getting cash from Google: so they're doubly hit.

There's a reason there are only a dozen or so successful search engines worldwide, and maybe five successful image search engines. The margins are razor thin, it's a constant battle against "SEO optimisers" trying to ruin search engines for profit, and the moment they get popular governments start coming up with very creepy requests and demands.

It'll cost them billions and they won't know if they can even beat Google before Google drops them as a client for trying to compete with them, taking out a lucrative multi billion dollar deal for a default setting.

No, I think they'll just contract Microsoft Bing and rid themselves of the risks. They're already incorporating Microsoft's side OpenAI side project into their service stack, so it'd just make sense to couple further. Maybe the American government will sue them for that deal as well, but before that's final there will be years of not decades of lawsuits and appeals.

I think that could only work if someone successfully makes the case internally that an Apple search engine built in to Safari (not as a first-class web app) would boost the Apple brand and/or Safari market share enough to justify it. Maybe even offer it as a subscription.

To monetize it with ads would go completely against their DNA -- ad revenue incentivizes companies to violate users' privacy and build a sub-optimal UX. So it would have to be either a subscription or a platform feature.

> I find it 10x more likely Apple would suddenly find the motivation to make their own search engine if forced to end their deal with Google.

I find it 10x more likely that in such case they would use white label Bing and do front-end on their own.

> Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is hereby declared to be illegal.

> Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other per- son or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, shall be deemed guilty of a felony

It's very under-enforced, but that's what it says.

You don't have to sign a paper in a big room with lawyers to have a contract. Whenever you buy something, you're entering into a contract. It's got all the elements.

Its interesting how a court case like this can expose a company's negotiating position

You can't really end run around this by doing it in the other direction, because it has the same effect - even though they could not hold apple in contempt, they could hold google, which has the same effect.

Again, it's gotten looser more recently, but forever, this was not okay, and the underlying precedent has not actually changed. Everyone does expect SCOTUS to make a statement case in the next few years about this.

In any case - Imagine i ordered you not to have contact with your best friend, without them desiring this. An argument that i've only enjoined you falls flat - at best, i've had serious affect on their constitutional right to free association, etc.

Saying "yeah but only you will get held in contempt" doesn't really work.