granzymes

Mozilla submitted a declaration to that effect, and Google mentioned it repeatedly. Google argued that once Microsoft set the precedent that Internet Explorer was free, browsers lost the ability to monetize except by selling default status in their search bar (or being subsidized by a larger platform).

Courts are understandably wary of micromanaging companies' behavior, so this is not so much a legal argument as much as it is a "beware of unintended consequences" argument.

I wish more reporters had a law background. The article is full of things that are almost true but misleading, and a handful that are flat-out wrong. For example:

> If Mehta sides with Google, the company's business practices will likely remain the same. If he rules in favor of the Justice Department, it's unclear how he'd sanction Google. It could be anything from fines to a restructuring of the company.

Put aside that “sanction” is a term of art that is misused here and focus on the glaring inaccuracy: DOJ cannot request fines as a remedy for the Section 2 allegations they have brought! Add to that the fact that restructuring is vanishingly unlikely and you get a paragraph so misleading that it should be stricken from the article.

DOJ, if they win the first part of the trial, is almost certainly going to request injunctive relief to prevent Google from entering into the exclusionary contracts that they challenged in this case. They could also ask for a court-ordered monitoring program to ensure ongoing compliance with the antitrust laws for a period of time. At the extreme, there could be some form of mandated data sharing to rivals to compensate for Google excluding them from search access points and depriving them of the scale DOJ says they need to compete.

I'll do some free work for NPR and rewrite their paragraph:

> If Judge Mehta sides with Google, the company's business practices can remain unchanged. The Justice Department has not yet revealed what remedies they would request if Judge Mehta rules in their favor, but they are likely to include an order preventing Google from entering into deals that give the company's search engine preferential treatment on iOS, Android, and the FireFox browser. A breakup of the company is unlikely.

Hard to see how reducing deference could lead to less consistency. You are literally commenting on a post about the FCC reinterpreting their authority to regulate internet broadband years after the lawsuits over the original Net Neutrality laws concluded.

If Loper Bright had been decided ten years ago we would already know today whether the FCC possessed this authority or not and it would be settled. Instead, we are about to embark on another round of litigation because the FCC just unsettled expectations again.

Case 1: agencies reinterpret the law ever four years in each new administration until the end of time.

Case 2: we figure out what the law means once and apply it going forward until Congress changes it again.

The Supreme Court is poised to decide a case this term, Loper Bright, which should help restore more finality to decisions like this.

Because agencies receive considerable deference to their interpretation of the law, even when that interpretation flip-flops every four years, we never get a definitive ruling on what the law says. The Court seems likely to greatly reduce this deference, leading to more consistency.

There are two things in the article: the NLRB rule (temporarily paused) and a bargaining order from an Administrative Law Judge who said Google is a joint employer for a particular group of contractors under NLRB case law.

The NLRB makes nearly all its law via adjudication, not rules. The aggressive interpretation of joint employer is what is causing companies to put up walls between employees and contractors so they don’t get swept up by the NLRB.

> Fraud costs are borne by merchants and to some extent processors, but not the issuer banks that receive the interchange fee.

Merchant fraud and merchant credit risk is borne by acquirers (although, if they went under the issuing baking is ultimately on the hook). But fraud by the cardholder and cardholder credit risk is borne by the issuer.

That’s true. In the same vein, competitors stagnating is not necessarily proof of anticompetitive harm.

But it’s a strong clue that maybe the EU got this one wrong. The fact that Spotify doesn’t pay the Apple tax and yet still is the market leader shows you that, at the very least, Apple is not foreclosing competition.

>In the past, Epic has denigrated Apple’s developer terms, including the Developer Program License Agreement (DPLA), as a prelude to breaking them.

>Given that pattern, Apple recently reached out directly to Mr. Sweeney to give him an opportunity to explain why Apple should trust Epic this time and allow Epic Games Sweden AB to become an active developer. Mr. Sweeney’s response to that request was wholly insufficient and not credible.

From Apple’s letter to Epic.

Hard to see what harm to competition there is in a market that has steadily grown, with Spotify at the top, during the entire period in which Apple was allegedly harming the market. Spotify doesn’t pay the Apple tax and yet charges the same as all the other market participants.

Going to be very interesting to see what the EU courts say in a few years.

It would result in a significantly improved user experience… I really have no sympathy for Spotify intentionally refusing to improve their HomePod experience in order to avoid “weakening their complaint.”

> For support, the Progressive Web Apps will still need to be built on WebKit, with all that entails.

I wonder if there was some sort of back channeling with the EU to determine that “actually this is fine, we don’t care about rendering engine competition for PWAs, WebKit-only is better than removing them.”

The law ultimately only requires changes to features the EU cares about.

Yes, see the laws in Canada and Australia. Meta actually now completely blocks all news links in Canada because if users posts them (or the news sites post them themselves) they would be obligated to pay for those links.

On the other hand, the characters in Dune have almost no information about Earth. Over the mindbogglingly long time scale between our present day and the events in the books/films, it's not only possible but likely that almost all of those audiovisual aids have been lost.

Sorry, I should have made clear I meant "do anything to block the merger." That's what my reference to a preliminary injunction was about, but I realize this is a tech forum and not a law forum so I should have clarified.

That's an in-house complaint before the FTC's own judge. I'm talking about a request for a preliminary injunction in Federal district court in front of a real judge. The FTC doesn't have the authority to block a transaction unless they're in an Article III court; their in-house proceedings can only unwind a transaction after it closes.

Did the FTC actually... do... anything in this merger? My understanding is that Nvidia called it off because there was no way the UK was going to let their one national champion in chip design be subsumed into an existing American giant. My recollection is that the FTC didn't even file for a preliminary injunction in this case.

Read past the provocative title, and Google actually seems to be doing the right things here. They cracked down on product reviews that aren’t actually testing the product in 2021, and the article says big media companies (presumably with lower quality review content) suffered as a result.

But then those media companies found a loophole with "The Best X" lists that weren't subject to the 2021 Products Review Update changes, which lets them continue spamming affiliate links while avoiding the new requirements.

So now independent sites with actual reviews are in a holding pattern for these search terms, waiting for Google to bring the hammer down again on sites that are evading its quality metrics. This article is pretty clearly an open letter trying to bring attention to this issue.

If the team at Google working on ranking for product reviews is reading this, I hope you have another update in the works to close this loophole. H1 planning just wrapped up!

--

Edit: The title on HN has changed to be less click-baity. The original title was "How Google is killing independent sites like ours".

Title aside, the article is quite excellent and does a great job of explaining the product review niche of SEO. Kudos to the authors.

It sounds like the 2021 Products Review Update did help rank up high quality sites, but the media companies doing affiliate spam found a workaround with "Best of X" lists.

If you actually read Amazon’s filing, they put in a few paragraphs towards the end basically dumping a bunch of constitutional arguments that are popular right now.

This is called preserving your argument for appeal. Amazon doesn’t think those arguments are going anywhere (certainly not in a proceeding before the board, is the board going to declare itself unconstitutional?), but they might get lucky and have one of these issues decided by the Supreme Court before their case is finalized on appeal.

If you don’t raise the issue now, you forfeit it later even if the law develops unexpectedly in your favor. Best practice is to preserve these arguments.

Facebook has 3 billion monthly active users and that number is increasing.

If that’s not doing fine, what the hell is?

Right idea, wrong case. The relevant case this term is SEC v. Jarkesy, which presents some of the "Federal agency adjudication is unconstitutional" arguments. The FTC brought this suit in-house before their own Administrative Law Judge, which is what TurboTax is protesting. The two cases related to Chevron deference also implicate agency power, but they implicate agency power in the actual courts.

https://www.scotusblog.com/2023/11/justices-to-consider-mult...

Google consolidated the podcast features into YouTube Music. Many of the "killed by Google" entries are actually Google shuffling around features between different apps. Annoying, but the functionality is still there.

From the outside looking in, it feels like Google lets their org structure dictate their product strategy to a comical degree.

Yep, only in-warranty repairs (including AppleCare). If your device is out of warranty and the "repair" actually means a full replacement then you aren't getting a replacement with blood oxygen enabled.

More likely, Apple pulls blood oxygen information for new Apple Watch sales until September when they introduce a hardware redesign for the Series 10.

This is a probably the least notable feature of the Apple Watch. If you live at a normal altitude and are healthy, your blood oxygen will be >95% all the time.

And, in addition, there is a limited exception to the import ban for the purpose of replacing/repairing existing devices. People who bought the watches before tomorrow (or whenever imported supplies run out) are not affected.

The Supreme Court does not decide cases: it decides questions. Whether or not the case is interesting, the legal questions the parties asked the Court to resolve were evidently not worth its time.

For Apple, since the court found that they have a right to collect their fee.

It means that Epic failed to identify a better way for Apple to collect its 30%/15% fee than mandating developers use its in-app purchase system.

Epic’s cert petition at the Supreme Court focused on the argument that it’s unfair that their identified solution needed to be equally or less burdensome, but the Supreme Court turned them away.

The 9th Circuit stayed its mandate until the Supreme Court decided whether to grant cert. That stay expired this morning when the Supreme Court published its orders list.

The 9th Circuit’s mandate will now be sent down to the district court, and judgement entered (on just the anti-steerage provision) for Epic. It’s a done deal at this point.

A Federal judge applied California law (in this case, a law against unfair business conduct). That’s normal, just like state courts can (sometimes) apply Federal law.

Federal courts can “certify” questions of state law to the state courts if they don’t know how they should be applying state law, but in this case neither the district court nor the 9th Circuit felt the need to ask for clarification. The Supreme Court has final say on questions of Federal and Constitutional law. State courts have final say on State law and State Constitutions.

A State law that directly conflicts with a Federal law is preempted. There are also sometimes “zones” of preemption created by broad Federal laws. But, in this case, there is no conflict.