Techdirt’s Mike Masnick has helped put together a followup to online moderation simulator Moderator Mayhem, and I’ve barely gotten started, but it looks like just as much fun. You can find out more about Trust & Safety Tycoon on Techdirt or play it here.
I spent some time with it last week — it’s as unsettling as you’d expect an interactive narrative from the studio behind Pathologic to be.
After a slight delay, the Department of Justice has posted an exhibit from earlier this week in US v. Google, shedding light on the details of Apple and Google’s multibillion-dollar search deal.
The 2007 email thread features Sundar Pichai expressing his discomfort with making Google the sole search provider on Safari, while also revealing another potential option he disliked: fully different editions of Apple’s browser, one with Google and one with Yahoo as the chosen search engine.
Now, his email to Larry Page and Sergey Brin (among others) has surfaced in the US v. Google trial, where the Department of Justice is taking aim at Google’s multibillion-dollar deal for prime placement in Apple’s browser. Google argues it’s simply the best choice, but in those early years, Pichai appeared ambivalent about the exclusivity deal regardless.
“I know we are insisting on default, but at the same time I think we should encourage them to have Yahoo as a choice in the pull down or some other easy option,” he wrote. “I don’t think it is a good user experience nor the optics is great for us to be the only provider in the browser.”
The Microsoft CEO’s testimony will follow extensive questions this week about the company’s dealings with Apple and its struggle to get Bing on the iPhone, apparently including floating a sale of the search engine to Apple. And after a week of locked-down testimony, Judge Amit Mehta has directed as much of it as possible to take place in public session.
Check out our interview with Mark Zuckerberg on today’s AI and VR news, the Threads rollout, and more. Meta’s show will continue through tomorrow — the schedule’s available here.
