David Pierce

Rolling Stone has an excerpt from Taylor Lorenz’s new book, Extremely Online, all about Julia Allison – who was an online influencer before “influencer” was even a thing — and what she went through both to make it big and then once she did. It’s an important story, and a good read.

Judge Mehta interrupts Google’s opening statements to ask an important question: there’s all this talk about the power of defaults, and about how easy it is or is not to switch search engines, but does anyone actually switch? Google evidently doesn’t have good data on whether people do, so we might not get hard numbers here. But it’s a good question!

The government’s argument: Nobody uses Bing because Google made it impossible. Google’s argument so far: nobody uses Bing because Bing sucks. Google’s attorneys are making the case that Microsoft is as well-resourced as anyone to compete, and yet even Windows users mostly pick Google because Google is simply better.

The big-picture “is Google crushing all possible search competitors” question will dominate US v. Google, but there’s another allegation in here as well: whether Google prevented Microsoft from getting access to SA360, Google’s search marketing tool. The state attorneys are deep in that argument now, arguing that it’s yet another way Google manipulates the search market for its own gain.

Let’s just say, hypothetically, you have a whole bunch of Lightning cables that are a couple of hours away from being obsolete. Or you just have that big bin everybody has of cables and chargers you don’t need but don’t want to get rid of them. Donate them! Shelters, hospitals, schools, and many other organizations all welcome chargers and cables (and phones, if you’re upgrading). This is my fall-cleaning project for sure.

One key question of the US v. Google trial — and any antitrust trial, really — is the size of the market. Google will argue that everything from ChatGPT to TikTok is a real threat in the space, and competition is everywhere. The government is going to try and argue, as attorney Kenneth Dintzer already has, that the market is “general search,” and that that’s really only Google and Bing. Which means it’s really only Google.