David Pierce

A huge part of Google’s defense in US v. Google is that it’s not illegal to build a great product. And to prove that that’s all that’s happening here, Google lawyer John Schmidtlein has spent the last 60 minutes reminding Satya Nadella of Microsoft’s decades of bad decisions about Internet Explorer, Live Search, Windows Phone, and all its other browser and mobile screwups. He even has an internal poll that is headlined: “Our Mobile Story Sucks.”

One recurring theme in Satya Nadella’s US v. Google testimony is his fear that the AI revolution could make it even harder for upstart search engines to compete. He worries publishers will sign exclusive deals that let Google use their data to train its models — meaning no one else can crawl that data.

We’re about 90 minutes into Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s testimony, and his stance so far has been simple: Google’s status as the default search engine has crushed Bing not just as a business, but as a product. Without scale and user data, he said, there’s just no keeping up.

I’m in the building for another day of US v. Google, the big antitrust search trial. On the docket today: Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, who I incidentally ran into in the security line. I suspect he’ll be asked a lot of questions about Bing, selling Bing to Apple, Bing AI, “making Google dance,” and more. Word in the hallway is we’re likely to be in open court most of the day, too.

First we run through the greatest hits of the Code Conference (including Linda Yaccarino’s interview, which was ... something!). Then we catch up on all the news from Meta Connect, how Hollywood is approaching AI and data going forward, the Logitech racing chair of Nilay’s dreams, and much more. It’s The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of publishing late today.

Meta is touting Meta AI’s ability to talk to Bing when answering your questions. ChatGPT just (re-)acquired the ability to browse the web, too. If these AI bots really are going to change the way we find information — and I think they might — this kind of real-time web access is going to be a huge part of it.

I’m pretty sure Supernatural is the app I’ve used most on my Quest 2 — it’s an awesome fitness app, and its price just got cut from $18.99 a month to $9.99. (You can also pay $99.99 a year.) This might be the most exciting news of today, at least when it comes to my budget.

He spent more than an hour with The Verge’s Alex Heath talking about everything from AI to Threads to X to the future of smart glasses and the Quest 3. Alex and Zuck tend to cover a lot of ground whenever they sit down to talk, and this is a great chat. You can watch it on YouTube, or listen anywhere you get podcasts. Don’t miss it!

Zuckerberg’s three things for the day were the Quest 3, all the AI bots, and the smart glasses. He’s recapping now, and says that actually the glasses are kind of the end point — put AI and Quest together, solve some hardware problems, and smart glasses are the thing. And with that it appears we’re done with Zuckerberg!