David Pierce

This week I bought a DVD, for journalism. Because with Netflix’s disc-delivery service coming to an end, we wanted to know: what’s next for physical movies and TV? We asked Redbox’s owner that very question. Then we talked about streaming metrics, why they matter, and whether they actually mean anything at all.

The Hollywood Reporter has a good read this morning on the last-minute negotiations to end the writers strike. It seems to come pretty much entirely from the studios’ perspective, but it’s a good read anyway.

Google certainly doesn’t seem to think so. In his questioning of Apple’s Eddy Cue this afternoon, Google’s John Schmidtlein took Cue on a journey through Safari history, and Cue said that Safari’s integration of a search box and URL bar was part of what made the browser worked. And that only worked because Google was there — or so the argument goes.

Apple’s agreement with Google doesn’t allow for that, Apple’s Eddy Cue said in court. And Cue said he doesn’t want to do it anyway: “we try to get people up and running as fast as possible.” But the DOJ is showing exhibits about all the “Ask App Not To Track” screens you see, and the Appearance settings in setup, and more. Their question is: for something as important as search, shouldn’t you let people choose for themselves?

We finally got into open court in US v. Google! For the last 45 minutes or so we’ve been listening to Cue talk about the deal he and Sundar Pichai negotiated in 2016 to keep Google as the default search engine on Apple devices. So far, Cue’s stance is simple: Google is the best search engine, so Apple picked it. He says Apple never seriously thought about ditching Google for another provider, or building its own search engine.

Today’s testimony was set to start at 9:30 this morning. At 9:28, we were told to get out of the courtroom, because this morning was beginning as a closed session. Everything about this trial so far has been unusually, frankly bizarrely , frankly bizasecretive and under wraps — the reporters in the hallway with me are all betting that we’re going to be let in for five minutes at the end of the day, just to hear the plan for tomorrow that we won’t get to see either. Who knows!

I’m writing this from just outside the courtroom in DC, where Apple’s Eddy Cue is set to testify today about Apple’s billion-dollar deal to make Google its default search engine. Bloomberg reports that Cue is planning to say Apple doesn’t need to build its own search, because Google is great — but I suspect the DOJ is going to have lots of questions about that.