Sorry this week’s episode is a little late! But it’s a good one — we definitively did not solve the Thread mystery, but we have some ideas. And we don’t exactly know what a general search engine is, either, but we have some thoughts on what’s been happening in the biggest antitrust trial in two decades. It’s The Vergecast!
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.
Oh, and ICYMI: We also talked about Allison, and lots more, with Taylor on The Vergecast a couple of weeks ago!
[Rolling Stone]
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 conventional wisdom, of course, is that nobody switches. Mehta says he knows that.
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.
No matter who wins this trial, this is going to be a tough 10 weeks of testimony for Bing.
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.
Google opening up its tools to its competitor? “It’s like waiting for a Yankee fan to invite you to a Met game,” the attorney said. “Not gonna happen.”
