President Trump wanted to ban TikTok. Now he wants to save TikTok. There might even be a plan to save TikTok, though right now it feels more like a “concepts of a plan” situation. Meanwhile, the Trump administration continues to press hard on regulating Big Tech, while also cozying up to their CEOs — and illegally firing some of the regulators. Companies like OpenAI and Google are trying to convince the White House to go along with their vision for AI, but it doesn’t seem anyone knows where they stand.
Trump’s confusing crusade against Big Tech
On The Vergecast: Siri’s still bad, Pebble’s so back, Starlink’s in the White House, and chaos at the FTC.
On The Vergecast: Siri’s still bad, Pebble’s so back, Starlink’s in the White House, and chaos at the FTC.
is editor-at-large and Vergecast co-host with over a decade of experience covering consumer tech. Previously, at Protocol, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired.
So what does the Trump administration want to do with Big Tech? On this episode of The Vergecast, we try and figure it out. But first, Nilay and David open with some other tech news. The Siri-sucks-gate fallout continues inside of Apple, including a fairly important executive shakeup. Pebble smartwatches are back, and poised to be at the center of a fight about how Apple works with watches. Google and Huawei both launched intriguing new phones, and Nvidia remains the white-hot center of the AI industry.
After all that, it’s time for some policy talk. The Verge’s Lauren Feiner joins the show to explain the latest on the TikTok ban, the state of the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program, what is happening at the FTC, why Brendan Carr continues to be the way he is, the fight over AI copyright, and much more.
Finally, in the lightning round, the hosts discuss the latest Cybertruck recall, the ongoing drama over Careless People, some small but fun fediverse news, and Netflix’s small but sick burns on Apple TV Plus.
If you want to know more about everything we discuss in this episode, here are some links to get you started, beginning with Siri and gadgets:
- Apple puts the Vision Pro guy in charge of Siri
- The first new Pebble smartwatches are coming later this year
- Europe is trying to get non-Apple smartwatches to work better with iPhones
- Google’s Pixel 9A gets a bigger screen and beefier water resistance
- Google briefly delays Pixel 9A release to investigate ‘component quality issue’
- Huawei’s new flip phone is weirdly wide
- Nvidia says ‘the age of generalist robotics is here’
- Nvidia’s cute ‘Digits’ AI desktop is coming this summer with a new name and a big brother
And in politics and policy:
- Musk’s Starlink gets deployed at the White House
- Federal rural broadband program loses head
- Oracle is reportedly in the lead to save TikTok from US ban
- A”high-level” deal to save TikTok can probably happen by the April 5th deadline, Vance says.
- Democratic FTC commissioners say they were ‘illegally fired’ by Trump
- Fired FTC commissioner warns of the ‘corrupting influence of billionaires’
- Democratic FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks will resign this spring
- From WBEZ: WBEZ, 12 other public media stations under investigation
- OpenAI and Google ask the government to let them train AI on content they don’t own
- Hundreds of celebrities warn against letting OpenAI and Google ‘freely exploit’ Hollywood
- DOGE stranded USAID workers with laptops full of sensitive data
- DHS’s airport panopticon is getting people deported and detained
And in the lightning round:
- Tesla recalls more than 46,000 Cybertrucks after trim starts falling off
- From New York: Elon Musk Has Become Too Toxic for YouTube
- ‘Careless People’ debuts at the top of the NYT best sellers list.
- Threads finally lets you set the following feed as default
- Ghost connects its newsletters to the open web
- Netflix’s CEO talks Apple TV, Amazon, and the NFL
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