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Bobby Allyn, reporting for NPR:

Google will destroy the private browsing history of millions of
people who used “incognito” mode in its Chrome browser as a part
of a settlement filed to federal court on Monday in a
case over the company’s secret tracking of web activity. For
years, Google simply informed users of Chrome’s internet browser
that “you’ve gone Incognito” and “now you can browse privately,”
when the supposedly untraceable browsing option was turned on — without saying what bits of data the company has been harvesting.

Yet, according to a 2020 class-action lawsuit, the tech
giant continued to scrape searches by hoovering up data about
users who browsed the internet in incognito mode through
advertising tools used by websites, grabbing “potentially
embarrassing” searches of millions of people. Google then used
this data to measure web traffic and sell ads. […]

As the suit was pending, Google changed the splash screen of
incognito mode to state that websites, employers and schools and
internet service providers can view browsing activity in incognito
mode. But under the deal, Google will have to state that the
company itself can also track browsing during incognito mode.

That was quite the omission. I’m not sure there was ever a product in history more purposefully misleadingly named than Chrome’s “Incognito” mode.

 ★ 

Bobby Allyn, reporting for NPR:

Google will destroy the private browsing history of millions of
people who used “incognito” mode in its Chrome browser as a part
of a settlement filed to federal court on Monday in a
case over the company’s secret tracking of web activity. For
years, Google simply informed users of Chrome’s internet browser
that “you’ve gone Incognito” and “now you can browse privately,”
when the supposedly untraceable browsing option was turned on — without saying what bits of data the company has been harvesting.

Yet, according to a 2020 class-action lawsuit, the tech
giant continued to scrape searches by hoovering up data about
users who browsed the internet in incognito mode through
advertising tools used by websites, grabbing “potentially
embarrassing” searches of millions of people. Google then used
this data to measure web traffic and sell ads. […]

As the suit was pending, Google changed the splash screen of
incognito mode to state that websites, employers and schools and
internet service providers can view browsing activity in incognito
mode. But under the deal, Google will have to state that the
company itself can also track browsing during incognito mode.

That was quite the omission. I’m not sure there was ever a product in history more purposefully misleadingly named than Chrome’s “Incognito” mode.

Read More 

Also from David Pierce at The Verge:

The two sides declined to share the cost of the acquisition, but
both made clear Yahoo is acquiring Artifact’s tech rather than its
team. Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom, Artifact’s co-founders, will
be “special advisors” for Yahoo but won’t be joining the company.
Artifact’s remaining five employees have either gotten other jobs
or are planning to take some time off.

The acquisition comes a bit more than a year after Artifact’s
launch and about three months after Systrom and Krieger
announced its death. “We have built something that a core
group of users love,” the co-founders wrote in January,
“but we have concluded that the market opportunity isn’t big
enough to warrant continued investment in this way.” They said
that the biggest reason to shut down was in order to focus on
“newer, bigger and better things that have the ability to reach
many millions of people.” The bet behind Artifact was always that
AI had the potential to be a huge, internet-changing technology;
maybe there were just more interesting things to work on than a
news app without a big news audience. […]

Artifact, the app, will go away once the acquisition is
complete. But Artifact’s underlying tech for categorizing,
curating, and personalizing content will soon start to show up
on Yahoo News — and eventually on other Yahoo platforms, too.
“You’ll see that stuff flowing into our products in the coming
months,” says Downs Mulder. It sounds like there’s also a good
chance that Yahoo’s apps might get a bit of Artifact’s speed and
polish over time, too.

“Yahoo, where scrappy startup acquisitions go to thrive”, said no one, ever.

 ★ 

Also from David Pierce at The Verge:

The two sides declined to share the cost of the acquisition, but
both made clear Yahoo is acquiring Artifact’s tech rather than its
team. Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom, Artifact’s co-founders, will
be “special advisors” for Yahoo but won’t be joining the company.
Artifact’s remaining five employees have either gotten other jobs
or are planning to take some time off.

The acquisition comes a bit more than a year after Artifact’s
launch and about three months after Systrom and Krieger
announced its death. “We have built something that a core
group of users love,” the co-founders wrote in January,
“but we have concluded that the market opportunity isn’t big
enough to warrant continued investment in this way.” They said
that the biggest reason to shut down was in order to focus on
“newer, bigger and better things that have the ability to reach
many millions of people.” The bet behind Artifact was always that
AI had the potential to be a huge, internet-changing technology;
maybe there were just more interesting things to work on than a
news app without a big news audience. […]

Artifact, the app, will go away once the acquisition is
complete. But Artifact’s underlying tech for categorizing,
curating, and personalizing content will soon start to show up
on Yahoo News — and eventually on other Yahoo platforms, too.
“You’ll see that stuff flowing into our products in the coming
months,” says Downs Mulder. It sounds like there’s also a good
chance that Yahoo’s apps might get a bit of Artifact’s speed and
polish over time, too.

“Yahoo, where scrappy startup acquisitions go to thrive”, said no one, ever.

Read More 

David Pierce, writing for The Verge:

Google Podcasts is dead. It has been dying for months, since
Google announced last fall that it was killing its
dedicated podcast app in order to focus all its podcasting efforts
on YouTube Music. This is a bad idea and a big downgrade, and I’d
be more mad if only I were more surprised.

The Podcasts app is just the latest product to go through a
process I’ve come to call The Google Cycle. It always goes the
same way: the company launches a new service with grandiose
language about how this fits its mission of organizing and making
accessible the world’s information, quickly updates it with a
couple of neat features, immediately seems to forget it exists,
eventually launches a competitor out of some other part of the
company, obviously begins to deprecate it and shift focus to the
new competitor, and then, years later, finally shuts it down for
real. The Google Graveyard is full of apps like Reader,
Duo, Inbox, Allo, Wallet, and countless others that have been
through The Google Cycle, and it feels just as bad every time.

The saying goes, “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” With people who come to rely on new apps from Google, it’s more like “Well, you’ve fooled me a dozen times so far, please don’t do it again with this new thing you made that I like.”

I haven’t been bitten by Google killing an app or service since Google Reader, because I never again trusted them. I suppose this might be a lot more difficult for Android users, but I honestly don’t even remember the last time I added a new Google app or service to the set of tools I rely upon. The only Google services I use are YouTube (and even there, I have complaints), Google Search (and even there, it hasn’t been my default web search for nearly a decade), and Gmail (and even there, I access it via IMAP from Apple Mail and Mimestream). The only Google apps on my iPhone are YT Studio (which, given how infrequently I publish videos to my channel, I probably don’t need), Chrome, and Google Keep. And the only reason I have Chrome and Keep installed is for syncing browser tabs and notes between my iPhone and my burner-device-to-see-how-things-are-on-Android Pixel phone. I wouldn’t be surprised if they shut down Google Keep and start an all new Google-branded notes app soon.

Oh, and the Nest app. I have that because we have (and love) Nest thermostats, but I don’t really think of that as a Google app.

I don’t eschew Google products as any sort of statement. I just don’t like most of what they make, and what I do like, I don’t trust them to keep around. It’s rather glorious living a nearly Google-free digital life.

 ★ 

David Pierce, writing for The Verge:

Google Podcasts is dead. It has been dying for months, since
Google announced last fall that it was killing its
dedicated podcast app in order to focus all its podcasting efforts
on YouTube Music. This is a bad idea and a big downgrade, and I’d
be more mad if only I were more surprised.

The Podcasts app is just the latest product to go through a
process I’ve come to call The Google Cycle. It always goes the
same way: the company launches a new service with grandiose
language about how this fits its mission of organizing and making
accessible the world’s information, quickly updates it with a
couple of neat features, immediately seems to forget it exists,
eventually launches a competitor out of some other part of the
company, obviously begins to deprecate it and shift focus to the
new competitor, and then, years later, finally shuts it down for
real. The Google Graveyard is full of apps like Reader,
Duo, Inbox, Allo, Wallet, and countless others that have been
through The Google Cycle, and it feels just as bad every time.

The saying goes, “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” With people who come to rely on new apps from Google, it’s more like “Well, you’ve fooled me a dozen times so far, please don’t do it again with this new thing you made that I like.”

I haven’t been bitten by Google killing an app or service since Google Reader, because I never again trusted them. I suppose this might be a lot more difficult for Android users, but I honestly don’t even remember the last time I added a new Google app or service to the set of tools I rely upon. The only Google services I use are YouTube (and even there, I have complaints), Google Search (and even there, it hasn’t been my default web search for nearly a decade), and Gmail (and even there, I access it via IMAP from Apple Mail and Mimestream). The only Google apps on my iPhone are YT Studio (which, given how infrequently I publish videos to my channel, I probably don’t need), Chrome, and Google Keep. And the only reason I have Chrome and Keep installed is for syncing browser tabs and notes between my iPhone and my burner-device-to-see-how-things-are-on-Android Pixel phone. I wouldn’t be surprised if they shut down Google Keep and start an all new Google-branded notes app soon.

Oh, and the Nest app. I have that because we have (and love) Nest thermostats, but I don’t really think of that as a Google app.

I don’t eschew Google products as any sort of statement. I just don’t like most of what they make, and what I do like, I don’t trust them to keep around. It’s rather glorious living a nearly Google-free digital life.

Read More 

Drew Harwell, reporting for The Washington Post:

Former president Donald Trump’s social media company said Monday
it lost more than $58 million last year, sending its stock
plunging more than 21 percent only days after a highflying public
debut set the company’s value at more than $8 billion.

Trump Media and Technology Group, which owns Truth Social, said in
a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that the company
generated just over $4 million in revenue last year, including
less than $1 million in the last quarter.

The nosediving share price of the company — which uses the stock
ticker DJT, for Trump’s initials — fell to its lowest level since
Trump Media went public last week and shaved more than a fifth of
its market value in a single day. It also slashed the value of
Trump’s 57 percent ownership in the company by roughly $1 billion,
to $3.8 billion.

The company’s 8-K filing is just bananas. They not only aren’t turning a profit, they don’t foresee ever making one. They don’t track any sort of metrics typical for a social media company — signups, monthly active users, average revenue per user — none of it. And they don’t plan to, either. To call it a scam gives scams a bad name.

I want to laugh, but: If Trump is elected again in November — which, based on the close results of 2016 and 2020, and the current polling data, is definitely possible — shaking down lobbyists and foreign governments with exorbitant rates for ads on Truth Social seems like a much better grift than running a hotel across the street from the White House. A corrupt president owning a social media site would be a grift that scales. If there’s any rational reason for Trump Media to have any value at all, it’s that. It’s worthless today, but could be a veritable goldmine in a second Trump administration.

 ★ 

Drew Harwell, reporting for The Washington Post:

Former president Donald Trump’s social media company said Monday
it lost more than $58 million last year, sending its stock
plunging more than 21 percent only days after a highflying public
debut set the company’s value at more than $8 billion.

Trump Media and Technology Group, which owns Truth Social, said in
a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that the company
generated just over $4 million in revenue last year, including
less than $1 million in the last quarter.

The nosediving share price of the company — which uses the stock
ticker DJT, for Trump’s initials — fell to its lowest level since
Trump Media went public last week and shaved more than a fifth of
its market value in a single day. It also slashed the value of
Trump’s 57 percent ownership in the company by roughly $1 billion,
to $3.8 billion.

The company’s 8-K filing is just bananas. They not only aren’t turning a profit, they don’t foresee ever making one. They don’t track any sort of metrics typical for a social media company — signups, monthly active users, average revenue per user — none of it. And they don’t plan to, either. To call it a scam gives scams a bad name.

I want to laugh, but: If Trump is elected again in November — which, based on the close results of 2016 and 2020, and the current polling data, is definitely possible — shaking down lobbyists and foreign governments with exorbitant rates for ads on Truth Social seems like a much better grift than running a hotel across the street from the White House. A corrupt president owning a social media site would be a grift that scales. If there’s any rational reason for Trump Media to have any value at all, it’s that. It’s worthless today, but could be a veritable goldmine in a second Trump administration.

Read More 

Taegan Goddard, writing at Political Wire:

While you were spending time with family over the weekend,
enjoying the start of the baseball season or watching college
basketball, Donald Trump was glued to Truth Social. After 71
mostly all caps posts, Trump finally had this Easter message.

It’s 168 words, the first 165 of which are (ostensibly) a single sentence. You really need to see it for yourself.

Goddard:

There are only so many ways we can say Trump’s behavior is not
normal. If someone close to you behaved this way, you would
desperately try to get them psychiatric help.

 ★ 

Taegan Goddard, writing at Political Wire:

While you were spending time with family over the weekend,
enjoying the start of the baseball season or watching college
basketball, Donald Trump was glued to Truth Social. After 71
mostly all caps posts, Trump finally had this Easter message.

It’s 168 words, the first 165 of which are (ostensibly) a single sentence. You really need to see it for yourself.

Goddard:

There are only so many ways we can say Trump’s behavior is not
normal. If someone close to you behaved this way, you would
desperately try to get them psychiatric help.

Read More 

Chris Quinn, in his Letter From the Editor column at The Cleveland Plain Dealer:

The north star here is truth. We tell the truth, even when it
offends some of the people who pay us for information.

The truth is that Donald Trump undermined faith in our elections
in his false bid to retain the presidency. He sparked an
insurrection intended to overthrow our government and keep himself
in power. No president in our history has done worse.

This is not subjective. We all saw it. Plenty of leaders today try
to convince the masses we did not see what we saw, but our eyes
don’t deceive. (If leaders began a yearslong campaign today to
convince us that the Baltimore bridge did not collapse Tuesday
morning, would you ever believe them?) Trust your eyes. Trump on
Jan. 6 launched the most serious threat to our system of
government since the Civil War. You know that. You saw it.

The facts involving Trump are crystal clear, and as news people,
we cannot pretend otherwise, as unpopular as that might be with a
segment of our readers. There aren’t two sides to facts. People
who say the earth is flat don’t get space on our platforms. If
that offends them, so be it.

There’s no need for any straight news publication to tie itself in knots over Trump and Trumpism. There are all sorts of reasons left-leaning Americans were opposed to right-leaning policies when Trump was president. Likewise, there are all sorts of reasons right-leaning Americans are opposed to left-leaning policies of the Biden administration. That’s called politics. And it makes sense that straight news publications try to stay above the fray on those divides.

What Trump did after losing the 2020 election isn’t on that spectrum. As Quinn put it so well, you know that. You saw it. We all saw it. It’s that simple.

 ★ 

Chris Quinn, in his Letter From the Editor column at The Cleveland Plain Dealer:

The north star here is truth. We tell the truth, even when it
offends some of the people who pay us for information.

The truth is that Donald Trump undermined faith in our elections
in his false bid to retain the presidency. He sparked an
insurrection intended to overthrow our government and keep himself
in power. No president in our history has done worse.

This is not subjective. We all saw it. Plenty of leaders today try
to convince the masses we did not see what we saw, but our eyes
don’t deceive. (If leaders began a yearslong campaign today to
convince us that the Baltimore bridge did not collapse Tuesday
morning, would you ever believe them?) Trust your eyes. Trump on
Jan. 6 launched the most serious threat to our system of
government since the Civil War. You know that. You saw it.

The facts involving Trump are crystal clear, and as news people,
we cannot pretend otherwise, as unpopular as that might be with a
segment of our readers. There aren’t two sides to facts. People
who say the earth is flat don’t get space on our platforms. If
that offends them, so be it.

There’s no need for any straight news publication to tie itself in knots over Trump and Trumpism. There are all sorts of reasons left-leaning Americans were opposed to right-leaning policies when Trump was president. Likewise, there are all sorts of reasons right-leaning Americans are opposed to left-leaning policies of the Biden administration. That’s called politics. And it makes sense that straight news publications try to stay above the fray on those divides.

What Trump did after losing the 2020 election isn’t on that spectrum. As Quinn put it so well, you know that. You saw it. We all saw it. It’s that simple.

Read More 

The one and only John Moltz returns to the show to talk about the relative dearth of original content for Vision Pro, WWDC rumors and guesses, and, yes, a wee bit about Apple’s regulatory/antitrust tribulations.

Sponsored by:

Nuts.com: The world’s best snacks, delivered fast and fresh.
Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code talkshow for 10% off your first order.

 ★ 

The one and only John Moltz returns to the show to talk about the relative dearth of original content for Vision Pro, WWDC rumors and guesses, and, yes, a wee bit about Apple’s regulatory/antitrust tribulations.

Sponsored by:

Nuts.com: The world’s best snacks, delivered fast and fresh.
Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code talkshow for 10% off your first order.

Read More 

On the EU’s share of Apple’s worldwide revenue, and whether, per EC commissioner Thierry Breton, it is “unthinkable” not to serve the 450-million-citizen EU market.

A couple of follow-up items regarding my column the other day, in which I idly speculated about whether the DMA might lead Apple (and/or perhaps Meta and Google) to pull back from the EU market.

First, a correction/clarification. Based on Six Colors’s transcript of Apple’s Q1 2024 analyst call back in January, I quoted Apple CFO Luca Maestri as saying, in response to a question asking whether investors should be concerned that DMA compliance will hinder services revenue, “Just to keep it in context, the changes apply to the EU market, which represents roughly 7% of our global absolute revenue.”

The word absolute was a transcription error, however.1 Listen to the published recording of the call, and it’s clear that what Maestri actually said was specifically in answer to the question: “Just to keep it in context, the changes apply to the EU market, which represents roughly 7% of our global App Store revenue.” (My thanks to Oliver Reichenstein for the timestamped pointer to the recording.)

That’s an important correction that, as ever, I’m happy to make, but it doesn’t really change my speculation. I wrote:

It’s unclear whether Maestri was saying that the EU accounts for 7
percent of Apple’s worldwide App Store revenue, or 7 percent of
all revenue, but I suspect it doesn’t matter, and that both are
around 7 percent. App Store revenue ought to be a good proxy for
overall revenue — there’s no reason to think EU Apple users spend
any less or any more in the App Store than users around the world.

It’s certainly possible that EU citizens account for significantly more (or even less) than 7 percent of Apple’s overall global revenue, but it strikes me as very unlikely that the EU’s share of Apple’s overall revenue is significantly different from its share of App Store revenue. I struggle to come up with any explanation for why the EU might account for only 7 percent of App Store revenue but significantly more (or less) of Apple’s overall revenue. Why would overall revenue from any region differ significantly from the App Store revenue from the same region, on a percentage basis? But it is an open question. (I hope an analyst asks Cook and Maestri about it directly on the next quarterly call in May.)

Second, I missed that the European Commission, alongside its announcement that it had opened non-compliance investigations against Google, Apple, and Meta under the Digital Markets Act, also separately published remarks from its two leaders, executive vice-president Margrethe Vestager and commissioner Thierry Breton.

From Vestager’s remarks, which were delivered in English:

The third one relates to the objective of the DMA to open closed
ecosystems to enable competition at all levels. Under Article 6(3)
of the DMA, gatekeepers have an obligation to enable easy
uninstallation of apps and easy change of default settings. They
must also display a choice screen. Apple’s compliance model does
not seem to meet the objectives of this obligation. In particular,
we are concerned that the current design of the web browser choice
screen deprives end-users of the ability to make a fully informed
decision. Example: they do not enhance user engagement with all
available options. Apple also failed to make several apps
un-installable (one of them would be Photos) and prevents
end-users from changing their default status (for example Cloud),
as required by the DMA.

I don’t know what she means by “depriv[ing] end-users of the ability to make a fully informed decision” or “they do not enhance user engagement with all available options”. I can only guess that she’s complaining that Apple’s current browser choice screen doesn’t actively encourage users to pick a browser other than Safari? But it doesn’t encourage users to choose Safari, either, and the choices are listed in randomized order each time. The iOS 17.4 choice screen just says what a default web browser is, and then offers a list of the most popular browsers in the user’s country.

As I wrote this week, there aren’t many un-installable apps on iOS. I might be missing some, but the list I came up with: Settings, Camera, Photos, App Store, Phone, Messages, and Safari. Vestager makes clear in her remarks what wasn’t clear in the EC’s announcement of the investigation: they have a problem with Photos. If they follow through with a demand that Photos be completely un-installable (not just hidable from the Home Screen, as it is now), this would constitute another way that the EC is standing in as the designer of how operating systems should work. Photos is not just an app on iOS; it’s the system-level interface to the camera roll. This is integrated throughout the entire iOS system, with per-app permission prompts to grant differing levels of access to your photos. Vestager is saying that to be compliant with the DMA, Apple needs to allow third-party apps to serve as the system-level camera roll. That is a monumental demand, and I honestly don’t even know how such a demand could be squared with system-wide permissions for photo access. This is product design, not mere regulation. Why stop there? Why not mandate that Springboard — the Home Screen — be a replaceable component? Or the entire OS itself? Why are iPhone users required to use iOS? Why are iOS users required to buy iPhones?

Then we get to Breton’s remarks, the first half of which were delivered in his native French. Here are two translations of his French remarks, from the iOS Translate app and from Google Translate. To my reading, there are no significant semantic differences between the two translations. Here’s the bulk of it, amalgamating the best from both translations:

And I will tell you a simple but important thing: in 18 days, the
DMA has moved the lines of the digital giants more than in the
last 10 years.

It’s not me who says it, but developers and users who finally see
concrete changes and openness to give everyone the opportunity to
gain market share, for example for browsers.

In 18 days, therefore, already very concrete results. Why?

Because it is an internal market regulation. This is where the
revolution operates.

You know how much I fought for the DMA to be a so-called “domestic
market” regulation, ex ante therefore. Because it is the best way
to promote our continent, Europe, which is an open continent, but
according to our conditions.

And a market of 450 million customers is simply unthinkable for
anyone not to be there.

Where the digital giants could pay fines of several billion
dollars without batting an eye — by the way, when they had to
pay them, after long years of procedures, which was not
systematic, far from it… — today none of them can afford not
to be in our market.

This is the reality of the balance of power of the world in which
we operate.

So does everyone play the game perfectly the first time? We are
entitled to doubt it of course and we are here to doubt by
definition in a way I would say.

At the very least, to check.

And that’s what we’re doing today.

Breton’s remarks in French were, in some ways, far zestier than his subsequent remarks in English. Breton lays bare the EC’s belief that they hold all the cards — that it is “unthinkable” for any of the designated gatekeepers not to conduct business in the EU, and that “none of them can afford not to be in our market.”

Perhaps he’s right, and I’m all wet for even speculating that one or more of the gatekeepers will pull one or more of their products from the EU market as a result of the DMA’s onerous demands and the threat of huge fees. But I, for one, consider it very thinkable. (Especially for Meta, as you’ll see next.)

From Breton’s remarks delivered in English:

First, today we are opening a case against Meta. We suspect that
Meta is breaching the DMA rules on data combination [Article
5(2) DMA].

You all heard about Meta’s “Subscription for No Ads” model. With
this new model, users have to pay if they want to use Facebook and
Instagram without targeted advertising. And this has forced
millions of users across Europe into a binary choice: “pay or
consent”. And if you consent, Meta can use your data, generated
for example on Messenger, to target ads on Instagram.

But the DMA is very clear: gatekeepers must obtain users’ consent
to use their personal data across different services. And this
consent must be free! We have serious doubts that this consent is
really free when you are confronted with a binary choice. With the
DMA, users who do not consent should be provided with a less
personalised alternative of the service, for example financed
thanks to contextual advertising. But they do not have to pay.

The EC’s problem here is that when faced with the clear choice between using Meta’s platforms free of charge with targeted advertising, or paying a monthly fee, the overwhelming majority of people choose to use the service free of charge with targeted ads. Just because typical people overwhelmingly prefer free services with targeted ads doesn’t mean that a paid subscription isn’t a fair alternative. Here’s Margrethe Vestager herself, back in 2018, in an interview with Jorge Valero of Euractiv:

My concern is more about whether we get the right choices. I would
like to have a Facebook in which I pay a fee each month, but I
would have no tracking and advertising and the full benefits of
privacy. It is a provoking thought after all the Facebook scandal.
This market is not being explored.

A provoking thought indeed, but apparently this was only worth exploring until they found out that EU citizens would overwhelmingly consent to free services with targeted ads. Privacy fundamentalists can’t seem to accept that most people don’t share their fervor that consensual targeted advertising is inherently wrong. Most people see it as a good deal.

The obvious solution would be for the European Commission to pass a law banning targeted advertising. But I suspect they haven’t done that, and won’t, because so many publishers in the EU use targeted advertising (along with “pay or OK” subscription offerings). They don’t want to eliminate all targeted advertising, just Meta’s (and Google’s), but that’s hard to put into written law while claiming not to be targeting very specific American companies.

It’s certainly possible that Meta can devise ways to serve non-personalized contextual ads that generate revenue per user in the same ballpark as targeted ads or paid monthly subscriptions.2 But if they can’t, the rubber hits the road on Breton’s belief that none of the designated gatekeepers “can afford not to be in our market”. Why exactly would Meta choose to remain in the EU if they’re forced to offer their services for pennies on the dollar (or in this case, cents on the euro)? Out of the goodness of Mark Zuckerberg’s heart?

Consider too that if Meta goes along with this interpretation by the EC of the DMA’s requirements, and offers a vastly-less-lucrative free-of-charge option to use Instagram and Facebook without targeted ads in the European Union, there’s nothing to stop regulators and legislators around the world from demanding the same. Conceding to this might mean not just generating only a fraction of Meta’s current revenue in the EU, but generating only a fraction of its current revenue worldwide.

Breton — after casting a stink eye at Google for presenting its own hotel, flight, and shopping recommendations in web search results, and at Amazon for promoting its own Amazon-branded products (a shocking practice for a retailer — good luck ever finding Kirkland products at Costco, Up & Up at Target, or, say, Ol’ Roy dog food at Walmart, right?) — concludes with a threat:

Should we have indications of ineffective compliance or possible
circumvention of the DMA, we will not hesitate to make use of the
DMA’s full enforcement toolbox, including innovative tools that
did not exist in antitrust enforcement such as the retention
orders. And if our investigations conclude that there is lack of
full compliance with the DMA, gatekeepers will face heavy fines.

We have a duty: ensuring full compliance with the DMA. And we will
do all we can to create an online space that is fair and
competitive to the benefit of all consumers and businesses
operating in our Single Market.

Turns out, though, that actual users don’t agree that removing longstanding features from Google search results is somehow for their benefit. I’m guessing they’d see even less benefit if entire popular services and products are removed from the EU market.

Read More 

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, reporting for TechCrunch:

“Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is
usually that because their traffic is encrypted we have no
analytics about them,” Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg wrote
in an email dated June 9, 2016, which was published as part of the
lawsuit. “Given how quickly they’re growing, it seems important to
figure out a new way to get reliable analytics about them. Perhaps
we need to do panels or write custom software. You should figure
out how to do this.”

Facebook’s engineers solution was to use Onavo, a VPN-like service
that Facebook acquired in 2013. In 2019, Facebook shut down Onavo
after a TechCrunch investigation revealed that Facebook had been
secretly paying teenagers to use Onavo so the company could access
all of their web activity.

After Zuckerberg’s email, the Onavo team took on the project and a
month later proposed a solution: so-called kits that can be
installed on iOS and Android that intercept traffic for specific
subdomains, “allowing us to read what would otherwise be encrypted
traffic so we can measure in-app usage,” read an email from July
2016. “This is a ‘man-in-the-middle’ approach.” […]

Later, according to the court documents, Facebook expanded the
program to Amazon and YouTube. Inside Facebook, there wasn’t a
consensus on whether Project Ghostbusters was a good idea. Some
employees, including Jay Parikh, Facebook’s then-head of
infrastructure engineering, and Pedro Canahuati, the then-head of
security engineering, expressed their concern. “I can’t think of a
good argument for why this is okay. No security person is ever
comfortable with this, no matter what consent we get from the
general public. The general public just doesn’t know how this
stuff works,” Canahuati wrote in an email, included in the court
documents.

There’s the Facebook we know and love.

In 2018 Apple removed Onavo from the App Store, but the fact that Facebook was using Onavo in this way was known a year earlier.

 ★ 

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, reporting for TechCrunch:

“Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is
usually that because their traffic is encrypted we have no
analytics about them,” Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg wrote
in an email dated June 9, 2016, which was published as part of the
lawsuit. “Given how quickly they’re growing, it seems important to
figure out a new way to get reliable analytics about them. Perhaps
we need to do panels or write custom software. You should figure
out how to do this.”

Facebook’s engineers solution was to use Onavo, a VPN-like service
that Facebook acquired in 2013. In 2019, Facebook shut down Onavo
after a TechCrunch investigation revealed that Facebook had been
secretly paying teenagers to use Onavo so the company could access
all of their web activity.

After Zuckerberg’s email, the Onavo team took on the project and a
month later proposed a solution: so-called kits that can be
installed on iOS and Android that intercept traffic for specific
subdomains, “allowing us to read what would otherwise be encrypted
traffic so we can measure in-app usage,” read an email from July
2016. “This is a ‘man-in-the-middle’ approach.” […]

Later, according to the court documents, Facebook expanded the
program to Amazon and YouTube. Inside Facebook, there wasn’t a
consensus on whether Project Ghostbusters was a good idea. Some
employees, including Jay Parikh, Facebook’s then-head of
infrastructure engineering, and Pedro Canahuati, the then-head of
security engineering, expressed their concern. “I can’t think of a
good argument for why this is okay. No security person is ever
comfortable with this, no matter what consent we get from the
general public. The general public just doesn’t know how this
stuff works,” Canahuati wrote in an email, included in the court
documents.

There’s the Facebook we know and love.

In 2018 Apple removed Onavo from the App Store, but the fact that Facebook was using Onavo in this way was known a year earlier.

Read More 

Pranav Dixit, writing for Engadget:

“WhatsApp is kind of like a media platform and kind of like a
messaging platform, but it’s also not quite those things,” Surya
Mattu, a researcher at Princeton who runs the university’s Digital
Witness Lab, which studies how information flows through WhatsApp,
told Engadget. “It has the scale of a social media platform, but
it doesn’t have the traditional problems of one because there are
no recommendations and no social graph.”

Indeed, WhatsApp’s scale dwarfs nearly every social network and
messaging app out there. In 2020, WhatsApp announced it
had more than two billion users around the world. It’s bigger
than iMessage (1.3 billion users), TikTok (1 billion), Telegram
(800 million), Snap (400 million) and Signal (40 million.) It
stands head and shoulders above fellow Meta platform Instagram,
which captures around 1.4 billion users. The only thing bigger
than WhatsApp is Facebook itself, with more than three
billion users .

WhatsApp has become the world’s default communications platform.
Ten years after it was acquired, its growth shows no sign of
stopping. Even in the US, it is finally beginning to break through
the green and blue bubble battles and is reportedly one of Meta’s
fastest-growing services. As Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told
the New York Times last year, WhatsApp is the “next chapter” for
the company.

Anecdotally, I’m seeing more American usage of WhatsApp too. Putting aside the (deeply misguided, IMO) antitrust arguments about iMessage, Apple’s decade ago decision to eschew an iMessage client for Android might be proven to have been a mistake the old-fashioned way: through market forces.

 ★ 

Pranav Dixit, writing for Engadget:

“WhatsApp is kind of like a media platform and kind of like a
messaging platform, but it’s also not quite those things,” Surya
Mattu, a researcher at Princeton who runs the university’s Digital
Witness Lab, which studies how information flows through WhatsApp,
told Engadget. “It has the scale of a social media platform, but
it doesn’t have the traditional problems of one because there are
no recommendations and no social graph.”

Indeed, WhatsApp’s scale dwarfs nearly every social network and
messaging app out there. In 2020, WhatsApp announced it
had more than two billion users around the world. It’s bigger
than iMessage (1.3 billion users), TikTok (1 billion), Telegram
(800 million), Snap (400 million) and Signal (40 million.) It
stands head and shoulders above fellow Meta platform Instagram,
which captures around 1.4 billion users. The only thing bigger
than WhatsApp is Facebook itself, with more than three
billion users .

WhatsApp has become the world’s default communications platform.
Ten years after it was acquired, its growth shows no sign of
stopping. Even in the US, it is finally beginning to break through
the green and blue bubble battles and is reportedly one of Meta’s
fastest-growing services. As Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told
the New York Times last year, WhatsApp is the “next chapter” for
the company.

Anecdotally, I’m seeing more American usage of WhatsApp too. Putting aside the (deeply misguided, IMO) antitrust arguments about iMessage, Apple’s decade ago decision to eschew an iMessage client for Android might be proven to have been a mistake the old-fashioned way: through market forces.

Read More