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Image: Oculus Studios

Meta is closing Ready at Dawn, the first-party studio behind VR games like Echo VR and Lone Echo, Android Central reported on Wednesday. The shutdown is effective immediately. Meta acquired the studio in 2020.
As for why Meta is shutting down the studio, here’s what Android Central said:
One report in mid-July said that Meta was cutting its Reality Labs division’s budget by 20% by 2026, and an internal memo sent to Meta employees by Gio Hunt, VP Oculus Studios — seen by Android Central — supports this reasoning. A Meta spokesperson told Android Central that the cuts weren’t being made to “save money,” per se. Rather, these cuts are being made to ensure that Reality Labs stays within the new budgetary constraints and that Oculus Studios can make a “better long-term impact” in VR development.
We tried to ask for more details, but Meta spokesperson Alaina Laszewski declined to comment. In its most recent earnings, Meta said that its Reality Labs division, which its VR efforts fall under, lost nearly $4.5 billion.

When Meta announced that it had acquired Ready at Dawn, it said that the studio would “continue creating memorable, immersive, and innovative VR content for gamers around the world as an independently-operated studio.” And while it did go on to release Lone Echo II for the Rift and Rift S — the game isn’t natively available for Meta’s standalone Quest headsets — Meta shut down the well-loved Echo VR in August 2023.
At the time, CTO Andrew “Boz” Bosworth said that the resources to make Echo VR “could be put to other uses that I think will be useful to the now tens of millions of people who are in VR.” The Ready at Dawn team also said that it was working on its next project, but now it seems that project won’t be released.
Ready at Dawn Studios is also known for games like The Order: 1886, God of War: Chains of Olympus, and the standalone Daxter game.

Image: Oculus Studios

Meta is closing Ready at Dawn, the first-party studio behind VR games like Echo VR and Lone Echo, Android Central reported on Wednesday. The shutdown is effective immediately. Meta acquired the studio in 2020.

As for why Meta is shutting down the studio, here’s what Android Central said:

One report in mid-July said that Meta was cutting its Reality Labs division’s budget by 20% by 2026, and an internal memo sent to Meta employees by Gio Hunt, VP Oculus Studios — seen by Android Central — supports this reasoning. A Meta spokesperson told Android Central that the cuts weren’t being made to “save money,” per se. Rather, these cuts are being made to ensure that Reality Labs stays within the new budgetary constraints and that Oculus Studios can make a “better long-term impact” in VR development.

We tried to ask for more details, but Meta spokesperson Alaina Laszewski declined to comment. In its most recent earnings, Meta said that its Reality Labs division, which its VR efforts fall under, lost nearly $4.5 billion.

When Meta announced that it had acquired Ready at Dawn, it said that the studio would “continue creating memorable, immersive, and innovative VR content for gamers around the world as an independently-operated studio.” And while it did go on to release Lone Echo II for the Rift and Rift S — the game isn’t natively available for Meta’s standalone Quest headsets — Meta shut down the well-loved Echo VR in August 2023.

At the time, CTO Andrew “Boz” Bosworth said that the resources to make Echo VR “could be put to other uses that I think will be useful to the now tens of millions of people who are in VR.” The Ready at Dawn team also said that it was working on its next project, but now it seems that project won’t be released.

Ready at Dawn Studios is also known for games like The Order: 1886, God of War: Chains of Olympus, and the standalone Daxter game.

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250 lumens of illumination isn’t super bright, but the light is cheap enough to group several of them together. | Image: TTArtisan

Even if you switched to a digital camera decades ago, TTArtisan’s Mini LED Light is a fun reason to carry around a film cartridge. Instead of a roll of 35-millimeter film inside, there’s a rechargeable battery and an array of 15 LEDs. It’s not the brightest camera light you can buy, but it’s also $7.
With just 250 lumens of illumination, you’ll need to position the light within 10 feet of your subject for it to be of any real use. But by way of comparison, you can buy 18 of them for the same price as a single 400-lumen Lume Cube LED light.

Image: TTArtisan
An included magnetic hot shoe mount lets you attach the light to a camera.

The Mini LED Light’s 300mAh rechargeable battery will keep it glowing for up to 180 minutes, and TTArtisan has even included three color temperature settings: 6,000K (cool), 4,500K (neutral), and 3,000K (warm). Its color rendering index of 95-plus is surprisingly accurate for such a cheap light. An included magnetic cold shoe mount allows the light to be perched atop a camera, and it comes in a small matching cardboard box that looks like the ones 35-millimeter film used to ship in. (It also has a lanyard hole.)

TTArtisan sells the Mini LED Light through its online store, but shipping to the US costs $20, which somewhat negates its impulse purchase appeal. You can instead buy it through Amazon if you don’t mind a small price bump to $9.90.

250 lumens of illumination isn’t super bright, but the light is cheap enough to group several of them together. | Image: TTArtisan

Even if you switched to a digital camera decades ago, TTArtisan’s Mini LED Light is a fun reason to carry around a film cartridge. Instead of a roll of 35-millimeter film inside, there’s a rechargeable battery and an array of 15 LEDs. It’s not the brightest camera light you can buy, but it’s also $7.

With just 250 lumens of illumination, you’ll need to position the light within 10 feet of your subject for it to be of any real use. But by way of comparison, you can buy 18 of them for the same price as a single 400-lumen Lume Cube LED light.

Image: TTArtisan
An included magnetic hot shoe mount lets you attach the light to a camera.

The Mini LED Light’s 300mAh rechargeable battery will keep it glowing for up to 180 minutes, and TTArtisan has even included three color temperature settings: 6,000K (cool), 4,500K (neutral), and 3,000K (warm). Its color rendering index of 95-plus is surprisingly accurate for such a cheap light. An included magnetic cold shoe mount allows the light to be perched atop a camera, and it comes in a small matching cardboard box that looks like the ones 35-millimeter film used to ship in. (It also has a lanyard hole.)

TTArtisan sells the Mini LED Light through its online store, but shipping to the US costs $20, which somewhat negates its impulse purchase appeal. You can instead buy it through Amazon if you don’t mind a small price bump to $9.90.

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One of the classic problems of looking into a palantir was correctly interpreting what the viewer saw… | Image: The Verge

Palantir, the company named for the dangerous seeing-stones that tended to mislead their users, has announced a partnership with Microsoft to deliver services for classified networks in US defense and intelligence agencies.
“This is a first-of-its-kind, integrated suite of technology that will allow critical national security missions to operationalize Microsoft’s best-in-class large language models (LLMs) via Azure OpenAI Service within Palantir’s AI Platforms (AIP) in Microsoft’s government and classified cloud environments,” the announcement says.
Palantir is a data-analysis company that sucks down huge amounts of personal data to assist governments and companies with surveillance. It is somewhat unclear from the text of the announcement what services Palantir and Microsoft will offer. What we do know is that Microsoft’s Azure cloud services will integrate Palantir products. Previously, Azure incorporated OpenAI’s Chat-GPT4 into a “top secret” version of its software.
Palantir didn’t post its first annual profit until 2023
Palantir, the “AI arms dealer of the 21st century,” was co-founded by Peter Thiel and received seed funds from the CIA’s venture capital affiliate. Its clients include Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), assorted police departments, and private companies such as Sanofi, the pharma giant. It is also heavily integrated into the war effort in Ukraine. There are indications that the software can be used to choose bombing targets.
Despite its large client list, Palantir didn’t post its first annual profit until 2023. But the AI hype cycle has meant that Palantir’s “commercial business is exploding in a way we don’t know how to handle,” the company’s chief executive officer Alex Carp told Bloomberg in February. The majority of its business is from governments, including that of Israel — though the risk factors section of its annual filing notes that it does not and will not work with “the Chinese communist party.”
As of this writing, Palantir’s share price has surged more than 75 percent in 2024.

One of the classic problems of looking into a palantir was correctly interpreting what the viewer saw… | Image: The Verge

Palantir, the company named for the dangerous seeing-stones that tended to mislead their users, has announced a partnership with Microsoft to deliver services for classified networks in US defense and intelligence agencies.

“This is a first-of-its-kind, integrated suite of technology that will allow critical national security missions to operationalize Microsoft’s best-in-class large language models (LLMs) via Azure OpenAI Service within Palantir’s AI Platforms (AIP) in Microsoft’s government and classified cloud environments,” the announcement says.

Palantir is a data-analysis company that sucks down huge amounts of personal data to assist governments and companies with surveillance. It is somewhat unclear from the text of the announcement what services Palantir and Microsoft will offer. What we do know is that Microsoft’s Azure cloud services will integrate Palantir products. Previously, Azure incorporated OpenAI’s Chat-GPT4 into a “top secret” version of its software.

Palantir, the “AI arms dealer of the 21st century,” was co-founded by Peter Thiel and received seed funds from the CIA’s venture capital affiliate. Its clients include Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), assorted police departments, and private companies such as Sanofi, the pharma giant. It is also heavily integrated into the war effort in Ukraine. There are indications that the software can be used to choose bombing targets.

Despite its large client list, Palantir didn’t post its first annual profit until 2023. But the AI hype cycle has meant that Palantir’s “commercial business is exploding in a way we don’t know how to handle,” the company’s chief executive officer Alex Carp told Bloomberg in February. The majority of its business is from governments, including that of Israel — though the risk factors section of its annual filing notes that it does not and will not work with “the Chinese communist party.”

As of this writing, Palantir’s share price has surged more than 75 percent in 2024.

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Image: ADT

Security company ADT disclosed in an SEC filing that hackers obtained “some limited customer information, including email addresses, phone numbers and postal addresses.” TechCrunch reports that ADT’s disclosure follows a seller on a cybercrime forum claiming last week that they had obtained more than 30,000 stolen ADT customer records.
The hackers obtained the information by accessing “certain databases containing ADT customer order information,” according to ADT. The company believes that only a “small percentage” of its subscribers were affected and says it has notified those customers. (ADT has about 6 million customers, according to a June blog post.) ADT says that it has “no reason to believe” that the hackers compromised home security systems and that credit card data and banking information weren’t taken.
“Our customers’ privacy and security is our utmost priority, and we have taken several steps to help keep their information safe, including immediately activating rigorous cybersecurity protocols,” ADT spokesperson Ben Tamblyn says in a statement.
Here’s the relevant text from ADT’s SEC filing:

ADT Inc. (“ADT” or the “Company”) recently experienced a cybersecurity incident during which unauthorized actors illegally accessed certain databases containing ADT customer order information. After becoming aware of the incident, the Company promptly took steps to shut down the unauthorized access and launched an investigation, partnering with leading third-party cybersecurity industry experts. The attackers nonetheless obtained some limited customer information, including email addresses, phone numbers and postal addresses.
Based on its investigation to date, the Company has no reason to believe that customers’ home security systems were compromised during this incident. Additionally, the Company has no reason to believe the attackers obtained other personally sensitive information such as credit card data or banking information. The Company is continuing its investigation into this cybersecurity incident and has notified the customers it believes to have been affected, who comprise a small percentage of the Company’s overall subscriber base. While the investigation remains ongoing, as of the date of this filing, the Company believes this cybersecurity incident has not materially impacted its operations and does not expect that this incident is reasonably likely to have a material impact on the Company’s overall financial condition, results of operations, or ability to meet its 2024 financial guidance.

Image: ADT

Security company ADT disclosed in an SEC filing that hackers obtained “some limited customer information, including email addresses, phone numbers and postal addresses.” TechCrunch reports that ADT’s disclosure follows a seller on a cybercrime forum claiming last week that they had obtained more than 30,000 stolen ADT customer records.

The hackers obtained the information by accessing “certain databases containing ADT customer order information,” according to ADT. The company believes that only a “small percentage” of its subscribers were affected and says it has notified those customers. (ADT has about 6 million customers, according to a June blog post.) ADT says that it has “no reason to believe” that the hackers compromised home security systems and that credit card data and banking information weren’t taken.

“Our customers’ privacy and security is our utmost priority, and we have taken several steps to help keep their information safe, including immediately activating rigorous cybersecurity protocols,” ADT spokesperson Ben Tamblyn says in a statement.

Here’s the relevant text from ADT’s SEC filing:

ADT Inc. (“ADT” or the “Company”) recently experienced a cybersecurity incident during which unauthorized actors illegally accessed certain databases containing ADT customer order information. After becoming aware of the incident, the Company promptly took steps to shut down the unauthorized access and launched an investigation, partnering with leading third-party cybersecurity industry experts. The attackers nonetheless obtained some limited customer information, including email addresses, phone numbers and postal addresses.

Based on its investigation to date, the Company has no reason to believe that customers’ home security systems were compromised during this incident. Additionally, the Company has no reason to believe the attackers obtained other personally sensitive information such as credit card data or banking information. The Company is continuing its investigation into this cybersecurity incident and has notified the customers it believes to have been affected, who comprise a small percentage of the Company’s overall subscriber base. While the investigation remains ongoing, as of the date of this filing, the Company believes this cybersecurity incident has not materially impacted its operations and does not expect that this incident is reasonably likely to have a material impact on the Company’s overall financial condition, results of operations, or ability to meet its 2024 financial guidance.

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Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Rep. Lori Trahan (D-MA) are calling for answers about how OpenAI handles whistleblowers and safety reviews after former employees complained that internal criticism is often stifled.
“Given the discrepancy between your public comments and reports of OpenAI’s actions, we request information about OpenAI’s whistleblower and conflict of interest protections in order to understand whether federal intervention may be necessary,” Warren and Trahan wrote in a letter exclusively shared with The Verge.
The lawmakers cited several instances where OpenAI’s safety procedures have been called into question. For example, they said, in 2022, an unreleased version of GPT-4 was being tested in a new version of the Microsoft Bing search engine in India before receiving approval from OpenAI’s safety board. They also recalled OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s brief ousting from the company in 2023 as a result of the board’s concerns, in part, “over commercializing advances before understanding the consequences.”
Warren and Trahan’s letter to Altman comes as the company is plagued by a laundry list of safety concerns, which often are at odds with the company’s public statements. For instance, an anonymous source told The Washington Post that OpenAI rushed through safety tests, the Superalignment team (which was partly responsible for safety) was dissolved, and a safety executive quit, claiming that “safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products.” Lindsey Held, a spokesperson for OpenAI, denied the claims in The Washington Post’s report, saying that the company “didn’t cut corners on our safety process, though we recognize the launch was stressful for our teams.”
Other lawmakers have also sought answers about the company’s safety practices, including a group of senators led by Brian Schatz (D-HI) in July. Warren and Trahan asked for further clarity on OpenAI’s responses to that group, including on its creation of a new “Integrity Line” for employees to report concerns.
Meanwhile, OpenAI appears to be on the offensive. In July, the company announced a partnership with Los Alamos National Laboratory to explore how advanced AI models can safely aid in bioscientific research. Just last week, Altman announced via X that OpenAI is collaborating with the US Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute and emphasized that 20 percent of computing resources at the company will be dedicated to safety (a promise originally made to the now-defunct Superalignment team). In the same post, Altman said that OpenAI has removed nondisparagement clauses for employees and provisions allowing the cancellation of vested equity, a key issue in Warren and Trahan’s letter.
The letter signals a key policy interest for the lawmakers, who previously introduced bills to expand protections for whistleblowers, like the FTC Whistleblower Act and the SEC Whistleblower Reform Act. It could also serve as a signal to law enforcement agencies that so far have reportedly set their sights on OpenAI’s possible antitrust violations and harmful data practices.
Warren and Trahan asked Altman to provide information about how its new AI safety hotline for employees was being used and how the company follows up on reports. They also asked for “a detailed accounting” of all the times OpenAI products have “bypassed safety protocols” and in what circumstances a product would be allowed to skip a safety review. The lawmakers are also seeking information on OpenAI’s conflicts policy. They asked Altman whether he’s been required to divest from any outside holdings and “what specific protections are in place to protect OpenAI from your financial conflicts of interest.” They asked Altman to respond by August 22nd.
Warren also notes how vocal Altman has been about his concerns regarding AI. Last year, in front of the Senate, Altman warned that AI’s capabilities could be “significantly destabilizing for public safety and national security” and emphasized the impossibility of anticipating every potential abuse or failure of the technology. These warnings seemed to resonate with lawmakers — in OpenAI’s home state of California, state Sen. Scott Wiener is pushing for a bill to regulate large language models, including restrictions that would hold companies legally accountable if their AI is used in harmful ways.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Rep. Lori Trahan (D-MA) are calling for answers about how OpenAI handles whistleblowers and safety reviews after former employees complained that internal criticism is often stifled.

“Given the discrepancy between your public comments and reports of OpenAI’s actions, we request information about OpenAI’s whistleblower and conflict of interest protections in order to understand whether federal intervention may be necessary,” Warren and Trahan wrote in a letter exclusively shared with The Verge.

The lawmakers cited several instances where OpenAI’s safety procedures have been called into question. For example, they said, in 2022, an unreleased version of GPT-4 was being tested in a new version of the Microsoft Bing search engine in India before receiving approval from OpenAI’s safety board. They also recalled OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s brief ousting from the company in 2023 as a result of the board’s concerns, in part, “over commercializing advances before understanding the consequences.”

Warren and Trahan’s letter to Altman comes as the company is plagued by a laundry list of safety concerns, which often are at odds with the company’s public statements. For instance, an anonymous source told The Washington Post that OpenAI rushed through safety tests, the Superalignment team (which was partly responsible for safety) was dissolved, and a safety executive quit, claiming that “safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products.” Lindsey Held, a spokesperson for OpenAI, denied the claims in The Washington Post’s report, saying that the company “didn’t cut corners on our safety process, though we recognize the launch was stressful for our teams.”

Other lawmakers have also sought answers about the company’s safety practices, including a group of senators led by Brian Schatz (D-HI) in July. Warren and Trahan asked for further clarity on OpenAI’s responses to that group, including on its creation of a new “Integrity Line” for employees to report concerns.

Meanwhile, OpenAI appears to be on the offensive. In July, the company announced a partnership with Los Alamos National Laboratory to explore how advanced AI models can safely aid in bioscientific research. Just last week, Altman announced via X that OpenAI is collaborating with the US Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute and emphasized that 20 percent of computing resources at the company will be dedicated to safety (a promise originally made to the now-defunct Superalignment team). In the same post, Altman said that OpenAI has removed nondisparagement clauses for employees and provisions allowing the cancellation of vested equity, a key issue in Warren and Trahan’s letter.

The letter signals a key policy interest for the lawmakers, who previously introduced bills to expand protections for whistleblowers, like the FTC Whistleblower Act and the SEC Whistleblower Reform Act. It could also serve as a signal to law enforcement agencies that so far have reportedly set their sights on OpenAI’s possible antitrust violations and harmful data practices.

Warren and Trahan asked Altman to provide information about how its new AI safety hotline for employees was being used and how the company follows up on reports. They also asked for “a detailed accounting” of all the times OpenAI products have “bypassed safety protocols” and in what circumstances a product would be allowed to skip a safety review. The lawmakers are also seeking information on OpenAI’s conflicts policy. They asked Altman whether he’s been required to divest from any outside holdings and “what specific protections are in place to protect OpenAI from your financial conflicts of interest.” They asked Altman to respond by August 22nd.

Warren also notes how vocal Altman has been about his concerns regarding AI. Last year, in front of the Senate, Altman warned that AI’s capabilities could be “significantly destabilizing for public safety and national security” and emphasized the impossibility of anticipating every potential abuse or failure of the technology. These warnings seemed to resonate with lawmakers — in OpenAI’s home state of California, state Sen. Scott Wiener is pushing for a bill to regulate large language models, including restrictions that would hold companies legally accountable if their AI is used in harmful ways.

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Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge

Instagram is expanding the number of photos and videos that can be added to a single grid post, the company said today.
Each carousel post can now have up to 20 photos or videos. Users could previously add up to 10 pieces of content to each carousel post — something that’s colloquially known as a “photo dump.” The carousel feature was first rolled out to users in 2017.

Image: Instagram

Instagram has slowly added more features to the carousel function, including the ability to pair songs with your slides and collaborative posts that allow multiple users to add their content. A higher ceiling could be helpful for this specifically, especially if several people are contributing to a single carousel post.
The expansion brings Instagram more in line with TikTok, which currently supports posts of up to 35 photos. Though TikTok broke through as a shortform video app, photos have caught on surprisingly fast: there are meme formats and trends that use photos instead of clips, for example, and some users tell long stories in small pieces, slide by slide (by slide). Interestingly, this isn’t really part of the Instagram culture — but perhaps doubling the amount of space could create incentives to do this.
The new feature begins rolling out globally today.

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge

Instagram is expanding the number of photos and videos that can be added to a single grid post, the company said today.

Each carousel post can now have up to 20 photos or videos. Users could previously add up to 10 pieces of content to each carousel post — something that’s colloquially known as a “photo dump.” The carousel feature was first rolled out to users in 2017.

Image: Instagram

Instagram has slowly added more features to the carousel function, including the ability to pair songs with your slides and collaborative posts that allow multiple users to add their content. A higher ceiling could be helpful for this specifically, especially if several people are contributing to a single carousel post.

The expansion brings Instagram more in line with TikTok, which currently supports posts of up to 35 photos. Though TikTok broke through as a shortform video app, photos have caught on surprisingly fast: there are meme formats and trends that use photos instead of clips, for example, and some users tell long stories in small pieces, slide by slide (by slide). Interestingly, this isn’t really part of the Instagram culture — but perhaps doubling the amount of space could create incentives to do this.

The new feature begins rolling out globally today.

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Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

Apple’s smallest Mac is in for some major changes, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. A new version of the Mac Mini coming later this year will undergo the product’s most significant redesign in over a decade. Gurman says “the device will be far smaller than its predecessor, approaching the size of an Apple TV set-top box.” That’s tiny, even if the Mini will likely be taller than Apple’s streamer.
The company has been testing one design with “at least” three USB-C ports and an HDMI output, and the device will maintain its aluminum casing. A Mac Mini that could inconspicuously sit on a TV stand? This thing sounds like a Plex lover’s dream.

The 2024 Mini will also reportedly get a processor upgrade to Apple’s M4 chip, which is expected to gradually make its way to the company’s entire desktop and laptop portfolio. The M4 debuted in the latest iPad Pro, but it’ll soon expand to the Mini, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, iMac, and Mac Studio.
Apple last refreshed the Mac Mini in 2023 and has since offered two variants of the machine: one has the standard M2 chip inside, while the other features the more powerful M2 Pro. Gurman says the company will continue this approach with the next revision, which will come in M4 and M4 Pro configurations. The Bloomberg report says suppliers are preparing to ship the M4 hardware this month, though the M4 Pro Mini won’t be ready until October.
Beyond some changes to its inputs / outputs and internal design, the Mini’s overall form factor hasn’t seen any drastic makeovers in a long time. Here’s our 2023 Mac Mini review, and here’s one David Pierce wrote in 2012. Despite a decade between models, it pretty much looks the same. Bring on the even smaller Mini.

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

Apple’s smallest Mac is in for some major changes, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. A new version of the Mac Mini coming later this year will undergo the product’s most significant redesign in over a decade. Gurman says “the device will be far smaller than its predecessor, approaching the size of an Apple TV set-top box.” That’s tiny, even if the Mini will likely be taller than Apple’s streamer.

The company has been testing one design with “at least” three USB-C ports and an HDMI output, and the device will maintain its aluminum casing. A Mac Mini that could inconspicuously sit on a TV stand? This thing sounds like a Plex lover’s dream.

The 2024 Mini will also reportedly get a processor upgrade to Apple’s M4 chip, which is expected to gradually make its way to the company’s entire desktop and laptop portfolio. The M4 debuted in the latest iPad Pro, but it’ll soon expand to the Mini, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, iMac, and Mac Studio.

Apple last refreshed the Mac Mini in 2023 and has since offered two variants of the machine: one has the standard M2 chip inside, while the other features the more powerful M2 Pro. Gurman says the company will continue this approach with the next revision, which will come in M4 and M4 Pro configurations. The Bloomberg report says suppliers are preparing to ship the M4 hardware this month, though the M4 Pro Mini won’t be ready until October.

Beyond some changes to its inputs / outputs and internal design, the Mini’s overall form factor hasn’t seen any drastic makeovers in a long time. Here’s our 2023 Mac Mini review, and here’s one David Pierce wrote in 2012. Despite a decade between models, it pretty much looks the same. Bring on the even smaller Mini.

Read More 

Photo illustration by The Verge / Photo by Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images

AAG Jonathan Kanter says the Google monopoly verdict belongs on the ‘Mount Rushmore of antitrust.’ Today, I’m talking to Jonathan Kanter, the assistant attorney general for antitrust at the United States Department of Justice. This is Jonathan’s second time on the show, and it’s a bit of an emergency podcast situation.
On Monday, a federal court issued a monumental decision in the DOJ’s case against Google, holding that Google Search and the text ads in that search engine are monopolies and that Google has acted anticompetitively to protect those monopolies.
The court hasn’t decided on the penalties for all this yet — that’s scheduled to happen in something called the remedies phase, which will kick off next month. And Google has already set it plans to appeal.

It’s the biggest antitrust win against a tech company since the Microsoft case in the late ’90s and early 2000s — and it promises to shake up the entire tech landscape. For example. Google was paying Apple $20 billion a year to be the default search engine on iPhones and Macs, and that kind of arrangement will be under the microscope now.
So I wanted to know what Jonathan thought of the ruling, what it means for the law, which appears to be coming back to a more practical and intuitive version of antitrust from the extremely technical and economic approach that’s been used since the ’80s. Most importantly, I wanted to know what remedies he’s going to seek to try and restore competition in search. The European Union has been trying to do that for a very long time, and I wanted to know what Jonathan has learned from those approaches, and what new ideas he might have.
I’ll just warn you: Jonathan is a very good lawyer and he is very good at not answering questions — in fact, you will hear him flat out say he’s not going to answer the question several times throughout this conversation. But there’s a lot here about his approach to antitrust, an approach that was just validated in a major way and which will inform the major cases yet to come against Apple, Google’s advertising business, and more.
One note before we start: You’ll hear us talk about brown shoes. That’s Brown Shoe v. United States, a Supreme Court case from 1962 that laid out a practical test for defining a market in an antitrust case. It’ll make sense when we get there.
Okay, Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter. Here we go.

This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Jonathan Kanter, you are the assistant attorney general for antitrust at the United States Department of Justice. Welcome back to Decoder.
Wonderful to be back with you.
There’s a lot to talk about today. You are here because the government just won a major antitrust case against Google. Tell us about that.
We brought a case alleging that Google monopolized various markets in the search industry, and just this week, we won that case with an extensive opinion by a federal court here in Washington, DC.
That opinion is 280-plus pages. Yesterday, I described it to my colleague Sarah Jeong as “readable,” and she looked at me and said, “I think you have a very different definition of ‘readable’ than other people.”
The conventional wisdom about this case and that decision is that it is entirely about the payments Google makes to Apple to be the default search engine on iOS. Are those payments illegal now?
I want to be very careful here. This is still active litigation.
We are heading into the remedy phase, so I can talk generally about the case. And what I would suggest is —given that you’ve read all 280-plus pages — you’ll probably observe that the case is about a lot more than that. The case is about the ingredients that go into creating and maintaining a monopoly, whether it’s the scale that you need for crawling and indexing, the data that you need from a click stream and from queries, and the distribution necessary to get the queries that you need in order to generate the scale that you need, and then, of course, the advertising revenue that you need in order to maintain that capital-intensive business. All of that is discussed at length in the court’s opinion.
But the heart of it is the distribution, as you just mentioned. Paying for distribution for search that no one else can get.
The heart of it, in this case, was Google imposing conditions on access to distribution. So, in exchange for getting payments, there were requirements that we alleged and the court agreed were exclusionary, meaning that it would limit the freedom of third parties to work with Google’s rivals.
Some of those conditions are about being the default. Some of those conditions, particularly as it relates to Apple, are about how good Apple can make its own search products. The court found that the agreement with Apple limited how good could make Siri in some cases, or Spotlight in some cases. Are those kinds of things not allowed generally? Or is that just in this case?
Each antitrust case is very fact-specific, and when you’re dealing with a monopolization case, everything has to be looked at in context. The context starts with, well, how big is the company? How powerful is the company? What are the elements and ingredients that make a company that power durable? And then, has the company engaged in exclusionary conduct, including exclusive or exclusionary contract provisions that might harm competition or threaten the ability of rivals to develop and have their full competitive impact?
In this context, we have a situation where a company with a significant degree of monopoly power is imposing contractual terms that limit the freedom of others to innovate at will and especially to innovate in ways that might threaten the dominant firm competitively. That’s very standard in terms of being an antitrust concern.
I want to come back to competition, I want to come back to Apple, and I want to talk about innovation generally, but I want to start with just some antitrust basics.
There is a lot in this decision that went your way. In particular, it seems like every tech antitrust case has run up against angst and noise in market definition _ just saying what the market for the product is. I’m thinking of Facebook basically arguing its way out of the idea that a market for social networking exists, and Facebook is in that market. But here, you’ve got the market definition. There’s a market for general search, and then the court found a market for text ads in search and that Google had monopoly power in that market and it used that monopoly power in anticompetitive ways. Did you get everything you wanted from that part of the decision?
We got a decision that came out in our favor, and so we’re overjoyed.
Did you get everything you wanted from that part?
We wanted the law to be enforced, and so we got that, yes.
Listen, there are a number of different markets. What we wanted to make sure is that we had the ability to articulate that Google has and exercised a degree of power. Market definition, which is a very technical antitrust term, is really just a tool. It’s a tool to help understand: is there an area of commerce where a company has power? Well, how do you gauge its power? Well, you understand, is it big or powerful relative to others in the market? Is the market competitive? How many other competitors are out there?

You have to ask the question, well, how many other competitors of what? We typically define a market, which is the process of saying, “What is the competitive set? Who are the range of rivals that might potentially threaten a firm that’s alleged to have monopoly power?” And so to do that, we define a market. We say, “What are the general boundaries of the competitive set?” Once we define a market and establish that a firm has a high enough market share or enough monopoly power in that market, then the question is, did they do something either to legally obtain or maintain that monopoly power?
But again, so much of tech antitrust thus far has been furiously arguing about market definitions. Even in this case, you argued that there was a market for general search, and Google argued that the market was actually answering all queries on the internet — that open text boxes on the internet is the market Google plays in. The court ruled for you — it held that there is a market for general search engines. Do you think that’s starting to get clearer, how to make these arguments, how to define these markets?
Yes.
That seems like the problem thus far.
Yes. Market definition ends up being an issue in every antitrust case because the questions that I just presented — which [are]: How big is the company? Who do they compete with? — comes up whether it’s bricks and mortar or ones and zeros. It is just a fundamental question in almost every antitrust matter, certainly every civil antitrust matter.
One of the things that we’ve been grappling with in antitrust is how do we apply that in the tech world? How do we apply it in a world where you might have a multi-sided market? Where you might have a platform where the services are given away to one side of the market for free and monetized in a different manner? Where there are significant network and feedback effects? Where competition might emerge not from a product or service that looks exactly like the one that is alleged to have monopoly power, but might be a new, disruptive force in the market?
We have to understand all of those dynamics in order to explain to a court why an issue may or may not be a problem. I think we’ve gotten a lot better at that. I think we’ve gotten a lot better at understanding how to define markets and bring antitrust cases. One of the ways in which we’ve been able to do that is by making sure we understand how the products work and hiring technical experts and technologists, and also understanding how consumers behave in the wild, in the tech industry.
Our first day of trial, we put forward — and this was, to my knowledge, the first time the government’s ever done this — a behavioral scientist to explain how consumers react to defaults and default settings. How often consumers might or might not switch the default in a browser or on a phone. Why things that might seem small or small, little points of friction that exist inside software might have an outsize effect on the way an individual reacts. These are things that we are now incorporating as standard fare as part of our antitrust investigations and, in this case, as part of our litigation.
There were two ways the courts evaluated this. One is what you’re talking about. There was a study from inside Google you brought forth saying people didn’t even notice when you switch from Google to Bing on iPhones, so Google itself knows it.
You and I have talked about this before. When I was in law school, all antitrust was deeply economics-based. It was mathematical. It was opaque. The court here went back to a case called Brown Shoe Co. from 1962. It said, “There are practical indicia of market power.” And one of them is just like, “Yeah, everyone talks about it this way.” There’s obviously a market for general search.
And then the court also went to when people buy search advertising or they buy advertising on the internet, they’re allocating their money in a way that doesn’t substitute for other products, like TikTok ads or something.
Is it the combination? Is that the approach now, you’re trying to cover the waterfront? Or is the more practical, “hey, let’s just be honest here” approach starting to come back to the forefront?
It’s all of the above, but I think we lost sight of the practical indicia, which has been at the core of antitrust, going back so many years. And you mentioned the Brown Shoe case. What is really happening in the marketplace? What is it that we’re trying to measure? And to do that, you have to start with understanding how this stuff works. Is something truly a substitute?
Well, let’s figure it out. Let’s look at your documents. Let’s understand what consumers think. Let’s see how they behave in the wild. Let’s start with the facts and work backward from that. And I think, for a long time, antitrust tried very hard and, I think, developed some very useful tools, quantitative tools, to help understand and assess these kinds of questions and regression analyses and surveys. And those are valuable, but it only tells you so much. You have to start with asking, well, how does this stuff really work? What are the practical indicia?
You won on the market definitions for general search engines and for text ads on the search results page.
The court ruled against you in a couple of ways that are important as well. It found that Google lacked monopoly power in search advertising generally — it actually found there isn’t a market for general search advertising. This case is certain to be appealed. Do you think you will bring that up on appeal?
Too soon to say.
I won’t comment on the appeal other than to say, for us, it was really important to make sure that we were putting forward two general categories of harm. One is the way in which users interact with the search engine from the perspective of the user and the way in which advertisers buy advertising that appears in a search engine. And I’m gratified that we were successful in defining markets and proving harm on both fronts.
It’s all but certain that Google is going to appeal. It sounds like you are going to appeal as well if they do?
I would not necessarily take that from this conversation. What I would take is I am not commenting one way or the other, up or down, can’t confirm or deny. I’m just observing what was in the opinion.
In general, the Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission — you and Lina Khan — have pursued some newer theories of antitrust. You’ve been careful several times in this conversation already to say, “This is the heart of antitrust. We’re getting back to where it was,” but it’s gotten away from, “Hey, just look at practical indicia.” It’s gotten away from, “Let’s look at the realities of the market.” You’ve had to pursue some newer theories of law. You’ve had to take some shots at cases that may or may not win. This one, obviously, you’ve won. Do you think it’s swinging your way now on changing how antitrust law works?
Well, I’m going to look at the cases that we’ve brought and that we’ve won, right? Obviously, there’s the case that came down this week, the Google case, which probably sits on the Mount Rushmore of antitrust cases. We’re really proud of our victory here.
We brought a case involving JetBlue’s proposed acquisition of Spirit Airlines, and the theory in that case was that the harm would be on cost-conscious flyers, and the court agreed. It took a practical approach and said that these airlines focus on people who care about price and who care about making sure that they can afford air travel, whether it’s a student flying home to see her family during a break or a family of four trying to afford a much-needed vacation.

We brought a case involving book publishers and the merger of book publishers and how the harm would not necessarily be, although it could have been, in the higher price of books but would result in the exercise of power against authors who rely on advances in order to produce professional works.

These are obvious concerns from the perspective of the public, as far as we believe, and I don’t view them as novel antitrust issues; they’ve just been forgotten. We haven’t had the opportunity to see as many cases involving these kinds of issues over the last few decades because we in the government haven’t been as aggressive or as proactive in bringing those cases.
But what we have found is when we present courts with facts that are solid, when we prevent courts with legal theories that, as you indicate, go back to the heartland cases of antitrust law, and we do a good, solid job presenting our cases to a court in telling a coherent story that holds up on the facts and the law, that not only do we win, but we win decisively.
I’m going to get real nerdy with you. What we’re really talking about here is dating back to the ’80s and Robert Bork, the introduction of the consumer welfare standard in antitrust that said you have to have prices that go up. And then you have this big problem where a lot of tech companies have free products, and it’s hard to measure the prices, and we’ve been stuck there.
Here the court looked at general search engines and said, “Well, they’re free, but this one is obviously a monopoly. And Google has obviously acted anticompetitively to maintain that monopoly.” It did not really look at pricing in the general search category. It looked at pricing in the advertising side because there are prices there, but you were able to overcome this “you have to find a price that goes up” problem.
Is that the beginning of a trend, do you think? Are you going to be able to pursue this more aggressively across the tech industry?
I think it’s the restoration and validation of a core element of antitrust — the purpose of antitrust law is to protect competition and the competitive process. The idea is that rivalry and competition leads to the kind of economic freedom and opportunity that we value in our society.
As we think about our antitrust cases in tech, we go back and look at the journalism industry. For decades, there were antitrust cases involving radio and involving newspapers, many of which were offered to consumers for free and then monetized through the selling of advertising. In fact, one of the most significant monopolization cases in history is the Lorain Journal case, which involved newspapers and advertising.

So, these issues are not necessarily new. They’re just being presented to the world in new flavors, which is technology. But I think we have to start from the premise of, well, what is it that we care about? What we care about is competition. What is problematic? Well, what’s problematic is monopolization or illegal maintenance of monopoly. And what is it that we’re trying to do, is we’re trying to create openings and opportunities for others to compete. And if we go back to those basic principles, I think we can find our true north and enforce the law effectively.
So, that’s the big context that’s inside of the law — the law is changing, and you’re pursuing big cases inside of the changing law. I think that’s how you end up with Google on the Mount Rushmore antitrust cases.

Let’s talk about this case itself and what happens now. I know you’re not talking about whether or not you’re going to appeal, but Google is. Google is going to appeal. They’ve said they’re going to appeal. Kent Walker, who is president of Global Affairs at Google, sent us a statement: “This decision recognizes that Google offers the best search engine, but concludes we should not be allowed to make it easily available. We’ll remain focused on making products that people find helpful and easy to use.”
He’s basically saying, “Look, we make the best product. The court said we made the best product. Now that’s illegal?” How would you respond?
I will go back to the words of the decision. The court found that Google is a monopolist and that it illegally maintained its monopoly power, so I’ll leave it there.
Apple’s Eddy Cue was a witness in the case. He testified, “There’s no price Microsoft could pay to have Bing be the default.” If this ends up with Google just not having to pay Apple but still being the default, have you accomplished anything?
First and foremost, what we accomplish in bringing in antitrust cases is to make sure that there’s accountability under the law. And no company, no matter how large, how significant, is above the law. So, a legal finding that a company is a monopolist and broke the law by illegally obtaining its monopoly power is a significant step forward. This is the first significant monopolization victory for the United States government in almost 25 years, the last being US v. Microsoft, so in and of itself, the accountability is significant.

Second, we want to make sure that remedies in any case, whether it’s this one or any other, are meaningful and meet the markets where they are today, not where they were 15 years ago. What is necessary to pry open competition in a market that’s been monopolized for many, many years is an important question that courts will have to grapple with at the remedial phase of any case, including this one.

But what we’ve learned from prior cases, including US v. Microsoft, is that remedies need to be forward-looking, especially in the tech market. They need to focus on the incoming inflection points. We are in a world, for example, where AI is among the most significant inflection points the technology industry has confronted in a very long time, and that has the opportunity to usher in new business models and new competitive threats. What we’ve learned from history is that incumbents often with monopoly power take steps to keep those competitive threats from realizing their full competitive potential. So, remedies in any case, especially in technology cases, must recognize this phenomenon and must be sufficiently effective and forward-looking in nature.

One of the reasons why this opinion is so thorough is that it explains that it’s not just about a contract. It’s not just a restrictive term in an agreement. It’s about all of the elements that go into making a technology product, whether it’s data, whether it’s revenue from advertising, or whether it’s the volume of click data and the ability to learn by doing. All of these are important elements and aspects of the case, and any remedy from our perspective in any of our cases, whether it’s this one or any other, has to recognize the facts as they exist. Going back to your point about being practical, we have to start with the pragmatic. How does the market work, and what does it take for competition to present itself?
It’s not just a symbolic victory, right? It’s not just accountability. It’s about the remedy. That’s what you’re saying. When are we going to see the remedies phase begin, and how long do you think it’s going to take?
We defer to the court and its process. The court has — and this is public — has ordered a status conference in September, and we look forward to appearing before the court and taking its guidance on the next steps.

In terms of antitrust cases generally, some courts will order remedies at the time of a ruling. This court and many others make the decision to bifurcate liability and remedies.
US v. Microsoft is a good example. There was a separate remedies proceeding, almost like a remedies trial in that case, which ultimately resulted in a negotiated resolution between the United States and Microsoft and then a proceeding to assess whether that was in the public interest. So, we have some historical precedents that we can look at to understand how to go about formulating remedies and how to go about a process for litigating that, but ultimately, that comes from the guidance of the court, and we look forward to taking that guidance in this case and any other.
You’ve made several references to the Microsoft case from the late ’90s, early 2000s. The decision itself makes tons of references to the Microsoft case. Like you said, that case ended with a very drawn-out settlement process, ultimately some oversight of Microsoft’s behavior. Do you think that was a good outcome?
I think the court in that case observed that it was an excellent outcome. And I think we’ve made the observation in some of our other filings and cases that platforms of today often give rise to the disruptive technologies of tomorrow.
So, if you think about microprocessors created in Bell Labs giving rise to IBM, which gave rise to Windows, which gave rise to browsers, which gave rise to Google, which gave rise to the technologies that have been built on and founded on the internet, one platform often is the springboard for the next. I think the remedy in the Microsoft case, there are people who have observed that it helped open up and preserve at least the opportunity for those new disruptive technologies to emerge. And I think the antitrust laws exist to make sure there’s a fighting chance for that to happen.
One thing you and I have talked about before — and so many antitrust people have been discussing for a while — is that the EU has pursued really aggressive measures against Google for a decade or more to introduce competition in browsers, to introduce competition in search. They’ve mandated browser ballots into the product design of various platforms, and none of it has worked. Google’s market share remains untouched. What have you learned from that process?
We have an excellent relationship with our colleagues abroad in Europe. The international stage has been dealing with technology firms that have dominant power now for a couple of decades. So, we all watch what the other is doing to make sure that we can learn from it, but we have to enforce the laws that we have here, and we have to enforce the laws based on the interest of our domestic population, and that’s what we’ve done here.
I think we come from a world where antitrust is sort of ingrained in the way we do business. Antitrust laws were written in 1890, and they were written to codify a principle that some argue goes back to the Tea Party, which is freedom from the tyranny of monopoly power and corporate oversight. These are concepts that are embedded in our essence.
Right. I’m saying a concept that is embedded in the essence of Windows in Europe is that when you open it up, it asks you what search engine you’d like to use, and everybody picks Google. At some point, you’re going to have to show up in front of a court and say, “These are the remedies the United States government would like.” Are you going to say search engine ballots? They haven’t worked.
I think what you could probably discern from this conversation is I’m definitely trying to avoid your question and say that I really do need to defer to the process in this particular case to play out. We’ll speak in our filings and before the court directly in terms of what we believe the appropriate remedy would be in this particular case.
What I can say is, more broadly, as I indicated before, remedies have to be meaningful. They have to work in the context of where the market is today and where it’s going tomorrow. In a technology market where the conduct is not just a contractual provision, but it’s the impact of contractual provisions, the cumulative impact of contractual provisions against the backdrop of massive feedback, network effects, and data, and the need for compute and servers, all of that has to be relevant to understanding the proper path forward.
The other part of the decision here is about search text ads. One of the things the court found in its ruling was that Google had been quietly raising prices on search ads in a monopolistic way. They hid it as noise in the auction process, and they slowly raised the prices. That is potentially billions of dollars in ad spend. Are you going to try to get that back?
Again, I am going to try to be really cool here and avoid your direct question. So, I’ll leave it to our filings to speak for what we’re going to ask for here.
Do you think there might be a private cause of action there?
I don’t know. That’s up to private parties. Accountability is really important in making sure, again, that the remedies actually pry open competition and lead to the next generation of technologies. And you talked about advertising. Well, very often, advertising is just like any other market. Some markets, you have prices that are put on a product with a stamp or a tag, and other markets, you have auctions and everything in between. And again, starting with the realities of how products are bought and sold and then making sure we understand what kinds of competitive pressure can come into play in the context of an ad auction market — that is something we understand pretty well, and we’ll make sure that we get right.
You brought up the idea that whatever remedies you seek have to make the next turn of technology innovation more competitive, and you mentioned AI when you were talking about that. Obviously, AI search is on the horizon. SearchGPT is out there. Google is obviously working to bring AI into search. Google’s a little bit afraid of these AI products, right? They have reacted to them very aggressively. Is that not a sign of competition already existing?
Well, it’s like I mentioned before. Often, when the new disruptive threats come in, that’s when we need the antitrust laws the most because they prevent the incumbents from thwarting the emergence of those competitive threats in order to fend off the sea change.
If you think back to US v.Microsoft, it came right around the time of what’s referred to in that case as “the internet tidal wave” where people were popping open browsers, and instead of running applications on their operating system, they were going out into the wild of the internet and running them on websites, and eventually those became apps.

So, those kinds of inflection points can be very exciting, and they can usher in new and transformative technologies. But if a company has monopoly power, and they’re the incumbent, then there’s a strong incentive either to keep those new technologies from emerging or developing or thriving or to drive them in a direction that feeds the monopoly moat rather than prying open brand-new frontiers. So, we want to make sure, again, that we’re not picking winners and losers, that we’re not mandating outcomes, but simply that we are allowing the natural competitive forces of innovation to emerge and thrive.
There’s a lot of general froth about antitrust and Google in particular in the tech world right now, whether regulating merger and acquisition activity makes it too hard for startups to exit. In a similar vein, they’re saying, “Well, if you don’t allow M&A, we’re just going to come up with other ideas” to exit.
AI is extraordinarily capital-intensive, extraordinarily talent-intensive. We’re seeing some other approaches to acquisition in the tech space. So, I’m just going to ask you a hypothetical: if a company doesn’t buy a company or acquire its shares, but it commits the same money it would to paying all of the investors and employees for their shares, is that still an acquisition in your mind?
Thank you for presenting that as a hypothetical.
I guess I would say, as an antitrust enforcer, substance over form. So, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it’s not an elephant. And I think we have to, again, be pragmatic and practical about it. So, if it’s an acquisition in all but name, then that’s what we’re going to call it, and that’s how we’re going to treat it.
We did that in a case we brought involving American Airlines and JetBlue, where they entered into an alliance. We essentially told the court it was an agreement that essentially merged the two companies for the purposes of air travel in this certain region, and we treated it as such against the appropriate legal backdrop. So, we’re not going to let form triumph substance when it comes to anticompetitive behavior.

I will say, at the same time, though, our goal is not to get in the way of legitimate business. We see thousands of mergers every year. I think less than 3 percent, if not even lower than that, actually get a look — a real in-depth look — and even a smaller percentage, a sliver, get challenged. There’s tons of M&A that’s occurring that never sees the inside of our building, that never receives a phone call from the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice because there are no competitive problems. It’s just a small sliver of transactions that result in strategic M&A with a firm that has significant market power or can create significant market power that might be a problem.

We want people to invest. We want companies to innovate and thrive and eventually want them to go public. I mean, companies going public and becoming the next generation of really strong, innovative entities is a great thing from our perspective. I know there’s a lot of consternation in the tech center about the cost of going public, especially for smaller micro-cap companies, and I think those are legitimate conversations. We want there to be multiple paths to success.
If the only way to succeed is through exit to a large dominant tech firm, then I think that’s a sign of a fundamental problem in the market. I think we should ask a broader question: why are we in a world where that’s the only pathway to durability?
Here’s the big question I want to wrap up the Google conversation with. It’s one that I thought about a lot as I was reading the decision. It doesn’t say this in the decision, but it feels like the decision is a reaction to this idea.
For over 10 years, Google’s response to any concerns of it acting in an anticompetitive way was to simply respond with “Competition is just a click away.” You think Google Search is acting anticompetitively against Bing or DuckDuckGo or whatever, and Google would say, “Competition is just a click away. People can just choose to use the other search engine. They pick us because we’re the best.”
I read this decision, and it is a pretty thorough deconstruction of that argument. It’s saying, “Here’s all the ways the competition is not just a click away. Here’s all the ways that consumers don’t even know that they should think about those clicks. They’re just doing what’s in front of them.”
Do you think that’s done now? That we’re going to stop making that argument? Because it feels like that has been the center of gravity in the antitrust argument about Google, in particular, for most of my career as a tech journalist.
I hope so.
I mean, I think it’s an extraordinarily unsophisticated argument, and I think this case and many of our other cases demonstrate that. The fact of the matter is: these are billion-dollar capital-intensive industries. Companies are paying tens of billions of dollars for distribution, accumulating massive petabytes of data, and engaging in machine learning.
Competition requires all of those ingredients, and it’s not easy, and we don’t want companies to shy away from making those investments or monetizing those investments. But the fact of the matter is that these industries are a lot more sophisticated than a punchline.
Do you think that we will actually see meaningful competition in search to get the remedies you want?
That is our goal, and I believe that is possible. I believe that antitrust law and competitive process and markets can work. I wouldn’t be doing this for a living if I didn’t truly believe that a market-based economy is the best one we have. In order for that to work, though, we need competitors with opportunities. It doesn’t mean that everyone’s going to win, and it doesn’t mean that everyone’s going to succeed. We just want the chance. We want the opportunity for companies to compete on the merits.

Going back to one of the themes we emphasized earlier, we are particularly concerned when a firm that has monopoly power becomes itself the regulator in an industry and starts imposing rules that tell other nondominant companies what they cannot and cannot do. And a lot of those restrictions, a lot of those rules, and the lack of accountability of those rules that make dominant companies the equivalent of industry regulators is where our focus comes in. We just want to make sure that other companies have the freedom to work with whomever they want to work with, to innovate, to incorporate new interesting features when they believe that they can compete effectively.
The Microsoft case was really about browsers and the application model moving from Wintel to the browser and to the web — which happened — and the Microsoft case might have created the conditions for that to happen. It created Google as a company or created the market conditions for Google to exist.
If you talk to folks at Google, the angriest argument they’ll make in response to this ruling is that it is just going to benefit Microsoft. It’s going to mean people have to use Bing instead of Google. Somehow, Microsoft has come all the way back around, and they’re going to be the winner this time.
How do you assess that, and do you see other competitors, other startups that might succeed? I’ll just say that everyone knows this, but it’s important to note here that Microsoft owns 51 percent of OpenAI, which is the main competitor right now.
I think that argument is ridiculous. If you look at our trial and the trial record and the decision that you just went through in detail, it talks a lot about smaller competitors. It talks a lot about rivals. It talks about different business models that never had the opportunity to fully succeed and compete because they didn’t have access to the distribution they needed. We’re never going to see the next generation of smaller startups and disruptive players unless we have an appropriate degree of antitrust enforcement that keeps them free to compete on the merits of their innovations rather than being elbowed out through restrictive contracts and other provisions.

I’ll also say this: a couple of weeks ago, I was out in the West Coast in the Bay Area, and I had the privilege of sitting down and talking to dozens of VCs and startup founders and innovators. What I heard overwhelmingly was support for these cases. They believe that a small number of companies are crowding out the ability of new innovative startups to invest in and build and grow and that they feel that the regulatory requirements — not from the government but from the dominant companies that impede their ability to grow, develop, earn revenue, and engage with their own customers the way they want to — are impediments to their success.

I think when it comes to thinking about the next generation of competitive startups and innovators, we need room for them to compete free from anticompetitive behavior. And certainly what I’ve seen and heard, and it was on display in our antitrust case, was that those startups and innovators are freely coming forward and saying, “We need a world in which companies play by the rules.”
I have one more minute, and I have to ask you. At the same time this is happening, the platform X is suing advertisers and advertising trade organizations for antitrust violations claiming that they have legally boycotted X and are withholding revenue. Do you think that makes sense?
I can’t comment on that.
I know you want to. So, can you give us a hint if you think that makes sense?
I haven’t read the legal filing, and even if I did, I wouldn’t comment on it, but I appreciate the question.
The discipline is admirable, as always.
Thank you, sir. I aim to please.
We will have to have you back as we head into the next phase of the Google trial. I think there’s quite a lot to talk about here, and you have other big cases coming up. There’s the case against Apple. There’s another case against Google for advertising technologies. What do you think people should take from this win as they begin to evaluate those cases?
The antitrust laws are alive and well. We are bringing antitrust cases, we are winning our antitrust cases, and we’re doing so in order to preserve and protect competitive markets and innovation. Ultimately, we want businesses to fight it out lawfully in the competitive field. That’s what we’re protecting. But antitrust enforcement — and our agenda — is working because we are litigating our cases with rigor, with sophistication, and we are fighting for the benefit of the American public.

Photo illustration by The Verge / Photo by Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images

AAG Jonathan Kanter says the Google monopoly verdict belongs on the ‘Mount Rushmore of antitrust.’

Today, I’m talking to Jonathan Kanter, the assistant attorney general for antitrust at the United States Department of Justice. This is Jonathan’s second time on the show, and it’s a bit of an emergency podcast situation.

On Monday, a federal court issued a monumental decision in the DOJ’s case against Google, holding that Google Search and the text ads in that search engine are monopolies and that Google has acted anticompetitively to protect those monopolies.

The court hasn’t decided on the penalties for all this yet — that’s scheduled to happen in something called the remedies phase, which will kick off next month. And Google has already set it plans to appeal.

It’s the biggest antitrust win against a tech company since the Microsoft case in the late ’90s and early 2000s — and it promises to shake up the entire tech landscape. For example. Google was paying Apple $20 billion a year to be the default search engine on iPhones and Macs, and that kind of arrangement will be under the microscope now.

So I wanted to know what Jonathan thought of the ruling, what it means for the law, which appears to be coming back to a more practical and intuitive version of antitrust from the extremely technical and economic approach that’s been used since the ’80s. Most importantly, I wanted to know what remedies he’s going to seek to try and restore competition in search. The European Union has been trying to do that for a very long time, and I wanted to know what Jonathan has learned from those approaches, and what new ideas he might have.

I’ll just warn you: Jonathan is a very good lawyer and he is very good at not answering questions — in fact, you will hear him flat out say he’s not going to answer the question several times throughout this conversation. But there’s a lot here about his approach to antitrust, an approach that was just validated in a major way and which will inform the major cases yet to come against Apple, Google’s advertising business, and more.

One note before we start: You’ll hear us talk about brown shoes. That’s Brown Shoe v. United States, a Supreme Court case from 1962 that laid out a practical test for defining a market in an antitrust case. It’ll make sense when we get there.

Okay, Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter. Here we go.

This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Jonathan Kanter, you are the assistant attorney general for antitrust at the United States Department of Justice. Welcome back to Decoder.

Wonderful to be back with you.

There’s a lot to talk about today. You are here because the government just won a major antitrust case against Google. Tell us about that.

We brought a case alleging that Google monopolized various markets in the search industry, and just this week, we won that case with an extensive opinion by a federal court here in Washington, DC.

That opinion is 280-plus pages. Yesterday, I described it to my colleague Sarah Jeong as “readable,” and she looked at me and said, “I think you have a very different definition of ‘readable’ than other people.”

The conventional wisdom about this case and that decision is that it is entirely about the payments Google makes to Apple to be the default search engine on iOS. Are those payments illegal now?

I want to be very careful here. This is still active litigation.

We are heading into the remedy phase, so I can talk generally about the case. And what I would suggest is —given that you’ve read all 280-plus pages — you’ll probably observe that the case is about a lot more than that. The case is about the ingredients that go into creating and maintaining a monopoly, whether it’s the scale that you need for crawling and indexing, the data that you need from a click stream and from queries, and the distribution necessary to get the queries that you need in order to generate the scale that you need, and then, of course, the advertising revenue that you need in order to maintain that capital-intensive business. All of that is discussed at length in the court’s opinion.

But the heart of it is the distribution, as you just mentioned. Paying for distribution for search that no one else can get.

The heart of it, in this case, was Google imposing conditions on access to distribution. So, in exchange for getting payments, there were requirements that we alleged and the court agreed were exclusionary, meaning that it would limit the freedom of third parties to work with Google’s rivals.

Some of those conditions are about being the default. Some of those conditions, particularly as it relates to Apple, are about how good Apple can make its own search products. The court found that the agreement with Apple limited how good could make Siri in some cases, or Spotlight in some cases. Are those kinds of things not allowed generally? Or is that just in this case?

Each antitrust case is very fact-specific, and when you’re dealing with a monopolization case, everything has to be looked at in context. The context starts with, well, how big is the company? How powerful is the company? What are the elements and ingredients that make a company that power durable? And then, has the company engaged in exclusionary conduct, including exclusive or exclusionary contract provisions that might harm competition or threaten the ability of rivals to develop and have their full competitive impact?

In this context, we have a situation where a company with a significant degree of monopoly power is imposing contractual terms that limit the freedom of others to innovate at will and especially to innovate in ways that might threaten the dominant firm competitively. That’s very standard in terms of being an antitrust concern.

I want to come back to competition, I want to come back to Apple, and I want to talk about innovation generally, but I want to start with just some antitrust basics.

There is a lot in this decision that went your way. In particular, it seems like every tech antitrust case has run up against angst and noise in market definition _ just saying what the market for the product is. I’m thinking of Facebook basically arguing its way out of the idea that a market for social networking exists, and Facebook is in that market. But here, you’ve got the market definition. There’s a market for general search, and then the court found a market for text ads in search and that Google had monopoly power in that market and it used that monopoly power in anticompetitive ways. Did you get everything you wanted from that part of the decision?

We got a decision that came out in our favor, and so we’re overjoyed.

Did you get everything you wanted from that part?

We wanted the law to be enforced, and so we got that, yes.

Listen, there are a number of different markets. What we wanted to make sure is that we had the ability to articulate that Google has and exercised a degree of power. Market definition, which is a very technical antitrust term, is really just a tool. It’s a tool to help understand: is there an area of commerce where a company has power? Well, how do you gauge its power? Well, you understand, is it big or powerful relative to others in the market? Is the market competitive? How many other competitors are out there?

You have to ask the question, well, how many other competitors of what? We typically define a market, which is the process of saying, “What is the competitive set? Who are the range of rivals that might potentially threaten a firm that’s alleged to have monopoly power?” And so to do that, we define a market. We say, “What are the general boundaries of the competitive set?” Once we define a market and establish that a firm has a high enough market share or enough monopoly power in that market, then the question is, did they do something either to legally obtain or maintain that monopoly power?

But again, so much of tech antitrust thus far has been furiously arguing about market definitions. Even in this case, you argued that there was a market for general search, and Google argued that the market was actually answering all queries on the internet — that open text boxes on the internet is the market Google plays in. The court ruled for you — it held that there is a market for general search engines. Do you think that’s starting to get clearer, how to make these arguments, how to define these markets?

Yes.

That seems like the problem thus far.

Yes. Market definition ends up being an issue in every antitrust case because the questions that I just presented — which [are]: How big is the company? Who do they compete with? — comes up whether it’s bricks and mortar or ones and zeros. It is just a fundamental question in almost every antitrust matter, certainly every civil antitrust matter.

One of the things that we’ve been grappling with in antitrust is how do we apply that in the tech world? How do we apply it in a world where you might have a multi-sided market? Where you might have a platform where the services are given away to one side of the market for free and monetized in a different manner? Where there are significant network and feedback effects? Where competition might emerge not from a product or service that looks exactly like the one that is alleged to have monopoly power, but might be a new, disruptive force in the market?

We have to understand all of those dynamics in order to explain to a court why an issue may or may not be a problem. I think we’ve gotten a lot better at that. I think we’ve gotten a lot better at understanding how to define markets and bring antitrust cases. One of the ways in which we’ve been able to do that is by making sure we understand how the products work and hiring technical experts and technologists, and also understanding how consumers behave in the wild, in the tech industry.

Our first day of trial, we put forward — and this was, to my knowledge, the first time the government’s ever done this — a behavioral scientist to explain how consumers react to defaults and default settings. How often consumers might or might not switch the default in a browser or on a phone. Why things that might seem small or small, little points of friction that exist inside software might have an outsize effect on the way an individual reacts. These are things that we are now incorporating as standard fare as part of our antitrust investigations and, in this case, as part of our litigation.

There were two ways the courts evaluated this. One is what you’re talking about. There was a study from inside Google you brought forth saying people didn’t even notice when you switch from Google to Bing on iPhones, so Google itself knows it.

You and I have talked about this before. When I was in law school, all antitrust was deeply economics-based. It was mathematical. It was opaque. The court here went back to a case called Brown Shoe Co. from 1962. It said, “There are practical indicia of market power.” And one of them is just like, “Yeah, everyone talks about it this way.” There’s obviously a market for general search.

And then the court also went to when people buy search advertising or they buy advertising on the internet, they’re allocating their money in a way that doesn’t substitute for other products, like TikTok ads or something.

Is it the combination? Is that the approach now, you’re trying to cover the waterfront? Or is the more practical, “hey, let’s just be honest here” approach starting to come back to the forefront?

It’s all of the above, but I think we lost sight of the practical indicia, which has been at the core of antitrust, going back so many years. And you mentioned the Brown Shoe case. What is really happening in the marketplace? What is it that we’re trying to measure? And to do that, you have to start with understanding how this stuff works. Is something truly a substitute?

Well, let’s figure it out. Let’s look at your documents. Let’s understand what consumers think. Let’s see how they behave in the wild. Let’s start with the facts and work backward from that. And I think, for a long time, antitrust tried very hard and, I think, developed some very useful tools, quantitative tools, to help understand and assess these kinds of questions and regression analyses and surveys. And those are valuable, but it only tells you so much. You have to start with asking, well, how does this stuff really work? What are the practical indicia?

You won on the market definitions for general search engines and for text ads on the search results page.

The court ruled against you in a couple of ways that are important as well. It found that Google lacked monopoly power in search advertising generally — it actually found there isn’t a market for general search advertising. This case is certain to be appealed. Do you think you will bring that up on appeal?

Too soon to say.

I won’t comment on the appeal other than to say, for us, it was really important to make sure that we were putting forward two general categories of harm. One is the way in which users interact with the search engine from the perspective of the user and the way in which advertisers buy advertising that appears in a search engine. And I’m gratified that we were successful in defining markets and proving harm on both fronts.

It’s all but certain that Google is going to appeal. It sounds like you are going to appeal as well if they do?

I would not necessarily take that from this conversation. What I would take is I am not commenting one way or the other, up or down, can’t confirm or deny. I’m just observing what was in the opinion.

In general, the Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission — you and Lina Khan — have pursued some newer theories of antitrust. You’ve been careful several times in this conversation already to say, “This is the heart of antitrust. We’re getting back to where it was,” but it’s gotten away from, “Hey, just look at practical indicia.” It’s gotten away from, “Let’s look at the realities of the market.” You’ve had to pursue some newer theories of law. You’ve had to take some shots at cases that may or may not win. This one, obviously, you’ve won. Do you think it’s swinging your way now on changing how antitrust law works?

Well, I’m going to look at the cases that we’ve brought and that we’ve won, right? Obviously, there’s the case that came down this week, the Google case, which probably sits on the Mount Rushmore of antitrust cases. We’re really proud of our victory here.

We brought a case involving JetBlue’s proposed acquisition of Spirit Airlines, and the theory in that case was that the harm would be on cost-conscious flyers, and the court agreed. It took a practical approach and said that these airlines focus on people who care about price and who care about making sure that they can afford air travel, whether it’s a student flying home to see her family during a break or a family of four trying to afford a much-needed vacation.

We brought a case involving book publishers and the merger of book publishers and how the harm would not necessarily be, although it could have been, in the higher price of books but would result in the exercise of power against authors who rely on advances in order to produce professional works.

These are obvious concerns from the perspective of the public, as far as we believe, and I don’t view them as novel antitrust issues; they’ve just been forgotten. We haven’t had the opportunity to see as many cases involving these kinds of issues over the last few decades because we in the government haven’t been as aggressive or as proactive in bringing those cases.

But what we have found is when we present courts with facts that are solid, when we prevent courts with legal theories that, as you indicate, go back to the heartland cases of antitrust law, and we do a good, solid job presenting our cases to a court in telling a coherent story that holds up on the facts and the law, that not only do we win, but we win decisively.

I’m going to get real nerdy with you. What we’re really talking about here is dating back to the ’80s and Robert Bork, the introduction of the consumer welfare standard in antitrust that said you have to have prices that go up. And then you have this big problem where a lot of tech companies have free products, and it’s hard to measure the prices, and we’ve been stuck there.

Here the court looked at general search engines and said, “Well, they’re free, but this one is obviously a monopoly. And Google has obviously acted anticompetitively to maintain that monopoly.” It did not really look at pricing in the general search category. It looked at pricing in the advertising side because there are prices there, but you were able to overcome this “you have to find a price that goes up” problem.

Is that the beginning of a trend, do you think? Are you going to be able to pursue this more aggressively across the tech industry?

I think it’s the restoration and validation of a core element of antitrust — the purpose of antitrust law is to protect competition and the competitive process. The idea is that rivalry and competition leads to the kind of economic freedom and opportunity that we value in our society.

As we think about our antitrust cases in tech, we go back and look at the journalism industry. For decades, there were antitrust cases involving radio and involving newspapers, many of which were offered to consumers for free and then monetized through the selling of advertising. In fact, one of the most significant monopolization cases in history is the Lorain Journal case, which involved newspapers and advertising.

So, these issues are not necessarily new. They’re just being presented to the world in new flavors, which is technology. But I think we have to start from the premise of, well, what is it that we care about? What we care about is competition. What is problematic? Well, what’s problematic is monopolization or illegal maintenance of monopoly. And what is it that we’re trying to do, is we’re trying to create openings and opportunities for others to compete. And if we go back to those basic principles, I think we can find our true north and enforce the law effectively.

So, that’s the big context that’s inside of the law — the law is changing, and you’re pursuing big cases inside of the changing law. I think that’s how you end up with Google on the Mount Rushmore antitrust cases.

Let’s talk about this case itself and what happens now. I know you’re not talking about whether or not you’re going to appeal, but Google is. Google is going to appeal. They’ve said they’re going to appeal. Kent Walker, who is president of Global Affairs at Google, sent us a statement: “This decision recognizes that Google offers the best search engine, but concludes we should not be allowed to make it easily available. We’ll remain focused on making products that people find helpful and easy to use.”

He’s basically saying, “Look, we make the best product. The court said we made the best product. Now that’s illegal?” How would you respond?

I will go back to the words of the decision. The court found that Google is a monopolist and that it illegally maintained its monopoly power, so I’ll leave it there.

Apple’s Eddy Cue was a witness in the case. He testified, “There’s no price Microsoft could pay to have Bing be the default.” If this ends up with Google just not having to pay Apple but still being the default, have you accomplished anything?

First and foremost, what we accomplish in bringing in antitrust cases is to make sure that there’s accountability under the law. And no company, no matter how large, how significant, is above the law. So, a legal finding that a company is a monopolist and broke the law by illegally obtaining its monopoly power is a significant step forward. This is the first significant monopolization victory for the United States government in almost 25 years, the last being US v. Microsoft, so in and of itself, the accountability is significant.

Second, we want to make sure that remedies in any case, whether it’s this one or any other, are meaningful and meet the markets where they are today, not where they were 15 years ago. What is necessary to pry open competition in a market that’s been monopolized for many, many years is an important question that courts will have to grapple with at the remedial phase of any case, including this one.

But what we’ve learned from prior cases, including US v. Microsoft, is that remedies need to be forward-looking, especially in the tech market. They need to focus on the incoming inflection points. We are in a world, for example, where AI is among the most significant inflection points the technology industry has confronted in a very long time, and that has the opportunity to usher in new business models and new competitive threats. What we’ve learned from history is that incumbents often with monopoly power take steps to keep those competitive threats from realizing their full competitive potential. So, remedies in any case, especially in technology cases, must recognize this phenomenon and must be sufficiently effective and forward-looking in nature.

One of the reasons why this opinion is so thorough is that it explains that it’s not just about a contract. It’s not just a restrictive term in an agreement. It’s about all of the elements that go into making a technology product, whether it’s data, whether it’s revenue from advertising, or whether it’s the volume of click data and the ability to learn by doing. All of these are important elements and aspects of the case, and any remedy from our perspective in any of our cases, whether it’s this one or any other, has to recognize the facts as they exist. Going back to your point about being practical, we have to start with the pragmatic. How does the market work, and what does it take for competition to present itself?

It’s not just a symbolic victory, right? It’s not just accountability. It’s about the remedy. That’s what you’re saying. When are we going to see the remedies phase begin, and how long do you think it’s going to take?

We defer to the court and its process. The court has — and this is public — has ordered a status conference in September, and we look forward to appearing before the court and taking its guidance on the next steps.

In terms of antitrust cases generally, some courts will order remedies at the time of a ruling. This court and many others make the decision to bifurcate liability and remedies.

US v. Microsoft is a good example. There was a separate remedies proceeding, almost like a remedies trial in that case, which ultimately resulted in a negotiated resolution between the United States and Microsoft and then a proceeding to assess whether that was in the public interest. So, we have some historical precedents that we can look at to understand how to go about formulating remedies and how to go about a process for litigating that, but ultimately, that comes from the guidance of the court, and we look forward to taking that guidance in this case and any other.

You’ve made several references to the Microsoft case from the late ’90s, early 2000s. The decision itself makes tons of references to the Microsoft case. Like you said, that case ended with a very drawn-out settlement process, ultimately some oversight of Microsoft’s behavior. Do you think that was a good outcome?

I think the court in that case observed that it was an excellent outcome. And I think we’ve made the observation in some of our other filings and cases that platforms of today often give rise to the disruptive technologies of tomorrow.

So, if you think about microprocessors created in Bell Labs giving rise to IBM, which gave rise to Windows, which gave rise to browsers, which gave rise to Google, which gave rise to the technologies that have been built on and founded on the internet, one platform often is the springboard for the next. I think the remedy in the Microsoft case, there are people who have observed that it helped open up and preserve at least the opportunity for those new disruptive technologies to emerge. And I think the antitrust laws exist to make sure there’s a fighting chance for that to happen.

One thing you and I have talked about before — and so many antitrust people have been discussing for a while — is that the EU has pursued really aggressive measures against Google for a decade or more to introduce competition in browsers, to introduce competition in search. They’ve mandated browser ballots into the product design of various platforms, and none of it has worked. Google’s market share remains untouched. What have you learned from that process?

We have an excellent relationship with our colleagues abroad in Europe. The international stage has been dealing with technology firms that have dominant power now for a couple of decades. So, we all watch what the other is doing to make sure that we can learn from it, but we have to enforce the laws that we have here, and we have to enforce the laws based on the interest of our domestic population, and that’s what we’ve done here.

I think we come from a world where antitrust is sort of ingrained in the way we do business. Antitrust laws were written in 1890, and they were written to codify a principle that some argue goes back to the Tea Party, which is freedom from the tyranny of monopoly power and corporate oversight. These are concepts that are embedded in our essence.

Right. I’m saying a concept that is embedded in the essence of Windows in Europe is that when you open it up, it asks you what search engine you’d like to use, and everybody picks Google. At some point, you’re going to have to show up in front of a court and say, “These are the remedies the United States government would like.” Are you going to say search engine ballots? They haven’t worked.

I think what you could probably discern from this conversation is I’m definitely trying to avoid your question and say that I really do need to defer to the process in this particular case to play out. We’ll speak in our filings and before the court directly in terms of what we believe the appropriate remedy would be in this particular case.

What I can say is, more broadly, as I indicated before, remedies have to be meaningful. They have to work in the context of where the market is today and where it’s going tomorrow. In a technology market where the conduct is not just a contractual provision, but it’s the impact of contractual provisions, the cumulative impact of contractual provisions against the backdrop of massive feedback, network effects, and data, and the need for compute and servers, all of that has to be relevant to understanding the proper path forward.

The other part of the decision here is about search text ads. One of the things the court found in its ruling was that Google had been quietly raising prices on search ads in a monopolistic way. They hid it as noise in the auction process, and they slowly raised the prices. That is potentially billions of dollars in ad spend. Are you going to try to get that back?

Again, I am going to try to be really cool here and avoid your direct question. So, I’ll leave it to our filings to speak for what we’re going to ask for here.

Do you think there might be a private cause of action there?

I don’t know. That’s up to private parties. Accountability is really important in making sure, again, that the remedies actually pry open competition and lead to the next generation of technologies. And you talked about advertising. Well, very often, advertising is just like any other market. Some markets, you have prices that are put on a product with a stamp or a tag, and other markets, you have auctions and everything in between. And again, starting with the realities of how products are bought and sold and then making sure we understand what kinds of competitive pressure can come into play in the context of an ad auction market — that is something we understand pretty well, and we’ll make sure that we get right.

You brought up the idea that whatever remedies you seek have to make the next turn of technology innovation more competitive, and you mentioned AI when you were talking about that. Obviously, AI search is on the horizon. SearchGPT is out there. Google is obviously working to bring AI into search. Google’s a little bit afraid of these AI products, right? They have reacted to them very aggressively. Is that not a sign of competition already existing?

Well, it’s like I mentioned before. Often, when the new disruptive threats come in, that’s when we need the antitrust laws the most because they prevent the incumbents from thwarting the emergence of those competitive threats in order to fend off the sea change.

If you think back to US v.Microsoft, it came right around the time of what’s referred to in that case as “the internet tidal wave” where people were popping open browsers, and instead of running applications on their operating system, they were going out into the wild of the internet and running them on websites, and eventually those became apps.

So, those kinds of inflection points can be very exciting, and they can usher in new and transformative technologies. But if a company has monopoly power, and they’re the incumbent, then there’s a strong incentive either to keep those new technologies from emerging or developing or thriving or to drive them in a direction that feeds the monopoly moat rather than prying open brand-new frontiers. So, we want to make sure, again, that we’re not picking winners and losers, that we’re not mandating outcomes, but simply that we are allowing the natural competitive forces of innovation to emerge and thrive.

There’s a lot of general froth about antitrust and Google in particular in the tech world right now, whether regulating merger and acquisition activity makes it too hard for startups to exit. In a similar vein, they’re saying, “Well, if you don’t allow M&A, we’re just going to come up with other ideas” to exit.

AI is extraordinarily capital-intensive, extraordinarily talent-intensive. We’re seeing some other approaches to acquisition in the tech space. So, I’m just going to ask you a hypothetical: if a company doesn’t buy a company or acquire its shares, but it commits the same money it would to paying all of the investors and employees for their shares, is that still an acquisition in your mind?

Thank you for presenting that as a hypothetical.

I guess I would say, as an antitrust enforcer, substance over form. So, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it’s not an elephant. And I think we have to, again, be pragmatic and practical about it. So, if it’s an acquisition in all but name, then that’s what we’re going to call it, and that’s how we’re going to treat it.

We did that in a case we brought involving American Airlines and JetBlue, where they entered into an alliance. We essentially told the court it was an agreement that essentially merged the two companies for the purposes of air travel in this certain region, and we treated it as such against the appropriate legal backdrop. So, we’re not going to let form triumph substance when it comes to anticompetitive behavior.

I will say, at the same time, though, our goal is not to get in the way of legitimate business. We see thousands of mergers every year. I think less than 3 percent, if not even lower than that, actually get a look — a real in-depth look — and even a smaller percentage, a sliver, get challenged. There’s tons of M&A that’s occurring that never sees the inside of our building, that never receives a phone call from the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice because there are no competitive problems. It’s just a small sliver of transactions that result in strategic M&A with a firm that has significant market power or can create significant market power that might be a problem.

We want people to invest. We want companies to innovate and thrive and eventually want them to go public. I mean, companies going public and becoming the next generation of really strong, innovative entities is a great thing from our perspective. I know there’s a lot of consternation in the tech center about the cost of going public, especially for smaller micro-cap companies, and I think those are legitimate conversations. We want there to be multiple paths to success.

If the only way to succeed is through exit to a large dominant tech firm, then I think that’s a sign of a fundamental problem in the market. I think we should ask a broader question: why are we in a world where that’s the only pathway to durability?

Here’s the big question I want to wrap up the Google conversation with. It’s one that I thought about a lot as I was reading the decision. It doesn’t say this in the decision, but it feels like the decision is a reaction to this idea.

For over 10 years, Google’s response to any concerns of it acting in an anticompetitive way was to simply respond with “Competition is just a click away.” You think Google Search is acting anticompetitively against Bing or DuckDuckGo or whatever, and Google would say, “Competition is just a click away. People can just choose to use the other search engine. They pick us because we’re the best.”

I read this decision, and it is a pretty thorough deconstruction of that argument. It’s saying, “Here’s all the ways the competition is not just a click away. Here’s all the ways that consumers don’t even know that they should think about those clicks. They’re just doing what’s in front of them.”

Do you think that’s done now? That we’re going to stop making that argument? Because it feels like that has been the center of gravity in the antitrust argument about Google, in particular, for most of my career as a tech journalist.

I hope so.

I mean, I think it’s an extraordinarily unsophisticated argument, and I think this case and many of our other cases demonstrate that. The fact of the matter is: these are billion-dollar capital-intensive industries. Companies are paying tens of billions of dollars for distribution, accumulating massive petabytes of data, and engaging in machine learning.

Competition requires all of those ingredients, and it’s not easy, and we don’t want companies to shy away from making those investments or monetizing those investments. But the fact of the matter is that these industries are a lot more sophisticated than a punchline.

Do you think that we will actually see meaningful competition in search to get the remedies you want?

That is our goal, and I believe that is possible. I believe that antitrust law and competitive process and markets can work. I wouldn’t be doing this for a living if I didn’t truly believe that a market-based economy is the best one we have. In order for that to work, though, we need competitors with opportunities. It doesn’t mean that everyone’s going to win, and it doesn’t mean that everyone’s going to succeed. We just want the chance. We want the opportunity for companies to compete on the merits.

Going back to one of the themes we emphasized earlier, we are particularly concerned when a firm that has monopoly power becomes itself the regulator in an industry and starts imposing rules that tell other nondominant companies what they cannot and cannot do. And a lot of those restrictions, a lot of those rules, and the lack of accountability of those rules that make dominant companies the equivalent of industry regulators is where our focus comes in. We just want to make sure that other companies have the freedom to work with whomever they want to work with, to innovate, to incorporate new interesting features when they believe that they can compete effectively.

The Microsoft case was really about browsers and the application model moving from Wintel to the browser and to the web — which happened — and the Microsoft case might have created the conditions for that to happen. It created Google as a company or created the market conditions for Google to exist.

If you talk to folks at Google, the angriest argument they’ll make in response to this ruling is that it is just going to benefit Microsoft. It’s going to mean people have to use Bing instead of Google. Somehow, Microsoft has come all the way back around, and they’re going to be the winner this time.

How do you assess that, and do you see other competitors, other startups that might succeed? I’ll just say that everyone knows this, but it’s important to note here that Microsoft owns 51 percent of OpenAI, which is the main competitor right now.

I think that argument is ridiculous. If you look at our trial and the trial record and the decision that you just went through in detail, it talks a lot about smaller competitors. It talks a lot about rivals. It talks about different business models that never had the opportunity to fully succeed and compete because they didn’t have access to the distribution they needed. We’re never going to see the next generation of smaller startups and disruptive players unless we have an appropriate degree of antitrust enforcement that keeps them free to compete on the merits of their innovations rather than being elbowed out through restrictive contracts and other provisions.

I’ll also say this: a couple of weeks ago, I was out in the West Coast in the Bay Area, and I had the privilege of sitting down and talking to dozens of VCs and startup founders and innovators. What I heard overwhelmingly was support for these cases. They believe that a small number of companies are crowding out the ability of new innovative startups to invest in and build and grow and that they feel that the regulatory requirements — not from the government but from the dominant companies that impede their ability to grow, develop, earn revenue, and engage with their own customers the way they want to — are impediments to their success.

I think when it comes to thinking about the next generation of competitive startups and innovators, we need room for them to compete free from anticompetitive behavior. And certainly what I’ve seen and heard, and it was on display in our antitrust case, was that those startups and innovators are freely coming forward and saying, “We need a world in which companies play by the rules.”

I have one more minute, and I have to ask you. At the same time this is happening, the platform X is suing advertisers and advertising trade organizations for antitrust violations claiming that they have legally boycotted X and are withholding revenue. Do you think that makes sense?

I can’t comment on that.

I know you want to. So, can you give us a hint if you think that makes sense?

I haven’t read the legal filing, and even if I did, I wouldn’t comment on it, but I appreciate the question.

The discipline is admirable, as always.

Thank you, sir. I aim to please.

We will have to have you back as we head into the next phase of the Google trial. I think there’s quite a lot to talk about here, and you have other big cases coming up. There’s the case against Apple. There’s another case against Google for advertising technologies. What do you think people should take from this win as they begin to evaluate those cases?

The antitrust laws are alive and well. We are bringing antitrust cases, we are winning our antitrust cases, and we’re doing so in order to preserve and protect competitive markets and innovation. Ultimately, we want businesses to fight it out lawfully in the competitive field. That’s what we’re protecting. But antitrust enforcement — and our agenda — is working because we are litigating our cases with rigor, with sophistication, and we are fighting for the benefit of the American public.

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2024 Dodge Charger Daytona Scat Pack, two-door version. | Image: Stellantis

Dodge has put a price on its first all-electric vehicle, the Charger Daytona, and it won’t be cheap for the mean, clean, neighborhood-disturbing machine. The 2024 Daytona two-door models will start at $59,595 for the R/T and $73,190 for the Scat Pack — both excluding a $1,995 destination fee.
Both Daytona models are starting production this summer, and four-door models will be built in the first half of 2025. You can check out the models heading to dealerships online starting in the fall, and they should make it to lots by the end of the year.

Image: Stellantis
The two-door models are launching first.

At launch, you’ll get a stage 1 upgrade kit included for the R/T model that boosts it to 496 horsepower and 404 lb-ft of torque, while the Scat Pack’s stage 2 kit zaps out 670 horsepower and 627 lb-ft of torque. Both run on a two-motor 400-volt system.
Of course, the real feature of the Charger Daytona is the “Fratzonic Chambered Exhaust” that adds noise to make the EV feel and sound like a gas-burning disturbance.
The patent-pending Fratzonic Chambered Exhaust system for Charger Daytona models uses two passive radiators to a create a unique exhaust profile with Hellcat levels of sound intensity that shatters the preconception of a typical quiet BEV and instead delivers a sound worthy of the Brotherhood of Muscle. Sound intensity is tied to higher performance, with a stealth sound mode also available. Distinct vehicle sounds assist in providing driver feedback, especially at the track and at elevated speeds, and enhance the immersive in-car feel.
We’ve heard demos of the simulated rumble over the last year, but the finalized Fratzonic Chambered Exhaust sounds will be revealed at a press event on Friday ahead of Dodge’s Roadkill Nights media event.
Mopar fans will appreciate those vroom noises most inside the higher-performing Daytona Scat Pack model with exclusive track features like Donut and Drift modes, plus a performance heads-up display (HUD). Scat Pack can deliver 0–60mph acceleration in 3.3 seconds — which matches the latest Ford Mustang Mach-E GT.
Both the R/T and Scat Pack models won’t be eligible for the $7,500 tax incentive through purchasing, but it can be applied in a lease.

2024 Dodge Charger Daytona Scat Pack, two-door version. | Image: Stellantis

Dodge has put a price on its first all-electric vehicle, the Charger Daytona, and it won’t be cheap for the mean, clean, neighborhood-disturbing machine. The 2024 Daytona two-door models will start at $59,595 for the R/T and $73,190 for the Scat Pack — both excluding a $1,995 destination fee.

Both Daytona models are starting production this summer, and four-door models will be built in the first half of 2025. You can check out the models heading to dealerships online starting in the fall, and they should make it to lots by the end of the year.

Image: Stellantis
The two-door models are launching first.

At launch, you’ll get a stage 1 upgrade kit included for the R/T model that boosts it to 496 horsepower and 404 lb-ft of torque, while the Scat Pack’s stage 2 kit zaps out 670 horsepower and 627 lb-ft of torque. Both run on a two-motor 400-volt system.

Of course, the real feature of the Charger Daytona is the “Fratzonic Chambered Exhaust” that adds noise to make the EV feel and sound like a gas-burning disturbance.

The patent-pending Fratzonic Chambered Exhaust system for Charger Daytona models uses two passive radiators to a create a unique exhaust profile with Hellcat levels of sound intensity that shatters the preconception of a typical quiet BEV and instead delivers a sound worthy of the Brotherhood of Muscle. Sound intensity is tied to higher performance, with a stealth sound mode also available. Distinct vehicle sounds assist in providing driver feedback, especially at the track and at elevated speeds, and enhance the immersive in-car feel.

We’ve heard demos of the simulated rumble over the last year, but the finalized Fratzonic Chambered Exhaust sounds will be revealed at a press event on Friday ahead of Dodge’s Roadkill Nights media event.

Mopar fans will appreciate those vroom noises most inside the higher-performing Daytona Scat Pack model with exclusive track features like Donut and Drift modes, plus a performance heads-up display (HUD). Scat Pack can deliver 0–60mph acceleration in 3.3 seconds — which matches the latest Ford Mustang Mach-E GT.

Both the R/T and Scat Pack models won’t be eligible for the $7,500 tax incentive through purchasing, but it can be applied in a lease.

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Cyclists have quick access to two of eight selectable alert tones. | Image: Trek

The quiet ding of many bike bells isn’t always enough to alert pedestrians or vehicles of a cyclist’s presence. Trek’s new BellBeats is a compact Bluetooth speaker that can be mounted to a bike’s handlebars giving cyclists a selection of eight quick-access alert tones that are either friendly or urgent.
Like a traditional bike bell, the alert tones on the BellBeats can be triggered while riding, using a thumb button. Cyclists can select two of eight tones — including a ringing metal bell, a subdued train horn, or an old-timey ahooga horn — that are activated with either a long or short press of the button.
Trek claims the BellBeats’ alert tones are more noticeable than the sounds made by traditional bike bells because they encompass a wider frequency range and have been “professionally sound-designed” to make it easier for pedestrians to determine what direction the sounds are coming from to help avoid collisions. The speaker also includes perpetually looping ambient tones for trail riders wanting to make hikers or wildlife aware of their presence at all times.

Image: Trek
Basic playback and volume controls allows a cyclist to adjust volume or skip music tracks without stopping to take out their smartphone.

With six hours of battery life and audio “optimized by Harman,” the BellBeats doubles as a portable Bluetooth speaker allowing cyclists to listen to music, audiobooks, podcasts, or even turn-by-turn GPS directions without the need for headphones that can diminish their ability to hear what’s going on around them. Built-in volume controls let cyclists quickly turn down what they’re listening to when riding through crowded areas.

A quick attach system allows the BellBeats to be easily removed from a bike’s handlebars and attached to a backpack strap or a belt, but it can also be left on a bike at all times thanks to an IP67 rating allowing it to survive a heavy downpour or even a complete dunking to depths of 40 inches.
Although the BellBeats is available now for $99.99 and is listed on Trek’s website, it can only be purchased from “local retailers” for the time being. Purchasing it directly from Trek will only be an option “in the coming months.”

Cyclists have quick access to two of eight selectable alert tones. | Image: Trek

The quiet ding of many bike bells isn’t always enough to alert pedestrians or vehicles of a cyclist’s presence. Trek’s new BellBeats is a compact Bluetooth speaker that can be mounted to a bike’s handlebars giving cyclists a selection of eight quick-access alert tones that are either friendly or urgent.

Like a traditional bike bell, the alert tones on the BellBeats can be triggered while riding, using a thumb button. Cyclists can select two of eight tones — including a ringing metal bell, a subdued train horn, or an old-timey ahooga horn — that are activated with either a long or short press of the button.

Trek claims the BellBeats’ alert tones are more noticeable than the sounds made by traditional bike bells because they encompass a wider frequency range and have been “professionally sound-designed” to make it easier for pedestrians to determine what direction the sounds are coming from to help avoid collisions. The speaker also includes perpetually looping ambient tones for trail riders wanting to make hikers or wildlife aware of their presence at all times.

Image: Trek
Basic playback and volume controls allows a cyclist to adjust volume or skip music tracks without stopping to take out their smartphone.

With six hours of battery life and audio “optimized by Harman,” the BellBeats doubles as a portable Bluetooth speaker allowing cyclists to listen to music, audiobooks, podcasts, or even turn-by-turn GPS directions without the need for headphones that can diminish their ability to hear what’s going on around them. Built-in volume controls let cyclists quickly turn down what they’re listening to when riding through crowded areas.

A quick attach system allows the BellBeats to be easily removed from a bike’s handlebars and attached to a backpack strap or a belt, but it can also be left on a bike at all times thanks to an IP67 rating allowing it to survive a heavy downpour or even a complete dunking to depths of 40 inches.

Although the BellBeats is available now for $99.99 and is listed on Trek’s website, it can only be purchased from “local retailers” for the time being. Purchasing it directly from Trek will only be an option “in the coming months.”

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