Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 04/18 – The Google Antitrust Snowball

Episode Date: April 18, 2025

Google is ruled an illegal monopoly. Again. But for a different reason this time. Switch 2 pre-orders are back on. Americans are flocking to Temu and Shein alternatives. And in the Weekend Longreads Suggestions, what if I told you 25 percent of community college applicants are now AI bots? And not only that, the bots are now “attending classes” in quotes. Sponsors: FactorMeals.com/ride50off and code ride50off Links: Google Broke the Law to Keep Its Advertising Monopoly, a Judge Rules (NYTimes) Google loses online advertising monopoly case (Axios) Google Found GUILTY of Monopolization Again (The Big Newsletter) Nintendo Switch 2 preorders start April 24th and the price is still $449.99 (The Verge) The latest viral ChatGPT trend is doing ‘reverse location search’ from photos (TechCrunch) Chinese shopping app Taobao joins DHgate in Top 5 on US App Store (TechCrunch) Weekend Longreads Suggestions: As ‘Bot’ Students Continue to Flood In, Community Colleges Struggle to Respond (Voice Of San Diego) Astronomers Detect a Possible Signature of Life on a Distant Planet (NYTimes) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Oh, welcome to the Tech meme right home for Friday, April 18, 25. I'm Brian McCullough today. Google is ruled an illegal monopoly again. But for a different reason this time, switch to pre-orders are back on. Americans are flocking to Temu and Shian alternatives. And in the weekend, long-read suggestions, what if I told you 25% of community college applicants are now AI bots? And not only that, the bots are now, quote, attending classes. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Well, it's happened again. A. A U.S. judge says Google acted illegally to maintain a monopoly in some online advertising tech. This is the second time in a year a court has found Google acted illegally in a monopolistic

context, though this time it is different from last time, quoting the times. Judge Leone Brinkama of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia said in a 115-page ruling that Google had broken the law to build its dominance over the largely invisible system of technology that places advertisements on pages across the web. The Justice Department and a group of states had sued Google, arguing that its monopoly and ad technology allowed the company to charge higher prices and take a bigger portion of each sale. In addition to the depriving rivals of the ability to compete, this exclusionary conduct substantially harmed Google's publisher customers, the competitive process, and ultimately

consumers of information on the open web. Judge Brinkama said. The government argued in its case that Google had a monopoly over three parts of the online advertising market. The tools used by online publishers like new sites to host open ad space, the tools advertisers used to buy that ad space, and the software that facilitates those transactions. Judge Benkema ruled in the government's favor in two of those, finding that Google illegally built a monopoly over publisher tools and the software system. She dismissed the third, the tools used by advertisers saying the government had failed to prove that it constituted a real and defined market. Another federal judge ruled in August that the company had a monopoly in online search.

He is now considering a request by the Justice Department to break up the company with a three-week hearing on the matter scheduled to begin on Monday. Judge Brinkama, too, will have an opportunity to force changes to Google's business. On Thursday, she gave both sides seven days to propose a schedule for the next phase of the case. In its lawsuit, the Justice Department preemptively asked the court to force Google to sell some pieces of the ad technology business it had acquired over the years. The government will now assess the ruling to determine what to ask the court to do to remedy the monopoly. We won half of this case and we will appeal the other half, said Leanne Mulholland, Google's vice president of regulatory affairs. Publishers have many options and they choose Google because

our ad tech tools are simple, affordable and effective, end quote. U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi called the ruling a, quote, landmark victory in the ongoing fight to stop Google from monopolizing the Digital Public Square, end quote. Those last two quotes are interesting to me, because number one, by my math, two-thirds is different than one-half. But also, that quote from Bondi is red meat for tea leaf readers trying to suss out how this administration will think of big tech antitrust cases going forward. Now, again, the DOJ and the 17 U.S. states that brought this antitrust case are apparently

seeking to force Google to sell off its network ad business, which is around 12 percent of of Alphabet's total revenue. So what would this mean? Quoting Axios. Forcing Google to give up its ad tech arm would be punitive, but wouldn't fundamentally change Google's business. The company still makes mountains of money, selling ads alongside its own YouTube videos and search results,

but a forced divestiture would almost certainly impact Google's top line enough to force it to recalibrate its spending on new areas of investment, such as its AI and cloud businesses. Google largely relies on ad revenue to fuel its new bets. The court drew a distinction between the markets for advertising exchanges and ad servers, where it found Google has an illegal monopoly, and the general market for display ads online where it found Google does not. The ruling means that the judge will move on to a phase in the trial that considers what sort of penalties or remedies to impose. The search case is now in that phase as well.

There, the government is seeking to force Google to divest its Chrome search engine. It's also possible Google will be forced to give up its lucrative search partnership deals with device makers like Apple as a result of that case as well, end quote. Now, I don't always agree with him, but I thought Matt Stoller made an interesting point on this ruling in his The Big Newsletter, newsletter. Mainly, Google is now facing momentum,

sort of like a snowball going downhill and accumulating mass. Quote, actually, this decision is now the third loss for Google. In 2023, Google lost a monopolization case to Epic Games over its control of the Android App Store. Last year, the company lost a case over its control of search, and today it lost a third case over yet another line of business. These decisions build on each other. Brinkama cited the decision in the search case to describe why Google had control over so many small advertisers. Referencing across the cases will continue to happen as we move into the remedy phase. Additionally, private and state antitrust cases, like a case led by the Texas Attorney General on AdTech, currently working its way through the courts, will benefit from.

this decision as well, end quote. Nintendo this morning announced Switch 2 pre-orders will start in the U.S. on April 24th, with the price staying at the initially announced $450 for the console, but prices of accessories will go up, quoting the verge. The Switch 2 JoyCon Pro Controller and Switch 2 Camera have all gone up in price. Originally, the JoyCon was priced at $8999 and is now $9499. The Pro Controller has also gone up $5.99 to $849.99. Finally, the Switch 2 camera has gone from $4999 to $5.99. Nintendo closed its announcement with an apology stating, We apologize for the retail pre-order delay and hope this reduces some of the uncertainty our customers may be experiencing, end quote.

Not too long ago, we did a story where insiders were suggesting Chat ChpT was cutting corners to ship product. And if so, this is the sort of thing they might have caught if they, had more time for testing, chat GPT users are figuring out the location of photos using O3's image analyzing capabilities paired with its web search functionality, thereby raising privacy concerns. Quoting TechCrunch, users on X quickly discovered that O3 in particular is quite good at deducing cities, landmarks, and even restaurants and bars from subtle visual clues. In many cases, the models don't appear to be drawing on memories of past chat GPT conversations or XIF data, which is the metadata attached to photos that reveal details, such as where the photo was taken.

X is filled with examples of users giving ChatGPT restaurant menus, neighborhood snaps, facades, and self-portraits, and instructing O3 to imagine it's playing Geogessor, an online game that challenges players to guess locations from Google Street View images. It's an obvious potential privacy issue. There's nothing preventing a bad actor from screenshoting, say, a person's Instagram story, and using chat GPT to try to docs them. Of course, this could be done even before the launch of O3 and O4 Mini. TechCrunch ran a number of photos through O3 and an older model without image reasoning capabilities, GPD40, to compare the model's location guessing skills.

Surprisingly, GPD40 arrived at the same correct answer as O3 more often than not and took less time, end quote. TechCrunch says that U.S. consumers are flocking to Chinese shopping apps D.HGate and Tao Bao, which let them buy directly from Chinese manufacturers as Sheehan and Temu prices rise amidst tariffs and whatnot. The Chinese e-commerce marketplace app, D.H.Gate, which is now the number two free iPhone app in the U.S. isn't the only one that's oddly benefiting from President Trump's tariffs on U.S. imports from China. Another Chinese shopping app, Taubao, has now also entered the top five as of Thursday. U.S. consumers began flocking to these apps over the past several days in the wake. of numerous TikTok videos from Chinese manufacturers explaining how much of the luxury goods market operates out of China. The videos claim that many products from top luxury brands like clothing,

handbags, shoes, and accessories are actually originally made in China. The items are then shipped over to the brand's home country like Italy or France, where they're repackaged after the brand's label is applied, according to these videos. Other U.S. and Chinese TikTok creators then pointed to e-commerce apps like D.HGate and Tao Bao as a way to buy directly from the Chinese manufacturers foregoing the huge markup, the luxury brands charge. Already wary of increasing prices on popular apps like Sheehan and Temu, U.S. consumers quickly began downloading these alternatives. In April, Tao Bows' estimated downloads totaled approximately 150,000, a 514% increase from the 30,000 it saw during the same period last month, according to new data from app

intelligence provider app figures. As with D.HGate, Tao Bows' downloads surged over this past weekend, with installs increasing 5.7x between last Friday and Saturday, the firm said. Taubao also grew from the number 49 shopping app on Saturday to become the number two app, topping Walmart, Amazon, Shian, and Temu. Chinese appalibaba.com is also climbing the charts here, now the number six shopping app on the U.S. App Store. Notably, app figure says that Taubao has never been in the top overall charts on the U.S. App Store before, according to its data, which goes back to January 1, 2017.

While switching shopping apps won't actually save U.S. consumers from tariffs on Chinese imports, shoppers likely think buying direct from manufacturers could potentially lower the overall cost of their purchases. For other consumers, it's simply a way to seek out luxury-style goods or dupes at a better price, end quote. I'm for the weekend long read suggestions, and first up, this is straight up the wildest story I've read about AI to date. We know that AI is potentially great for doing scams, right? especially for aping actual humans when doing that scamming. Well, get this. U.S. community colleges are suddenly battling a flood of fake or bot students who bilk financial aid by enrolling in online or remote classes and then submitting AI-generated coursework. Quoting Voice of San Diego.

Ever since the pandemic forced schools to go virtual, the number of online classes offered by community colleges has exploded. That has been a welcome development. for many students who value the flexibility online classes offer, but it has also given rise to the incredibly invasive and uniquely modern phenomenon of bot students now besieging community college professors. The bot's goal is to build state and federal financial aid money by enrolling in classes and remaining enrolled in them long enough for aid disbursements to go out. They often accomplish us by submitting AI-generated work. And because community colleges accept all applicants, they've been almost exclusively impacted by the fraud. That has put teachers on the front lines of an ever-evolving

war on fraud, muddied the teaching experience, and thrown up significant barriers to students' ability to access courses. What has made the situation, all the more difficult, some teachers say, is the feeling that administrators haven't done enough to curb the crisis. Community colleges first started seeing bots managed by fraud rings invade classes around 2021. Those bots seem to generally be real people managing networks of fake student aliases. The more they manage, the more financial aid money they can potentially steal. Four years later, there are no clear signs it's slowing down. During 2024 alone, fraudulent students at California community colleges swindled more than $11 million in state and federal financial aid dollars more than double what was stolen the prior year.

Last year, the state chancellor's office estimated 25% of community college applicants were bots. Despite the eye-popping sum, state leaders are quick to point out that amounts to a fraction of the around $3.2 billion combined state and federal financial aid dispersed last year. But for many community college teachers, particularly those who teach online courses, the influx of bot students has changed what it means to be a teacher, said Eric Mag, who has taught at Southwestern for 21 years. We didn't used to have to decide if our students were human. They were all people. But now there's the skepticism because a growing number of people we're teaching are not real. We're having to have these conversations with students like, are you real? Is your work real? Meg said, it's really complicated the relationship between the teacher and the student in almost like a fundamental way, end quote. Those teacher-led investigations have become more difficult over the years, professors say, while some bots simply don't submit classwork and hope they can skate by, they also frequently use AI programs to generate classwork that they then submit, determining whether a student is a bot can be a confusing task. After all, even real students use AI to do some

good old-fashioned cheating in classes. There are some patterns, though. Asynchronous online courses tend to be the heaviest hit, so are classes with large sizes and shorter-term courses, like those that run for only eight weeks. Some teachers also said classes whose names start with letters at the beginning of the alphabet are harder hit as well. The time spent doing blade runner-esque bot detection has also stretched professors thin, said Carrie Lesh, a counselor and the president of Southwestern College's academic senate. It's really hard to create a sense of community and help students who are struggling when you're spending the first couple of weeks trying to figure out who's a bot, she said. Finding the fraudulent students early is

key, though, if they can be identified and dropped before the third week of the semester when Southwestern distributes aid funds, the bots don't get the money they're after. It also allows professors to open the seats held by scammers to real students who are crowded out. But dropping huge amounts of enrollees can also be frightening to teachers who worry that should their classes not fill back up, they may be axed. Even after dropping the fraudulent students, though, the bot nightmare isn't over. As soon as seats open up in classes, professors often receive hundreds of nearly identical emails from purported students requesting they be added to the class. Those emails tended to ring some linguistic alarm bells. They feature clunky phrases that are

uncommon for modern students to use like, I kindly request or warm regards or I look forward to your positive response. Much of that stilted language lines up with what has been seen from the AI generated content submitted by bot students. That mad, bot powered dash for enrollment, has left some students unable to register for the classes they need. It has also given rise to a sort of whisper network where professors recommend students reference them by name when trying to get added to other classes, end quote. Finally, this week, long-time listeners will know my long-time fascination with the Fermi paradox in a different, maybe more ideal timeline. I'd be the host of a podcast devoted to nothing other than debating solutions to the Fermi paradox. Well, from my literal

Fermi paradox Google Alert, scientists have found the strongest signal yet that could indicate life on another planet. Quoting the New York Times, while inspecting K-218B, Dr. Medhusadan, and his colleagues discovered it had many of the molecules they had predicted a Heisan planet would possess. In 2023, they reported that they had also detected faint hints of another molecule and one of huge potential importance. Diomethyl sulfide, which is made of sulfur, carbon, and hydrogen. On Earth, the only known source of dimethyl sulfide is life. In the ocean, for instance, certain forms of algae produced the compound which wafts into the air and adds to the sea's distinctive odor. Long before the Webb Telescope was launched, astrobiologists had wondered whether

dimethyl sulfide might serve as a sign of life on other planets. Last year, Dr. Matt Hussedon and his colleagues got a second chance to look for dimethyl sulfide. As K218B orbited in front of its star, they used a different instrument on the web telescope to analyze the starlight passing through the planet's atmosphere. This time they saw an even stronger signal of dimethyl sulfide, along with a similar molecule called dimethyl disulfide. It's a shock to the system. Dr. Matt Hussedon said, we spent an enormous amount of time just trying to get rid of the signal. But no matter how the scientists revisited their readings, the signal stayed strong. They concluded that K218B may in fact harbor a tremendous supply of dimethyl sulfite in its atmosphere thousands of times higher than the level found on

earth. This would suggest that its Heiseanses are brimming with life, end quote. Now, obviously, there are still questions to answer around all this and plenty of doubts and doubters as well. Otherwise, this would be a much bigger news headline. But still fun for folks like me who geek out over this stuff. No weekend bonus episodes for you this weekend for obvious reasons. In fact, as I think I told you, we've already gotten six to eight inches of snow this morning where we are on this side of the mountain on Czech's calendar, April the 18th. We believe and hope we will be able to get safely down the mountain to the Denver airport tomorrow afternoon and won't be snowed in all weekend, but who knows? Maybe I'll be coming to you again.

from the side of this mountain on Monday. Hopefully not. Talk to you then.