Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 06/16 – Apple’s Turn in The EU Antitrust Toolshed

Starting point is 00:00:00 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. Welcome to the Tech meme right home for Tuesday, June 16th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. The EU is investigating Apple for antitrust. Is Instagram surpassing Twitter as a news source? A look at that new hey email service, a look at a whole slew of new services from Dropbox. And if you wanted to get

Starting point is 00:00:51 your hands on one of those Boston dynamics four-legged robots, today is your lucky day. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. So Spotify has gotten its way, I guess. The European Commission has opened two antitrust investigations into Apple's App Store and Apple Pay practices, quoting from the Verge. The first investigation will probe whether Apple has broken EU competition rules with its app store policies following complaints by Spotify and Rakuten over Apple's 30% cut on subscriptions and sales of e-books through its app store. We need to ensure that Apple rules do not distort competition in markets where Apple is competing with other app developers, for example, with its music streaming service, Apple Music, or with Apple Books, says Marguerite

Starting point is 00:01:39 Vestager, the head of the EU's antitrust division. I have therefore decided to take a close look at Apple's App Store rules and their compliance with EU competition rules, end quote. Spotify has claimed Apple uses its app store to stifle innovation and limit consumer choice in favor of its own Apple Music Service. Rakuten filed a similar complaint to the EU earlier this year, alleging that it's anti-competitive for Apple to take a 30% commission on e-books sold through the App Store while promoting its own Apple Books service. Alongside the App Store investigation, the European Commission will also look at Apple Pay to assess whether Apple's payment system violates EU competition rules. Apple has limited access to the near-field communication or

Starting point is 00:02:22 NFC functionality of its iPhone and Apple Watch devices. A move that means banks and other financial service providers can't offer NFC payments through their own apps. Vestager, points to an increase in mobile payments in Europe due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic has motivation for its Apple Pay investigation. Quote, it appears that Apple sets the conditions on how Apple Pay should be used in merchants' apps and websites, says Vestager. It also reserves the tap and go functionality of iPhones to Apple Pay. It is important that Apple's measures do not deny consumers the benefits of new payment technologies, including better choice, quality, innovation, and competitive prices, end quote. Not sure about that.

Starting point is 00:03:01 last Apple pay bit, but all right. Because anyway, this is and always has been primarily about the 30% Vig on the app store. Like 30% is and always has been quite steep. It is essentially what everyone feared Microsoft would do to computing in the 1990s. If you want to get a sense of why such gatekeeping and rent seeking can put an artificial lid on markets, do a simple thought exercise. Imagine how much value could be unlocked for other companies, for the entire market, really, if Apple were forced to lower the Vig. As Nicco Wittenborn tweeted, quote, A potential Black Swan event for mobile subscription companies is regulation or competition forcing Apple to reduce its percentage take through the app store at one point. Should that

Starting point is 00:03:49 ever happen, say down to 15%, it could mean tens of millions of dollars going straight to EBITDA and hundreds of millions of dollars in extra enterprise value for the big ones, end quote. And as Tom Warren tweeted, Microsoft and Google will be looking at the EU antitrust investigation into Apple very closely. The outcome could greatly impact services like XCloud and Stadia on iOS, end quote. Funny enough, Apple just so happened yesterday to release a report that would allow you to run thought experiments like that. Apple release numbers indicating that the App Store facilitated $519 billion in commerce globally in 2019. As TechCrunch says, quote, this is a new and broader figure than has previously been reported,

Starting point is 00:04:42 as it includes all transactions the App Store facilitates, not just those on which Apple takes a commission. The new study examines the wider world of transactions on the App Store, while Apple earlier announced it had made $155 billion in direct payments to, developers to date, the study attempts to position those payments as a small fraction of the total when sales for other sources, like physical goods and services, are also included. In other words, the study is taking into consideration the number of retail sales flowing through the app store, like when you shop Target or the Best Buy iOS app, for example, or when you book an Uber or order food from DoorDash or Grub. The study notes that because Apple only receives commissions from the billings

Starting point is 00:05:25 associated with digital goods and services, quote, more than 85% of the $519 billion total accrues solely to third-party developers and businesses of all sizes, end quote. So do you want to break down that $519 billion number? Apple says $413 billion of that goes to physical goods and services, like again, buying via the Target app or even booking travel via the Expedia app. Then digital goods and services account for $61 billion and $45 billion goes to in-app advertising. As Sarah Perez puts it in TechCrunch, it's easy to see how this study is attempting to shift the narrative from one about how much Apple profits off developers, developers who are often now also competitors, to one that characterizes the app store as one where business transactions flow freely. It paints a picture

Starting point is 00:06:19 of industries that generate billions without Apple's hand in the pot, so to speak. But this ignores all the workaround's businesses have to take to avoid Apple's cut, end quote. Actually, I highly recommend reading up on this whole report if you're at all interested in the space because it's just a treasure trove of data that Apple has never revealed before. As Mike Dutas tweeted, quote, Nothing gets the financial disclosure machine rolling like a good old antitrust inquiry. And as Tomaso Valletti tweeted, quote, not uninteresting, but it has nothing to do with competition concerns.

Starting point is 00:06:53 looks like a monopoly, actually, end quote. A new report says that 11% of people under the age of 25 use Instagram to get their news compared with 12% of people that use Twitter for news, which is odd, because if Twitter is not for news, then what is it for other than trolling people, I guess? Anyway, expect Instagram to overtake Twitter sometime soon as a news source, quote, Instagram is now used by more than a third of all people who answered the survey and two-thirds of those under 25, and 11% use it for news, putting at just one point behind Twitter. Instagram's become very popular with younger people, said Nick Newman, lead author of the report.

Starting point is 00:07:41 They really respond well to stories that are told simply and well with visual images, end quote. Stand-out visual stories in recent months have helped. Climate change, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the coronavirus have all seen, massive engagement on the platform, end quote. Which, yeah, hadn't thought about that. But then again, I've aged out of this demo anyway. I still do go to Twitter for all of my Black Lives Matter and coronavirus news. Though I thought this was interesting that the use of social media for news continues to increase for basically everyone, YouTube, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Twitter, they're all still rising in terms of the percentage of people going to them for news. The only one not rising as a source of news,

Starting point is 00:08:24 Facebook, but Facebook is still the king of the hill with 36% of respondents saying that they turned it in the last week for news. The next highest platform, YouTube at 21%. A couple of interesting launches to tell you about now. Basecamp has debuted, hey, an email service that for $99 a year tries to blow up email, basically completely reimagine it. It's interesting, but it does have some issues apparently. For example, it needs its own client. and you can't import your old email, like you'll need to make a clean break if you use hay, which, hey, you know, might not be such a bad idea. But the main point of hay is to block read receipts and tracking pixels.

Starting point is 00:09:12 Hay blocks them all and also alerts you every time it does so. Names and shames, if you will, quoting David Pierce in protocol. It costs $99 a year, and its business proposition is simple. You can pay Google with your privacy or base camp with your money. It's designed to be a total rethink of email chock full of its developers' opinions on how email should work. There's no way to get to inbox zero. There's not even an inbox. Hay instead calls it the M-box, which Freed describes as for important and immediate things I want to know about.

Starting point is 00:09:45 Everything else gets shoved off somewhere else. As for what goes where, you decide. Freed said there's no AI in Hay, quote, we're doing human intelligence, not artificial intelligence. Hey does have a very basic spam filter, but the first time someone sends you a message, you decide where those messages should go to the inbox, to the feed full of newsletters, or the paper trail full of receipts and marketing stuff. Or you can simply say you don't want to get those emails anymore and, hey, we'll stop them coming in altogether.

Starting point is 00:10:14 Hay doesn't have unread counters or turn notifications on by default because who needs to be reminded to check their email. Hey doesn't allow signatures of any kind because signatures have become bloated. image-heavy things filled with pointless legal disclaimers. You can't import your old email. You can't use Hay with another email client. To use Hay is to buy into its and base camp's worldview. This is what Hannah Meyer Hansen calls soup-nazi features, which is to say they've done it the way they think is best, and if you don't like it, you can go somewhere else. No hard feelings. There's virtually no chance Hay will really challenge Gmail's place at the top of the email market, but that's okay with

Starting point is 00:10:52 Freed and Hannah-Meyer Hansen. Success to base camp looks something like 250,000 Hay users, which would be a pittance compared to Gmail's 1.5 billion, but they figure it's enough to make a real business and a dent in the ecosystem. Failure looks like, quote, five people show up and want to pay us $8 a month for email, Hannah Meyer-Hanson said. Right now, Hay is somewhere in between. Nearly 50,000 people have joined the waitlist for the app, which required sending the team an email with their feelings about email, end quote. Lots of folks, actually, that I thought. have been posting reviews of it so far, and they're positive. If you happen to be one of those people

Starting point is 00:11:31 trying, hey out, why not get in touch with me over Twitter? Because we'll probably do another listener call-in episode in the next few weeks, and it would be cool to have someone, you know, report their impressions of hey. And Dropbox has launched a bunch of new things, including a password manager, a secure vault for storing documents like birth certificates, a backup service, and even a family plan, quoting the verge. The password manager called Dropbox passwords lets you store your passwords in one place, like you would with a dedicated password manager like one password or last pass, but using your Dropbox account credentials. The release of Dropbox passwords follows Dropbox's acquisition of password manager Vault last year.

Starting point is 00:12:15 Dropbox is also launching Dropbox Vault, designed to be a secure place in your Dropbox account to keep sensitive documents. You can secure your vault with a six-digit pin, and Dropbox files will be encrypted when they're uploaded, downloaded, and while they're stored on Dropbox's servers. And if you need to selectively share access to your Dropbox vault in an emergency, you'll be able to do that without opening up your whole account, according to the company. Dropbox is also introducing a new service that lets you automatically back up folders from your Mac or PC to Dropbox. You'll be able to select which folders Dropbox backs up if you choose to do so, Young tells the verge, end quote. Which I thought Dropbox already did.

Starting point is 00:12:56 something like that, but I guess not. And I've not been a Dropbox power user for a while now. Anyway, passwords and vaults are available in beta today for all mobile users on Dropbox Plus, which runs you $11.99 a month, by the way. The computer backup service will be available in beta for Dropbox Basic, professional, and plus users today. Also, HelloSign signature is now a native feature within Dropbox. Dropbox bought HelloSign last year.

Starting point is 00:13:25 And there's even a Dropbox. App Center to find third-party apps to integrate with Dropbox. But as for that family plan, you can have up to six people under one Dropbox plan. It's called Dropbox family, naturally, and it is rolling out to Dropbox Plus users in a few weeks and all users later this year. Finally, today, if you want to get your hands on one of those Boston Dynamics Spot Robots, if that's your dream Father's Day present for doing, I don't know what you would do with one of these, but, you know, one of those robots that looks like a dog that can climb stairs and whatnot, I'm sure you could find a use case for it.

Starting point is 00:14:06 Well, you can get your hands on a spot for yourself for the low, low price of $74,500. So basically a Tesla Model S or a sort of Terminator-looking robot. Tough choice this Father's Day. But I'm sort of kidding. This is actually Boston Dynamics big coming out party. They want businesses to find the use case for these things, quoting the verge. Boston Dynamics says, for that money, you're getting the most advanced mobile robot in the world, able to go pretty much anywhere a human can, as long as there are no ladders involved.

Starting point is 00:14:41 Although Spot is certainly nimble, its workload is mostly limited right now to surveying and data collection. Trial deployments have seen Spot create 3D maps of construction sites and hunt for machine faults in offshore oil rigs. Less routine tests include helping hospitals triage COVID-19 patients and somewhat controversially working with a police bomb squad. Boston Dynamics pitch is that spot is a multipurpose mobility platform that can be customized with different sensors and program to perform patrols and inspections. We mostly sell the robot to industrial and commercial customers who have a sensor they want to take somewhere or they don't want a person to go. Boston Dynamics' lead robotics engineer

Starting point is 00:15:19 Zach Jukowski told the verge last week. usually because it's dangerous or because they need to do it so often that it would drive someone mad, like carrying a camera around a factory 40 times a day and taking the same pictures each time. The company says it will continue upgrading spot as it gets feedback from customers, but that the robot is finally ready for general sale. This is partly due to a recent software update coded by Boston Dynamics engineers working from home with their own spot units. Spot 2.0, as the update is called, allows for more advanced autonomy and navigation features, end quote. That is all for today. There's been road construction right outside my window, so I'm going to try to wrap this up while they're on their lunch break. Talk to you tomorrow.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 06/16 – Apple’s Turn in The EU Antitrust Toolshed

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