Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 03/13 - Spotify Anti-Trust's Apple

Episode Date: March 13, 2019

Spotify files a pretty timely anti-trust complaint against Apple, Microsoft tries to get a jump on Google’s steaming video game announcement, is Google scaling back its hardware ambitions, what is Discord and why is it going mainstream all the sudden, and maybe you already knew this, but scientists think they’ve proven that there’s no such thing as objective reality. Sponsors: Tiny.website Wix.com/podcast DataDogHQ.com/ridehome Links: Spotify files EU antitrust complaint against Apple (Reuters) Apple Courts HBO and Showtime for Service to Challenge Netflix (Bloomberg) Facial recognition's 'dirty little secret': Millions of online photos scraped without consent (NBC News) Google has told dozens of employees on its laptop and tablet division to find new jobs at the company, raising questions about its hardware plans (Business Insider) Verizon’s 5G service will cost $10 extra, launches in Chicago and Minneapolis on April 11th (The Verge) Microsoft demonstrates xCloud game streaming a week before Google’s ‘future of gaming’ event (The Verge) How an App for Gamers Went Mainstream (The Atlantic) A quantum experiment suggests there’s no such thing as objective reality (MIT Technology Review) 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. Welcome to the tech meme ride home for Wednesday, March 13th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Spotify files a pretty timely antitrust complaining its Apple.

Microsoft tries to get a jump on Google's streaming video game announcement. Is Google scaling back its hardware ambitions? What is Discord and why is it suddenly going mainstream? And maybe you already knew this, but scientists think they've proven that there's no such thing as objective reality. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Spotify has filed an anti-examination. trust complaint against Apple with the European Commission, claiming App Store rules limit choice and stifle competition.

Central to the complaint is Apple's vaunted 30% rake for apps in the App Store. Essentially, Spotify complains that because of that rev share, it can't compete on price with something like Apple's Apple Music Service. In a blog post, Spotify CEO Daniel Eck wrote, quote, In recent years, Apple has introduced rules to the App Store that purposely limit choice and stifle innovation at the expense of the user experience, essentially acting as both a player and a referee to deliberately disadvantage other app developers. After trying unsuccessfully to resolve the issues directly with Apple,

we're now requesting that the EC take action to ensure fair competition. Apple operates a platform that, for over a billion people around the world, is the gateway to the Internet. Apple is both the owner of the iOS platform and the App Store and a competitor to services like Spotify. In theory, this is fine, but in Apple's case, they continue to give themselves an unfair advantage at every turn, end quote. Spotify also launched a website outlining its beef with Apple and is apparently paying for an ad campaign to that end as well. In a press conference in London, Spotify's General Counsel Horatio Gutierrez said, quote, Apple uses its complete control over access to its app store to deprive consumers of choice

and disadvantaged rival providers of audio streaming services, in particular Spotify, to the benefit of Apple's own streaming service, Apple Music, end quote. Quoting now from Music Alley. Gutierrez claimed that Apple's restrictions on Spotify became, quote, more frequent and more extreme after the company acquired beats electronics, including its beats music streaming service in 2014, and then relaunched the latter as Apple Music in 2015. He also claimed that Spotify had been, quote, pressured into using Apple's in-app purchases system in 2014, forcing the company to increase the cost of an iOS-Spotify subscription to $12.99 a

month to factor in Apple's 30% cut, thus disadvantaging Spotify when Apple Music launched for $9.99 a month. Gutierrez also talked more about the restrictions Spotify claims have been placed on it since it dropped in-app purchases in iOS. Quote, Apple's rules dictate that we're no longer to communicate with our own customers about what we consider to be pretty important stuff, he said, citing promotional deals on subscriptions. Spotify's annual 99 cents for three months campaign being one example. Quote, we can't even tell our users to get premium or give them tips on other ways in which

they can upgrade outside the iOS platform. Apple has gone as far as prohibiting Spotify from emailing our users about ways they can subscribe to our premium service, he said, end quote. Spotify's complaint is apparently designed to trigger an antitrust investigation by the European Commission, but simply filing the complaint does not yet mean that that investigation is going forward. The complaint also mentions blocking of Spotify integration with Siri and Apple Watch. Spotify swears that the timing of this announcement is unrelated to the Apple event coming

on March 25th, but, you know, speaking of that Apple event, according to that Apple event, according to Mark German and his usual gang, Apple's upcoming video service will feature mostly content from partners at launch. Its first slew of original programming won't come until later in the year. The company is racing to secure movies and TV shows to offer alongside its own original videos and is offering concessions to get deals done by a Friday deadline, according to people familiar with the matter. Pay TV programmers such as HBO, Showtime, and Stars have to decide whether Apple is an existential threat,

as some now view Netflix, a potential partner or something in between, end quote. So mad rush to the finish line, apparently. What about the news subscription service? We had heard previously that Apple was struggling to get big-name publishers signed up for that as well. No word on how those negotiations are going, at least today. But to what I mentioned earlier this week, German has this, quote, Apple plans to sell its video and magazine services separately, but could offer them at a discount to users who subscribe to multiple services,

one of the people said, end quote. So no eye bundle yet. NBC News has a blockbuster report out claiming that IBM and other companies have long been using Creative Commons Flickr photos to train facial recognition software without the consent of the people in those photos. I sort of think this has been an open secret for a while, now. A lot of stuff that we post on social media has quietly been used as fodder by researchers to do a lot of training of various AI technologies, and I don't even mean that in a malicious way.

But the problem is, going forward, what's to stop whatever software has subsequently been developed using your photos from being turned against you, you specifically in the near future? After all, they do have your face. quote, experts note that the distinction between the research wings and commercial operations of corporations such as IBM and Facebook is a blurry one. Ultimately, IBM owns any intellectual property developed by its research unit. Even when algorithms are developed by academic researchers using non-commercial data sets, those algorithms are often later used by businesses, said Brian Brachene, former CEO of the facial recognition company Carios.

As an analogy, he said, think of it as the money laundering. of facial recognition. You are laundering the IP and privacy rights out of the faces, end quote. Business Insider is reporting that Google has moved dozens of employees out of its laptop and tablet division, suggesting that the company is maybe scaling back the size of its in-house hardware group. So even though I feel like we've seen signs recently that Apple was leaning into so-called made by Google hardware, maybe that isn't the case after all. Quoting Business Insider. After several false starts, including a short-lived acquisition of phonemaker Motorola from 2012 to 2014, Google declared its seriousness about hardware in 2016 when it hired Rick Osterlo to head

up a new hardware group. Google has repeatedly stressed it is in the hardware business for the long run, even as the efforts have driven up expenses and weighed down the rich profit margins of Google's online ad business. Today, the creative division is responsible for the pixel book laptop and the Pixel Slate tablet amongst the company's wider swath of made-by-google products. Other divisions within the company's hardware product area, known internally as HWPA, include Pixel for smartphones, home for smart-home devices, including Nest, and wearables, end quote. Now, on the one hand, laptops and even tablets, and really most hardware, it's nearly a commodity business with razor-thin margins, as Carol

Carolina Milanez tweeted, quote, I like the pixel book, but there is limited value Google can bring to the device compared to what they can do with a smartphone. So they may as well let their partners bring higher-end Chromebooks to the market so the reach can be wider and deeper, end quote. But then again, as the Verges Tom Warren tweeted, nobody is buying pixel book laptops or the pixel slate. I've literally never seen anyone with one.

So not surprised to see Google giving up, end quote. On the 5G beat, for months, Verizon was vague about its official 5G rollout timetable, even as others not only made their announcements, but officially launched in some cases. Well, today, Verizon officially announced that 5G will roll out for the first time on its network on April 11th in Chicago and Minneapolis. Notably, this is the first publicly available 5G rollout in the U.S. that actually supports smartphones. Of course, that does require you to have your hands on a 5G-ready smartphone already, which isn't an easy task. In fact, the only 5G-capable phones available on Verizon's network that we know of are the MotoZ3s with the M5G Moto Mod. But Verizon also officially announced pricing.

In short, whatever Verizon plan you're on, it will cost you $10 more a month to go 5G, quoting from the verge. The new prices will now start at $85 per month for the base go unlimited plan for a single line, which is always subject to throttling and only offers slow hotspot speeds and 480P video. $95 per month for the beyond unlimited, 22 gigabyte of unthrottle to LTE, 15 gigabytes of LTE hotspot and 720P video, and $105 for the above unlimited plan, 75 gigabytes of LTE before throttling, 20 gigabytes of LTE hotspots. 720P video, and a few other perks. The good news is that, at least for now, Verizon isn't holding users to those data-throttling limits for 5G.

According to the company, 5G data usage with the Moto mod is unlimited with no data deprioritization, even for users on plans that ordinarily would. In other words, Verizon is offering true unlimited data to customers with 5G, although the real test will be to see whether that continues as 5G continues to roll out. end quote. Now, the rollout, even in the initial two cities, will still be super limited. Geographically, in Chicago, 5G service will only be available on the Loop and Gold Coast, as well as River North and Old Town areas. In Minneapolis, the initial neighborhoods to get 5G will be downtown west, downtown east, and Elliott Park. And on the streaming gaming beat,

ahead of the now highly anticipated Google Future of Gaming Keynote at the Game Developers Conference next week, Microsoft today demoed its Project XCloud game streaming service. If you click on the link to the verge piece about this, you can actually see a video of the demo. Quote, during Microsoft's Inside Xbox event last night, Microsoft showed off Forza Horizon 4,

streaming from the company's Azure data centers to an Android device. An Xbox One controller was connected to the phone via Bluetooth, showing how it will be easy to stream games from the cloud to mobile devices. Karim Chowdhury, Microsoft's Gaming Cloud Chief, appeared in the segment and revealed in a blog post that the company isn't trying to replace consoles with Xcloud. Quote, we're developing Project XCloud not as a replacement for game consoles, but as a way to provide the same choice and versatility that lovers of music and video enjoy today,

explains Chowdry. We're adding more ways to play Xbox games, end quote. And from the influencer beat, the great Taylor Lawrence checks in to report anecdotally that Discord, the chat app that first gained traction as a messaging platform for gamers, has suddenly become popular among influencers, Instagrammers, YouTubers, and others. Why? Because Discord makes it super easy to set up ad hoc but also highly customizable private communities for your fans and followers.

So your own private social platform, in a sense. quote, after signing up for Discord, users join different servers. Each server functions as its own community, and it's very easy to toggle between them. Once you're within a server, you can hop between a long list of hashtag marked channels on the left-hand side of the screen. Some channels are text-based and some are group voice chats. Visually, Discord looks very similar to Slack. Discord is also highly customizable. Not only can servers have public and private channels, but administrators can also designate an endless series of

roles to each user, all of which can come with custom privileges, colors, and name tags. Most server administrators designate roles to help moderate their communities. In addition to the group chats, Discord allows for global private messaging. You can add friends from any server to have one-on-one conversations without having to click into each server itself. It's like having an aim buddy list at the top of the app. Roberto Blake, an Atlanta-based YouTuber, compared Discord not to Slack, but to, quote, chat rooms from the 1990s. But he told me, quote, they made that experience mobile and way more robust and sophisticated, end quote.

Might this be the very sort of my own private Idaho future of social private messaging that Mark Zuckerberg recently said he thinks is the future and wants to move Facebook towards? Finally, after an oddly news-packed day in the world of tech, let's palette cleanse a bit with something a little outside of our lane. Quoting from the MIT Technology Review, physicists have long suspected that quantum mechanics allows two observers to experience different conflicting realities. Now they've performed the first experiment that proves it, end quote. Or as the headline says, a recent quantum experiment suggests there's no such thing as objective reality. If you're familiar with the Winger's Friend thought experiment, then you've had some super geeky cocktail hour conversations in your time.

I won't go into the details here. If you're not familiar, read the article. If you want to understand how a single photon can exist in two different polarization states at the same time, a so-called superposition. TLDR, physicists have found a way to test the Winger's friend hypothesis in a real experiment. And spoiler alert, the results would mean that it is impossible to agree on the objective facts about any observed experiment. Again, too many variables of this story to explain briefly here. Read the article.

But bottom line, to really bake your noodle, quote, Proietti and company's results suggest that objective reality does not exist. In other words, the experiment suggests that one or more of the assumptions, the idea that there is a reality we can agree on, the idea we have freedom of choice, or the idea of locality must be wrong, end quote. Something, something, maybe the most 2019 science news possible. That's all for today.

I've been Brian McCullough. Follow me on Twitter at Brian MCC. The show has a subreddit at R slash ride home. And of course, you can subscribe to an ad-free version of the show at the very last link in the show notes, Kimberlite.fm. Forward slash Ride Home. Talk to you tomorrow.