Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 11/10 – Big Tech Smacked Down In Court

Episode Date: November 10, 2021

Apple and Alphabet suffer setbacks in court. More hardware moves in the great Metaverse realignment of the tech landscape. Unity buys Weta Digital. No word on if Andy Serkis is part of the package. And Twitter Blue is finally live. A reminder of what that actually is. Sponsors: Masterworks.io/ride Oracle.com/ride Links: Judge orders Apple to allow external payment options for App Store by December 9th, denying stay (The Verge) Google Loses Appeal of $2.8 Billion EU Shopping-Ads Fine (WSJ) Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Spaces try to make it easier to get apps ready for augmented reality (The Verge) Unity is buying Peter Jackson’s Weta Digital for over $1.6B (TechCrunch) Meta plans to remove thousands of sensitive ad-targeting categories. (NYTimes) Twitter will now let you pay to undo tweets and read ad-free news in the US (The Verge) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Tech meme right home for Wednesday, November 10th, 2021. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Apple and Alphabet suffer setbacks in court. More hardware moves in the great metaverse realignment of the tech landscape. Unity buys Weta Digital. No word on if Andy Circus is part of that package. And Twitter Blue is finally live. A quick reminder of what that actually is. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. It's not been a great day for big tech in the courts. First up, the judge in the Epic versus Apple trial says Apple must comply with an order letting developers link to external payment options, denying Apple's stay request, quoting the verge. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez-Rogers issued her order after a Tuesday hearing concerning the Blockbuster antitrust lawsuit, which Fortnite

publisher Epic Games filed in 2020 and which went to trial this year. During the hearing, Apple said it needed more time to rewrite its anti-steering policies, rules that bar app developers from linking to payment methods besides the iOS App Store. This will be the first time Apple has ever allowed live links in an app for digital content. It's going to take months to figure out the engineering, economic, business, and other issues, said Apple attorney Mark Perry. It is exceedingly complicated. There have to be guardrails and guidelines to protect children, to protect developers, to protect

consumers, to protect Apple, and they have to be written into guidelines that can be explained and enforced and applied, end quote. Apple has mostly praised the ruling in Epic v. Apple. where Judge Gonzalez-Rogers concluded that Apple hadn't violated antitrust law by kicking Fortnite off the app store and said the company didn't have to reinstate Epic's developer account. But it appealed the section saying that Apple's anti-steering policies hid relevant information from users and demanding that it removed them. Judge Gonzalez-Rogers was skeptical of Apple's request, particularly because it asked for an indefinite stay of the injunction, despite saying Apple just wanted more time to evaluate risks. You haven't asked for additional time. you've asked for an injunction, which would effectively take years, she said. You've asked for an across-the-board stay,

which could take three, four, five years, end quote. Perry responded that Apple wanted to delay the changes until the case was resolved, saying that it was confident, quote, we're going to win the appeal, end quote. That didn't sway the judge in her order Tuesday evening. She accused Apple of wanting, quote, an open-ended stay with no requirement that it make any effort to comply and suggested that Apple has provided no credible reason for the court to believe that the injunction would caused the professed devastation, end quote, with regards to the company's argument that it would be harmed by adding external links to alternate payment systems within apps. Apple says it plans to appeal to the Ninth Circuit for a stay since it didn't get one from Judge Gonzalez-Rogers,

end quote. And the EU's general court has upheld a $2.42 billion fine against Google, levied in 2017 for abusing its search engine dominance by promoting its own shopping services. quoting the Wall Street Journal. The EU's general court in Luxembourg on Wednesday gave its endorsement to a 2017 antitrust finding by EU competition regulators that the alphabet search engine had broken antitrust laws by directing users toward its own comparison shopping ads at the expense of rival services. At stake in the case, which was argued a year and a half ago, is a legal precedent that is the focus of intense scrutiny globally. Whether the Internet's biggest platforms have a special responsibility to avoid favoring their own in-house products and services over those offered by

competitors. Google departed from competition on the merits, the court said, finding that changes Google made to its search engine that favored its own ads didn't create efficiencies, quote, that would counteract its negative effect on competition, end quote. In a minor victory for Google, the court struck down one element of the EU's case, saying that regulators hadn't proven Google's conduct distorted competition among general search engines. But the judge's backed regulators findings that there had been harmful effects on the narrower market of comparison shopping search engines. The judges also reaffirmed the amount of the fine Google had to pay. A Google spokeswoman said it was too early to say whether the company would appeal the decision to the EU's top court.

This judgment relates to a very specific set of facts, she said, adding that the company would, quote, review it closely, end quote. If yesterday's show highlighted anything, it's that folks chasing the new hotness of the Metaverse aren't just software folks. Hardware folks also see this as a growth area. Thus, all the announces we told you about yesterday, and then this one today. Qualcomm has unveiled the Snapdragon Spaces XR developer platform with hardware agnostic APIs and support for Unreal Engine 4 and Unity, among others, quoting the Verge. While a lot of talk about the Metaverse has focused on virtual reality experiences that use a VR headset to put people in digital environments, other approaches,

use augmented reality, AR, or mixed reality XR, to blend digital and physical elements. Today, at the Augmented World Expo, Qualcomm is revealing its Snapdragon Spaces XR developer platform, a kit that will help devs expand existing apps and create new ones to take advantage of AR devices you wear on your head. Today's announcement doesn't include mention of new hardware. However, Qualcomm is lining up some important partners for the mixed reality future that it's been planning for the last decade. They include Neanty, and its recently revealed light-chip platform for real-world Metaverse apps, as well as hardware OEMs including Lenovo, Motorola, Oppo, and Jaume.

Lenovo's Think Reality A3 glasses based on Qualcomm's XR1 smart viewer reference design will be the first to commercialize Snapdragon Spaces next year. T-Mobile is the lead 5G launch partner and will work with startups and developers via its existing T-Mobile accelerator program. Snapdragon Spaces is intended to underpin an open and cross-dosepherson, device ecosystem with APIs that are hardware agnostic, so the software developers create can run on many different types of platforms, including AR glasses or full AR headsets that look more like Microsoft's HoloLens. According to Qualcomm, this is the first headworn AR platform optimized for

AR glasses tethered to smartphones with an open XR conformant runtime, end quote. It also has support for the familiar developer tools, Unreal Engine 4 and Unity. It's available now to select developers like Hollow 1 and NZXT. Access for everyone is coming early next year, complete with tools for hand tracking, image recognition, and tracking, positional tracking, and the like. Coalcom also announced it has acquired assets from HINS SaaS and its subsidiary Clay Air for hand tracking and gesture recognition, while a partnership with Wikitud will open up access for that AR development platform's 150,000 registered developers, end quote. Speaking of Unity, if that last segment didn't prove my point, how about the news that Unity

is set to acquire Peter Jackson's visual effects company Weta Digital, including more than 275 engineers for a total of $1.625 billion, quoting TechCrunch. Whether or not you recognize the name, you've seen Weta Digital's work, from Lord of the Rings to Avatar to Shang-Chi, if it's the kind of movie where people say, you should really see it in a theater, there's a good chance Weta Digital played a huge role in the visual effects. Leading to this deal, Weta Digital was both a team of artists creating visual effects and a team of engineers developing many of the tools those artists use.

It's those tools and engineering teams specifically that Unity is acquiring. The visual effects artistry team, meanwhile, will be split off into its own new thing. Weta Digital's more than 275 engineers will join Unity. The VFX artists will be spun out into a new entity, Weta FX, of which Peter Jackson will continue to own the majority. The two companies expect to continue working together with Unity noting that it sees Weta FX being one of their largest customers in the media and entertainment space moving forward. Meanwhile, Unity will be taking over the development of Weta Digital's many built-in-house tools, things like City Builder, which procedurally generates the massive 3D cities we see destroyed in movies like King Kong, Manuka, their custom physics-simulating renderer that helps make everything look oh-so-real

in the final version, Gazebo, their faster real-time renderer used by artists to accurately preview scenes before the much more time-consuming final render, and all of the other bespoke tech the team has built for rigging characters, animating and rendering faces, processing, motion capture, or simulating hair slash fur, slash smoke, slash a thousand years of vegetation growth across an abandoned cityscape. As part of the deal, Unity will also acquire the massive catalog of digital assets that wedded digital has built over the years, a list of creations that is much, much too long to list. But think of everything from 3D models of cities or cars or people to the algorithms determining

how smoke works when it comes off a fire in the rain, to simulations of how a herd of animals might move together through the trees, all of which potentially could find its way into Unity's products for creators to build upon. That won't include recognizably clear IP Witten notes, so don't expect to be able to drag and drop Gollum into your next game, end quote. From Weta to Meta, again, meta is making some very on Facebook moves ever since becoming meta. Meta has announced it aims to remove ad-targeting options based on user interactions with content about health, race, political affiliation, religion, and more topics. Quoting the New York times. The move which takes effect on January 19 affects advertisers on meta's apps such as Facebook,

Instagram, and Messenger, and the company's audience network, which places ads in third-party apps. The Silicon Valley company said it was making the changes to limit the way that its targeting tools can be abused. In the past, these features have been used to discriminate against people or to spam them with unwanted messaging. We've heard concerns from experts that targeting options like these could be used in ways that lead to negative experiences for people in underrepresented groups. said Graham Mudd, a vice president of product marketing for META. Meta relies on targeted advertising for the bulk of its $86 billion in annual revenue. The company has excelled at giving advertisers a place to personalize promotions,

with brands often able to aim their ads at Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger users who are interested in topics as specific as LGBT culture or Catholicism. Such tailored ads often have a better chance of sparking a sale or prompting users to join a particular Facebook group or support an online organization, than more generalized ads. Meta's latest changes may be unpopular with the millions of organizations that rely on the company's tools to expand their audiences and build their businesses. Advertising on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger that is finally tuned to people's interests is often more affordable and effective than advertising on broadcast television and other media.

Those organizations include political groups and advocacy groups, many of which rely on the platform for fundraising. Last year, political campaigns and non-governmental organizations criticized Facebook when it temporarily removed political advertising from its sites around the presidential election. The restriction was lifted in March. Some campaigns said the move had benefited incumbents and larger organizations that didn't count on small donations through Facebook. Republicans and Democrats blasted meta's changes on Tuesday. Reed Vinias, a vice president of majority strategies, a digital ad-buying firm that works with Republicans, said in an emailed statement that the social network had gone from being, quote, the gold standard for political advertising to throwing

roadblocks between campaigns and voters. Quote, this decision is harmful to nonprofit and public affairs advertisers across the board and will result in fewer charitable donations, limited public debate, and a less informed public, he said, end quote. Finally today, Twitter Blue has officially rolled out to the U.S. for $2.99 per month. A reminder that this is Twitter Stab at a premium content service featuring scrolls, ad-free articles across more than 300-public. publications, an undo button, and most importantly for Twitter fans like me, a Nuzzle-like

Top Articles Roundup. Nuzzle used to be the one app that I used every day, especially to do this show. Quoting the Verge. Perhaps the most useful Twitter blue feature is an undo button, which lets you recall tweets before they send. I can think of a few times that would have saved me from an embarrassing typo. Other features in the initial launch included a reader mode for tweet threads, bookmarks folders, the ability to theme your Twitter app and app icon, and, as of last month, a Labs program that lets subscribers try out some new Twitter features early. But as part of Tuesday's expansion, Twitter Blue is about to get a lot more useful for people who love reading and finding news on Twitter. One feature lets people view ad-free articles on participating websites and gives

a portion of the revenue from Twitter Blue subscriptions to those sites. If you're a Twitter-Blue subscriber, when you come across the link from a publisher offering ad-free articles, you'll see an ad-free with Twitter Blue label under the headline. The feature builds off the company's acquisition of scroll, which offered similar functionality, and Twitter had said in October it would be rolling it into Twitter Blue. More than 300 U.S.-based sites are participating in the program, including the Washington Post, The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, the Hollywood Reporter, and Full Disclosure, The Verge. The Company says it hopes to include publications from outside the U.S. in the future. And Twitter says it doesn't change the proportion of money it gives to publishers if you subscribe to Twitter Blue

from iOS or Android, which take a cut of digital purchases. Twitter Blue's ad-free articles feature doesn't let you pass paywalls, Twitter says, so depending on the publication, you might not be able to read some articles even if you're a Twitter Blue subscriber. And unfortunately, ad-free articles aren't available on Android right now, and the company didn't share a timeline for when that might change. Disappointingly, you'll still see ads on Twitter even when you subscribe to Twitter Blue and don't hold out hope for an ad-free feed that will be arriving anytime soon, if at all. quote, we are not currently considering a Twitter ads-free product, Twitter senior director of product,

Sarah Bakeport said in a briefing. Ad-free articles aren't the only scroll feature making a comeback. Twitter Blue will now offer a Nuzzle-like roundup of the most shared articles from the people you follow, called Top Articles that updates every 24 hours. Twitter wound down Nuzzle when it bought Scroll, but committed to bringing core elements of the product to Twitter at some point. The roundup of top articles won't be an email like Nuzzle was. Instead, you'll access it on Twitter itself, though it's only available on Android and the web at the moment. A Twitter spokesperson said it will arrive on iOS, quote, very soon, end quote. If you'll recall, we did a Twitter space back in May, where we spoke to the scroll team

about the Twitter acquisition soon after it happened. If you're interested in more details on that, again, it's a bonus episode from May. The title is Tipjar, Base Camp, and Doge. Thanks all of you that reached out to try to help with my DNS issues yesterday. It actually turns out I had gotten things back in order. I just needed to wait a bit longer for the changes to propagate across the Internet. So again, a bit of a headache. That reminds me sometimes stuff just breaks. And so I should have more understanding when that happens to other folks as well.

But also super useful to have the Mutant Podcast Army in my corner sometimes for things like that when they happen. Thanks again. Talk to you tomorrow.