The Vergecast - Epic wins for Epic and Threads

Episode Date: December 15, 2023

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz discuss Apple responding to Beeper's iMessage for Android and the various other text-based platform news from this week. Sean Hollister joins the show to discuss his time covering the Epic v Google trial, and what we learned from it all. Further reading: The year Twitter died: a special series from The Verge Beeper vs. iMessage is a fight about how tech works — and who's really in charge  Apple responds to Beeper’s iMessage for Android: ‘We took steps to protect our users’ Beeper says Apple is blocking some iMessages, but there’s a fix Google Messages might let you edit texts after they’re sent  Threads is officially starting to test ActivityPub integration  Threads launches for nearly half a billion more users in Europe Adam Mosseri’s Threads account is rocketing up the Mastodon followed lists. An X outage broke all outgoing links, again Epic win: Jury decides Google has illegal monopoly in app store fight  Epic CEO Tim Sweeney: the post-trial interview  20 things we learned from the Epic v. Google trial The Apple TV app now looks more like an all-purpose streaming hub E3 is officially over forever  Opera’s gamer browser now has a ‘panic button’ for when you’re caught in the act Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello and welcome the Vergecast. America's number one source of Cybershack Wiper news. Breaking news on the VergeCast today, the Cyberstruck Wiper is one blade. It will cost $79 for a place. And the entire assembly, I believe, will cost 169-420.

I actually don't know the second one. That sounds right, though. I fully believe that. I was like, yeah, that sounds like accurate. Oh, God. What have we become? I'm your friend, Neelai. That's David Pierce.

having an existential crisis. Alex Kranz is here. I'm your friend that also believes that's the right price. It sounds right. I don't think you can price something at 420 cents. I just want to, there's a tell in there. You can.

You just like you put an asterisk next time. All right. Two things about the CyberTruck wiper before we begin the show. There's a lot to talk about. There's a huge week for low stakes Apple drama, I will say. Threads officially launched activity pub support in minor ways. We should talk about that. It's a big deal.

and then big news of the week, maybe the year, maybe the century, Google lost the antitrust case with Epic. Epic won the antitrust case against Google. Sean Hollisher was in the courtroom every day. He interviewed Tim Sweeney at the end of it. He's going to join the show. We're going to talk all about what happened there and what it means. And then, of course, we're not a lightning round. But let's begin with the cyber truck wiper, which is why do the most important news at the top. Which is why the people are here. So many, many, many people sent me Jason Camisa's video of the cyber truck on launch day. I think I've mentioned Hagridi in the channel before. This is like a great YouTube channel. Jason's really good. That video is very controversial because it is fawning. It is just a fawning look at the cyber truck.

And you can whatever. You can have whatever feelings about that in that video and that moment. Sure. In that video, he waves around a cyber truck wiper on his lap. it shows that it's one blade, but it's all flop. It's like, I just didn't want to, I couldn't engage with it. You know what I mean? Did you just almost say the phrase floppy blade and decide to run away from that?

Do you see where I'm at with it? Yeah. So the evidence that it was one single blade was there at the launch day when the videos from Marquez and Jason came out. And I think Motor Trend had one too. I just couldn't, I couldn't be like, this is what solved the mystery. I just, in my heart, do you know, do you know what I mean? A floppy blade can't solve a mystery.

I understand. I understand. After all this work, it's just a floppy blade. So then this week, and people are sending to me and I appreciate all the Cybertruck Wibert detectives out there. This week, the parts manual for the Cybertruck one online. Yeah. What's interesting about it is some people can see prices in it and we cannot.

Oh. So Omar Shakira and our staff has a Tesla 1 3, logged in with his account, can't see the prices. on Twitter, people are going through it, and they can see the prices. Hmm. There's a discrepancy there. We're digging into why. If you know why, please email us at firstcast at the ridges.com. But in there, Cybershop Wiper, single blade, $7.9, which in the grand scheme of luxury vehicle

wiper blades is not that high, but I would just ask you to look into your heart, imagine a triangle, and decide if you think the cyber truck wiper should cost as much as like a BMW M3 Wiper. You just tell me. I don't know the answer to that question. I mean a BMW? Yes, it should. Wow.

Same kind of person. Rough. And that's the Vurchast, everybody. That's Alextrans. It's Alex.crans. It's Alex.cransavarch.com. You all read idiots and cars on Reddit. You know what I'm saying.

Yeah. How much does the turn signal stock cost out of BN? All right. I do read it. Anyway, that's the Cybertruck Weber Nays. We believe based on the available evidence and it is a single floppy blade.

I don't know, man. You watch the video. There's a video of Marquez driving it through the rain and his video is really good. But you should watch them while. It's fine. Even though Jason one is really fun, though. The production value is very high. He's wiping and you can see it bending as it wipes.

And you're like, if anything, if there's something other than rain, for example, snow or ice, is the thing just, going to bend at the halfway point. I don't know, man. I don't know. It's like a scoop?

I don't want to review this truck at all. I understand there's four-wheel steering under it, and it's 48-volt. I understand it's steer-by-wire. There's technology. You can hit it with a hammer. Whatever you want. I just want to use the wiper. If anybody can hook, Alexis O'Hanian, I'm talking to you, bud.

One, can I meet your wife? Two, can I try your cybertruck's wife? This is once again getting into Milai's forever vision of reviewing cars without ever going anywhere in them. Like, me, I just wants to sit inside of a car that is not going anywhere and review it that way. Just push, push all the buttons sequentially. It would be great. All right.

That's the cyber truck update for this week. Once again, the Verge is your number one source of Cybertruck Wiper News. And it's all things. So listeners like you. Vergecast with Verge.com. All right. Big week for low stakes Twitter drama. Yeah.

Big week for low stakes Apple drama. Although I think if you're on Apple's security team, maybe this isn't solo sticks for you. David, tell the people what is going on with Beeper Mini and iMessage. Okay, so last week, you guys were on the pod talking about this new app, Beeper Mini, that came out from this company, Beeper, that if you listen to Vergecast, you've heard us talk about a few times. It's like a universal messaging app.

And they had come out with a new app called Beeper Mini for Android that made you completely seamlessly a blue bubble on iOS. Big deal meant you could send native IMessages to. iPhone users, it would fix your group chats. Like, huge win. Everybody got very excited. Apple didn't say anything when it came out. Has not really said anything over months about these apps in general.

Like, beeper's been kind of making noise about how it's hacking IMS for a while. Text.com is a thing that exists. Sunbird and nothing did that weird thing, not that long ago. Apple really hasn't said anything. And I and others on our team have been pestering Apple for weeks to say something about this. Like this, if Apple is the security focus. company it believes it is, it should have something to say about whether these are a good idea or not. We didn't hear anything for a long time. And then last Friday, right after you guys published

the Vergecast, because the news is a fun and fickle thing, it started to become clear that Beeper Mini was not working anymore. People couldn't send messages. And the ongoing assumption was that Apple had found a way to shut it down. The Beeper team starts like furiously trying to fix it. Eric Mijikovsky, the founder, is talking to everyone he can find who will listen to him about why Apple should not shut this down, why it's good for the world, why it's making things more secure even for iPhone users. On and on and on, on, on Saturday, as I'm sitting in the HyperX e-sports arena in Las Vegas waiting for the World Excel Championships, which is a thing I'm sure we will talk more about in the future. I get a note from Apple saying, finally, we have something to say. And basically what Apple did was confirm that they took steps to shut down Beeper Mini. And kind of without saying in exactly those words said they intend to keep doing so.

And that has sparked this whole fight where Beeper then spent the next few days trying to get back up and running. Apple seems to have kind of taken steps to shut it down again after I got up and running. Beeper got a version of it that was still functional but less impressive where you still had to use an Apple ID and you were only messaging from your email, not your phone number. so it's kind of a half measure. And basically we're now in this like cat and mouse game where Beeper is both like on principle and for the sake of its product, deeply committed to the idea of getting I message working. And Apple has made very clear that it is not going to allow that to happen. And it's perfectly possible that things will change eight more times between when I am saying

this and when you hear this podcast. But as of right now, that's where we stand. Like two sides fundamentally at odds and neither one really has even a move to back down. at this point. I mean, just read this statement from Apple, because I think it's fascinating. And again, this was sent to David while he was at the Excel World Championships, and he messaged me at what I believe was 9 p.m. on a Friday night saying, can you edit this? I'm in Las Vegas.

Just an incredible message to receive. All right, here's the whole statement from Apple. At Apple, we build our products and services with industry leading privacy and security technologies designed to give users control of their data and keep personal information safe. We took steps to protect our users by blocking techniques that exploit fake credentials in order to gain access to iMessage. These techniques post significant risk to user security and privacy, including the potential for metadata exposure and enabling unwanted messages, spam, and fishing attacks. We will continue to make updates in the future to protect our user. So this is a really interesting statement to me.

one, it exists. That's something. It's not nothing, right? People should know, this is worth saying out loud. I'm sure we have said this in the past, but like, we ask Apple to comment on things that happen in and around the Apple world all the time. And the vast majority of the time, we get absolutely nothing. Occasionally, we will get a, like, we declined to comment.

And then you get that, like, canned statement that Apple says every once in a while when they acquire a company that's just like, Apple acquires companies from time to time and just not generally a comment on the murder of acquisitions. So, yeah, the very existence of a multiple sentence comment from Apple is unbelievably unusual. So that's just one thing. Like the amount of pure signal from this statement existing is very high. Apple felt like it needed to shut this down. It felt like you needed to explain why.

And, you know, everyone knows about our background rules. We said put a name on it and they put a name on it. Great. then it explains how they blocked it, which is super interesting, right? There's a level of technical detail in here. They block techniques that exploit fake credentials in order to gain access to iMessage. I'll come back to that. Then it explains why Beeper is dangerous in Apple's view.

They don't have to do that, right? There's something in there where Apple felt like they have to say there are risks to security and privacy and what those risks are. Metadata exposure, enabling unwanted messages, spam, and phishing attacks. This is vastly more information than anyone actually needs, or that honestly that Apple is required. Like, these are their servers. You can feel however you want to, but one totally legitimate avenue for Apple to take here is to say, we lock down access to our servers or our servers go away. And Apple has done things like that a million times.

Yeah. Like we're having this conversation in the context of Epic v. Google, which was preceded by Epic v. Apple. You will recall Apple responded to Epic launching a in app billing system on iOS by shutting down access to Unreal Engine. Yep. Like this is not a company. It acts lightly when it acts. So I want to talk about the Y just really quickly.

And then I want to go back to the how, because the how is important, especially with how beeper is getting around it now. The why here, I think they have to say why, because there was demand for Beeper Mini. There were people, lots and lots and lots and lots of people were excited about it. They want this product. So for Apple to take it away from them, they had to provide some reasons for why it's being disallowed, why an experience is being broken, that people like. and people wanted, and those reasons have to be good.

And in general, when it comes to large companies and their servers, the thing they turn to is security. Yep. And the security argument might be valid. I'm just saying, in general, when they're like, what's a morally unimpeachable reason for doing whatever we want? The answer is always security. And so I don't know what the actual potential for metadata exposure is.

That's a weird one, especially because Apple right now is in a bit of crisis over the cops just asking for push notification data and getting it without warrants. Yep. That's a real problem in iOS. Apple's plugging that hole, changing as a policy, but that was a real problem. Like, if you're worried about metadata exposure, there's, there are bigger fish to fry. But this is really interesting, right? They're laying out metadata exposure, which is basically the cops asking for metadata

from companies that don't have the resources to fight back, click beeper, and then all this enabling it on watch itself. So that's the why. and you can you can evaluate the Y on your own, but big companies often turn to security, Apple turn to security. Then there's the how. We blocked techniques that exploit fake credentials.

So Beeper was coming up with what, fake serial numbers of... Yeah, they were using like, they were spoofing serial numbers that already existed for like Mac products, Apple. And this is the thing that enabled them to just register any phone number,

time message, right? You did not need an Apple ID. So now you do need an Apple ID. and it's tied to an email address, and I truly wonder if there is still a fake credential or an old serial number in the mix and whether Apple will be able to stop it.

Yeah, it's hard to know because I think Eric and the Bueber team have gotten maybe not surprisingly less open about how all of this works. They were very confident 10 days ago. They put out a whole big white paper about how the tech worked. A lot of it was open source.

They're like, this is what we did and how we did it. And the assumption was, they're only being this honest because there's nothing Apple can do about it, right? So that was like the line going around was, if Apple wanted to stop this, it would have to shut down a huge portion of I message. Turns out, not the case. So Beeper has definitely, like, locked down some of its explanation. But what it used to do in the early days of Beeper was just sign you into your Apple ID on a Mac Mini in a server rack somewhere. That is, in every way you can think about it, insecure.

Right? Like it meant it meant your messages and your Apple ID information was sitting on a computer that you did not own, like straightforward insecurity. What Beeper says now is that it's figured out kind of a good middle ground, how to take some of that on device encryption and added security in Beeper Mini and applied it back to to some extent the old way of doing things. It's not on a Mac Mini anymore. It's still on your device, but they're going. It seems like through the same old login through your Apple ID stuff. as they used to. So they found kind of a half measure that seems to solve some problems, but it screws up the main thing, which is it no longer works with your phone number. Like Eric has been texting me this week from his Gmail account, which is not the same as your

phone number. It's just not. And so Beeper Mini is like kind of a knee-capped version of what it once was, but it does seem to have, at least if you believe Beeper, and that is kind of the open question, is it is back in a lot of the right, security practices here, which is good. Yeah. The one thing that I think is fascinating about this entire ordeal, and then we should just move on because this is just going to be a catmouse game for a long time. Beeper is very confident in their technical solution, right? And that turned out to not be the case. And then now they're very confident in this technical solution. Maybe they'll get back to phone numbers and whatever. That is the technical side of this. Can Apple

defeat this exploit? Maybe they can, maybe they can't. Maybe it will be catmouse forever. It feels like it'll be catmast forever. There is a gigantic legal problem here. Right? Like, BEPR users and I are just accessing Apple servers without permission. And Apple has lawyers. I don't know if anybody

is aware of this. There's quite a few of them. They are not shy. And I think that this is probably, that's probably the last resort here. Again, just the presence of this statement indicates to me that Apple knows it has to explain its behavior.

and blocking this on a technical level, if they can't do that and they have to resort to a legal level or a contractual level, right, to say, okay, if you, on Real Engine, if you are using, if you're using our servers in an unapproved way, we're just going to turn off your Apple IDs. You're done. You're out. That's just a contractual thing they can do. You broke our terms of service. You're done. No more, no more access to your photos. They could do it, right? Other platforms do stuff like that all the time. Do you want them to?

Like, I don't think they want to do that to people. If they go ahead and sue Beeper for a violation of the computer fraud and abuse act, which is a very controversial statute, like that's not like a cut and dry. You're morally correct when you invoke the CFAA. Do you want to have that fight? Do you want to go to court again? I can send Sean to that courtroom, too. Story streams are great, you know?

I just think Apple would prefer to defeat this on a technical level. level, and I think Beeper would prefer to fight this on a technical level, there is a whole set of other levels that is vastly more complicated that Apple has not touched yet. And I'm actually kind of shocked. They haven't even sent the letter to Bieber yet. That's like, stop it. I mean, that to me is... They could have. They just haven't told us. I think I think Eric would happily publish that letter. Yeah, I agree with that. That would be out there. Well, I think on the one hand, I think the reason Apple hasn't done that yet is the thing that Beeper is holding on which is that people want Beeper.

Like I think if you just abstract all of this away, and it's like, okay, what should the world look like? Beeper's right, right? Like the, I want to live in a world where Beeper Mini exists. It is better. Interoperable messaging is better. Cross-platform messaging is better. The whole green bubble, blue bubble thing is stupid,

and we should do whatever it takes to get rid of it. I believe all of those things. I also believe Apple is absolutely within its right to shut it all down, right? Like both of those things are true. I think Apple has started to pick a public fight here that Beeper can make very ugly for it if it wants to. And Apple will fight those fights if it comes to it. It will pick a privacy fight in the court of public opinion or in literal court when it comes to it. But that's a pretty big battle.

And Eric and Beeper have proven they're willing to be very loud about this and they're willing to be very principled in their argument for an open Internet. And that's just a hard fight to fight if you're Apple without looking like the bad guy. Well, they have an obligation. Yeah. Because they kind of are the bad guy. They're allowed to be the bad guy. They're well within their right to be the bad guy. But they will look like the bad guy if they pick this guy.

But the Apple kind of has to pick it a little bit, right? Because it does have the regulators in the EU. It has regulators looking in the United States. And one of its big defenses for all of its really like kind of bad practices is that it's security, security, security. So anytime there is like these security moments, they have to do it. Otherwise, that argument falls apart in all those other places, right? Right. But I think the more aggressively and loudly Apple picks a fight with Beeper, the worse it's going to look doing so, right?

Because it's one thing to say, we're doing something to protect our users. It's another thing to say we are out to destroy this startup full of people who just want to make messaging better. Well, it's very similar to jailbreaking where, like, they weren't necessarily always going out and sending letters to jailbreakers. They were usually closing those holes quietly. And then people would get upset. And then they would just slowly start taking all of the good stuff from jailbreaking and put it into Apple. To the point where, like, nobody really jail breaks phones as often anymore because you don't have to. Like, you don't get anything of real value for the majority of people.

And it feels like that's kind of the same thing here where they can just, like, keep. keep making, like, if the solution for Beeper becomes, like, unwieldy enough, then Beeper goes away because nobody wants to just be sending text via their email. And Apple wins in kind of that similar jail break way of just like, well, if the other, if the option's crummy enough, do you really want to do it? And most Apple users are like, nah, I'll just go to Android. Totally. And we're kind of headed down that road now, right? Like, even the Beeper team has been tweeting as this has all gone back and forth. Like, we understand this is a pain. we get it if you want to bail while we try to figure this out.

Like, we will figure this out. Like, they're clearly feeling the hit of how complicated Apple is making their lives. Yeah. But at the same time, Elizabeth Warren is out here tweeting about beeper and what is happening to green bubbles and blue bubbles, which is like hysterical. This might be a fight coming for Apple in a way that it doesn't want and is probably not likely to try and look like the heavy on more than it has to. I don't know.

I don't think this is anywhere near over. Yeah. My guess would be Beeper Mini never gets back to being what it was, but this fight gets louder and uglier in other directions, and I have no idea where it lands. That feels right. Yeah. I get the feeling that Apple is going to just end up leaning on RCS support

to solve all these problems, right? This is why they're doing it. They basically made this horse trade with European regulators. We're going to support RCS, and you're not going to make us open up my message in exactly the way that Beeper is trying to open up my message. And eventually they will kill Beeper. It just seems like the question is whether they can do it on a technical level or whether they have to resort to the more aggressive legal level.

I think the fact that they already conceded the RCS question means that they're not going to hesitate to kill it. They're going to maybe hesitate in how fast they kill it and probably assume that they will do it on a technical level with what feels like an unimpeachable security rationale. rather than a legal level in what feels like a you know, much less fun business rationale. Yeah. This thing preserves our lock-in,

right? That's the answer. Yeah. Like we have the emails from Eddie Q to Phil Schiller where Eddie Q is like, we should open up I message to Android and Phil Schiller's,

I believe it was Phil Schiller. It was Phil or Craig writes back, this is the thing that parents hand down their iPhones to their kids for. Yep. So no. And that's just like, dead on as,

it gets. And a lawsuit based on that seems way less fun than a bunch of engineers fighting. Alex, by the way, to your point about jailbreaking, a huge number of members of the jail, a huge number of the jailbreak community was Apple engineers. Oh, really? And I think there's a, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think Apple knew this. There was, there was a lot of, yeah, there are some, there are some stories in the gashigays, but we'll set those aside. That's what I'll say. I don't remember how off the record stories are. That's what I'm trying to tell you. They're so long ago that I don't remember if they were secrets or not. But it is true, just on its face, if you go back and dig through it,

a substantial amount of the jailbreak community was reliant on Apple engineers, which is fascinating. So, Beeper, that's your answer. Yeah, jailbreak the iPhone. That's your answer. All right, Let's talk about other messaging news, which is much more exciting, but also about interoperability, which is activity pub had a big moment today. Massadone had a big moment today. Threads had a big moment today. David, what's going on there? So the biggest thing that, well, two big things happened to Threads this week.

One is that it's now available in the EU. So to everyone who has gotten a bunch of new followers putting U's where there should just be O's. That's why there's tons of those people. And the other thing is Mark Zuckerberg kind of out of. nowhere posted on threads that threads is now starting to integrate with activity pub in a very small way basically you can now read threads posts from a couple of accounts it's like adam miserie and a couple of other meta people right now but ultimately it'll be everybody who's on threads you can read their posts on mastodon or in any other activity pub app like that so this is this is the

first real step in federating threads with the rest of the activity pub universe. And for months, there's been this debate. Is Threads ever going to do this? Now that they see it's such a big potential business and it's so successful, maybe they'll walk away. And they have said over and over and over, like, no, we plan to do this for real. And it appears that work is like very seriously underway. People are starting to see Adam Masary's threads posts in their Mastodon clients, which is kind of mind bending in the coolest way. Like, it's happening. It's the best. Yeah, he's at Maseriot at Threads.com. I followed him from my a mass son social account using the mammoth app.

And then I opened my regular Massadon client and looked at my account and it was there. And I was like, oh, this is the future. Yep, that's it. That's the stuff. Like, I'm using multiple clients to access one account and content from another server entirely that is owned by meta is showing up here, including a video, right? The first thing you post shows a video. Yeah.

And then a bunch of other threads folks, including their engineers are posting like little jokes. Like, it went from 4-4 to 200. And you can tell, they're just like playing with it. Now, the cool stuff is not there yet, right? Like, this has been enabled on the level of what you might think of as RSS right now. Yeah, that's right. So they publish something on the thread server. Another server can pull it in.

There's no interactivity. There's no true interoperability. Right. You're just kind of pulling some content down. Right. That's still a big deal, right? And for a company like meta to be like, we will publish a syndicated feed of content from our platforms, our social platform. Still like a big deal.

Right. But it's not the thing. thing. Well, and the beauty of it is this is the part that meta has the least incentive to do, right? Like, all of the rest of it is better for meta. Like, the thing where in theory, like you described, you can read Adams posts on threads in your Macedon app that is a third-party app. What meta wants and what's ultimately good for meta's business is when you can like or reply to that stuff and it funnels all the way back through that whole stack to threads. So Adam can be in threads and you can be in mammoth and you can have a conversation with each other. That's where all of this wins. So you wouldn't do the thing where you just let your content go other places without real commitment to building all the stuff that brings it back and all the account sharing stuff they're going to want to do because it'll bring people to threads because threads is the best platform for it.

Like, this is not the one part of it you would do if you weren't committed to doing the rest of it. Yeah. And I agree with you. I think what I had to point out is the other part's way harder. Building RSS feed is pretty easy, right? Way hard. The part where you're like, okay, someone hit like. in Mammoth or Ivory or whatever,

Mastodon client that like funneled to their server, which then talked back to our server, and that like showed up in the Threads app for somebody. That's very complicated. There are real security challenges there. There are real content moderation challenges there. It's not just likes. It's also comments and replies, reposts.

Like all that stuff, as you bring it back onto your server, you have to moderate it, you have to care about it, whatever. And I think that's the stuff that's, to build, but you are correct that that is the stuff that accrues value back to meta, because it makes their community ultimately more vibrant. And I think what meta thinks it's going to sell is better product design, better user experience, better advertising, all this stuff, which, you know, if you're meta, it's a pretty good bet to make that you will outdo a handful of Mastodon server admins on things like content moderation and advertising integration. Yeah, it was

really interesting. I went back and when I was writing the post about this was just pulling some of meta's old quotes about this stuff from the last six months or so as they've been talking about this. And they've been surprisingly consistent in a way I didn't even realize. Like Mark Zuckerberg in particular has talked about this as a creator play. The idea is that this network of open systems is what creators are going to want because they've understood too many times that if you build an audience in one place that is captive to that one place, people will eventually leave or that place will fall apart or whatever and then you have to start from nothing. And nobody wants that. And so what Mark and Adam Maseri have continued to say is the future is these more portable, more interconnected systems. And what meta is betting is that it can build creator tools, right? It can build the best stuff to use to post. It can build the best AI things. It can like bring Tom Brady into your life in a weird AI way. It can monetize you better. Like meta is actually sort of divorcing the idea of social networking is a good business, which it turns out it's not. Everybody has figured this out. And

leaning into, we're going to outsource all of the, like, hanging out with your friends' bits of this, and we're just going to win at how people make money on these platforms. And I actually think if I'm meta, that's a pretty good bet, because meta has proven over and over, it's better at that than everybody. Yeah. And I think it also creates opportunities for those creators or media companies in different ways. Like, everyone knows what I, we're going to do it somehow. I don't know how we're going to do it. But if you keep saying it, it'll eventually happen. I'm just going to horsepower this thing into existence. Look, we had it.

I'll just give you some inside baseball. Our company had it all hands today just before we're recording. And our CEO said the word Fediverse during the all hands. And I was like, I did it. He did kind of say it like it was written on a piece of paper in front of him, but he'd never seen it before. Like I was standing behind the curtain with a knife. You know, like, say it. That just means I've said it enough than other people think they should say, which was Victory One.

But I'll just use another example. threads lately has been very thirsty for sports threads yeah i don't know this they they start out they are a bunch of f1 fans over there so they even in a series video about launching in europe today he's like we want to bring sports communities are deeply rooted in europe like f1 yeah which is an amazing way to say f1 is kind of fussy um they did a whole thing with the NBA at the in season tournament the other thing that was happening in videos while i was there they were like they were a big sponsor they brought in all the espn people esPN's having this fight with with elon musk and and twitter so they're all come, like, it's a, it's a thing that's happening.

So if I was running ESPN today, I would not be like, you can have my reporters for free, right? Yeah. Woge is not going to tweet scoops for free on threads the way that he's been doing for Twitter. I'm setting up a Mastodon server and you can federate with us if you pay us the money for access to the people. And that is just a new way of thinking about these businesses that it, I, you know, a bunch of media executives, like, don't like thinking anyways. They're like, what if we make YouTube videos? Like, that's like how they all think. Um, if you heard of this platform, it's called TikTok, like, these are the dinners I go to. But they are all starting to think now, okay, how do we

actually get paid for the stuff beyond just being like, we can make it go viral better than anybody else? And so there's just new opportunities for companies, for creators to stand up their own services and say, look, if you want access to us, like, we need some revenue sharing terms, or you need to let us put advertising into our feeds. The same way that you let Instagram creators put advertising into their feeds. And I just said, I don't know if any of that's going to work. I truly do not know if any of that's going to work. I know that it's new.

And no one has actually like, I can't point to anything else that has ever worked like that. And I can't point to anything else that could work like that. And so, like, new things are just like fundamentally exciting to me because I think the way it shakes out will be different or potentially better or potentially way worse. but it's new. I'm just on the hunt for new. Like we've been doing it the platform way for like 10 years. We just ran our big package on Twitter being dead, which I don't know if people caught, like Twitter is dead.

It's not that we called it dead. Elon Musk killed the company and he renamed it X. Linda Yakorino was on our stage of code and she's like, Twitter is dead. It's called X now. Okay, Twitter's dead. This is whatever. But inside of that, I wrote a big piece. about just like what the platform era of media did to all of us.

And just Ezra Klein is in that. And we talked about it on the Wednesday show. But I just repeat this. He's like, Twitter increased the scale of our communication. And it reduced our ability to communicate. And what if we just like did some other stuff? And I promise you this,

activity pub stuff. It's at least the thing that creates the opportunity for people to think in new in different ways. It might not be the thing. It might not work. But I just have not seen so much. many people having new ideas about the internet in a long time. What about social media in particular?

But I kind of have one big question about this whole integration. What happens for people who have like a lot of followers on Macedon and also have a threads account? What do they do? So this is, I would argue, one of the most fun conversations about this right now because no one knows the answer to that question. Because there is a way of thinking about it that is like I have one. omnibus Fediverse account, right?

That it is my, it would be the equivalent of having one account that worked across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and everywhere else, right? Your single account, you can actually make a really good case that that doesn't make any sense, that actually what you're going to want is a couple of different accounts in different places, and that the upside is that you choose where you post and to what. And so, like, you could use your Macedon account for just, like, tweeting about the cool new glasses that you got. And your threads account could be your work account.

and that maybe those things being separate is useful, but the upside of it is that if I want to read your work account where I have my personal account, I can, right? So it's all sort of platform agnostic, but there may be a world in which people want lots of different accounts for different uses. But that just gets bonkers. Like, oh, I have 10 accounts for 10 different things,

but you can access any of them from anywhere. It's like the UI of that totally falls apart if we don't do it correctly. So I don't know. guess would be, if I had to bet on something, I would guess that a lot of people will get Threads accounts because Threads is going to be, it's going to be the Gmail of this space for a while. And then it'll just be sort of the default one to have. And then we'll get to see how it plays out in lots of different directions. But right now, like I think a lot of us we've talked about as

on the show, we sort of bet on threads, betting, A, that it would eventually integrate with Activity Pub, and B, that it was probably going to be the biggest platform for a while. And there are real values to being on the biggest platform. So like, I've spent more time on threads than Mastodon. So when it comes to it, I will probably end up investing more in my threads account over time than my Mastodon account. But will I keep the Mast... I don't know. This is also weird. And this is why it's fun. To Nila's point, like, this is a new thing we've never actually had to figure out before. I've been talking with other friends about this too, because like I don't, I never really used Mastodon. I've got like an account there, but it just is like a placeholder

more than anything else. But I know people who are like very, very active on Mastodon. And as they started seeing threads getting bigger, they're like, okay, I'll go start an account there. So now they're active on both. And one, how do you have the energy? Yeah. But two, like, I was like, well, what's the calculus then like when this all interacts? Do you maintain both accounts? You kill it?

And they're like, I genuinely don't know. I don't think anybody does. Yeah. And I don't know. Yeah. I think there's some real value to having different places for different things. 100%. Uh, and I agree with you.

I do not know how people are like being goblins on blue sky and then being whatever LinkedIn version of themselves there on threads. Also goblins. Different kind of goblin, but still pretty goblin. They were in like a little tie on, on threads. Um, but like I can see a world again, I don't know if any of this would work. I don't know this is a good idea. I don't know if you know if we can build any of this.

But I can just see a world where my work personality tweeting about tech and silliness happens at, you know, Nilai at theverge.com. And you can follow that on threads. And that shows up in our homepage. And those are quick posts. And those got federated. And you can, you can just follow me where you are. And then tweeting about Aaron Rogers happens somewhere else.

Right. And that just seems better. And maybe, maybe you want to slam all that stuff together. Maybe some people will. But it just feels like for too long, we have just slammed too many things together. Right. And actually being like, okay, I've built one distribution channel for one kind of audience that I can cultivate and grow.

I can build another distribution channel for my friends or my family that isn't like a wholesale platform shift. Like, I'm this person on Instagram in the format of short videos. I'm this person on Twitter in the format of deeply snarky text posts. Right. Like, I'm the most nihilistic version of myself on Twitter. And I'm this person on threat. Like, that, having the format dictate what kind of thing you're doing, I think has forced just, it just caused a lot of weird shit to happen. Yeah.

And I think saying, okay, you can have lots of different feeds. You're a lot of different accounts. And you can, you're kind of format independent, but you're chasing different things. They get new. I don't know if anything that's going to work. Yeah. Well, I think I think that trips me up there is, you know, this kind of stuff, we've been doing more than one account for a while now, right? like Finstay accounts and stuff like that.

But what happens is people inevitably go and have that one account because that's where they have the most interaction. Yeah. And so like, are you really going to want to take your reckless at Green Bay Packers dot social account? And only use that when you have like 50 followers there who also have the same feelings about Aaron Rogers. I assume more than 50 people have those feelings. They do. But like is,

You know, are you going to want to do that? And then when you have this much bigger mouthpiece over here. And I'm just really curious how people are going to feel about that. I feel, I just want to say this now. And this is, I apologize. Is it about Aaron Rogers? I've given him even more attention. Let's talk about Jordan Love, or as I call him, Flaghart.

He's great. I need an account just for that, just to make Flaghart, flagged social. When you type Jordan Love's name into the iPhone to text your group chat about it, it replaces it with a Jordanian flag, you know. Heart icons. Now we don't just call them Fly Heart. We can make this happen together.

Jordan, if you're listening, and I know that you are. Alexis, can I meet your wife and Jordan Love and drive your truck? That's a road trip I would enjoy. I would go on that trip in a heartbeat. Just the weirdest more people in a cyber truck. Dead quiet. So two of you are world-class athletes. on us. Both of us were very active on Reddit when we were young.

Anyway, I'm excited about it. I think it's really fun. If you have a mass and I can just like, do it. Do the thing. Follow. Maseri's already the third most followed person in the Fediverse by one chart that I saw. Which is wild. Yeah. Follow some people on threads. Like, just try it out. Like it will change your brain a little bit. Right. It's like a follow button that you just don't expect to exist. And you're like, oh, this is better. Like, there's just something better about it being like, oh, I'm in much more control of this situation.

I don't know. I think it's going to be, I don't know what great, but it's going to be different, and I'm definitely in the market for different. Yeah, agreed. Same. All right. We've got to take a break. I'm going to come back.

Sean Hollister's and tell us all about Epic versus Google. We'll grab back. Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is an enterprise-grade, no-code website builder. used by teams at companies like Perplexity and Muro to move faster. With real-time collaboration and a robust CMS, with everything you need for great SEO, not to mention advanced analytics that include integrated A-B testing, your designers and marketers are empowered to build and maximize your dot-com from day one.

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We're back. Sean Hollister, welcome to the Vergecast. Thank you for having me yet again. I'm very excited to talk to you. You spent every single day in the courtroom for the epic v. Google trial. You were there when the verdict came in, which was very fast. What was it like a month was the whole thing, Sean? I spent a fortnight in Fortnite court because it was 14 actual days of Big and Court.

I know if Fortnite includes nights too, whatever. But yes, the trial lasted like four weeks plus like one day. We had Fridays off, but I spent 14 actual days in the courtroom. And on this last day, we expected the verdict might come in quickly for Google. And it came it quickly for Epic. And none of me, not myself, not any of the other courtroom reporters expected that. That was a huge surprise. So I just want to congratulate Sean here inside baseball.

Sean beat everyone by minutes, if not hours, to publishing the story of the verdict. So congratulations, Sean. Well, well played. The power of a pre-written stub. Don't tell the people how we do it. Sean wrote 65 stories for every possible outcome. Sean Hollister in the multiverse. It was four.

I pre-wrote four stories. So there's a version where Google wins, one where Epic wins, one where like The courtroom explodes. Yeah. And then one where the judge is just like, never mind, get out of here. All of you buy iPhones. Get out of my face. Exactly.

So Epic won. Runaway victory that Google found for it on every claim. That's the headline. Let's back up here. A lot of people are very familiar with Apple v. Epic in which Apple won on virtually every claim. There are some key differences in the trial. What were the, cases about and what were those differences? Oh my gosh. So I actually have an outline of the differences,

because this is the question on everybody's mind. How could Google possibly have lost this case when Apple, one, isn't Apple the obvious monopolist with the Waldgarden and everything like that? But a whole bunch of things that I'd heard and read told me that these were very different. First off, the lawyers for both sides were telling me before we began. These are logistically different cases with different evidences, different judges. The Apple verdict doesn't carry any weight here. And not only that, they were not able to bring up the Apple case in the courtroom. The judge said, you don't talk about this.

So carries no weight at all. The next big thing, of course, is that Google controls its ecosystem with all these third-party business deals, whereas Apple is its own OEM. There are more unfair-looking documents in more hands because Google had to, like, hand out all these contracts to these different companies. We'll just have to, like, send more emails with more attachments. Like, literally, it feels like that was a big part of this. Emails. Absolutely emails.

I'm just telling you, it's one word that means everything, and you can buy a shirt. We've known this for, like, ages now. We wrote a piece in, what, 2011, 2012, one of the first years of The Verge, about the Skyhook case where we saw how Google, tries to control the ecosystem through all these contracts. But so many of them came out in this moment. And so many looked unfair. And I don't know if, like, unfair would have swayed a judge, but I think it may have swayed a jury who looked at these, like, blatantly unfair. Spotify gets to pay, you know, nothing to Google to be in the Google Play Store while other companies have

to pay 26 or 30 percent. Like, that seems blatantly unfair. The jury saw that. They saw Google trying to keep it secret, and they didn't like that. Jury in front of a bench. That's one of the big things here. They saw that Google had a lot of things to hide, especially all of these chats between various executives that were being auto-deleted by the corporate policy at the time for document retention. The judge is like, what the fuck, Google?

You're supposed to keep the documents for us so that we can look at them in the courtroom, And Google was like, nah, we never change any of that stuff. So wait, can I just say one thing about this, actually? Because I was in court for USV Google when Sundar Pachai was testifying, and they brought this up to him, too. And he absolutely won that interaction, which was so fascinating to me because the case that he made essentially was there was this one thread that they brought up with him in which the last thing you see is him saying, can you turn off history, please? and so they turn off history, and that's obviously the end of the thing, because they stop storing it. So they bring this up, and they give Sundar this whole long spiel about, you know, you're destroying evidence, this is the disaster. And his response is essentially, well, did you find any more versions of that happening?

And they were like, how would we know? You deleted it? And he was like, well, you found this one because I asked them to turn off history. Did you find any other times rather than turn off history? And the lawyer goes, no, and that's the end. And Sundar just like victorious sits back. And that immediately went away in USV Google. And it was such a non-issue.

but in this one, it just kept being part of the trial. I want Sean to get into this. I just want to point something out that I think is often forgotten when we cover the legal system. One, we have an audience of tech people and people believe the legal system is deterministic. Like, it's an algorithm. Like you put in some inputs and you get an output and you can predict the output. Not true. I think we've learned over and over again in America over the past couple.

Not true. Almost completely random, especially when there's a jury involved. And then I'm a lawyer and I'm married to a lawyer and I have a lot of friends who are lawyers. So I'm just going to say this and we can all just react to it however we want. Some lawyers are better than other lawyers. And if you're epic, you can afford really good lawyers. And if you are the United States government, hire better. It's just, right?

like prosecutors like you you just see it i you know it's like i'm just like you can just react to that however you want but you can just see that some lawyers are better than other lawyers and there's that's a real difference in these cases for sure epic afforded some really good lawyers here i i was very impressed with how just how much and how often they put the witnesses on edge and and turned google's witnesses against google and all these things. I was surprised that Google's lawyers didn't have a better defense, but they were in a very difficult position here.

Because Epic spun this whole thing as this tale of good and evil with all of these unfair documents on the table. And Google was left to explain away all these complicated business deals, which might make sense and might have even convinced a judge, hey, this is just normal business practices. You've seen this in your courtroom a thousand times. But the jury hasn't. The jury hasn't seen all these unfair deals.

And Epic constantly, every Google executive that came under the stand, every Google witness that was there got grilled hard about their emails and about these deleted chats. You know? Oh, I love it. How will we ever know what's in your chats? You'll never know. So Sundar, though. The judge was willing to let Sundar pass the buck. Epic's lawyer was all like, you know, you agree that you're responsible for.

everything that goes on at Google, right? But after the jury filed out of the courtroom, Judge Donato was, you know, okay, okay, Sundar. I accept that you got bad advice from your lawyers, maybe, but I want the buck to stop with somebody. Bring your chief legal officer in the court. So the judge hauled in Google's chief legal officer for over, I want to say over an hour of questioning about how the heck this happened. and he did not look good on the stand. Google's CLO, Judge was not buying it. His name is Kent Walker.

Kent Walker, yes. Kent Walker, Google's attorney, who's, sorry, Epic's attorney, whose name is escaping me right now, but she was amazing. And she just, just completely threw him off balance. The judge double-teamed Kent Walker with this, with this attorney.

And like, you know, I don't understand this either. Can you explain those things you just said to me again, Mr. Walker? And he wasn't having any of it. And he ended the judge, Judge, almost one of the penultimate things that Judge Donato did in the case is he said he's going to personally investigate Google. For deleting all these chats and for abusing what one Google lawyer internally called fake legal privilege. We saw a whole bunch of documents during the case that were marked, you know, confidential and privileged. And Google executives, including Sundar Pichai, agreed that the only reason some of these things were marked confidential and privilege was so that they wouldn't be forwarded around the company internally and potentially fall into other hands. It's not a good sign when the judge vows to personally investigate your company after the trial was over.

So here's what I want to know, Sean. And then we can dive into some of the merits of the case. This was happening. The judge is furious about this. We talked about this a couple weeks ago. We're seeing all these documents. You wrote a great recap of all the documents, all the deals. The judge instructs the jury.

Like, you can interpret the lack of documentation and the hiding any way you want, which is a big wink, wink on how to interpret them. And yet everyone thought Google would win. Why? That's the part that does. Why was the vibe in the courtroom that Google would win quickly here? I think the vibe in the courtroom was that Google would win quickly here. I think the vibe in the courtroom was that Google would win because,

of the key question that we always ask in an antitrust trial, market definition. Google's been arguing since the very beginning of the case that whatever it did, it was justified because it does all these things so that Android can compete with the iPhone. And if you say the market definition here is iPhone versus Android, Android is competing with iPhone. Consumers are choosing to buy an iPhone versus an Android phone. how is Epic going to say, hey, Google, you have a monopoly on phones? Hey, Google, you have a monopoly on apps. Epic wanted everybody to think that Google has a monopoly on Android app distribution,

very specifically, and on Android and app payments. Where it kind of does. I mean, yes, there's a Samsung App Store, but Epic convincingly showed that Samsung's App Store accounts for barely any time compared to Google. Everybody wants to use Google. And that it's all of the... All of that is because of Google's abuse in the system, right? That Google has done the work to ensure that Samson and others can't play nicely.

That's the substance of it. I just, for one second, I just want to sit on why everyone thought Google would win. So I read that, right? Okay, it's market definition. Apple just won. Android is technically more open than the iPhone, even if contractually it is not more open, as we've learned. Of course, Google's going to win, right? The phone's more open on its face.

And in so many ways, too. I mean, yes, you can have your other app store in the phone, but you can also side load apps since the very beginning of Android. I was holding it my T-Mobile G1 phone. I would download an APK off the internet, and I would put it on there. I don't know if any of us would do that these days. Exactly. I don't know if anybody any of us do it these days

because so many things are on the Play Store already, and why wouldn't you go there? But, like, the idea that you can put an app on Android's phone, so many different ways you can't put on the iPhone, how could Google have a monopoly on Android app distribution? The other thing that I think is just sort of reverberating here. And I think we all noticed it was the lack of interest in the Google case compared to the Apple case. The Apple case was like a star studded, you know, our traffic charts are off the charts every single day. Google burbled along and Sean, you did a great job. Like a lot of people covered the Google trial by just following Sean

in the story stream, which is, you know, great. That's the service we provide. But we could see there was a different level of interest. And the thing that I'm honing in on is, one, I think everyone assumes that big companies will always win their antitrust cases, which is wrong. And then two, I think people thought it was boring. And it appears that the jury did not think it was boring, right? This is like the key thing that everyone missed is the jury was like, oh, this is pretty exciting and interesting and dramatic, actually.

Yeah. Not only was the jury paying attention throughout almost the intent. entire trial. We saw some yawns. When a couple of the expert economists came in and spent a while explaining, you know, basic market theories, there were a few yawns. But most of the time, they were extremely attentive. They were looking over at the person asking the questions. They were looking over at the witness to see what the answers were. They were looking at the judge. They were looking down at their monitors, looking at all the documents, trying to follow along with some of the slide decks. And they asked questions. Literally today, we got to see a few of the questions

that the jurors asked during the case. They wrote notes to the judge and said, hey, can you ask Google how many of the devices are in the RSA 3.0 premier tier, which, by the way, is the contract that decides whether a OEM can preload another app store or not onto a phone.

So they're like, oh, yeah, did Google actually keep anybody from doing that? They cared. So now let's get to the substance of it, which is the market. I think everybody thinks of the market is iOS versus Android. But here, I think what we are really talking about is Google runs Android.

It's a platform. It's open. Anyone can use it. And there actually is a market for Android app distribution. There are other stores. There are other ways to get Android apps on Android phones. There is not a market for iOS app distribution, which I think was a real problem for Epic. They couldn't argue that Apple was unfairly dominated market because no market existed.

Well, that's why that one became all. about payments, right? That was fundamentally the thing. And like the win that Epic got was the anti-steering stuff where you could start to tell Apple users that other ways to pay for things exist. But yeah, in that case, I went back and read a bunch of this and there's so much of it that it's like Apple was able to get away with so much because specifically it is so incredibly locked down. And Google, we thought Google's relative openness was going to be a reason it was harder for Epic to win. And I think it actually went the other way and gave Epic like a chance to make a case against Google that you just can't do because you have to pry open Apple as a company to do it,

and that's not going to work. I think that's absolutely right. We talked about this with the beeper stuff in the first segment, where Apple kind of has an obligation. Their whole brand is we shut everything down. We lock it down, and it wins them trial after trial. If you look at this and say, oh, yeah, if the minute Google started saying, well, sure, we have a monopoly here, but it's Android and we're competing against iPhone, Google was kind of trouble because that was never the argument the other side made. And they just kind of like,

it felt like almost they ignored the argument that Epic was making to be like, no, no, but see, we're competing against Apple. And it's like, well, why would you make that argument when you really can't bring up Apple that much here? And two, that's not what the people suing you are complaining about. Yeah. So when I was reporting on this case in the courtroom, what I did not understand until the very end. And I don't know if it's always this way, but what I didn't understand until the very end was who is going to decide the market definition and how in a jury trial. In the Apple case, the judge said, well, you know, Epic, we don't, we don't think it's about, you know, iPhone versus Android. It's going to be about mobile game transactions,

because that's what you're actually suing over, right? V-bucks and where people can buy them and how. and that meant that Epic had to be competing there with other game stores like Nintendo and Sony and Microsoft, where it already pays 30%. So why shouldn't you pay 30% here on Apple too? But in this case, the people who got to decide the market definition were the jurors. They got to write it in on the verdict form themselves. And they were steered by the jury instructions and by a lot of the case towards the idea that it would. would be Epic's chosen market definition of Android app distribution and in-app transactions, in-app mobile payment systems, I mean. And so when they were confronted with that, and the judge was very skeptical of any other theories. Like Google really wanted you to think that this was not only just about Apple versus Android, but also they had one of their expert economists come under the stand and suggest it was going to be about the facilitation of mobile transactions.

And the judge was not having it. The judge was like, isn't what you're saying? Doesn't that apply to any transaction on the internet? How does any of that have to do with mobile apps specifically? How do you get a job as an expert economist? You get paid so much money. Just be like, look at this chart. It means whatever who's paying me wants it to me.

It just seems like such a good and lucrative gig, right? Yeah, we heard like $1,600 an hour for this person. to be delivering their statements in court, $1,200 now for this person. And it was funny that... The chart is all used in the... Every time it was this back and forth between Epic and Google, I wonder if we can point out how much their expert is making. Let's just point out that they're biased.

Bit of a double-edged sword there. But just to be clear, the market on its face, because it exists, is Android app distribution? It is... There could have been a better-enricher Samsung app store, but Google paid some money. There was this idea that, what was it, Epic and Valve and a bunch of other companies, Activision Blizzard would start AppStores and compete against Google.

Yeah, they wanted to build the steam of mobile to compete against Valve, but Epic, Activision Blizzard, I think it was SuperZill, was going to be part of that. They were going to build a steam of mobile they claimed and put that on Android, and then, you know, you'd buy your games there, maybe. And then Google respond to this with something called Project Hug, where it just went and hugged people with money to make them not do it. That's a smooth move. That's what you want to do.

It's a hug. And you're like, is that getting a beat? Is it a weird? Oh, no, it's just cash. I thought maybe the jury would get that it wasn't exactly a bribe because it's all like these co-marketing arrangements. Here, we'll give you some Google ad credits. And here's some revenue sharing over here. And here's, you know, the only company that I think Google,

directly paid. It was like, here's money for doing the thing. It's just a bribe. Is Motorola and LG? But yes, I mean, it all comes down to it's harder for anybody else to build the thing

because Google is paying someone It's like bad bribe, but it's a prize. And this is why I think the fact that it's a jury trial is so fascinating because it's like there's a series of things in here, right? And I think Project Hug, which you just described,

and then the Spotify deal that Google gave Spotify where it essentially doesn't, actually can you just explain that really fast because I confess I got hung up on what the numbers are about here. But essentially, Spotify got a sneaky deal from Google where it essentially didn't have to pay anything

to be in the Play Store, right? That's it. I mean, Spotify, okay. Normally an app developer pays, what, 30% to be on the Play Store. They pay 15% for their first year or something like that. And then there's a 15% for subscriptions. There's a bunch of ways that Google discounts the rate. But some app developers said, we want to have our own payment system.

And Google first said, no, you're not going to have your own payment system. And then they said, well, maybe we'll do this experimental trial thing where some companies get their own payment system and we'll give you a 4% discount. And they called it something choice billing. So if you were on the choice billing, you'd have Spotify would theoretically have one system where it pays its 15% to Google for subscriptions. or it's 30% for one-time purchases, if that's a thing on Spotify anymore.

And then on the, on, if it wants, if Spotify wants to use its own payment system, it would get a 4% discount on that. So 11%. Which is nothing. And like, this came up a bunch, right,

that like by the time you pay another payment processor, you're going to be back at 15%. So you might as well just get to Google because it's simpler. So like that's not a deal at all. Google calculated to be paying more than that 4% to get your own payment system. They thought it wasn't even going to be a choice.

So it's a fully fake deal. They have been money. Completely fair. Okay. But what we learned is Google, Spotify secretly had an arrangement to pay not 11%, but 0% when it used its own bill. Which is a deal. And that's quite a deal. But Google isn't offering that to anyone else that we're aware of.

Google also said, hey, Netflix, you don't want to pay 30% anymore or 15% anymore. You can pay 10%. I want to pay 10%. Netflix said no. We're going to just bypass the store. we're not going to let you buy thing, buy your subscription to Netflix through Android. You'll go buy it on the web.

You'll buy it somewhere else. We know you'll find it elsewhere. That's like when one monopoly hits another monopoly. Like Netflix is like, what are you going to do? You're not having Netflix? Yeah. We're not paying you money to sign up for Netflix. No, you'll just have it in both.

That's Netflix's approach. Here's my question. That is also what Spotify said. What are you going to do? Just not have Spotify? Yeah. And Google said, okay, you can pay nothing. And at what point, at what point, Google said they were going to do this to us if we didn't give them a deal.

I didn't realize at that point that it was a 0% deal. I thought it was, you know, maybe they get 6% or something. Zero percent. What do you do at that point if you're Google? Do you say, okay, you get the special deal? Do you say, let's treat everybody fairly like we pretend we're going to do and make that real and just give everybody the 0%? So Google has to make the deal because. there's the other there's the out right apple just says we're going to not have Netflix which is

fascinating like their view and it's played out in different ways for Apple in different platforms so on the iPhone they're like we just want to have Netflix and everybody caves like the idea of not having your app on the iPhone completely out of bounds Apple tries to pull the stuff with the TV app on the Apple TV and Netflix is like, no, we're just, no, what are you going to do, not have Netflix? But at the same time. And Apple's like, okay, you don't have to put your Apple TV. Can you sign up on Netflix through in-app purchases? I don't think so.

Netflix has held pretty fast on that stuff. And there's, but the thing is, there's only a handful of companies that can get away with that, right? Like, I'm actually surprised Spotify rises to that level for Google or anybody. But like, I think if I'm Google, my worry is like, okay, Spotify's not in the play store. Spotify's going to be in the Galaxy store. And you know what? like a hell of a lot of people might do to get Spotify on their phones is open the Galaxy

store. That's what I mean. There's a market there. They have an out. They can go and say, open this other app store. We're going to partner with Samsung directly and preload Netflix on the phone in a way that Apple is just like, no. No other choices shall exist.

And Sean, you interviewed Tim Sweeney right after the trial and I thought this was the most important thing that he said. He said, I wish Apple wasn't so clear cut on what you. you can't do. And I think the exact words he used were, thou shalt not have another app store. And it's like, oh, that's why you lost against Apple. Because there wasn't even the possibility for Apple to unfairly foreclose. Right. Like Google's like, oh, there's all these outs they can take. It might result in some fragmentation. You can assign noble intentions to Google here, by the way. You can say Android had a big fragmentation problem. You don't want all these different ways to get

apps, especially the big apps. Like, if you get a new. phone and to get Spotify and Netflix and TikTok, you need to download three different app stores. This is a bad outcome for Google. It's a bad outcome for users. I think it's important to remember that we at the verge spent several years writing reviews of Android phones where we were like, I wish this just had pure stock Android on it instead of layers of blood. Bone stock, I believe.

Bone stock. That's right. That's right. Like I want that for my phone. Motorola testified on the stand that it helped. them cell phones. Like, I get why Google wants to crack down in fragmentation. We've written the editorial eight times here at the verge.

And these contracts are how it does that. But these contracts have also helped to make the Google Play Store a profit center for the entire company that makes ridiculous billions in revenue, would be a Fortune 100 company all by itself and has a 72% or something like that profit margin. Yeah. And by the way, one way you could cut down in fragmentation is by being more competitive. Right. Like this is actually like really interesting. Make better phones. Right.

You can make a better phone. You could make the pixel really competitive. Like there are a million ways to do it. And Google chose to do it by taking a bunch of money, firing it into the market and making sure that no other competitors existed. Which, by the way, David, to come back to DOJ versus Google is exactly what they do in the search market. And I don't know how that case is going to go.

but the parallels are right there. The parallels are right there. And I think the difference, like, back to the thou shalt not thing, like, you can accuse Apple of many things, but you cannot accuse Apple of being inconsistent, right? Like, it is, it has been what it has been for a very long time. And you can dislike it, but I think one of the reasons Apple keeps winning is because it just keeps saying the same thing. And it's not unclear about what you are signing up for when you buy an iPhone.

And when that happens, it might be different. Google, on the other hand, I think the sketchiness of all of these deals, I think really worked against Google, especially in a jury case where like you can you can sort of talk yourself into somebody as being like reasonable things that reasonable businesses do. But like there's no question that they just feel gross. And I think to a jury, especially over time, and I wonder how it felt even just sitting in the courtroom. Like my sense was even just like following your stuff in the story stream, Sean, like you kind of got more and more of like a. ick over the course of the trial watching all of this go down. And you just go from thinking like, oh, Google is a company that makes deals to insured to just being like, this just sucks. And I think like, I get the sense everybody sort of felt that over the course of four weeks.

Yeah. I think maybe I was a bit of a proxy for helping our readers live vicariously in the position of the jurors. So they could see it kind of like that. If you were in the courtroom, would you feel the same way if you were one of the people, the nine jurors making these decisions? I do want to challenge what you said earlier about Apple being consistent. It has been, compared to Google, incredibly consistent. But Apple made sweetheart deals over private email, too. I mean, Netflix had a unique relationship with Apple to do a 15% revenue share, which was not enough for Netflix, and Netflix eventually did go its own way. But they did try and broker that similar kind of arrangement. That's true. There were a number of things like that that we saw back in the day.

But not at this trial, because you weren't allowed to stay. I don't talk about Apple at the trial for the most part. Exactly. Yeah, but we had another trial. Alex, you're going to say something. No, no. I think mine was just an anecdote because I was like reading all of your coverage, Sean, and a friend of the family is a former judge.

And I'd be like, okay, I have a question for you as a former judge. If someone has been going out of their way to like hide a lot of documents and stuff to the point that it keeps coming up in trial, how would that case probably go for them? And that friend was like, not well. Just as a judge, don't do that. And then there was also a bunch of proof that they were doing these sweetheart deals. And like, other people do it, but they were doing it. And they're like, no, you're kind of boned in that respect.

They used more polite terminology there, but they were very much like, oh. Like it was, I think for anybody who wasn't kind of in that tech space and had seen the Apple case, but it has like any kind of grasp of this stuff, it was just like, Oh, no, Google was going to get wrecked. Like, you can't piss the judge off that much and expect to win generally. Yeah, where the judge is like, I will personally investigate you. That was a long night for Google's lawyers. Like, a lot of McAllen was concerned.

That's what I think Google's lawyer strength. Two things that I want to bring up. One, Alex, to your point, I think having the jury, you know, there's that phrase, like, you don't want to know how the sausage is made. And I think a lot of judges are like, oh, that's some soft. sausage. Yeah. And then Drew's like, this is gross. Like, I'm never eating a hot dog again, right? Like, I think there's just that element of it. And then I think in this, Sean, I kind of want to to bring this together and wrap this up a little bit. There's just the element that all

business works like this. And if you just like see how it happens, like maybe that's bad. Right? Like Google's an advertising company. And they do a lot of deals. And they're really good at making sharky deals. And that version of Google is very different than the version of Google. It's like the new Google doodle is in different colors today. Right. Like they maintain that quirky, silly image. And then the back end of Google is a sharky advertising company.

And when you see it, it's like really bad. And there was one moment that I still think is the most fascinating where Tim Sweeney and Sunopachai met for settlement. And they couldn't get there. and you talked to Tim about it, he wouldn't tell you about it, but the specifics. But it seemed like Google tried to make another deal for the last minute, and Tim said no. That's what, that's certainly what Tim Sweeney was implying. He certainly implied that Sundar tried to offer me personally something again. And frankly, to your point about like, maybe this is just how the sausage is made, business deals happen like this.

The judge also thought that Epic might take its own. own deal. In the courtroom, after the jury had gone home for the day, Judge Donato was like, hey, Epic, Google, have you tried settling yet? And when Epic's attorney, lead attorney, said, no, we haven't actually really tried that yet, he was like, what are you asking for? And Epic went off on some like, we want this for us and all developers. And the judge came back with, well, Spotify got this special deal for itself. I'm sure you could get that special deal. I'm sure you could get that special deal for yourselves, too, go talk about it. And so the judge was under the implication that this wasn't going to be a blank thing for all developers. Maybe Epic should go get a special

deal for itself. Yeah. By the way, most cases settle. This is a thing we should note. Like, 70 or 80 percent of cases settle. And judges want the cases to settle. Right. The idea is that the American legal system should not resolve conflicts between two right priorities themselves. You should go work it out. And that's fine. So I think the judge has to say that. But like the idea that He asked Epic, what do you want? And Epic responded with some potentially self-serving, but yet very idealistic screen. Perfectly in character. Yeah.

Well, and that's actually totally in character. That was the other thing I was wondering, Sean, is for what, three years now, Tim Sweeney has been trying to kind of white knight his way through all of these processes. Like he really wants to be seen and have Epic be seen as the good guy here, right? And he even said to you, he's like, we would never take a deal. We're doing this. For all developers, we've always. We've always done this for all developers.

Even when Google offered us a deal, we said, no, we want to do it for all developers. He dug up an email that they offered the deal that he didn't want. But then he sits on the stand and is like, yes, if this happens, we're probably going to make billions of dollars. Okay, so a little story about that. A little story about that. I thought that maybe Tim Sweeney is just that kind of personality where he walks up there and he doesn't necessarily know what he's saying is truthful, but maybe not the best thing to be seen publicly saying.

Maybe, maybe this just kind of came out of him. Just testifying on vives. Maybe he just came out of him that he's laughing about how he could make billions of dollars by paying Google nothing. But no, but no. I ran into him later in the hallway. I think it was the next day, because by the way, he's been there every single day of the trail, save one.

I ran him to the next day, and he walks up to me and he says, you got the number of exclamation points right. And he's referring to this post where he's laughing about making billions of dollars off of Google. Interesting. How many exclamation points was it? Just one, actually. But one for that phrase and another one in another sentence. Awesome. It's awesome that he could avoid paying Google anything.

So one there and then one for the billions of dollars, two exclamation points total. So is Tim Sweeney still the white night? for all developers everywhere. Like, at the end of this, if, as they appear to be winning this fight, which will get appealed and God only knows, but like, does he still seem like the champion of all developers, or do he just, like,

line his pockets and laugh all the way to the bank? God, I don't know. I feel like a question in the back of my mind for three years now has been, does he actually think he'll ever win any of these lawsuits all the way through appeal? Or is he doing this to grossly embarrass me? Google and Apple because all of these documents and contracts are coming out and because he's decided

he wants to personally make his company's wealth go towards this this effort. Which by all accounts would not be out of character for Tim Sweeney. Like I've never met the man, but everything people who know him say makes that seem like a perfectly plausible explanation. Absolutely. Yeah, like a very funny Tim Sweeney fact is a, you know, we have like lots of ideas, but on the record, not the record in the background.

Tim Sweeney only talks on the record. That's just the thing. He just, like, won't. He won't even entertain the idea that he should talk to you in background. That's him coming to us. That's usually the other way around. And I know people have, like,

lots of issues with him as a personality and, like, what Steam does and whether, not Steam. I know people have, like, a lot of issues with Epic and what Epic does and whether Epic is ruthless on the PC and when they're buying exclusives from the Steam, like, whatever. But I do think there's an idealism there.

Like, it's actually, a really interesting thing for a company of Epic size to be idealistic or to have a CEO who's idealistic? Like most CEOs are like Sundropatrya offered me billions of dollars. He even tried to be idealistic about the billions of dollars thing. I mean, the very next thing that happened was in that moment. He said, I think it would be billions of dollars. It'd be awesome if I could avoid paying Google anything. Google was very satisfied with that. And they said, pass the witness. Epic came back on and Epic said, you know, so why do you want, you know, where do you think

you get this same kind of deal where you avoid paying anybody else anything? And he said, that's how it's been on the PC with Windows. That's how it is on the Mac. You can put apps on there and not pay somebody to put your apps on there. So he may believe that this is part of the idealistic thing that he's trying to do. And I think that he has supporters who also believe that. I'm not quite sure which side I'm on of that. Yeah, I think that's an open question, especially because what's going to happen next is both of these cases are on appeal.

And I don't know if this is true. This is just my interpretation of the Apple case. I think the judge ruled the way she did in the Apple case to set up an appeal, right? There's a reason that the judge in California felt very comfortable saying the state law in California allows me to do a prohibition. prohibition on anti-steering. But the federal antitrust law does, I'm not going to, I'm not going to run into that fight. I'm going to let a higher, I'm a trial court judge. I'm not going to reinterpret the antitrust law of the United States. I'm going to kick that upstairs because she knows this appeal is coming. So that has always been my read of that. I think she's a very savvy judge.

She developed a trial record. She kicked it upstairs. This judge had a jury. The jury doesn't give a shit about being overturned out of appeal. You know, like it's a different case, the facts are different, the markets are different. Both cases are going to get appealed. Sean, based on your talk with Tim, you're covering the trial, what do you think Epic is doing next year? I think Epic is still going to wait, quote, unquote, a little bit because we have until the second week of January before Epic's lawyers and Google's lawyers come back together and say, hey, judge, what is actually going to happen now that Epic is one? Because we don't know what the judge can or will actually grant Epic now that the jury has said, yes, there is, you know, this is an illegal monopoly as far as we're concerned.

So there's that. Tim was like, oh, yes, we'll keep fighting everywhere. We've got all these other cases going on around the world. They're waiting. I think there were a couple of Australia cases that were kind of on hold because they wanted to see what was going to happen in the U.S. before Australia weighed in. Classic Australia. And, of course, the Apple one is being appealed.

They're both sides, both Apple and Google, are hoping the Supreme Court will take up the Apple decision, which has already been through the appeals pellet level. We'll see. We have another year of sending Sean to courtrooms. I'm so sorry, Sean. Potentially in Australia. I haven't wanted to visit Australia for a while.

Certainly is beautiful. All right, we got to take a break. We're going to do a whitening around. Support for this show comes from What Not. Whether you're selling online or out of a storefront, you already know the challenge. You're simply hoping for people to find your listing or waiting for them to walk in.

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com. That's cloud.a.ai slash vergecast. And check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude.a.ai slash verge cast. All right, we're back. Sean, sticking with us for the lightning round. Sean, you're the guest of honor, even cooped up for a Fortnite and Fortnite court with Tim Sweeney. One of the best headlines we've run in a while, by the way.

A Fortnite and Fortnite court was going. People got mad at us. They're like, you're too gleeful about Epic women. I'm like, the company's name is Epic. What are we supposed to do here? There's not a journalist in the country or world that can stay away from Epic victory in this moment. What are you talking about?

Epic win, epic victory. For a while, I read the Apple case. It's the name of the company. Yeah, it's not even, like, anyone who's reading that as an adjective is wrong. Epic, Epic win. It's a fact. Can you imagine the other way? Google win.

Google victory. People just start searching. What did they win? Bard's like, I don't know. Can't tell me. During the Apple case, we called the judge, Epic Judge. Fairly often, that was fun. Yeah.

That's very good. All right, Sean, you're the guest of honor. You get to go first. What's your lightning around item? Opera's gamer browser now has a panic button for when you're caught in the act. Oh, boy. I knew you were going to pay this. Oh.

And I don't want to talk about the panic button. I want to talk about how opera has a browser that has to go to these incredible, ridiculous gamer-centric extremes in order to differentiate from Chrome, the dominant browser, because nobody else can compete. We've just been talking about Google competing with things. Like, no, this is, but this is the competition. This is. You need a browser that can set limits on CPU and GPU usage so you can keep gaming

at your full frame rates and that has a panic button. So if someone walks in while you're gaming. It's very resource intensive. And there's a little known feature in Opera GX where if you die, hopefully you pressed the button that told it to delete all your history so that they won't save things that you were looking at when you press the panic button. My favorite thing about this is that when you press F12, which jumps you out of whatever you're doing into a quote-unquote safe tab, one of the options they give you is to go to Twitch, which is like, is that better? Like, oh, I'm playing a video game.

I don't want my boss to see me. Let me go to Twitch. Does it auto-mute, too? I have not true. Does the tab auto-mute? It should. I was going to say. Opera.

Yeah. You know what? I don't want to linger on this for one second. If you're in a situation where you need a panic button in your browser, fucking volume should be off. Headphones, people. Head phones. Freshmen in college, you get this browser. You share in a dorm room, you get this browser.

Can't wait to see their market. Oh, boy. Thank you, Sean. Why? Why did I do this? All right. Pierce, can you just clean us up? Mine is the Apple TV app, which has a new panic button where when you're...

Takes you to HBO Max. So Apple... The dark recesses of HBO Max. You hit a button and you go to HDCV, just like that. It's like no problem. Whatever you were watching. No, the Apple... Somewhere David's Azel is like, shit, but panic, but...

This is how we win. Yeah, you can have that for free. No one can know you watch Guildonage. The Apple TV... app just got a redesign on the Apple TV. Apple has had this, like, I don't know, 15-year-long obsession with, like, trying to solve the interface of television. And I think it's, like, the most quixotic thing Apple is trying to do.

It's either that or build a car, like, two equally impossible goals. But the new TV app actually looks really nice. They redesigned it. It has easier ways to get to some of the channels you can get at through Apple TV. It has some easy ways to get to, like, buying stuff from a bunch of different platforms. Apple's big idea is to be like the TV guide for all your streaming stuff. So it pulls all the stuff you're watching, all the recommendations, all this stuff into one place. It notably does not have Netflix, which like immediately destroys its utility for a large number of users because...

This is what I'm saying about when one monopoly hits another one. It's also bad at a lot of other ones too. It is. Apple, Apple, I think is on the right path here. I just think it's impossible to do what it's trying to do. But I admire Apple for just continuing to believe that it is Apple. and so it can eventually bully every other company into being part of this. But the new app is very nice.

I suspect we'll get a lot of this stuff on other platforms as well. And like, the streaming interface that we have sucks. And somebody should fix it. And like, I don't care if it's Apple. I don't care if it's like just watch, like pick a company. I don't know. I don't get if it's Plex. I actually want it to be Plex.

I would like for it to be Plex. Could you please see this? I just want to say that Steve Jobs did not tell Walter Isaacson on his deathbed that he wanted to build a car. he said he'd crack the TV and it's about time they cracked it it's exactly right it's exactly right really the whole company chased this like deathbed comment for too long do you think steve just meant like he he cracked his tv he like threw something at his television and cracked it and walter just like misheard of him out so we bought a house we're like I'm building a home

theater down there it's like a whole thing there's speaker wire everywhere the poor electrician just keeps looking at me like I'm crazy. It's great. So two things. One, in the meantime, we have a Samsung frame TV, which will eventually be the bedroom TV. And I have used Tysen now. The moment of silence for Nelai. Tysin's support club.

Please help me. But Samsung does one very smart thing with Tysin on this TV in the Milton software. When you're watching YouTube TV and you click out of it and you're trying to go back to any other place where there should be media playing, it just starts playing it again, as though you are just watching TV. Yeah. It's just very clever. It just restarts your streaming app, and it just has media playing where you're like goofing around in the menus or whatever.

It makes it feel like a TV and not like the Apple TV, which very much feels like a tiny iOS device that is very upset that you are not watching Apple TV Plus. Or like all the fire TVs now, which are like, oh, you turn on your TVs? Here's some ads. Do you want to watch some ads? How about some ads? As soon as you turn it on. Yeah.

So there's something there, which I think is just really clever and smart in Thaisen. But it's part of the turn you're talking about. These interfaces suck because they're all trying to get you to do something you don't want to do or they're all trying to keep you away from watching TV or they want to show you ads. Particularly like Alex writes about fast all the time, right? Like free ad supporting TV is a big thing, which means they're desperately trying to get you to watch free ad-supported TV. That's weird. second thing,

I've been thinking about this a lot with just Apple TV and like, what will be my primary device? And here's what I've settled on. I'm going to buy a Sony A95L. They're not in stock anywhere. And I'm just going to watch Bravia Corp, Sony's proprietary streaming service that has the highest bit rates in the entire

industry. Oh, boy. In that, I think that's my solution. Spider-Man's going to look so good on that TV. It's going to be it. It's like four movies. It's, yeah. Look, it has, I think it has 4-4-4-4 See?

See? They love to be like, look how good Spider-Man looks with our high bit rate. Red is famously the hardest color to compress. And Spider-Man's a great demo. I'm going to watch the hell out of Spider-Man. That and Red buses in England. They're like, look at it. It's beautiful.

You're like, it's fine. Yeah, I don't know. It's just like all of my stuff, I bought a lot of movies in Apple. And now it's like, this thing does not want me to, they shut down the movies app and the TV app. which I never used, but they shut down the movies app. And it's like, oh, I just wanted to see what was out and like watch a movie. And now it's like, I have to contend with the morning show. Like, here it is.

Here's just, do you want the morning pay for this? Yeah, watch it. And I'm like, I just want to see what movies are out. I don't know. Are any of us holding on the discs? I just bought a bunch. I've still got my 4K discs. They go on my PS5.

That's how I watch my good looking movies. I was going to do that, but bravi a cord dog. Sean, I will say history is increasingly proving you right. I was not here last week to be furious at what Sony did, removing all the stuff that people had bought on their Playstations. But that shit sucks. And we are rapidly nearing a point where legitimately, if you want to make sure you can watch something, you're going to have to buy it on disc, which is like a dumb place to end up, but feels like we're going to do. I've now got Michael Dutikoff's American Ninja from the 80s on DVD. And like, can't find that on

streaming. All right. Well, there's Alex. What are you going to do? You want to watch that horror show? Only one way to watch it. If my sister's listening, I'm sorry you now know. That's one too many. All right. I'll do mine and we'll end with Kranz. Mine is a weird week for electric cars just around the board.

But Cadillac announced the Cadillac Vistique, which is their next electric SUV. It looks pretty good. It looks like a little baby escalade. I just want to point out Cadillac's prices for EVs are completely out of control. So this one is going to cost $90,000. And I will remind you, it is called Vestique with an IQ because that is catalog. What is Cadillac? There's like the lyric, which I assume is now pronounced lyric and the optique.

And there was like the Sintique and the Celestique. Like who at Cadillac keeps being like, you know what's dope? Is our cue names that are unpronounounoun. Like, stop it. So, yeah, they start with a lyric, which sort of makes sense. It's actually pronounced Larique. Sorry, I don't know if I just want to. The Larique is actually kind of reasonably priced.

It's like, you can get one in the 60s, which for our catalog is like in the zone. They have a cheaper one that's coming out. And then they have the Escalade, which starts at $120,000. Is there a Q level trim? And then the Celestique is $3,000. 40,000. It's Escalade with a Q. Sorry.

Sorry. It's the Escalade IQ. They could not figure out how jam the Eke on the escalade. So like whatever, it's the escalate IQ. Like, we're just, here's an Eke. You can have it. $120,000, please. I will say, though, these cars are hot.

Like, I'm very into the styling they have for these. I have, I don't need a car. I move back to civilization. I don't live in the woods anymore. I live in a very walkable place. I'm like, I should buy a lyric. All the time, I'm like, I should buy a lyric. And I'm like, why?

I would never drive this. We have a hybrid with 25 miles of all electric range. I haven't bought gas in three months because that's all we need. How's the pickup truck? Pick up. I love it so much and I need to get rid of it. And I had, my own. Still waiting for the Iionique, which is a Hyundai vehicle to get some NACS charging.

Who decided? Also, I shouldn't buy any of the stuff until they have the chargers. We need the chargers. One day. All right. I'm going to buy a catalog for steep. All right. It does look pretty good.

All right. This one is a little sad. I've been 2003. I was in college and I met a guy. And he said, he said, hey, you panic button. Panic button. He said, hey, my uncle's a producer at like Today Show or something. he's going to E3, do you want to go?

And I went in college to E3. And then I went for the next 10 years. Wow. Not always with his family and the hosts of the Today Show or whatever. It was great. And then I never went again because it got really bad. And it continued to get bad. And E3 just got less and less and less useful.

And that is why this year E3 is officially dead. it was the trade show for video games. Like, Sean, did you ever go to E3? I feel like you went to E3. It was like, it was kind of fun. Should I tell the story? I was like, I was born in the dark. It was fun.

You saw cool stuff. Oh, you know, I went the year that they moved it all to Santa Monica and you had to see all the video games in an airplane hanger. And otherwise, you just had to know a lot of people and I did not. So I spent a lot of time on the beach that E3. It was great. But, uh, you just. what I should have done.

It's really, really nice. Sean, what's your weirdest E3 story? I feel like I can just see on your face. You have a weird E3 story that you don't want to tell. And I would like you to tell it. A weird E3 story I don't want to tell. Or do you want the good one, the one about the good one? Give us the good one.

I love the good one. Yeah, you got to go, a good one. I'm just going to read from my C-Med article because I haven't rewritten this. And I'll just do my voice. It'll be great. I was playing Warhawk. The first game for Sony's just announced PS3 motion. controller, where you could fly a heavily armored warplane just by tilting a game pad.

Believe it or not, those simple motion controls were revolutionary at the time. This was before the iPhone was announced before Twitter existed and even before the Nintendo PS3 were released, to give you some context. Yet on the show floor, there wasn't much of a line. I only had to wait a few minutes before I got to try this potentially groundbreaking title. The longer I played, the more people crowded around me. Soon I felt like a star. It was on fire, playing war like a champ in front of my very old audience. The more people watched, the better I played flying that deadly warplane with precision. Then it was over.

I turned around and handed the controller to Shigeru Miyamoto. This is a dream you had, right? This is not an ether. The father of Barioz Zelda was behind me the whole time. The crowd had been there for him. Because they were watching the man who developed the wheeze motion controller. try his competitor's product for the first time. And you're just like, wow.

And so I just stood there, Dov founded, watching Bea Moto play this game, and his face had no expression on it. None. Stone cold. He was not as impressed with your playing. Fantastic. Was he? I just saw like. Well, Sean didn't know.

He wasn't paying attention. He was locked in. I was in the war. I was in the audience. I just saw Paris Hilton and like those TV or the t-shirt cannons. She had t-shirt cannons. everything i never once i've never been once and every instinct i ever had this to stay away and i feel like it collapsed on itself right like like it was a trade show that three big

companies were there i think in covid sort of like Microsoft pulled out then sony pulled out and there there was like a question of whether it would come back and i think those companies all were like wait this sucked like we can just do our own events which is what all the tech companies have realized over time. And there was no, there was no chance it was ever coming back. For years, I heard people say, oh, E3 is going to die this next year. We don't need it, particularly after that Santa Monica show where it got like really tiny. They were like, oh, we don't need E3. But what I kept hearing smart people in the room say was that the executives at the video game companies would always need a stage so that they could go glad hand each other. And they needed to have like some place

where the meetings would happen. And now we have Jeff Keely, which, with the Summer Game Fest and all those things. And he'll gladly let people execute his gland hand each other on stage, even if they have nothing to show. Yeah, I mean, that's exactly what happened. Like, that 2008 Santa Monica show was, it had gotten too big, right? Like 2007 was enormous. It was really, really unwieldy.

It was not a great time. And so they said, okay, we're going to shrink it down. And then they reopened it. And they were like, well, we need more people, so we're going to let anybody come. And that just made it like not a trade show anymore, but this weird hybrid that didn't make anybody happy. And then finally, COVID came. And like, like, COVID effectively, like, they realized, oh, yeah, everybody realized, oh, wait, I don't need this.

I don't actually need the glad hand here. Jeff Cleave, just Jeff Keely and, you know, a web broadcast is enough for me. All right. Well, that's the broadcast way back next week. I don't see that's for me. The vibes are different. for CES. People are pumped.

Such a downer. Are they? Things that did not stop in the pandemic. Back with a vengeance, CES. No, that's it. Sean, thank you so much for coming. This has been really fun. Oh, thank you.

Can I just say one more thing before you, before you take us out? I just want to shout out a person on threads named Mark Pograno who decided that what he would do is post at me every single day until I mentioned him on a Vergecast episode, which I had no intention of ever doing. And then he did it for two weeks to the point where Threads throttled him and wouldn't

let him post for a whole day because they thought, threads thought he was harassing me. He's allowed to post again, but I just want to say, I hear you and thank you. And also please, no one ever do that to me again. Very good. Very good. Sight looked great this week. You go read Sean's coverage of the trial. All sorts of other good stuff.

The Twitter package is amazing. Like, truly, if you haven't. been on the scroll back of Alexandria. I spent 90 full minutes just scrolling, reading tweets. And it is the single best way to kill time on the internet right now. Yeah. That's it. That's Vurchase.

And that's a wrap for Vyrgecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866 Verge 1-1. The Verge is a production of the Verge and box media podcast network. The show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. This episode was mixed and edited by Zander Adams. And that's it. See you next week.