The Vergecast - OnePlus 7 Pro review, the White House's censorship tool, and more streaming wars

Episode Date: May 17, 2019

Dieter Bohn's OnePlus 7 Pro and Pixel 3a review starts off the show, followed by Adi Robertson's coverage of  everything the government is doing with Facebook and tariffs, and we end on our featured updates on the streaming wars.  Stories mentioned this week: One month ago, Foxconn said its innovation centers weren't empty …Verizon’s 5G network is now hitting gigabit download speedsThe new Apple TV app launches today on iOS, Apple TV, and Samsung TVsFacebook will increase pay for its contractors in North AmericaSamsung’s Galaxy Home missed its April launch date, and the company won’t say whyGoogle Pixel 3A review: a $399 phone with a great camera OnePlus 7 Pro review: an amazing screen meets a good enough …White House launches tool to report censorship on Facebook …Donald Trump is short-circuiting the electronics industry Phones and laptops are next to be hit by Trump's China tariff hikes …White House cracks down on Huawei equipment sales with executive …FCC commissioner calls for investigation into Chinese telecoms operating in US networksHP’s new dual-screen gaming laptop lets you watch Twitch and play simultaneouslyWhat does it cost to compete with Disney and Netflix? Quibi bets $2 …Disney wants full control of Hulu, but doesn't want to lose any shows …Comcast is giving Disney full control of HuluSubscribe to The Vergecast for free in your favorite podcast app https://pod.link/430333725 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on the Vergecast, Adi Robertson, joins Dieter, Paul and I. We talk about the 1 plus 7 Pro. We talk about the Pixel 3A. We get deep into everything the government is doing with Facebook and tariffs. We're in it. Then we talk about the streaming wars. That's Vergecast coming up now. Support for the show comes from Retool.

Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompt something like,

build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software.

What's up, y'all. I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years, covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds.

Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello, and welcome to Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the newly reconstituted Verge podcast empire. And I say that only because now we have two shows again, which is great. It's very exciting. I'm Neelai. Your friend, Dieter's here.

Hello. Hi. Howdy. Paul is here. Hello. And Addie Robertson. Hey. Two for this week.

Welcome, Adi. Hi. So if you don't know, Adi and I interviewed Mark Rifkin, who's one of the lawyers representing the plaintiffs who sued Apple for monopoly app store pricing. It was big news this week. But we did a whole episode where Addy explained what's going on. We interviewed the lawyer. What did you think? I think that a lot of the cases basically now we get to have a case.

Yeah. But he was very compelling. He was very interesting. So you should listen to that. We're not going to get into it on this show. because Addy's here again this week because there's, I'm just to be honest, there's a ton of stuff going on. Before we start, though, I want to tell you that why'd you push that button is back. Season four, premiere, Ashley and Caitlin went for it.

They just went for it, and they did green and blue bubbles in iMessage, which is one of the trolleiest ideas I've ever had. But it's a really good episode, I promise you. Dieter, you're on it. I am, and they managed to make me not sound completely ranty and insane when I talked about RCS. So something we've never accomplished. But that's out now. Season 4 is super exciting. Just go listen to it after you'll listen to this show.

Okay. So there's just a lot going on this week. Just a tremendous amount of tech news. There's launches. There's 5G networks. There's our government and our president just doing all kinds of stuff. But before we start and get into it, and we're going to get into almost all of it,

there's a lot of stuff that I think is worth like one or two lines of updates, It's just stories we've been tracking and talking about on the show forever. In a normal week, we dive into all this stuff, but there's so much going on this week that I just want to run through it really fast just to acknowledge that these stories are moving. But I want to focus on the pixel 3, the 1 plus 7 Pro, all the frankly insane policy stuff that's going on and then make fun of Quibi. So that's always what I want to do. Okay, so I'm going to try to go through as fast as I can. A month ago, we reported that Foxcon's innovation centers were empty in Wisconsin. Foxcon held an event, like several days after we reported that, where they bought another building,

and they promised to laughter from the crowd that the buildings were not empty and that they would be issuing a correction to us soon. Also, don't climb trees, something about climbing trees. Josh has our reporter. They said, we promise there's a plan, but don't climb trees to look at the buildings and see if they're full or not. We promised they're full. So we just waited a month. If you follow my Twitter, you'll know that Foxxon never issued its correction or statement to us about what the buildings to be used for in Wisconsin. And then, you know, it was a month.

So we sent a photographer around in the buildings again. Lo and behold, not only in the buildings still empty, one of them is even emptier than before, which is incredible. There used to be like saw horses and a laptop in one, and now they're gone. So it's just a bare concrete floor. So we still have no idea what's going on with Foxxon. The buildings are still empty. We're tracking that story. If you're in Wisconsin, you know, it's going on, get a hold of Josh.

Maybe, maybe the innovation is invisibility. That would be incredible. If that was ultimately the statement, like Foxhound's like, we did it. All the people are invisible. Like the true. Gotcha, Burge. Yeah. What's the killer at for 5G?

Invisibility. I would accept that. I would be like, you know what? I was wrong. That is yet to happen. We've been talking a lot about Microsoft and Sony, cloud games, Stadia. They announced a joint partnership on cloud gaming and AI, literally today. It's very loose in the way that these announcements are.

We don't know that much about Stadia. Yeah, it's just like what is happening. But Google entered the cloud gaming business, and then Microsoft and Sony did like the classic international relations move of immediately forming a alliance between rivals. Okay. It does look like Sony's going to use at Microsoft Azure. to run their thing. But the big question is, are they going to, you know,

work together from the consumer side in some way, shape, or form? Because, you know, Sony's got a great history of being open with its games, Fortnite. Yeah, I mean, Sony doesn't, like, operate a cloud. You'd think they would, like, have called Amazon first.

Like, they can't call Google. Google's their competitor. Yeah. It doesn't seem likely they would call the Xbox people. Did, like, the AWS people just blow it with Sony? like they made the call and they were like, yeah, we're not, we're just, whatever, games. And Sony is like, fine.

And they call, right? Anyway, so that's happening. Cloud gaming is a thing. Chris Welch is in Chicago as we speak. Speed testing a Galaxy S10 5G. It is getting a gigabit down on Verizon's network right now. It's getting a gigabit down if you're standing on the exact right block with a perfect line of sight to a microcell pointing directly at you

without any rain or obstructions between you and the microcell. Fair. Okay. And the upload is only an LTE. So it's a gigabit down and 60 up, perfect LTE. So it's still not real. It's realer than it was the last time he was there with like a wacky Motorola phone with like a modemot on the back. Because this is an actual phone.

It's not a phone with like another part. It's an actual phone. I just think this makes AT&T's 5G stuff look like pure nonsense even more. Like, Verizon can tell you that there's a real 5G network that's up and running. You can use it. And AT&T is like, we shipped an icon to everyone's phone. Like, anyway, so that's happening. Sprint is announced its first.

5G phones are going to ship on May 31st. So the 5G stuff is up and running. This is very personally exciting to me and pride of Dieter. Google Assistant is finally like here on the Sonos 1 in the Sonos beam. Yeah, it doesn't support multi-user. So like voice recognition stuff. Also, it's slow. It's super slow.

It's way slower than a proper Google Home. Ooh. But if you have a bunch of old sonuses, you can just use a Google Home Puck. Yes. What's it called a NessDot? What are they right in? You can just use a regular Google Home and light up your sono speakers, which is great. Yeah.

Maybe that's what I'll do. I'll just stick a MIDI on top of one of my sonos surrounds. Chris Welch and I got to see the new Apple TV app, which is very confusing. because it runs on a device called the Apple TV and then we'll support a service called Apple TV Plus. So whatever that is named, it looks shockingly like the existing Apple TV app. Many of the squares are now circles, is what I will say.

Or I'm sorry, many of the squares are not ovals. Okay. Wait, wait, a rectangle with rounded corners is not an oval. I'd like you to issue a correction on that. I'm going back to many of the squares are now circles, which is even more wrong. I'm just going to stand by that one. Yeah, they rounded a.

bunch of it off. The thing that's interesting is they are telling us that if you subscribe to HBO through Apple in the app, not only will it look better, like they're, you know, they're promising these, the best quality. So they're saying it will look better if you subscribe to HBO and watch it through this app. But if you go to a device that doesn't have the Apple TV app and you want to download like HBO Go, you'll be able to off it through Apple. So, you know, right now you're like off, if you subscribe to HBO through Comcast or Fios or like I have Fios, and you like log in, it says, select your service provider, and you log in with your Fios credentials, and it authorizes HBO.

Apple is going to show it up in that list. So that means Apple is officially a cable company now? Yeah. The same as like Sling TV shows up in that stuff, right? If you subscribe to the premium channels, you can off it. But yeah, Apple is basically doing the cable company off, which I don't think most people didn't expect. The Apple TV app is also out on the newer Samsung TVs.

which is just wild. There's Apple Made a Tysan app, everybody. You can get it now. I asked them if they, like, if they're Tysin team and their Android team and their WebOS team and their Wackadoo Vizio OS team, like we're talking and they're like, we're not disclosing how the teams will operate.

So I just assume like the team building the web OS app is like in the basement. Like they don't get, they're not in the spaceship. You know, they're just like down the street another part of the country. Anyway, it's out. You can get it. You can play with it. This is a big update. Casey wrote the big piece about Facebook moderation. Contractors underpaid, feeling bad, having depression. Facebook is giving them all a raise, an $18 an hour minimum in some markets. It goes up from there depending on where you live. Facebook said they have been planning this. It's been in the works. It had nothing to do with reporting. I think we all know that this is just a victory lot for Casey. He exposed what was happening. He got them a raise. I'm very proud of him. The Galaxy Home, you might recall this, the big. XP competitor to Alexa in the HomePod and Google Assistant devices.

Just missed its ship date and then Samsung won't say why. It's hanging out with the fold. I think they realized they made a Weber grill with a bad assistant. They should rethink it. So it's just not out yet. And then lastly, Dieter, you should get in this a little bit more. Last week at I.O., Google announced the big roll together of Google and Nest. And they said works with Nest is getting shut down.

Yeah. Dan wrote a great piece being like, this is bad for a variety of reasons. And then Google today issued a big blog post saying, actually, we're walking a lot of this back. What's going on there? Nest had this thing where a bunch of their passwords were insecure because they didn't have two-factor because a bunch of people were using passwords. The solution was, well, let's just use Google's login infrastructure. In order to do that, they have to figure out how to authenticate everything through your Google login. Google looked at works with Nest and said, this is really scary because all your personal home data can get out.

So we're shutting it down, and now everything has to work with, you know, works with Google. And, you know, it turns out if this and that, there's a Google Assistant routine just waiting for you. And a whole lot of it was going through the Google Assistant. But they had a very aggressive timeline for shutting down the Works with Nest program. And it was unclear what was going to happen to a lot of stuff that actually really mattered to consumers like, I don't know, using Alexa or some like smart light integrations that hadn't connected up to Google yet. So there was an uproar. There was a fur, for-or. And so they now are saying they're not going to shut down Works with Nests connections beyond August 31st.

But if you do switch to a Google account to get the higher level security, then it will get shut down and you'll need to switch some stuff. And in the meantime, they're going to work really hard to make sure that all the stuff that people actually care about will work with the Google version of Works with Ness instead of the Amazon version. And I'm just going to say this is two Google IOs in a row. where Google made assumptions about how people felt about private data privacy and just whiffed it. Last year was duplex. And this year was, yeah, no, Nesta, we're going to lock down security because people really don't want their data shared via if this than that. And nope, everybody got mad at that. So, like, they're, I don't know, their vein, their weather vain for how most people actually feel about their privacy moves is a little bit off, I think.

Well, the lesson here is they should have phased it from the start, right? I mean, yeah, there's a lot of people in the world who tell their Alexis to turn the thermostat up and down. Yep. And they should have been like, we have a plan to continue this, not we're shutting it down and everything will be fine. Right. So on balance, I think it's good, especially because the Google Home ecosystem is starting to become a better competitor to Alexa. But it's not there yet. So this could have been the forcing function the whole way along, but they like went too fast.

Well, the thing is like long term, like having stuff work. with Alexa means that it sort of gets connected up to a bunch of other stuff Alexa does. And if all that eventually goes away, then it really is a forcing function to have you start working with Google stuff, right? If you want those like extra hooks and extra integrations to work. Yeah. Routines and whatnot. I just want to say it's 2019 and what we're fundamentally talking about here is thermostat ecosystem lock-in. And that's horrible. Actually, what we're fundamentally talking about is like thermostat macros. Yeah, thermostat macro lock-in.

Who gets to run the macro is essentially what we're talking about here. If we did episode titles of that style, I would say the episode title for the show would be thermostat macro lock-in. Yeah. I'm just putting it out there. Okay. That's enough updates. Let's talk about some phones.

So, Deeter, you, we obviously talked about the Pixel 3A a lot last week with Hiroshi and Steph in every episode. That was great for coming. But you actually reviewed the phone and you reviewed the 1-plus 7 pro. So let's talk about those. What did you think of the 3A? The 3A is remarkable because it's $400 and like, or I think it's $480 for the bigger screen one. It feels like a $400 phone.

Well, maybe a little bit better, but the camera is amazing. And so the only question is how much do you care about it being fast and how much do you care about it being fast for like two or three years? And I don't know. That's a hard one to answer. but like in terms of like quality and will you miss out on stuff and does it feel like a phone that does phone stuff and doesn't annoy you every day like it's totally there yeah um i will say i you know sent one to dan seafurt and he is less optimistic about its speed and less happy about its large bezels um but i think the consensus is like yeah no it's fine if you if you want a fast phone or a more expensive phone like you won't be

happy with it uh but if you know you've got four hundred dollars to spend on a phone this is absolutely the phone you should buy. So Dan's point to me repeatedly is that most people aren't spending four, at least in the United States, are not spending $400 on a phone, right? They're either spending like $150 on like a weird blue phone on like a Metro PCS or whatever, or they're paying a monthly fee and then the sort of step change between a $400 phone and $800 phone is minimal, right? Because you're looking at dollars per month. Right. So Google would have two responses to this. One of which, I'm not sure about one of which I'm really interested to see if it works. So the first response is nobody buys a phone in a market unless there's a good phone in that market.

So like nobody bought $1,000 phones until there were $1,000 phones. And so there weren't any really truly good $400 to $500 phones out there. So it's possible that they could actually change consumer behavior with this phone. That's what they're trying to do. And their lever for doing it is the other thing, which is they're finally distributing this phone for real instead of it being, in a sad kiosk in the corner of a Verizon store and having weird billboards up on the freeways that compare it to the phone X, which by the way,

those billboards are so cowardly. Just call it the iPhone. Anyway. Apparently some of the billboards have small print that say the phone X is an iPhone 10 and that's just like, what are you doing? It's just the most stupid thing. You didn't even hide the ball.

You hit the ball and then you're like, the ball is behind me. Anyway, the big question is, now that you can get these in basically every carrier except AT&T, because AT&T hates, I don't know, this phone, that it's now being sold on Amazon of all places. Google and Amazon made up for that somehow. Yeah. And it's already being discounted by like $100, basically everywhere. So it's actually like a $300 phone. And so will that final actual real distribution for Google phone?

phones and not a sad kiosk in the corner of a Verizon store, actually convert into real sales for these phones that matter in terms of market share? Yeah, I have no idea. Right. There's not in, I don't know, I think it comes down to like, is Google going to market the hell out of this phone in a way that they haven't before? And I think maybe that won't happen until it's on every carrier, right? Right.

I think we're anticipating that AT&T will, like, fall into line at some point. One plus seven pro, which is fundamentally more interesting because that's a flagship phone at 700 bucks that it looked. Yep. The only complaint that I think people have is like it's kind of big. It's pretty big. It feels bigger than like an S10 plus. Like you, it's big.

It looks exactly like a Samsung, like, except for like the strip of cameras on the back, like the way the glass curves, it's just like Samsung, Samsung, Samsung. The screen is amazing because it's got that high refresh rate. There is some Twitter back and forth because Marquez said that it is not a variable refresh rate, but I had said that it will change its refresh rate, depending. if you're watching a video, it turns out we're both right. It doesn't do the thing that like an iPad does where if you stop scrolling, the refresh rate slows down.

So it's always at 90 hertz, killing your battery. But it does know if you're watching a video that's like 24 frames or whatever, and it'll slow down for the video. That's the only thing it'll slow down for. Anyway, to me, the big story with the One Plus is, like there's two things that the screen and the camera. One Plus managed to have the best screen you can get on a phone.

It's pretty big, but it is the best screen on a phone right now, period. So that's cool. But then the question is, did they make a good camera? And, man, the answer is they made a good enough camera. And you look at all the other reviews. I think the opinion is basically saying it's pretty mixed, which is a pretty good sign. Like, I think it's more than good enough unless cameras like your number one priority. But like, you can make this thing fall down really easily. Really? But, oh yeah. Like portrait mode's mess, dark mode is nowhere as good, or sorry, night scape is nowhere as good as other other night modes. The contrast is soft, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah.

But, you know, you just like take a shot and put it on Instagram. It looks good every time, you know, when you've got good light. So you can make it fall down a little bit easier than you can make other cameras fall down. But it is not like, well, if the camera didn't suck, I'd tell you to buy it. It's like, the camera's good enough. Yeah. I have to say the more time I spend out the 10S camera, the more I'm like, oh, this camera's not good. Yeah.

I mean, it's just, I think I'm at the point where I think all smartphone cameras are bad. Like, I've just arrived at that point where I use a DSLR consistently enough now, where I'm like, oh, this is disappointing. And I think the thing that happened was everyone stopped using real cameras and our entire point of reference change to basically what can the iPhone 4 do and is this better. And I'm just reminding everyone that real cameras are still significantly better. I'm more willing to trade off on camera performance in my phone because I carry a real camera on so often now. It's because I produce Spawn. Like that's it.

Wow. That was like the only reason I added a camera back to my life is like the baby. I was wondering how noticeable screen is because it's tough when you hear 90 hertz. Like I can't watch you on YouTube sell me 90 hertz. So yeah. You would notice it, Paul. You would immediately notice it.

Like you can feel it when you scroll. It just feels better. Animations are smoother, but scrolling, which, you know, Android has a particularly spotty history of being good at. Feels very, very good. And it's really subtle, though, right? You know, I went back to my iPhone 10R, and, you know, it's fine. Like, it's a sort of thing that, like, screen people will notice and nobody else would. Now, if that screen made the phone cost an extra $200, I would be like, yeah, but don't spend the money on it.

It's not worth it. But you can get a phone with 256 gigs of storage and 12 gigs of RAM and the fastest processor available on Android for $750. Yeah. And it has the best screen on any phone ever. Like, crazy town. I think you forgot to mention one very important thing that it has. Pop-up selfie camera. Which is a pop-up selfie camera.

Yep. By the way, if you just like lowered and raise it over and over and over again, it finally pops up a warning saying, yo, chill out. You're like going to wear this thing out. How much do you use the pop-up selfie camera? I mean, as much as you use any selfie camera, it loads up about as, like, if you, like, I don't know, even on my, like, iPhone 10R, like, if you hit the button to, like, rotate the screen, it takes, like, a second, give or take, that's about how long it takes. By the time the software's, like, I'm taking a selfie now, the camera's up there. Yeah. So it didn't bother me.

Now, I didn't use it for face unlock because, you know, anything, it's just insecure, so whatever. Fingerprint reader of the screen is pretty fast? It's so fast. It's stupid fast. And they made it big, which matters because it's way too small in the S-10. Maybe this is my next. And the battery life is, that's a surprise. It's well, so there's a little bit of mix there.

Most reviewers are getting what I got, which is more than a day, but a couple are getting less. You should be able to expect screen on time in like the six to seven-hour range, if that means anything to you as an Android user. I think it's fine, but I've also been using small phones for really long time. Like, I've been using a Pixel 3 for the past couple of months, and, like, it has atrocious battery life. So maybe I was too impressed. But, like, just, like, using it like a phone, I got more than a day, which is pretty rare. I'm buying this phone. You should, like, grab the review unit from Dan that's in New York and give it a try. Okay. I didn't buy the last pixel on the show, so I feel like I have to make up for it.

All right. Paul. Yeah. There's a PC that folds now. It's so cool. I'm so glad you asked me about it. Okay, Lenovo in an effort to endlessly dilute its X1 brand has a ThinkPad, X1 prototype, foldable PC. Literally has nothing in common with the DNA of ThinkPad. It's a screen that folds. So imagine, like Samsung's phone without a screen on the outside, just a big screen on the inside. but it's a laptop.

It's a 13.3 inch 4-3 2K OLED display inside a book-sized form factor. And you look like a dork if you put a software keyboard up on it, but you could theoretically type on it. Apparently they're going to, they're thinking of shipping it's like 2020, sounds like. Maybe Intel will have some better processors by then. but ideally I think this is

a form factor that if it's operational and it doesn't break and the crease isn't bonkers which in you know Haim did a video I should definitely check it out so you can see it in action there is a noticeable crease

when it's open but you could open it up set it up on it's with a kickstand and then you use an external keyboard, right? So my ideal situation is like a B-Y-O-K, bring your own preferred Bluetooth keyboard, right?

Yeah. And now you have, sure, in the mouse. And, but it's just, I feel like I could use a computer like that at a coffee shop, you know? You put the tablet up on its little kickstand, you've got a Bluetooth keyboard. It's like the iPad form factor. Yeah. But it has a lot more flexibility because you can use it like a tablet. You can use it like a book.

Yeah. I just like the idea of you saving the space of the laptop by folding the screen, but then carrying like a full extended keyboard with you and like a wired mouse. Like that to me is like I've made all the wrong tradeoffs confidently. Like this screen is a lot easier to carry around than a laptop. But here's my full-size Apple extended keyboard too. The thing I've realized with laptops that if you're smaller than you're smaller, 15 inches and you're lighter than a MacBook Pro and you're less than like an inch thick,

it just literally does not matter. Or you have like two of those three specs. It just literally doesn't matter anything else. It's completely portable in your backpack. And maybe that's just my personal metric because I have accustomed myself to carrying a 13.3 inch MacBook Pro from 2015. So any improvement on that I'm completely fine with putting in my backpack. But I feel like I could put this and a little, a little slice of Bluetooth keyboard be completely fine. You have to have a full-size keyboard. That's the law. I'm making it the law.

I want a pop-out keyboard. I want this to be like a razor phone where they have like a, it's a tablet, it's a book, but there's also a keyboard and the keyboard pops out. And it's a hardware keyboard. Wait, pops out from where? Back somewhere. It slides out. I get it.

The side of it that's the battery and that is also the place where you would type is also as like a little extra layer that's a thin hardware keyboard that you can kind of slide out. Yeah. Oh, and they could fit it because when it's slid in, they could have the keys compressed so it wouldn't have to be that thick. And then they'd like pop out. They'd like when you pull the keyboard out. That's pretty exciting. This is both a sci-fi dream and a nightmare of moving parts. By the way, Lenovo would totally make this.

Have you noticed that whenever there's a crazy new PC form factor, Lenovo is like, oh. it right away. They had the yoga book with the thing and the E-ink and then they did the dual screen thing and they like were the first to clone the surface and I think I don't know, blah, blah, blah, blah. If you said the new trend in PCs are computers with razor blades that shoot out the sides. A little bit will be like, yep, we'll make that, you bet. Yeah, it's our new brand. It's called Think Death. We just kill you when you use the computer. Before we move on, I just, Chris Welch, we said, is on the ground in Chicago testing 5G. He asked us what he should test. and I said, you should see what blocks the signal

with increasingly hilarious or creepy things. Like start with paper, move to water balloon, then maybe a tree. He just sent me a video. A street mime effectively blocks a 5G signal. Now, what is the, what material is the streetmime pretending to hold? Yeah, is it a fake brick wall?

Or is it lead? Perfect. All right, well, I cannot wait for that post. it's all happening all right gadget time is over we're going to take a break and come back with some frank policy talk I mean it's gonna get

Frank Frank is the mime all right we're going away we're having an ad we're coming back we're going to get into what's going on here support for this show comes from Shopify starting something new isn't just hard it can be really scary too so much work goes into this thing that you're not

entirely sure will even work but here's a better thought what if it did all work What if your instincts were actually right all along? Shopify wants to help you get there. They're the commerce platform behind millions of businesses worldwide and nearly 10% of all e-commerce in the U.S., from established brands like Allbirds and Heinz,

to companies just getting started. Their design tools make it simple to create the exact online presence you're envisioning, with hundreds of ready-to-use templates available. And with built-in marketing tools, you can launch full email and social campaigns in just a few clicks. so you can connect with customers wherever they are. It's time to turn those what-ifs into with Shopify today. You can sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com slash vergecast.

You can go to Shopify.com slash vergecast. That's Shopify.com slash vergecast. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts. but time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers. That's where LinkedIn Hiring Pro comes in.

It's built to be your hiring partner, helping you find the right candidates faster. That way you can hire with confidence without turning it into another full-time job. Hiring Pro streamlines the entire process from drafting your job to short-listing candidates and conducting AI-powered interviews for initial screenings. Its updated conversational interface lets you describe what you need in plain language.

Nearly 60% of hirers find a candidate to interview within a week. With Hiring Pro, you spend less time searching and more time connecting with the right talent. And instead of getting buried in resumes, you get a focus shortlist that actually moves your hiring forward. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn. to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. Okay, Addy, we're back. Yes, the fun part is over.

The fun is over. The fun is just beginning. I would say the action around regulating our social platforms increased substantially over the past week and a half. So I'm just going to do some context and I want you to explain what's going on this week. So last week, Chris Hughes, who is a co-founder of Facebook, that I think people who work at Facebook don't take very seriously. But indeed, he was Mark Zuckerberg's roommate and thus a co-founder of Facebook.

Put an editorial in New York Times calling for Facebook to be broken up. Bernie Sanders today said he agreed that Facebook should be broken up. He joins Elizabeth Warren. So there's a lot of like break up Facebook activity. Facebook, they put out a response. Basically, the response was, well, we're very rich so we can protect democracy. And if you break us up, those companies will be less rich. One third is rich, in fact.

And thus, therefore, one third is able to protect democracy from doing their math correctly. So that's like, that was the context of last week. That led into this week. You wrote a piece saying the Hughes plan to break up Facebook was particularly problematic about speech. I mean to explain that. But then the White House launched a tool so that people could report if they'd been unfairly censored by Facebook and Twitter. there's an entire new wave of conservative bias accusations, and then there's a fact that the social media bias reporting tool

is like fundamental estate about you as well. So just walk us through what's going on. Okay. So yeah, like you said, last week, called a breakup Facebook. Those have been kind of constant for a long time. And then Bernie Sanders comes out in favor of it. And that's kind of where we are with that, but it's just kind of gaining momentum,

having Sanders and Warren on board here is... They don't like each other. There's going to be a lot of pressure. Yeah. It's a debate topic. You can see it coming. It's going to come up in every sort of policy conversation with those two leading the chart. And Morgan's plan is granted to break up basically every big tech company, so that's going to be a much larger debate, too.

Yeah. And that actually ties into the conversation we had earlier this week. That's like an App Store monopoly plan. So that's all happening. But the other part of Hughes' editorial was like there should be a regulator for speech on the internet, which you think is pretty problematic. I don't know what exactly he's talking about because so much of it was that there is kind of a broadly accepted, eh, we should have somebody to kind of regulate speech on the internet. And that's really problematic.

The phrase he used was, quote, the agency should create guidelines for acceptable speech on social media, which like we already have that. That is the exceptions to free speech that exists now. And it is bizarre to say that we need either an extra agency that's going to make all of these extra sort of enforcement rules that will either be super toothless or weird. Or that he literally wants there to be more categories of speech that are regulated on the internet than offline, which is also really bizarre. Yeah. Addie, can I be a straw man for this free speech thing and then you can light me on fire and knock me down? Disclosure. My wife works for Oculus, which is a division of Facebook.

If one of the free speech rules that we've got right now is you can't yell fire in a crowded theater. That is not a free speech rule right now. Aha. Okay. What is a free speech rule? You can't make credible threats of violence against people. Okay. And do you think that there is, there's no difference in like what the rules should be online than offline at all?

I mean, there are differences and they come up in case law. Like the difference, like defamation law say online, people can make the claim that you don't take stuff online very soon. seriously, so defamation has a lower burden. But if you're actually going to write whole different laws that protect completely different categories of speech, I mean, I guess you could do that, but that's a really huge step. And that's a step that you should not just throw in midway through your Let's Breakup Facebook Manifesto. Also, fire in a crowded theater is not a, it's not like there was a case where someone yelled fire in a crowded theater. It was an analogy that someone made in a case that was overturned many decades ago. It would probably still, like there are cases

where if it went to trial, it would probably be illegal. But it's not like that's a settled issue. And people use that a lot and he used it and it's really terrible. Yeah. There are no police monitoring theaters at this time for people improperly yelling fire. So there's that. And then there's sort of the like conservative bias moment, right, which is in my opinion based on a misreading of the governing law, which is section 230, which is from what I

understand conservatives want to make it so that we're making this false choice between whether Facebook as a publisher or a platform. But just explain, explain 230 real quick. So we all have it right because I want to lead into the conservative bias argument, which is happening at a very high level right now, literally at the president's level. So to really oversimplify 230 is that if you run an information service provider, if you run a website or a web service basically. We run a website. Yes. This applies to the verge. The verge. So if we post something on our site and it's illegal, or it's defamation or something, you can sue us. If someone else posts something on the site, then you cannot sue us.

Yeah. So just to, there's like our webpage and there's like the byline. Like Geter wrote the one plus seven pro review. I did. You can sue him for that. You can sue the virtual. Oh, good. He just can.

Like, you work here. You posted it. Then below that is, don't give anybody any ideas. Deeter, regret to inform user counsel that you've been sued. Below that is our comment section, which is user-generated content. Anybody can, like, post in our comments. But 230 gives us the power to, well, 230 shields us from liability for what's in those comments. So if you want to sue us for something that's in the verger's comments, you can't because we're protected.

But it also importantly gives us the ability to moderate those comments. Right. So that's like very important to us. That's the thing that enables us to have a comment section. We're able to moderate them. If you spell it biased and not biased, I will ban you. That is still true. You can moderate it without being called a publisher is kind of the important thing.

Yeah. Right. So even though we are a publisher, we are not the publisher of those comments and we still get to moderate them. Facebook, Twitter, Reddit are giant comment sections, right? They don't even have the other bit. So like the same law applies, 230 applies. so that they're not liable for what users do on those platforms, and they have the ability to moderate it.

And I think the false dichotomy is particularly conservatives are saying you're biased against us, you're making moderation decisions against us, and if you make enough of those, eventually you become a publisher, and you're now liable for the whole thing, which is just flatly wrong in my reading. It seems like they're not totally sure

whether that is already the law or whether that should be the law. Yeah. Ted Cruz believes it is the law. law, he asked a bunch of really terrible questions about whether Facebook was a, quote, neutral platform. They don't even call it publisher now necessarily. It is also the, they have added the idea that you can be a platform, but you have to be a

neutral platform to receive these protections, which is just something that's not even there. Yeah. It's not in the stat. I mean, Ted Cruz went to Harvard Law School. It's impurating. So that leads into the White House launching this tool, which. Is it a tool? It's a web form.

Well, it's a thing. It's a web form. Deider, what is a tool? The White House launched an instrument of state control. But explain what it is. It's a web form that starts with, in all caps, social media platforms should advance freedom of speech. Yet too many Americans have seen their accounts suspended, banned, or fraudulently reported for unclear violations in scare quotes of user policy. No matter your views, if you suspect political bias caused such an action to be taken against you, share your story with President Trump.

And what follows is a 10 question questionnaire. It asks whether you're a U.S. citizen. It asks you to describe which platform you were censored on. What was your account? Is there a screenshot? To tell if you're not a robot, it asks you to put in the year that the Declaration of Independence was signed. That's great. And then you can submit it and it goes to a reasonable...

By the way, any robot could have that information pre-programmed into it, correct? Or you could just ask Alexa when the Declaration of Independence was signed. I'm just saying, if you were, if you, Paul, just to be clear, the state of robotics is such that you can program one number into a robot. Yeah. What is the point of this forum, do you think? I'm hesitant to impute, like, good or meaningful intent to a lot of things that the government does because I think a lot of the time they just kind of throw something up. Like Trump might have been just, I'm really mad about my Twitter follower account, which is a thing he says all the time. time and someone was like, here, we'll put up a web form. But the thing it might be used for

is that there are all of these hearings about whether tech is biased against conservatives. And they talk about how all they have are anecdotes, which is correct because tech companies don't really release it a lot of data. And now they get to get a lot of anecdotes, which they can turn into some form of data. Yeah. And because this is Trump talking and trying to get people to fill things out, that's probably going to have sort of a political skew. I'm like already imagining the horrible debate moment where they like, every candidate does this on both sides of the aisle. They're like, I met Sally from Kansas. Sally was censored by Twitter and now she's dead, right?

And like, you can just see it coming because they're going to collect this set of unverified stories of how horrible it is. And they're also just, it's really, this is not Trump's fault. It is really hard to tell why anything happens on social media. Yes. Like why your search ranking is the way it is, why you got downranked in something, sometimes why you get banned. And then it fosters a lot of really conspiratorial thinking. And then this just plays into that.

So one way to read this, if you were to be maximally uncharitable towards the administration, is that this is the first step towards directly regulating speech on platforms and saying, this is what you can and can't post, this sort of Chris Hughes model. Like we're whitelisting this stuff. We're saying it has to be allowed, this type of political speech, regardless of its consequence. That's really hard for them to do. That has massive First Amendment problems associated with it. So maybe they'll do that, but that seems very, very difficult.

The other thing they could do is the thing that it seems like Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, who we interviewed about this stuff, have already threatened to do, which is write more exceptions to 230. So like the big one that just happened was Fasta and Sesta, which says, okay, you can't have like sex trafficking on your website. it led to entire companies like going out of business because Backpage had a lot of ads for prostitution and sex work on their website. And Backpage was taken down under laws that had nothing to do with Fasta and Sesta.

And yet the law passed, right? Like that's a big recent exception to 230 that was passed and it had this set of consequences. You could carve out more exceptions to 230 which basically would mean the platforms are liable for more things. That's like the mechanism of it. And if you go all the way, they're liable for everything

on the platform, which is an impossibility and they would just go out of business. Yeah. Well, if you go down the Ted Cruz sort of fairness doctrine for the internet, as some people have called it way, then you also end up having some situation where they're trying to define bias in law. And that's going to just really bizarre. Yeah. And this all just to me seems unworkable on its face, right?

Like, I don't know how you would engineer such a situation because you have to make definitions about things that are basically impossible to do. define for any moment in time. But then on top of it, like, that's a lot of government intervention into private companies for conservatives. And what drives me crazy about this is that if you're very interested in the internet being neutral, you maybe should break up Facebook so there's more competition. Right? Like, that's the problem is that these are like monopolies. And there's only two big social platforms that they care about, three if you count YouTube. And if there was just just more competition in the system, you wouldn't be so mad if Facebook banned you because you might

go to someplace else with different rules. And I just don't, it just seems like those ideas are ships passing in the night and no one quite gets it. It's driving me crazy. Yeah. I mean, I don't know how much anybody who's talking about this cares about logical consistency or hypocrisy is the thing. Like it feels like I'm kind of walking into a trap by caring about that. But yeah, it's really frustrating. And then the other thing that drives me crazy is that the Republicans opposed net neutrality, where there is even less competition and more control by our cell carriers and by our wired broadband providers. And so if you are really mad about bias in the news, you would look at AT&T that now has

the ability to zero rate CNN, which it owns, in charge you data prices for Fox News. But that just like totally over the heads of everybody. No, no, that's the thing. It's not. Is that they actually, there is IGPI makes this connection. Like when he was talking about net neutrality, he's like, well, Twitter can censor what you say. So they're clearly aware that there is like a connection here. Right.

Well, his thing is you shouldn't worry about neutrality. It's fine. We should worry about Twitter, which can actually censor you. And I just don't, if you want it to be neutral, the whole stack should be neutral. Like, maybe you're right. Maybe we should not worry about logically, logical consistency in the government. But that to me is the craziest thing is most people only have but one or two choices for the core pipe of information in their house. And that we're just like totally willing to let like every broadband company decide what it can throttle or not or block or not.

We've literally wiped out those rules. The broadband companies are buying media companies that they're going to treat preferentially. That's their business strategy. But we're worried about individual accounts and Twitter being blocked seems absolutely disconnect from reality crazy. If I were going to actually try to draw a distinction, I would say that there's that people who don't worry about neutrality think that they are fine with commercial. speech being controlled, but that they are particularly worried about a category that they think of as political speech. I don't know that that actually makes legal sense, but if you're trying to talk about sort of a coherent strategy or theory, I can see that.

I mean, isn't the coherent strategy or theory that just simply people get angrier about it because it affects them directly and personally as like an individual that could get banned? And it's a better strategy to get people paying attention to the thing that they're most angry about than be consistent in how. you apply policy across the entire tech stack? Look, I'm trying to be charitable. Okay. We're trying to assume that all these arguments are having good faith. Like, yes, is the thing that's fundamentally happening here a lot of a lot of Trump riling people up?

Yeah, that's what he does. Like, I don't. Do I think Trump has ever heard of Section 230 of the Communications Seasency Act? I do not. Like, I just fundamentally do not believe that he's ever been briefed on it or how it works. I think someone has told him that he can threaten Twitter and Jack Dorsey, will show up wearing a like a rumpled suit in a bad hat and like he'll have a conversation with him. And that's indeed what happened. But I just, to me, the answer to these problems

fundamentally is the introduction of competition at every layer of the system such that we are not making government policy determinations about whether AT&T can zero rate HBO. Because you could buy it if you want. But like, there's just not enough competition for that. There's not enough competition for Facebook because it owns its two biggest competitors. It just doesn't count. Like, Instagram is not meaningful competition to Facebook. But does that mean logically we need to institute net neutrality for Facebook if we don't break it up? Yeah.

Okay. Right. I'm just saying, like, if you go down this road where you just have one powerful actor that is a quasi-state, which Facebook thinks of itself has, then it should have all the transparency requirements of the state. It should have all the regulations of this. It should be the state. You might as well just be the state. Right? I would rather have that than this weird dance where we pretend it's a private company operating in a real market.

I feel like Paul's going crazy. Paul's like ready to yell at me. There is a big part. I mean, I follow a lot of conservatives on Twitter. And it is a debate in the conservative movement. And it's kind of a debate, I would call it a debate mostly conservatives and libertarians versus what I think of as Republicans. Some people call them rhinos. Oh, no.

Oh, boy. But there is a big difference of opinion on how the government should handle this perceived censorship that is happening on the social networks. Well, I think first you have to prove it. Well, I will say that people have experienced enough of it and they see that all the people that they follow on YouTube, all the people they follow on Twitter, all the people they follow on Facebook have encountered. serious censorship, like the major voices that they're following, are being suppressed in some way, that when these tech companies try to convince, or if you could write an article on the verge and giving a hundred reasons why it's not true, people have experienced it themselves, and so they know it's true. And so this gaslighting is not going to convince the right

that they have not been censored. Wait, the question is whether they, like, whether if you follow people on the left, they will also tell stories of getting banned for no reason. Like, it's not whether people don't get banned on the right. I don't know. That's the thing that I feel like never gets addressed in the hearings, and I just really would love to know if that's a thing that there's an argument against. It's so hard to figure out that ratio. But I'm just saying that the subjective perception from the right is that they are far and away get an outsized amount of censorship. Right. So I just want to challenge you in that, right? Yes, it is true that we could write an article and we could say it's not happening using the data that we have, which, to Addie's point, is not sufficient data, right? The platforms are not nearly transparent enough about how their algorithms work, about what gets censored, when it gets censored, about any particular decision conceded, right? I wish the platform is more transparent. But we have some data and we can write articles and say this actually isn't true. That is not gaslighting, right, to state the fact. It is perhaps not compatible with the experience of these people are having,

but it is not insisting that a thing is, right? Like, it's not, it doesn't need to be persuasive. So Casey makes the point. He made it in the newsletter yesterday. He makes it in the newsletter almost every week. The top stories shared on Facebook are routinely from conservative publishers. So, like, if there's this, like, systematic bias in the system, you would not see that. This Casey argument, I haven't had an analysis.

until today, but I thought of one today. If I was playing basketball against LeBron James and you jumped on LeBron James for a piggyback ride, LeBron James would still destroy me at basketball. The score at the end would be 75 to like two, you know. But first of all, we have to do this. I'm not a small man, Paul, and I do not believe this is correct. So just because you, the outcome does not dictate what has been happening,

Casey's argument would presuppose that the amount of voices who are trying to say things are exactly 50-50 on each side and the amount of audiences who are trying to hear things are 50-50 on each side. No, I think that's a lot. Like, I understand what you're saying, and I think that makes a reasonable amount of sense and that you could draw an analogy. I think there are analogies that you don't want to draw with, like, say there are successful women or something. And you can say there's a successful woman that doesn't mean women don't face discrimination. But I still just don't think that answers the question of whether this is confirmation bias. Because especially everyone agrees that social media platforms are awful and constantly ban you for no reason and do terrible things.

Yeah, none of these companies are well run. Right? Just to be clear. Like, I don't think anybody listening to Verchast believes that I think Mark Zuckerberg is like a great leader of his company or that Jack Dorsey is anything but like a shared spectral hallucinings. we have instead of like an effective CEO. But they are private companies. And so it is extremely weird that they're not allowed to just do stuff, right? In a place where we're pretty aggressively deregulating every other kind of private company.

That's why it's a debate because some people think it is so damaging that we have to get the government to intervene. Other people like myself would say the government is garbage at doing it. anything. And so if it intervenes, it will make everything worse. So that is not a solution. But just because you don't want government intervention, it doesn't mean you can't say that Facebook is garbage and should stop censoring people. Again, my proposed intervention is that you introduce competition into the system and maybe there's a better version of Facebook that more is competently run. That is more transparent. And that is a thing that they can compete on. That just, it doesn't seem, that seems like

an idea that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have and not an idea that has as much traction on the conservative side, although it's antitrust enforcement of that kind is like fundamentally a market solution and it has its roots in conservatism. So that to me is like what is the Vurchase about? It's about competition. Ultimately, like I wish there are more choices. I wish there are more flippy phones. This to me seems like the lack of competition is leading us to extremely extremely weird conversations about speech online and extremely weird flip-flops of regulatory intent right on these parties. You would not expect free speech regulation to come from the right wing of the policy

spectrum. Break him up. Okay. We didn't talk about the Christchurch call. Walk us through that. Yeah, that's actually a huge one as well. Okay. There was also a very large coalition of governments and social media platforms that

signed something, the Christchurch called action that's supposed to rally them to limit extremism on platforms to take a whole raft of other, again, somewhat nebulous measures to promote non-extremism and to basically stop something, stop hate content from spreading online. The U.S. did not sign. Yeah. We support it generally. But we don't support support it. Yeah.

We're not all the way. You guys are doing great. is based, I think, are the government statement. Why do you think they didn't sign it? It's hard to say. Their statement is that they have free speech concerns. And this is one of the weird cases where, yes, it is entirely possible to read this as we don't want to condemn something that someone might think of as a political ideology that's too close to their own because there's a fine line between white supremacists and like certain parts of the Trump's political base. It's also possible to genuinely read it as it's weird to have governments and social media platforms talking about creating ways to police speech on their platform that is still legal speech.

Yeah. Casey talks about this a lot, the concept of the splinternet that eventually governments around the world are going to create their own little internets because their own little laws. Little laws. The little laws of Europe. And it seems like that is just ever, it's hurtling towards us. and our free speech sort of doctrine is way more permissive than lots of other places. So, yeah, there's like one logical argument that's incompatible with how we think about it. It's not incompatible with how Germany thinks about it. Right.

Or New Zealand, which did genuinely ban sites after the Christchurch shooting. Yeah. All right. There's yet more Trump. I apologize. We can't actually miss this. The trade war continues. Trade war expands.

Trade war expands. Trump imposed a bunch of tariffs. China retaliated. Addie, walk us through what's going on there. Roughly facing the sort of important takeaway is that there's a huge category of devices that could face, or of products that could face 25% tariffs. And that includes a lot of stuff that now people interact with every day and are very, very cognizant of the price of, like phones and tablets. And that it's possible that people will not see these price increases if it's someone like Apple that has reasonable profit margins. But if you're looking at the low end or you're really lots of companies that aren't Apple,

then we could end up seeing higher prices or sort of other problems. And that still has not quite gone into effect. There's going to be public comment. There's going to be meetings. And categories could get dropped, but it's potentially a very big deal. I mean, Apple is like $130 billion in the bank. Yeah, Apple is going to be fine. But like Walmart today said they couldn't necessarily eat all of the hit to their margins

and consumers would see prices. So it's happening. But I think like phone chargers being more expensive. is going to be more real for more people than anybody expects. I think those are also, these are things where everybody kind of knows how much they should cost, and there are also big ticket items where you're like, yeah, I can spend X amount of money on this phone, and you will notice if the price jumps a really substantial amount.

This is a really good time for Google to be putting out like a $400. I'm just saying. Can he move, Google? This is horrible and shallow of me, My first thought is that Intel is coming out with 9th gen processors in the summer. And I'm thinking about getting a new laptop. And I don't want it to cost 25% more, is what I'm saying. I've thought about this with building a PC or buying anything.

Buying a new phone. My phone's almost three years old. Oh, man. It's coming. Everybody stop what you're doing and start shopping. That's how you boost that consumer confidence index. Okay. Last one.

The White House also basically issued an executive order by the end of it all ban Huawei from selling networking equipment in the United States. It gives them the ability to ban companies in general, but it is probably going to be Huawei. Yeah. Which people are worried about because of somewhat nebulous concerns over the government, like the Chinese government, basically having a way into U.S. infrastructure. Yeah. Well, as I say, I mean, the reason people in this country want to buy Huawei equipment is because it's cheap. than the competition. Yep.

And so hilariously, we've written this story. You can go read it. It's rural broadband providers who are going to be most affected. So the tariffs in the trade war is literally like farmers won't be able to sell their crops and then they'll have slow internet. Like just feels like a like a bad combo platter for everybody. But the Huawei thing is like happening. It's like moving along.

Yeah. There is a novel that I read came out in 2015. it's called Ghost Fleet. And it's about a war between China, well, the United States versus Russia and China. And it kicks it all off because China built all our microchips and they hack all of the America all it once, right, at the start. So I think what happened is that somebody in Congress read that book.

Oh, yeah, of course. That's Peter Singer. He just wrote a new book. I bet Peter Singer just like slinging copies of Ghost Fleet Yeah By the way you should read Wired for War Which is a great Peter Singer book

That book's pretty good Yeah you're probably right Like Mattis Red Ghost Fleet And here we are Like we're just like going for it That's probably true Like given this administration That is more likely true

It's happened in other I think under Clinton We had a whole bio-warfare division That basically happened Because he read a novel about You read Outbreak Yeah All right

We're taking a break and have policy talk, we're coming back, Paul's going to do this thing, then we're talking about the stream wars. We're much less heated war. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts, but time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates

takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers. That's where LinkedIn Hiring Pro comes in. It's built to be your hiring partner. helping you find the right candidates faster. That way you can hire with confidence without turning it into another full-time job. Hiring Pro streamlines the entire process from drafting your job to short-listing candidates

and conducting AI-powered interviews for initial screenings. Its updated conversational interface lets you describe what you need in plain language. Nearly 60% of hirers find a candidate to interview within a week. With Hiring Pro, you spend less time searching and more time connecting with the right talent. And instead of getting buried in resumes, you get a focus shortlist

that actually moves your hiring forward. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. Support for the show comes from Anthropic. Not every question has an easy answer.

And the ones that are really worth asking, usually come with a healthy mix of inspiration and backpedaling, aha moments, and quiet meditation. When you're working through one of those problems, you want a partner to bounce ideas off of and figure out where the deeper issue lies. That's where Claude can help. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you, whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move. Claude extends your thinking

to tackle the problems that matter. Plus, Claude's research capabilities go deeper than basic search. It can have comprehensive, reliable analysis with proper citations, turning hours of research into minutes. Ready to tackle bigger problems?

Get started with Claude today at cloud.aI slash vergecast. That's cloud. cloud. a.I. slash Vergecast and check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude.a.ai slash

vergecast. Okay, Paul, every week. You wow America with your platform. That's right. Called Dongletown, USA. Bring it up back. Anchor has created a lightning

to USBC adapter. Is this segment called Dongletown, USA, bringing it back. Anchor has created a USBCDA. Well, actually, I'm sorry, but I have to interrupt this regularly scheduled segment of Dongletown USA to bring you a breaking update from the keyboard in the front club. H.P. Omen X2S. Right?

So you've seen those laptops where they have a track, the track bed turn is actually a screen. Yeah. And you're like, that's garbage. because the keyboard's not in the front. HP thought the same thing. So they put the screen up above the keyboard. So it's a two-screen laptop with a keyboard in the front, trackpad on the right.

It's for gamers. Yeah, I'm very excited. I love it. I mean, I looked at a picture of this thing, and I was like, I don't know what that screen is for, but I need it. And then I did not buy it. Well. I should buy it now before it goes up in price for 25%.

That's right. All right. I just have a quick update from the stream wars. By the way, here's my belief. Disney Plus is going to launch in June, right? Is it that soon? It's coming right up. June or July, they're going to launch Disney Plus.

It's going to have all the Star Wars, additional Star Wars will be waged on Disney Plus. Yeah. You know, it's got all the Marvel movies. They're saying Endgame will only be on Disney Plus. It's coming. It's the big competitor to Netflix. Yeah. The streaming wars are upon us.

Apple TV Plus is going to launch to compete with Star Wars in endgame. They will have a series of shows from Oprah and Aquaman in a world where everyone is blind. Okay. It's true. That's what they announce. But they're here. It's happening. You can just like make a list of verge buzzwords and put them in a sentence around stream wars.

They will make a real headline that we could write. Yeah. T-Mobile zero rates, 5G, HBO on Apple TV Plus. is a nonsense sentence. But by the end of this year, it could be a real verge headline. So I think it's very important that we track this stuff.

So Disney Plus is coming. That means a lot of stuff is happening in the run-up. So AT&T, which owns Game of Thrones, just a reminder for everyone, that is the outcome of the world that we live in, AT&T owns Warner Media,

which owns the rights to the office and friends. They're going to launch the Warner Media streaming service, and they're going to pull the office and friends off of Netflix when the deal expires in 2019 and force you to subscribe to Warner Media and streaming service to watch Friends, which is like a nuclear level move.

I feel pretty good about Netflix. They've got like good brand equity with me. I feel pretty good about Disney. Like Disney feels like it's a good brand that I trust and I'll, you know, much happier to have children watch that than, you know, YouTube kids and it's creepy stuff. But neither of those compared to how much I dearly love. In my heart, how important to my life, Warner Media is. I cannot wait to pay money.

So this is why we're going to lose antitrust. Yeah. Everybody wants one company to own everything. Yeah, it's true. Actually, someone tweeted me today that. Holding the still wet with dripping blood knife that murdered film struck, that got way darker than I thought. It's true.

A thing that is true is that friends in the office are still, to this day, the most popular shows. Netflix. Yeah. So they're going to take this thing that everyone just sort of, you know, you turn on Netflix, you don't know what to do. You just like watch Friends. People do it. They're going to say, you want to do that?

Go. My theory is that Friends Piracy and Plex usage is about to Skyrocket. Because you don't need anything else that's on the Warner Media Streaming service. So that's one thing. Disney bought out all of the assets of Hulu from Comcast. So now Disney is in full control of Hulu. So that's happening. Isn't it they're like they're going to be, like they could now or they're going to be or like it's clear they're going to, but they're still like they're still involved in some way for another couple of years, stock.

I think they get some revs share. Oh, I should say disclosure. Comcast does not own Vox Media. Everyone who tweets that at me, just please stop. It's not true. Comcast is a minority investor in Vox Media, which is the parent company of The Verge. Also, they hate, they just personally hate me. So that's just, that's the disclosure.

Comcast is giving full control of Hulu to Disney. They're launching, this is true, an NBC Plus streaming service. You can pay $10 a month for it, but they don't want you to do that. They want you to still have cable. So if you have cable or satellite or whatever, you can log in to NDC Plus and get everything, including YTV and Video on Demand. But if you pay the $10 a month, you get less than that. Oh, my God. That's their plan.

Here's my solve for all of this. By cable? No, I'm going to watch less television. Yeah, it seems right. If you don't watch an hour or two of television a night, you freeze up time to do other activities. This is not fun. I don't need this in my life. Well, Paul, let me see if I can interest you in what I believe is the future of television,

which is the short form mobile video service known as Quibi, which has already raised $1 billion. And now the information reports is on the Honda. to raise yet another billion dollars, giving them two billion dollars to put six minute videos on your phone. And this is what they can do. They can rotate from portrait to landscape. The contrast is off the charts.

But when you watch it in portrait, you see one stream. And when you rotate it, you see another stream, adding a frisson of interactivity and also double the bandwidth usage to your video usage. I gotta say, one of the best parts of any week is when YouTube has the temerity of plugging another YouTube original in my feed. And I love just hitting the triple dot button and saying, hide this. I would sign up for Quebebe just to thumbs down every garbage piece of content. But then there'd be nothing else there. You're paying the money just to thumbs down all of the comments.

The name of this company stands, it's a smash-up, Portmanteau, I think, is the word. Is that right? Is that the word portmanteau? Uh-huh. Yeah, of two words, quick, bites. Say the word quick. Quick.

Quic. Quic. Quibbe. It's quibis. It's quibis. No, quibai. Quibai. Well, okay, now, if B-I is pronounced by, then that means $2 billion, that's a billion

dollars per quib. This is horrible. Anyway, by the way, and this service is still a year away. So the wars are off and running, right? Like, you got 10 extra dollars to spend. You can buy a cut-down version of NBC. You're paying for Disney Plus. You're paying for Hulu.

You're paying for Netflix. And then you're like, you know what I don't have enough of is six-minute videos that show me a different video when I rotate to landscape. Now I'm going to pay them to. But they have Guillermo Dutoro involved. They do have, I mean, they're, I mean, it's Jeffrey Katzenberg, right? Like the, the sort of like word on the street in media is don't bet against Jeffrey Katzenberg who ran Disney and then left Disney and then started Dream. Like, right, like he has his track record of success. Like, dude, dude made Trek, I believe. Ants. Ants is DreamWorks. Smashmouth owns their, like, continuing existence to Jeffrey Katzenberg. So, like, yeah, everyone is like, don't bet against Jeffrey Katzenberg, which is a fair thing.

to say. I just, my fundamental thing is like the reason anybody has an app on their own screen is because there's user-generated content in that app, right? Like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Reddit, very, like, very few the apps on your home screen that your phone maker didn't put there or that aren't, like, your email messaging are not user-generated content apps. The New York City subway time. Well, sure, but that's like utility. I meant like content apps. Do you have Netflix on your home screen? No. Like, I know very few people who have Netflix on their home screen.

I have New York Times The Verge and my RSS reader Newsify. Okay, well, you're like living a healthy life. Oh, yeah, I have Feedly. I have Feedly too. But I replaced Facebook with Feedly in an effort to like be a better person. Paul, what do you got? Audible, Spotify. Oh, yeah, I got Spotify.

Yeah, me too. All right. Well, my theory is breaking down in front of this like media elite circle that I'm in. Oh, yeah, I have the Times too. The most popular apps in the world, the most popular media apps in the world are all user-generated content and Netflix. Right? And so if you're making this weird competitor to YouTube, but you're not going to have this like vibrant library of people doing stuff. I think you're like, do you know it didn't cost $2 billion in content costs?

TikTok. Are you building up to an argument that creepy will fail? Where are they on the go 90 scale? 80. Holding at 80 is my theory. By the way, the NBC Plus app, I'm giving an incomplete did not finish. Because if you're trying to charge 10 bucks a month

for not everything, and your CEOs out in the world being like, we'd rather you subscribe to cable, like you shut up with a test and you just drew a dinosaur instead of the answer. Like, that's where they're out. Here's why I'm mad about the streaming wars. If you want to watch video

that is made by a professional on the internet, there's no opting out. When we first cut the cord, you could like opt out of paying for cable. And if you really wanted to watch a TV show, you could just go buy it on iTunes for 30 bucks or whatever the season cost. But now if you want to watch a bunch of these shows, you have no choice but to subscribe. And then try and quickly unsubscribe. So if you're diligent, you could theoretically like you pick and choose your shows. You're going to have to set up a schedule for the year.

And I'm like, all right, March is my CBS All Access Month. And in March, I will turn up, flip on my CBS All Access subscription, and I will watch every show that I want. I watch Star Trek Discovery. I watch the Twilight Zone. It would be great. And at the end of March, it gets shut off, so I only pay, you know, seven bucks for it. And then April, April, that's my NBC month. Yeah.

And you'll flip that on, watch all your NBC shows. Well, not all of them. Otherwise you're, well, some of them. But there's no way. If it, like, I just want to opt out. I just want to be like, you know what, guys? I'm happy to pay you money for your content. Just let me just buy it and put it in my like online catalog of TV shows.

And then I will not deal with your subscription. And you can't do that. Here's my, here's my counter proposal, which is, you know, the very first cable systems in America. Community Access TV. That's what it was called Cat TV.

You know, friends, neighbors, literally countrymen, gathered together to put up one big antenna and then they ran wires to their house. Yeah. Collective action. I'm saying we form roving bands of shared subscribers. Ooh. Right.

And you will forever be known as like CBS All Access. Right. And you will walk the streets bartering your CBS All Access login for Netflix. Oh, so it's like the end of Fahrenheit 451, but instead of representing a book, I represent a streaming service. Yes, exactly. That's exactly what you're getting at. You will have to memorize all of CBS All Access. It's got along.

You will literally walk the streets being like, I'm looking for a Hulu. And then what we will do is we'll start like a paid matchmaking service so that the Hulus can find the Netflix's. And we'll just sit back. Wait, how do we work dating into this? You don't want to see what happened. The sparks fly when a Hulu meets a Netflix. Okay, that's the Vergecast. Thank you, Adi for joining us.

Yeah. We got to get you on the show more often. Adi Robertson, how can they tweet at you? The Dexterityarchy. Paul? Mm-hmm. You had Future Paul. Yes.

Deeter. I'm Backlon. I'm at Reckless. You can listen to the show anywhere you want. You can subscribe in your favorite podcast app. You can look at the show notes. We have been asked by the BoxingiaModcast. I work to make this request from making it.

Please go on Apple Podcasts and leave a rating and review. I subscribe to the competition theory, but they're asking that you monopolize your review activity towards the Apple Podcasts platform. Do that. Check out. Why did you push that button? Season 4 is here. It is very, very good. If you want to know more about tariffs

and how they're impacting small gadget makers, Ashley actually just made a great video. It's on a YouTube channel. You should watch that. Okay, that's it. Rock and roll. Paul. promo code.