The Vergecast - The T-Mobile and Sprint merger, Apple tweaks the Macbook keyboards, and Huawei vs. Trump

Episode Date: May 24, 2019

The Verge's Russel Brandom joins the show to decipher the Huawei ban as well as its larger implications. Second half of the show, Dieter Bohn explains how Apple is tweaking its troubled keyboard design on its current and future Macbooks. Nilay Patel ends the show with updates on the T-Mobile and Sprint merger.  Playdate is an adorable handheld with games from the creators of Qwop, Katamari, and moreOuya will be shut down for good on June 25thHuawei vs. Trump: all the news about the Chinese phone maker's …Intel, Qualcomm, and other chipmakers reportedly join Google in Huawei banGoogle pulls Huawei’s Android license, forcing it to use open source versionLawmakers applaud Google for revoking Huawei’s Android licenseHuawei can keep sending software updates to phones for three months, US saysMicrosoft removes Huawei laptop from store, remains silent on potential Windows banApple tweaks its troubled MacBook keyboard design, expands repair …Apple will repair 2016 MacBook Pros with 'flexgate' display issues for …Apple updates top-end MacBook Pros with tweaked keyboard and ...Sprint will sell off Boost Mobile if merger with T-Mobile is approved …T-Mobile's merger promises are meaningless Justice Department recommends blocking T-Mobile-Sprint ... The future of AT&T is an ad-tracking nightmare hellworld Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on the Verchast, we talk about the playdate, the new little handheld thing. We get deep into Huawei with Russell Branden. We talk about the new MacBook and the new MacBook keyboards, and a lot about the T-Mobile and the Moines Sprint Merger. That's the Verchast 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 me. 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 the Vergecast, the flagship podcast with the Verge Radio Network.

I wish we had some like laser beam. Poo-poo-poo-bap-de-bow. I feel like we could make that happen. I've been trying to turn this show into a zoo crew show for so long. Anyway, hi, I'm Neelai. I'm your friend. Paul Miller is here. Hello. Deeter Bone is here. I tried to commit to like playing off your I'm a friend joke by coming up with all sorts of synonyms for enemy and I'm just done with that. I'm here. You're neutral. Russell Brandem is joining us today. Hi. So Russell, we're going to talk a lot about Huawei. Yeah, Huawei. I was in the video. I was very careful to say Huawei and really hit the ho. Yeah. And people really appreciate it. We had comments that were specifically like, thank you for hitting the H. For getting it right. Wow. Yeah. Huawei. Huawei.

Huawei. So that's, it's the news of the week. We got to talk about the Timo merger. We got to talk about these Macbooks. I just want to start with something fun. Yeah. I want to start with the Playdate. Do you know what the play date is? Yeah, it looks really cool. Deider, do you want to go through it? I know you have a lot of emotions about the playday. Do you want to walk the people through what it is? So there's, there's this old school, been around forever software company called Panic. And a while ago, they're like, well, you know, making Mac apps is fine, but we want to do other weird. And so they became a video game publisher. They published Firewatch and an upcoming game, which I have tried, called Untitled Goose game. And it is amazing. You basically, like, walk a goose around and troll people and, like, break stuff with the goose. It's the best thing. That sounds correct. Yes.

But now they decided they're making hardware. And so it's this cute little yellow thing with a, I guess, apparently a high-resolution black and white screen. You know, a couple of buttons. It's meant to play video games. It's got a crank on the side. Like a literal crank and the crank is like another controller. So instead of like having, you know, like, you know, shoulder buttons or like a joystick instead of just the D-pad, they have a crank and you play games with the crank. So the crank isn't like a like a battery power situation.

You're not like winding it up to play it. It's powered by USBC. All right. It's like those Bopit machines except you're cranking it. So they announced it this week and I got to say the feelings that Neely references this thing made a job. gigantic splash because there's a corner of the internet of like, you know, like the really cool kids. And all the really cool kids were connected to the software company in some way because they've been making Mac apps forever. And they're genuinely like good, interesting people that are run an indie company.

And so I am very excited for the PlayDade. I think it's amazing hardware. I think it looks cool. Well, before we get into all that, I just want to two more facts about the PlayDade. One, it's being made by teenage engineering. which is rad and everything that company makes is great. Yep. It's $149 when it comes out later.

So that's all cool. Second, the business model for the games is super neat where one comes out, when you buy it, you get 12 games that they unlock on Mondays every week. It had like an outsized launch. It was like it was the only thing I saw on like my version of the internet for like an entire day. So good job. But also like, man, maybe maybe this isn't going to change.

the planet? I don't know. Let me just read to you a sentence. Okay. This story is about PlayDate, the most amazing and exciting product announcement for me since the original iPhone. That is our friend John Gruber, who is not prone to hyperbole. Well, he's not prone to comparing products to the iPhone, the single most successful product of all time that has literally restructured society. It's fact. Yeah. Yeah. This is a Game Boy with a black and white screen. I feel like Groover is maybe thirsty for leadership. I like John, it's just an incredible sentence. I feel like there's, yeah, but it's like, you know, he's like been, started hitting Apple really hard.

He's clearly like lost the faith. Yeah. And he's become like one of those guys who like gets out of the army and becomes like the cults are all like, hey, join our cult. Maybe this is what's. I see what you're saying. Maybe this is what. Like he's not going to like become like an Android fan. Boy. Yeah, exactly. So he needs some new thing. He's not buying a Windows PC.

Here's how I feel at the play date. You know when you discover a band? Maybe like you thought you went really deep on Spotify or something or you, in back of the day, you went to a record store. And you're like, oh my God, this band is amazing. I have to tell everybody about it. I've discovered this amazing indie band. And then everyone's like, oh yeah, they've been around for like three years. What are you talking about? We know that. That's how I feel about the play date. When I first saw it, I was like, this is amazing. And I look at the internet and everyone's like, this is amazing. And I was like, oh, this is the broken social scene of handheld gaming. Oh, no, that's too harsh of a burn. I will say that there is something, I think something about the innate appeal to people like myself is this, this appeals to like, we went to the moon, but now all we got is 140 characters. You know, like the same innovation and whimsy that you can bring to app development, you can apparently bring to hardware development if you take three years to develop. in conjunction with teenage engineering. But you can get there. Yeah.

You can get there. Okay, here's why I'm excited about it. One, it is, in fact, a new, it seems like a complete product, right? Yes. It's finished. So few things are complete at all anymore. For example, would you say that Android is finished? No.

Android is a decade old. It's like wholly incomplete. You can buy Android phones and they're like, yep, this isn't. finished yet. Google shipped the Pixel 3 with a whole chip in it. They didn't do anything for a while. Nothing is finished. This thing appears to be finished.

They built a custom OS. It's not like a weird Linux kernel or whatever, but custom OS, their own little screen, this own interface idea with the crank. They have a novel business model where you're going to play these little games for a week at a time. Then you get a new one on Monday. And also that novel business model in the games industry

isn't like a loot box scam. It's just a new business model, which is nice. Yeah. And then on top of all of that, it's focused. It doesn't have like a Twitter client on it. There's no potential for this thing to destroy democracy. Well, it does run video games, which I have some questions about. Many of the things that we discuss in the show are like, that's great. I love it. It's an awesome new way to watch TV.

30% chance it will destroy democracy along the way. I'm super into this. I want one immediately, is what I'm saying. Yeah. I get the love. Remember the peak from 2008? Yes. The Twitter, the Twitter peak.

It was a bespoke single purpose gadget. It had a keyboard and a black and white screen and that was it. It was great. It was like a two-way pager for Twitter. But it wasn't just for Twitter. The Twitter, like, got at it. No, but the second version was actually called the Twitter peak. It was right before phones.

I almost bought one in a fit of peak. Oh, my God. Russell, it's been great having you on the show. Series of mistakes have been made. I forgot about this, but I love it so much. If only it had a crank. I mean, that's correct. There needs to be more weird hardware in the world.

I'm excited about this. I just think this is the most exciting product announcement since the original iPhone is an incredible, incredible sentence. All right. So that was the fun. We've had all the fun we're going to have today. I wanted to start with fun. Now, let's move on to,

the current geopolitical situation. Russell, just go ahead in, I don't know, 30 seconds or so, tell us what's going on with Huawei. Okay, so there's like, much like the MCU, I think it's useful to divide it into phases. Yeah. So I would say phase one of the Huawei stuff, which has been going on for a while. Wait, before you start, the news that we're... Yeah, that's phase two. Okay, but there are some news, which is, Huawei's been in a lot of trouble this week.

it's been the biggest set of headlines on our site. Yeah, it's disastrous. Google has their Android license. Yeah. Last week, there was sort of this weird series of things that the government did. There was an executive order that said the Commerce list, that the Department of Commerce could like place restrictions on various, you know, companies that sound like Huawei.

And then we weren't really sure how they were going to do that. And then at the end of the week, the Department of Commerce sort of added Huawei to the entities list and people were sort of like, okay, we don't know how exactly how companies are going to interpret this. And then over the weekend, Sunday, Google was like, okay, we had our lawyers look at this. This means we can't do business with Huawei, so we're going to not do business with Huawei anymore, which means we're not going to license Android to them and we're just sort of cutting ties. And then we've seen, you know, at first it was like, is Google just being weird and aggressive and it was like, no, absolutely every American company that Huawei works with,

like, their lawyers all agree, like, this means you have to cut ties. Maybe, like, the Department of Commerce will back down at some point, or maybe you will be granted a license at some point in the future, but as of now, like, do not answer their phone calls. And so that's basically what's happened. And, like, it's genuinely unclear. One of the things we ran on the site that Cameron did a great job on was literally can they keep making phones if they don't have US parts, which I think the answer to is yes, but again, it's a phone is not the review headline you want. It's harder to make a good phone, certainly. But like just the question of whether they can keep doing the things that they've been doing,

like, okay, so they don't, they've been developing this plan B operating system, which is the sort of alternative to Google supported. Android. Wait, before, we're going to go, we're going to spend a lot of time on this. Why did the Commerce Department put them on the entity list? Oh, so, why is it called the entity list? Entity just means a thing that exists. I love that it is called the entity list.

You're like a forbidden entity. You're like an entity that we've got our eyes. No, it literally sounds like they're ghostbusters. Well, because the thing is, some of them are people and some of them are companies. Yeah. And some of them are like weird. And so it's just like. And some of them are spooky ghosts.

Let's not get too specific about what. belongs on this list. Entity is literally the most generic word for thing that exists that they could come up with. It always makes me think of like, you know, you detect the ship's sensors are picking something up. It's like an entity out there. Yeah, okay, so why did this happen? The Loch Ness Monster. Why does anything happen?

How can we attribute causality to events? Russell, that's my stick in this show. What are you doing? Well, okay, separately from this, yes. People have a lot of problems with Huawei. There are a lot of concerns about Huawei, and it is tempting to draw a line between those concerns and what has recently happened, right? So the concerns basically are they make network equipment.

Like the companies that make network equipment are basically Nokia, which is based in Finland, Erickson, which is based in Sweden, and Huawei that's based in China. In general, it's a free country. Like, if you're Verizon and you're building out 5G infrastructure, you can buy from whoever makes the best deal, and sometimes that's Huawei. And but I mean I think folks like at the NSA and at various intelligence agencies are like maybe don't buy the Chinese one. Yeah like just as a favor to me. And then they sort of this became a broader and broader thing and there were more restrictions and. But this is building for a while.

Yeah, that's been true. That's been true even under Obama. And it was also like it was like maybe don't buy the Chinese one to like, I'd prefer it if you didn't to like, you know, you really shouldn't to like, oh my God, don't without any like clear like here is that. the thing that we know that is going to scare the hell on you. Yeah, like, it's never like we found this thing in the Huawei hardware, and that's why you shouldn't do it. Like, it never got to that level. It's just that, like, this thing is possible, and there's nothing you can do that we'll make it, we'll make it worth it to accept this level of risk. And so just structurally, this is a bad idea, which is kind of a drag and I don't love, but I do think, like, fundamentally, you know, The Snowden leaks show the NSA doing a lot of stuff like this internally, not like on U.S. hardware that's used externally, but like it is targeting the network infrastructure is like a classic surveillance espionage thing to do.

So it does make sense. Yeah. Okay. So there's that. And then as things have escalated, and this is more under Trump, there's a lot of specific stuff against Huawei that like doesn't make as much sense. So, like, Chinese companies tend to, there's been a lot of trade secrets cases of, like, someone goes to work for, like, Monsanto, and then suddenly they, like, get on a plane to China with the hot new corn seeds and then, like, suddenly, you know, those corn seeds are just being used in China,

but it's a different IP regime, and so we can't really stop it. And, like, there's a lot of stories like that. A couple stories like that have been leveled against Huawei. I don't find the indictment super convincing. Like the specific trade secret case that has been publicly, they've been publicly charged with is that they stole T-Mobile, which is a phone testing robot made by T-Mobile that's literally just like a hand that taps on the phone. And then you see how long it taps till the phone break. I'm going to go ahead and say that that doesn't, that's not like an advantage of, as a T-Mobile customer, I don't think I have received the benefit of that. And I'm not worried about that technology falling into Chinese hands.

if that was the cause, if there was a cause that they could actually say out loud of why Huawei's on the entity list, a public court case would be something they could say. Right? When a judge says you can't ship iPhones anymore because you're in a beef with Qualcomm or something, like there's a cause that you can point to why you're not allowed to ship iPhones anymore. Yeah. And also like executive actions while they tend to be like it's a lower burden of proof. You're not like proving stuff.

usually when presidents do this sort of thing, they like want people to know why they did it so that people don't just think they're going nuts. And like, and so there often is this kind of pageantry of like, well, here's the evidence like we first contacted, you know, Huawei at this time and their answers were not satisfactory. And then we ultimately decided that this thing was. And we just haven't gotten that. And that's, I think, to a large extent, probably just a bureaucratic failure that they got used to kind of, you know, Trump does a lot of things this way where I'll just like sort of do something and he knows it'll make people mad and he doesn't care. Or just like there was someone internally and they just couldn't get it together to make the case. But like the result is if you're going to try to connect the problems with Huawei to like why this is necessary to do this, it's weird because it's like you're doing their work that. they should have done already. And like, they probably know stuff that's not public because it's

all national security concerns. I very much believe that they're concerns about Huawei that aren't public. But like, it's a little weird. You got to say something. Well, so the other piece of this is, so Russell just explained, you know, what's going, what do we actually know about Huawei and security concerns? But the other thing that's going on with China overall is a gigantic trade war. And so it just so happens that at the exact moment that Donald Trump is trying to to put the screws to China, his administration puts Huawei on this entity list. And so the question of why did Huawei get put on the list and no company gets to talk to them anymore, like, was it truly just security or was it part of this trade war?

Yeah. And also, so we're leading up, like there's these new tariffs are taking effect in June. In theory, there are going to be more trade talks. They're trying to cut a trade deal. it looks bad if you say like, hey, this piece of technology is a national security risk, like, throw it out and burn it. We can't have it in U.S. borders anymore. And then you go and cut a trade deal and then you come back and you're like, JK, now everything's fine. Like, that is, well, and like generally you shouldn't, like, you can say, hey, they're bad.

Like, we're not going to let you import them for tariff reasons. But like, you don't want to cry wolf on like state espionage things. again, because you have this whole Iraq war problem of like there is this evidence that plausibly cannot be made public and you need people to just trust you. And it may be really important at some point that they trust you. And so it's a bad idea to erode that. You were saying it's like the MCU with four phases. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, we'll walk me through the four phases. I mean, no, no, I only had two phases. Oh, I see. I'm not actually that up on the MCU. This is like early, we're only to Ultron. But like the first phase was Huawei has network hardware problems. And it's like, all right, maybe I want a little bit more evidence. Like I understand there's not a smoking gun.

But like I think the standard for let's not put this cell equipment in our country, like in what is fundamentally a very like a perennial target for espionage. let's just like be a little more sort of tightly controlled about that. I am like fundamentally willing to cut them the benefit of the doubt on that. It's a very plausible case that they're making. And we had Jeffrey Starks in the Veritcast this week, who is Democrat, worked for Obama. Yeah. And he was saying we might need these rural carriers to rip out all their equipment and replace.

Yeah. Well, and like he's an FCC commissioner, so he's thinking about like the integrity of American networks. And like the FCC has a lot of leeway over that for this exact. reason, right? So that's a totally legitimate thing for an FCC commissioner to think about. And like, again, it's, you don't really need the standard of evidence. It's not a judicial thing because it's risk tolerance. Yeah. But what's happening now is, and this is the wildest part of it to me. So Google was, Huawei phones aren't like a thing in America. So when we're talking about can Huawei make and sell the phones, we're not saying can they make and sell them in America.

We're saying can they make and sell them in Europe and India and China? So like, what is the benefit of stopping Micron from selling flash memory to this phone that will be, like, even if they are just tools of the Chinese state, what is the national security benefit of us keeping that flash memory out of this phone like that is then going to be sold within China? So that, and that I genuinely don't know. The concern is also, okay, so let's say it's not a national security thing. It's just that Huawei's bad and they've done bad things to us and we're going to do bad things to them, which, I mean, I'm saying it in like a silly way, but that is sometimes how it works. Yeah. Like, nation states interacting, sometimes it gets dumb, like, okay. But that case isn't specific to Huawei.

Like there are other companies that have also been implicated in trade secret stuff. There are other companies that are also like uncomfortably close with Chinese intelligence. So we've seen people making moves around DJI. It's like, okay, are they just going to decide? They did this to ZTE already? Well, I mean, CTE, it's like, all right, like you sort of have the same network thing. But like, if they cut ZTE a deal. Yeah.

At the end of it all. That was the thing. So commerce, I mean, they can have, and this is more akin to like what happens when you interact with a Department of Justice where it's just like, all right, like we want to let you back in. You're out for seven years. We're going to do these tests. You have to pay this fine. But there's like this path towards you being allowed back into the game again.

That has not happened. It would be cool if when they did this, they said, we're doing this preemptively, but we want to cut a deal. Because again, then we would know why all this was happening and what they were talking about. Yeah. We don't. And I'm worried that if it's kind of a. screwy thing they did, they might do it to another company. Maybe they're doing all of this to psych China out, which doesn't seem like a great plan. So I just don't think Wawa is that

scared of this moment, right? Here, and Russell has heard me say this many times. To me, this is like step one along like a four-step path to the dissolution of the entire like current world economic order. This is where we get into the MCU because now we have four stages. Yeah, yeah. Well, just like, go with me on this. Like, I'm not even kidding. The reason Google went first is because Android doesn't make them any money, right? That was the reason they were like first out the gate. Well, wait.

Well, it's possibly it went first because they were the first one the government put the screws to because they figured that was like the fastest way to make an impact on Huawei because they're already very close to being the number one, undisputed number one phone company in the world. They're trading places with Samsung all the time. But also, like, I mean, Google's making money when you do a Google search off the Huawei. phone. But you don't do Google searches in China. Ah, okay. So there we go. In Europe and...

Well, sure, sure. But Google, like, doesn't transact for Android. So they can announce to shareholders, they can just make an announcement. They can put out a press release. We withdrawn the Android license for play services from Wallet. They don't get to use it anymore. And there's no, there's no corresponding like loss of revenue booked, right? Like, it's not material impact on Google's bottom line. because phones will still be in the world doing Google searches and that's the revenue.

Whereas if you're Micron. If you're Micron, you're saying we're cutting off one of our biggest customers. You've got to do all the work. If you're Qualcomm, we're cutting off one of our biggest customers. Intel, we're cutting off one of our biggest customers.

You've impacted your bottom line. You're not making those sales anymore. A really bizarre company that has not said anything yet is Microsoft. Yeah. Which sells Windows to Huawei. Huawei makes great Windows laptops.

They've pulled the Huawei laptops off the store, but they have just like for a week, no commented us on whether they're going to yank the Windows license from Huawei, which is... So you're saying they have to line up their disclosures to their shareholders so they don't get sued by the SEC? Right. They have to, if they're going to disclose material information about their financial performance, like this is the thing. So then there's, Russell is mentioning Huawei's had this like plan B, which is we're going to make our own op. We're going to make our own competitor. to Android, we're going to make our own competitor windows. There's rumors they've been stockpiling parts for three months, or for a year they've built up a three-month stockpile of parts, which could have also changed the financial results of all these companies because they're

buying more parts than they need. Like, this is a disaster in the making for a huge number of companies. Google licenses play, and they get in trouble, and, like, you know, Europe sues them, and you have Chrome and Search and the Play Store. That's a license on top of the Android open source license, right? And so Android is open source, and we all know that Chinese companies take the open source Android. They build their own little version of it. They sell in China. The Chinese market's very different than here because there's no play store or whatever because Google's not allowed to operate there.

But open source is still a contract. Like the whole way open source works is that you take the code for me and you agree to my contractual license terms that you will contribute. your code back, that you won't, like, go and make it proprietary. So if I take Android and make my own version of it and say, now it's proprietary, Google can sue me for breaching the contract. Right. That's the, that's, like, the mechanism by which open source stays open. Yeah.

So they can't just take AOSP and make their own version of it. It is super unclear. Like, this breaks a fundamental part of open source. Yeah. Like, no one has ever really thought about what happens if the code. you're giving away in the license under which that code stays open is preempted by like federal national security concerns. So you're leading to a place where Huawei might do something about that. Let me throw one more log on that fire of intellectual property problems that they're running into. Arm, which is a British company, has decided, well, there's enough American technology in the way that, you know, we distribute our processor designs that we also cannot do business with Huawei.

And so there are two kinds of processors that Android runs on, Intel, a few of them, and Arm chips. And now Arm is saying we can't talk to Huawei, which is like the thing that everything that's not a Windows laptop basically runs on Arm. Right. So, okay, so now you've got Arm saying, okay, we can't do business with you anymore. We withdraw your license to our designs. What does that mean? Right? Like, they already have the designs.

They make the chips. who's going to stop them at all. Are the Chinese state authorities going to show up at the Huawei office and be like, hey, you had this contract with a British company and because of an American trade action, that contract was withdrawn. So now we're arresting you for IP infringement. Like, that's definitely not happening. These are all just pieces of paper. And so you end up at this place where, like, the fundamental contractual nature of AOSP and open source, like, it. Behind every contract is like a gun, right?

Right? Yes. That's the, Go on. It's true. If I make you a promise and I breach it, you can sue me and like the government makes me like perform. That's how that works. So if you take all that away.

It's like a legal fiction, you might say. It's not a legal fiction. It's just the reality of how we enforce promises. Because right, these are collective action problems. So if you take away the ability to enforce the Android open source license, you take away the ability to enforce the arm license, and Wally just makes the stuff anyway and uses the code anyway, then at some point China's like,

why are we in the World Trade Organization? Which is like we're in it because we agreed to have these IP laws. Or we have these IP laws because we're in this organization, but now we're not respecting them anyway. I mean, this wouldn't be the first time China had like sort of played to the limit on like WTO stuff. They are playing to the limit already. So now we're just like push them way over and like screw it.

We're out. Right. And they're just going to, and they make so much of this stuff anyway that like revoking the piece of paper that says it's okay is like almost meaningless in this situation. Like if you're always engineers, you're still just working on the arm chips. Like taking away the piece of paper doesn't like cut your key code access to the building.

So like this, it's, I don't know, man. It's super dangerous. Because you're removing the authority that makes the contracts effective. So Tom Warren had this great piece this morning about, you know, okay, so you get alternate components. You get this alternate, you know, the arm chips, it means they're going to like fork from the new stuff that Arm is developing. So, okay, they're headed off in this other track. And his point was just laying out, all right, you're making phones without Android. you're making laptops without Windows,

this is a hard road. You can do it, but it's much harder to succeed as the Huawei-sized brand that you were before this week if that is the path. Right. Yeah, I absolutely agree. I just think,

I think Ben Thompson, who was a Microsoft employee before, who was like by usage, China was like one of the top Microsoft markets in the world, but by legal usage, it was like the size of Argentina. Like, there's rampant and massive piracy in this country. Well, in this country, too. That country. We just sweep it out.

No, but ours is good, and theirs is bad. I'm just saying, if you make these moves and you start withdrawing these pieces of paper, like, suddenly the pieces of paper don't mean anything anymore. I did want to make a point of clarification. There are two, like, primary open source licenses. is Linux is a sort of a viral license. If you use Linux, you have to keep it open source. Apple, which brought the Unix, which is under a different license, I think it's the BSD license,

did not open source. It's modified Unix kernel for a long time. So there's that slight differentiation. But again, Android is based on Linux, so therefore it has that more viral. Android is mostly licensed under the Apache 2.0 license. There's just a thing. There's lots of licenses. But it's built on Linux, which is GPL. Sure. But at the end of the day, the reason open source works, the mechanism of that virality is that you sign up to a contract that makes it viral.

I mean, open source is a hack. It is a hack that relies on the existence of extremely strong copyright protection. Right? So because I wrote the code and I invested with like total copyright protection by the government, I can write a contract that makes you have to do stuff when you use it. So, like, if you don't have really strong copyright law, if you don't have really strong contract law, open source fails. So then you'd go to a place like China, which does not have tremendously strong copyright law. The viral licenses fail, like, you know, public domain open source or MIT, like just, hey, don't sue me if this breaks, otherwise do whatever you want.

But it's still a contract, right? The mechanism, this is a thing. We don't think about it. We take it for granted because we assume the government. government exists, right, and that we have some recourse if something bad happens. But all of this stuff, like, it's on public servers and it says, like, license in their GPL. Or, like, you look at Wikipedia and it's like the Wikimedia license. And, like, all of that is predicated.

And, like, there's a functional government that will enforce these contract rights. This is also, and I'm going to get angry tweets from the EFF folks about this. But this is also why you would want to bind unaligned countries in the region into some sort of trans-Pacific partnership. Yeah, yeah. You want to gain some leverage over the... But wait, so the point of being, TPP was like, at the time,

when we didn't like copyright, hypothetically, this was when TPP was like this massive, one of these weird trade deals where everyone's just in a room in Brazil somewhere and no one has any idea what's happening. And it's like, the gloss on it at the time, which I very much was convinced by, was this is the U.S. exporting its bad copyright provisions

to the rest of the world, so they can't, you know, have a Mickey Mouse cartoon in Brazil because the entire world would collapse. But, like, now you look at it. And so Trump, one of the first things he did was back out of it as like an anti-globalism measure, which was like one of the few cookies that I think the left got from the Trump election. But then, like, now you look at it and you're like, okay, if we're looking at a fracturing of the global copyright system, which is kind of what we're talking about here. then that's the kind of thing you'd want to have around

just to make sure there's more people on our side who can't buy the weird off-brand Huawei phone that's pirating Android. And it seems like a very sensitive moment because if let's say there was a negotiation that we just haven't heard about and Trump or whoever was like, well, if you're not going to play a ball,

Huawei, we're going to take away all of your chips and all of your partners, everybody we have any influence on, going to tell them they can't work with you. And if Huawei dies, you know, then apparently that's that was an effective stick. If Huawei manages to make replacements for every single U.S. partner, that is no longer an effective negotiating tactic with anybody in China. Yeah. I mean, especially because Huawei's the biggest and they will have and they also operate in a managed economy. Like they will be able to like make enough replacements. And I heard they have friends in

the Chinese government. Yeah. Anyhow, I would basically put this at maximum complexity. Like, thinking about whether or not the entire underlying foundation of open source is broken by what might be a somewhat unrelated national security concern around cell phone towers is a wild place to be, right? But that's kind of the level we're at. They can just take Android and make it proprietary because Google's not allowed to do business with them. and ultimately, AOSP requires you to be in some sort of contractual relationship with Google. But they give all the code away.

It's just like, the lawyers on Twitter, their brains are broken by this. Okay. Are you ready? Because I have an excellent quote about the future of Huawei from the CEO of Huawei. Okay. This was sent to me by a Huawei representative. It's an interview he did with Chinese state media. And they seize on the metaphor of the interviewer says,

another media person took out a photo of a bullet-ridden aircraft. I was also given the same photo. I heard that you like this photo very much. And he said, yes, I had this feeling that the aircraft was quite like our company. So our current situation is that we are repairing our, quote, aircraft during its flight so that it can make its way back home. Wow. Yeah. So it's just some bullets?

It's just some bullets. And like, you could get shot up in a plane with just regular bullets and, like, plausibly make it back. But it's not like a great situation. Also, if you came to The Virgin, you were like, the Verge's situation right now is that we're like a bullet-ridden aircraft. I'd be like, man, Eli, is it that bad? Strong leadership. All right, so Russell, I want to ask, we've been going on this for a while. I want to ask one question very, very directly.

It's the one I see in the comments on our site. I saw in the comments on your YouTube video, which everyone just watched. Excellent. Has the government made any case at all? Like, I read these comments. Like, the government, this is all fake. We do worse stuff.

There's backdoors and HP network equipment. Verizon's got a building in New York that spies and everyone. Yeah. It's just a fact. You can just like go to that building in New York. It's very ominous. It's possible for the U.S. government to also be bad. Okay.

Like I've been talking about the Chinese government being bad. I didn't want to imply that the U.S. government isn't bad and that we should not all just rise up and tear down our oppressors. Now you're speaking Paul's language. Crypto, baby. Okay, here is the thing. So, like, what you will get. I'm going to assume you meant cryptography, and we're just going to move on. So the thing is, what you get is, like, officials on background.

saying they have concerns and leaking things to reporters. You get retired army officials. You get like military adjacent people saying this is a huge concern. And so I did this piece with common where we were just like, tell us what the problem is. And they're like, well, I don't know what the exact problem is. But I can tell you this situation of having a Huawei, you know, equipment in our 5G networks is unacceptable. What you really want is someone who works for the government to get in front of a podium and say, Here are the problems with Huawei.

This is what we were looking at. This is why we did this. Here are the incontrovertible proof that there are weapons of mass destruction. Yeah. Yellow cake uranium. Someone you can really trust telling you something trustworthy. But like, look, I get that we're not going to get proof. You never know who to trust in this world.

I just want someone to make the case that like this, there are reasons for why we did this, even if you don't agree. And that really has not happened, which I think is part of why the response to this has been so chaotic, is like I can impute motives to them and assume what they were looking at might have been something like this. But I would like them to say something about it. Yeah. I mean, on this show, we like do our best to not give like Google the benefit of the doubt. I feel like we can not give the government the benefit of the doubt. No, it's really like, yeah. The strongest case I've heard specifically about the 5G thing is like, look, even if the hardware is like pristine and perfect, there's no way to build 5G infrastructure without requiring the company that made it to be able to issue software patches.

Yeah. And so if Huawei can issue a software patch to the infrastructure, then they could potentially be influenced by the Chinese government to issue a software patch that is somehow detrimental. Or the Chinese government could just hack in, you know, if there's a pipeline to deploy software, the Chinese government could. can just sort of break in and not tell Huawei. And Huawei will be like, I mean, we heard this a lot with Prism stuff where Google was like, I had no idea the NSA was in there. And like, they really did have no idea the NSA was in there. It's just sort of, it's hard to really defend against that.

And I think that's a legitimate thing. But that doesn't explain why we can't have an American flash memory chip in a European phone that was built by Huawei. way. So I don't know. Maybe there's a reason. Maybe we're worried about them stealing the flash memory technology. That's cool. Just say that.

For both sides of this feel very cypherpunk where one cypherpunk ideal is the, from the U.S. government's perspective, you want to be able to audit your hardware. Ideally, I could make my own phone and I could source it from basically random manufacturers just to make sure that anybody who's trying to attack. attack me directly has to do a lot more work to intercept all the different, you know, random packages to install whatever spy stuff. So that's like pretty cypherpunk, the idea that you could potentially audit your supply chain and therefore be more provably safe.

The other thing, you should probably have end in encryption, no matter what, because it's, you know, the fact that someone could spy on you. Now, it would be bad if China could just turn off our infrastructure, and that's something that end-to-end encryption does not solve. But then being able to read your messages is something that end-in encryption could theoretically solve. Yeah, but if everyone turns on end-end encryption, AT&T can insert ads. That's a price I'm willing to pay. We will come to AT.

We have gone on way too long. I promise you, I promise you listeners and friends. We will rant about AT&T's bullshit later in the show. show. We're going to have an ad. We're going to come back. We're talking about some MacBook keyboards. 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.

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That's upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's upw-w-rk.com. Upwork.com. Deeder. Yeah. Tell me about the secret new material the MacBooks are made of now. Oh, my God. Okay.

So Apple did something. Apple did something is like the heart of our show. Yeah. Apple did something which our friend John Gruber pointed out was really heartening for Mac fans. And that is they put out a spec bump for the MacBook Pro. Apple just randomly spec bumping one of their Macs is the thing that they like didn't used to do. They like stopped doing that for years. And now they're just back in it doing it. So that's a very good sign.

But they couldn't possibly spec bump the MacBook Pro without addressing the keyboard issue. And so they did. They got on calls with a bunch of reporters one by one by one, and I got to be one of those reporters. And they said we're doing three things. Number one, the butterfly keyboard four-year replacement program thing applies to all butterfly keyboards, even the thing we're releasing today. So that's great. Number two, we fixed our like Mac stores or Apple stores so that repairs are way faster. I don't know how, because that repair is ridiculously intensive. You've got to take the whole damn thing apart to get to the keyboard, but sure.

And then number three, this new MacBook Pro has still a third-generation butterfly keyboard. However, it is built with, quote, new materials that make it less likely to have double key presses or missed key presses. And if you have a computer with the third-generation butterfly keyboard, this is a generation with the silicone watchmo. call it in it, and you get it repaired, then you will also get the keyboard with this, quote unquote, new material. I don't know what the new material is, and I and everybody else who got this call asked, and Apple is just straight up not saying. So here's my number one thing.

It's a new material singular. Like they made it out of a new material. Yeah. That, that's like, for some reason I just find that so funny. it's like I just keep thinking about the the scene at the end or the middle of Iron Man 2 by the way spoilers for Iron Man 2

Vibranium where like Tony Stark has to invent a new element but they like didn't know what elements were were they were writing it so it's just a triangle like did they do that? We're like in the basement and they're like we got a the map of the world's fair it's a new element like

it's like let's jumbo size a speck of dust to you know let's see there's a brick on the ground right And the brick is impeding my ability to put my shoe all the way on the ground because the brick's in the way. Yeah. So if I make my shoe out of a new material, can I now step through the brick? Yeah. It's just an amazing thing to say about keyboard reliability.

Here's what we know right now. We know that there is a very long Reddit thread and Reddit post that has got relatively compelling evidence that maybe the problem. isn't just the dust or the dust at all, it's actually some sort of metal fatigue. And it's possible that what they've done is put better metal in it that is more reliable in some way. We also know that IFixit has like ridiculous micron scales, and that means that they are trying to measure the density of whatever this new material is. And so they are actively working as we record this to tell us what the new material is. If you are a fan of the upcoming HBO show in the previous books, his dark materials.

This is very amazing because the, like, dust actually plays a significant role in those books. And they're called his dark, so anyway. I'm just say Apple is a company that when it suits them, will tell you that the back of the watch is made of Sapphire, that the

casing is made of 7,000 series of aluminum. Oh, this year it's 8,000 series aluminum. That the front crystal of the camera has made it. Like, they are happy to tell you what materials they are when it suits their marketing purposes and they can get the quote in the story.

When they're like, our keyboards have been broken for three generations of this product, this is our fix. They're like, it's a new material. And they just like won't tell, there's no information here. Yeah. I mean, they like, they held a press conference for Intenegate, right? That was a different guy. Yeah, that was a different guy. But there's like the obstinate like I don't even know man just like just say there's something wrong and they they finally apologize it took him three years to even say sorry.

Yeah, Joanna had to dress up as a butterfly to get an apology out of it. Casey Johnson has been doing nothing but writing about this for two years and she can't get Apple to admit she exists. Yeah, Apple should definitely talk to Casey Johnson. I'm just saying. She's an excellent reporter and she's been on this story. They should definitely talk to her. Do you think they fixed it? That's my answer. It was basically the internet's answer to this question. So the spec bumps are good, though, right?

The spec bumps are fine. Like, there's more turbo, you know, faster, you know, base speed. Although the thing is they didn't significantly change the way that this thing handles thermals. And, you know, a bunch of people, especially, you know, YouTube creators, were already disappointed in this generation of Max because their thermal envelope meant that. you couldn't crank up the, you know, the processor speed when you need to render as quickly as much as you would want. I just feel like this design didn't work for them. Like fundamentally, we've been, they've been cracking away at it for however long, and it just

call it, right? I mean, it's one thing if you're comparing, like, the iPhone to a Huawei phone, for instance. We live in a world where Lenovo has... Some spirit captured of the think pad keyboard. Real laptops exist that are a pleasure to type on. That's all I was trying to say. I'm sorry, it took a roundabout way there. Lenovo has captured the spirit of the thinkpad keyboard.

Its name is Steve. Yeah. It's spooky. It's on the entity list. It's great. But you're right. Like Lenovo is known for great keyboards. That's just a thing.

Apple used to be known for fantastic keyboards. An okay keyboard. And I kind of just don't know what they're playing at with these. Like, why are they so committed to it? The rumor is there's a 16-inch MacBook that will have a new keyboard design at some point in the future. Well, WBC invites one out. We got them. Yep.

Presumably. Presumably. They had to address this before WWDC. Like, they're going to stick to the, if they know internally like this design is fundamentally flawed, The only question is, how long are they going to run out the clock before they, like, release a new design? And, like, what's the cadence of the new design going to look like? Because as soon as there's a new laptop that has a different kind of keyboard, everyone is going to say, well, don't buy any Macs right now, wait for the new one to come out that has a new design. Like, that is what's going to happen.

And so Apple needs to contend with that very real fact. And so they're going to have to, like, try and release them all at once. They're going to have to just, like, hope that this fixed it and then it won't be a problem anymore. I don't know what they're going to do. I think that's already a true statement. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I'm just very hesitant by a new MacBook Pro. You might have heard the fan on my 2015 MacBook Pro with discrete GPU

several times during this episode. They also announced another fix. Which is a problem that a lot of people have had. Vlad had this, which is the Flexgate problem. So this is, to me, just more extremely strange Apple messaging. They call Dieter, a bunch of reporters, say, here's some new Macs. Our new 2019 MacBook Pro, we've made a super secret material to fix the keyboard. By the way, repair extension already in place for this brand new product.

Yeah. Great. They did all that. Here's the announcement. Same time, no announcement, no pre-reuse, no nothing. They announced a repair extension for the display issues that people are having on these machines, which has been called FlexGate. I don't love gate names, so, but whatever.

Vlad had this problem. It's the one where you get little pillars of light at the bottom of your display. and people believe it's because there's a cable that's too short and it gets cramped so the fixes literally make the cable longer. They announced that too. So this is like two very common problems

with these machines. But they announced that quietly. It just sort of like later on in the day after everyone got their keyboard feelings out, they're like, oh, by the way, this too. And I just suspect they couldn't announce a display problem and a keyboard. Like, what is a laptop?

Mm-hmm. Like, they couldn't be like, both halves of this are broken and we're taking measures to fix it. Let's be clear. They have class leading touchpads. It's a fact. And then they have a little crappier touchpad at the top of the keyboard. In case you want to do some sliding around.

I honestly think it's great. Like they're thinking about Macs. They're updating them good. At some point, they're already going to have to be looking at slowing sales because they're a little too scary to buy, right? And I wonder, like, is the, do people who buy a MacBook Air know they're taking a risk on these keyboards? Do the MacBook Air get updated with this new material?

No, nothing is being updated with a new material. Like, even computers that currently have the third generation, I specifically asked, so, like, once you're, like, you sold out of what your inventory is, well, like, the next MacBook Air that comes off the line be using this new material, we have no announcements about future products. I see. I'm just saying Tony Stark did not start using the circle chest thing after he invented the triangle when he stuck with the... All right. Yeah. We're going to take another break.

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Claude.a.ai slash vergecast. All right, we're back. Paul. Lighten the mood, my friend. Your segment, which is always called... I'm sorry to tell you it's about, well, you know what it's about. It's called the JSON of emotions. If you're not aware of JSON, Jason, Jason... Literally the slowest emotion.

JSON is, okay, when you have information in a computer, right? We think of it, you know, ones and zeros, right? But then it gets, you know, when you look at it in a different way, it's like a string or a number, you know, or it's an object or something like that. But when you want to send that data over the wire, for instance, let's say you're Amazon and you decide to make a wearable that monitors people's emotions, right?

If you want to send that data over the wire, it's a 50-50 chance. I mean, maybe you're going to use something new and fancy like GRPC, but you're probably going to use the old trusty side. serialization format, JSON. And so I just, Bloomberg has a story that Amazon's working on some wearable. I've been interested in this concept

of effective computing for a long time. Like, it's really cool to imagine computers that are paying attention to your emotion and can interact with that emotion. Like, for instance, like, let's say you are starting to get angry. A computer could warn you before you act out in anger. Something like that. Really cool ideas.

You know, these were explored years ago. And it's cool that some company is thinking of doing it. The fact that it's Amazon, which kicks back in their Seattle offices and listens to your private home Alexa conversations is not exciting to me at all. But it got me thinking of what serialization format. And just trying to think of that data structure of an emotion. Like is it sad and then like the value 10 and 10 is the most sad? or do they use decimal numbers, you know? It just got me thinking.

I'm going to suggest that we already have an answer to this question, and it comes from an open source consortium called Unicode. Sometimes you're feeling smiley. Sometimes you're feeling grimace. Sometimes you're feeling dancing woman. Sometimes you're feeling poop. Yeah. Not literally, because that'd be gross.

If that's true, make sure you wash your hands. Oh, wait. Did you guys see the Caitlin story? Caitlin Tiffany, who hosts, why you push that button, used to be Virgin Reporter. It's now with the goods at Vox. She had a story this week. Online ads can now be targeted based on your emotions.

The New York Times will now allow advertisers to, they can programmatically read their articles and predict what emotions you will feel, and then you can target the ads. This is the list. Caitlin says, these are the emotions ranked in descending order by how much I would want to be targeted based on them. This is really the list.

It's a long list. I'm just going to read it all. Bored, amused, indulgent, optimistic, interested, adventurous, self-confident, inspired, informed, competitive, happy, nostalgic, and then a turn. Fearful, hateful, hopeful, sad, in the mood to spend, and feeling love. Wow. You got a feel for the reporters whose articles get tagged as making readers bored. Let's really advertise for the bored demographic against Russell's new tariff piece. I think for whatever reason, I think readers, while they're on this page, will be feeling bored.

Yeah. I'm going to go with, I want everyone to just feel competitive when they read my pieces. I don't know why. That's what I'm hoping to inspire. Anyway, that piece is on Vox, Caitlin wrote it. It's hilarious, as always. All right, that was enough fun. That's how I'm doing this today.

Enough fun, children. There was yet more policy news, so I'm glad Russell is here with us. T-Mobile has been desperately trying to buy Sprint. Yeah. For a while now. I just want to point out to preface this conversation that one of T-Mobile's lobbying strategies

in their quest to buy Sprint is to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars at Trump's hotel in D.C. That is true. Which just makes me sad. Maybe they're just going there because it's the finest hotel in the area. Potentially. And it's just at another level of service. This is what I hear from the White House Communications team.

They really like, you know, wedge salads. Yeah. Also, all the government officials are there. So just easy bribing. Anyhow, they have been, I would say, rebuffed for a while in their quest of, by Sprint, but the FCC, actually not the FCC, EG Pi, chairman of the FCC, announced this week he would be willing to support their merger because they had agreed to some conditions. The conditions, importantly, are not public and there's no order before, like, the whole FCC,

the FCC hasn't voted. Pi has just been like, they're going to make some promises and I like them, so I'm willing to support it. Well, we sort of know a little bit. So what are the promises? Deploy a 5G network covering 97% of the U.S. population within three years and 99% Americans within six years. This time span notably coincides with the rollout of 5G. T-Mobile will not stop the march of time.

Merger approved. Like, my laptop's about to break. If you give me what I want, I will buy a new laptop. Yeah. And also, we have the piece on the site by Carl Bode, who's amazing, that's just like, in general, the FCC in particular, but also the government in general, is not great about, like, coverage maps. Yeah. We're not, like, good at it. So actually checking on this is going to be bad if there were any mechanism for checking on any promises that people make before mergers anyway, which...

Diffy. Yeah, they, like, tend to not be great. So, and I just want to point this out. So the deal that Pi said was good is T-Mobile and Sprint promised to build a 5G network, which, by the way, is the reason that they want to merge, right? T-Mobile is like a better company than Sprint. Sprint owns better spectrum than T-Mobile. So the rationale for this merger is we'll just buy Sprint.

These wackos can just like hang out. We'll use their spectrum and build a great 5G network. But they'll also increase jobs. they'll employ more people because of the promises made to at your pie. Sure. Also several thousand people will be laid off because that's what happens in merger. It doesn't matter. That's the case.

The case is they have better spectrum. We're better at executing. We'll take their spectrum and build a 5G network. So Pi is now saying, okay, they've promised to build a 5G network. And they promise to cover this many people. And if they don't do that, there'd be an escalating series of fines that would be like devastating to the business. Right? This is like the bargain in the deal.

So then you're like, okay, well, how will you make sure they're keeping their promises? So Russell's pointing out in this piece by Carl Bode, like, there are no national, like, universally recognized coverage maps. We don't have, there's not like one coverage map that everyone agrees on. Like the carriers are sort of like submit their own. And then in the deal itself, as far as I can read, the mechanism of enforcement is T-Mobile will submit report cards to the government saying how well it's, done.

And then they had a call, and McKenna was on the call, and I think they asked, like, what else will you do to make sure? And they said, oh, well, T-Mobile will pay a third party to check, too. If you put all of this making promises to the government and all this enforcement, all of that aside, do you think three years from now, like T-Mobile and Sprint as solo companies, like subscribers to them would have better service than in this theoretical future where they're a combined company? If you really believe the problem with Sprint is it has great spectrum and bad management,

like there's one really easy way to fix that problem, right? You just change the management of the company. Or T-Mobile buys their spectrum. Or T-Mobile buys their spectrum and you don't destroy it, right? You don't, like, reduce the number of competitors in the market. If you are, Disclosure, Comcast is an investor in Box Media, which owns the very, verge. Your Comcast, even like casting about trying to get a mobile business off the ground. Like, you just buy Sprint. Comcast is like reasonably good at executing.

I'm also, by the way, so people have put this forward as like a less nightmarish alternative because you're not reducing the number of players. I find it more nightmarish because I don't think like this is this is like vertical integration, right? Like, oh, wouldn't it be great of Comcast owned a mobile company? Like, no. We're just going to get more go nine Shinanagan's if that happens. Oh, yeah. Oh, we live in a world of go 90 shenanigans. Yeah, exactly. That's a given.

No, but I'm saying, like, if you're Disney and you're looking at AT&T, right, baby Bob, like, this is, like, my favorite of the crazy nightmare scenarios. There's just many other scenarios by which you maintain the number of competitors vying for consumer dollars, as opposed to reducing that number, which has known bad outcomes. It just seems like it would be nice to have a carrier with more spectrum. Well, sure. There are two of them. They're a duopoly. Yeah. We know if that's big. So the fact that T-Mobile and Sprint can't merge seems to push me into the arms of AT&T and Verizon if I want quality service. Or you do something with Sprint Spectrum that isn't taking it out of the equation. T-Mobile is successful company. People like T-Mobile. They like the service they're getting from it.

They like that it is a disruptor. They like the uncarrier attitude. And that all of that exists because AT&T was prevented from buying it. Right? So what if you just do it again? Like that is an outcome that is known. And it's not like capital won't flow to these markets because competition is scarce. Right.

There is churn in the system. There's a proven way to be a disruptor. It just seems like Sprint failed and now they just like want to quit. Like that's a crappy way to run a business. I just think that the promises being made in this agreement are, A, great, but they're the promises that were already made. It is the thing they said they were already going to do. So that's ridiculous to call them promises.

Second, the mechanism of enforcement is like literally T-Mobile grading its own test, which is ridiculous. And like, by the time the bill comes due, I sincerely doubt many members of this current FCC will even be there anymore. Right? Like, that's just the nature of the game. So, like, who cares? but next to all this is the Department of Justice. So this is the really funny thing. Which seems like they are not sold by any of this.

Well, so historically, and correct me if I'm wrong here, but I remember hearing that like, okay, anytime there's one of these mergers, there's these two tests, and the FCC test was always the harder one to clear because the FCC test was just, is this of benefit to consumers? Whereas the Department of Justice had to be like, is this creating a monopoly? such that like the resulting company is going to be so scary that we have to intervene with the force of law and break it up. And so, you know, it's easy to be like, oh, this is mostly fine, but it does seem like slightly three is fewer than four, so maybe no. And now it's been flipped because we have a very business friendly, as I think the polite term for it, FCC chairman. and the antitrust sort of division of the DOJ has been getting a little salty. Like it's getting, it's getting spicy over there. Spicy and salty.

It's like the Doritos of Justice. Absolutely. Yeah. When I think of a condoer, I think of a spicy nacho Dorito. Yeah. What remains, the nutritional value remains to be seen. But so it's a little weird because we know that there was a recommendation.

recommendation within the DOJ written sort of to stop the merger and then some reporters got hold of that. But also the DOJ has not officially made its decision. And so it seems like it's in like this political limbo of everyone's waiting for the, but definitely, you know, folks are hyped for the DOJ to make a move. Yeah. It just, it doesn't seem like they are that they know what they want, right? The reports out of D.C. are like, the agency has said we don't recommend it, but they haven't convinced the commission, like the DOJ is in a fight. It's almost like they don't have skin in the game because these are not their businesses and it's not theirs to decide.

I don't know what that means. Like, I honestly don't know what that means. It is theirs to decide. It's their authority. It's not their businesses to buy and sell. But they're the ones who approve such buying and selling. But why? What do you mean?

Because collective action problems exist in society and wireless spectrum in particular is a scarce resource. And property is only a value in the context of the state. No, Russell, that's not correct. No, no, no, no, no, no. I mean, we did earlier say that behind every contract is a gun. And so, I mean, that's, like, legitimately true. That's where we live this year. Like, that's the argument against, like, everything, right?

is that there may just be like a really dumb example, right? Yeah. Paul, you and I are neighbors. Mm-hmm. Okay? And we like share a, we share a property line.

This is not actually true. This is not actually true. This is not actually. We live very far part. But like, you know, spiritually, we're neighbors. But like, hypothetically, you and I are neighbors. And I just decide to walk over and build a shed in your yard. Right? Like, we've agreed in some way that, like, that property is yours and this property is mine.

How do you get the shed off of your yard? yard. I don't get it. How did you get into my yard? I just walked over. I just walked over and put it there. It seems like you're invading my, my, my, my, yes, yes, that is true. I have, like, violated your property. Are you a stealer? Well, sure. Yes. Okay. All right. How do you get, how do you get, how do you stop this problem? I attack you. Right. So, like, a thing that we have done in society is, like we've generally removed the ability for people to just straight up attack each other. And we've given that ability to the state, right?

Here we have two willing participants. Like, I've got some property. Other person's like, I want your property and I'll give you some money. And so they're like, okay. But there's this saying like there's no power in yes. When you're a government regulating, there's no power in just saying, oh, okay, that's okay. That's fine with me.

So these government agencies sit around and like, I don't know. I can't think of a concrete consumer harmed any of this, but I just don't like saying yes, because then I have no power over these companies that I didn't build and I don't own. But they are thinking of concrete consumer arms, right? That's the whole game, right? The Department of Justice took AT&T and Time Warner to court. They listed literally every consumer harm they could think of except the one that was important because the Republican Party doesn't believe in that neutrality, whatever, and they lost. right so like there is like this function where you get you get some recourse but that's their job is to identify consumer harms and their job is to say like in particular for the FCC for them to say wireless spectrum is a fixed amount of territory and we have to like partition it up so it's used in the way that best serves the public and so here I just like I think it is wild that the Trump FCC and the Trump DOJ are just like like at odds with each other.

It is particularly funny because Pye's entire, like, mode is to weaken the FCC, right? He's, like, handed off a bunch of enforcement authority to the FTC. He's handed off a bunch of enforcement authority to other agencies. And now the DOJ is, like, it's cool that you agree to this deal where exactly what they said would happen is enough for you. But we are just not going to pay attention to you. It is, like, pretty funny to me. I don't know.

Like, that example, though, of, like, all contracts are backed up with a gun. Like, if I agree to sell you a bunch of stuff and I take your money and I don't deliver the goods, what is your recourse except to have the state show up? It's you would just have to shoot me, right? You would have to do the violence. And, like, we've just, like, set that aside. And, like, in all of these circumstances, it's, like, a very thorny question of, like, how much do you want the government to start doing stuff? What if we built a gymnasium across both your yards and we trained proud Olympic athletes there? And it just wasn't either, didn't belong to either of you anymore.

No, Russell. All right. Sold. Can I, can I? To the reddish. Wait, wait, wait. I have one last tariff thing. This happened while we were talking.

While we were talking. Trump had one of his press conferences and he was sort of rambling and he said, quote, Quote, Huawei is very dangerous, but, and this is a paraphrase, he could imagine it be included in some sort of trade deal. Oh, my God. Those are the sort of two things that are intentioned. And friend of the show, FCC commissioner Jessica Rosenworsal said, these comments are going to require some more explanation. That's like, yes. I feel like all news out of the Trump White House should just be prefaced.

It should be bracketed by those words. Yeah. So, a lot of drinking in Washington, D.C. tonight. I guess it's a punchline there. We forgot, by the way, to dunk on AT&T at all on this show. And I just, I'm going to plug my own piece, which is that AT&T's plan, it's starting to come into focus on the own WarnerMedia. I described it as a nightmare hell world. Yeah.

It's terrifying. what they are planning to do. That's why you should break them up, Paul. This is why you should become a cypherpunk, so it doesn't matter. Every subscriber will be forced to watch the Justice League movie to activate their phone. We got to go. This is my new mood. Whenever one of these big companies does something horrible, like I just, I missed this story.

Google just tracks everything you ever buy. I view it as this wonderful opportunity to sever my relationship from a horrible company. It's like it's hard to get the enough inertia to cancel everything all the time every day because every company is being horrible to you constantly. But when they do it really hard, really bad, and really mean, that's when you have the energy to leave. And I'm very excited to start quitting Google. In order to leave, you got to have some place to go or require some competition, my friend. I will build my own operating system and you can't use it. I'm just saying, I'm all for the market dynamic.

It just requires marketplace participants. Or here's my other option. It's sort of the opposite of Russell's gymnasium idea. One single gigantic corporate overlord that I am in charge of. Think about it. I thought you were going to transition from this into like a Casper mattresses ad. We got to go. That's the Vergecast.

I love you all. I'm sorry I was heavy this week, but it was important. Russell, I'm glad you were here. Happy to be here. You can listen to a much more fun podcast, should be honest. Why did you push that button? Ashley and Caitlin are going after it. This season is amazing.

Check it out. It's where a podcast or serve. I think you should just listen to it. They're about to have an entire series on like death online. I mean, just go for it. They're just going for it. It's fun. You can subscribe to the Verstcast free on your favorite podcast app.

Just hit the link in the show notes. You can also rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, which is a ratings monopoly. So that's where we want you to go. You can tweet at us. I'm at Reckless, Deer's at Backlon. Paul's at Future, Paul. Russell, where are you? At Russell, brand.

Very nice. Rock and roll. I was kidding. I'll definitely let you use my operating system. Paul. Snip, sniff. I'm bringing that back.