The Vergecast - Trump signs executive order targeting social media companies / HBO Max launches in the US

Episode Date: May 29, 2020

Nilay Patel and Dieter Bohn welcome back Adi Robertson and Casey Newton to the show to discuss Trump's executive order targeting social media companies like Twitter, Facebook, and Google. Julia Alexander also stops by to discuss the launch of WarnerMedia's new streaming service HBO Max. Stories discussed this week: Google search results will take ‘page experience’ into account next year T-Mobile now supports cross-carrier RCS messaging Google Messages may finally be adding end-to-end encryption for RCS Why Twitter labeling Trump’s tweets as “potentially misleading” is a big step forward FCC commissioner says Trump’s Section 230 plan ‘does not work’ Donald Trump is starting a messy fight with the entire internet White House organizes harassment of Twitter employee as Trump threatens company Donald Trump signs executive order targeting social media companies YouTube is deleting comments with two phrases that insult ... YouTube fixes error that deleted comments critical of the ... YouTube says China-linked comment deletions weren't ... HBO Max is full of potential, but its biggest hurdle remains AT&T’s messy execution HBO Max is taking on Netflix with human curation instead of solely relying on algorithms HBO Max will use anime from Crunchyroll to compete with Netflix’s growing empire All eight Harry Potter movies are streaming on HBO Max much earlier than expected Snyder Cut fans demanded AT&T’s attention, and now AT&T is demanding their cash Here are the hundreds of classic movies people can stream on HBO Max You can no longer subscribe to HBO via Apple TV Channels HBO Max’s catalog is full of weird holes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on the Vergecast, Casey Newton, Addie Robertson, join us to talk about Trump's executive order, somehow regulating social networks. Got a little spicy. And then Julia Alexander joins the show. Talk about HBO Max. Also got a little spicy. That's coming up on the Vergecast. 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.

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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 the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the internet, which is under attack. I'm your friend, Nelai. Dieter Bone is here. I feel attacked.

We have basically a two-part show today. So Casey Newton is here. Hi, Casey. Hey guys and gal. Addy Robertson is here. Hey. Casey and Addy are here to talk about Trump's executive order, which handwavy at the social media platforms does something bad to them around Section 230. It's a big story. We got to unpack it. We're going to spend a lot of our show on it. And in the second half of the show, Julia Alexander is going to join us. And we're going to talk about the launch of HBO Max. So a distinct shift in tone will occur about halfway through this episode. of the verge cast. I'm just letting you know what's happening. Those are two parts of our show. Before we start with the executive order and what's going on on social media platforms, I just want to give my usual set of updates.

It has been 11 weeks since Donald Trump presented a flowchart to the American people about a website that Google was going to make where you could sign up for test. The website still doesn't appear verily exist, soon to our talk to us about it, but the sort of national testing infrastructure. Would you say that your fact-checking

something that the president has said on social media right now? I am not the arbiter of truth. I am just one man who is also a corporation, who is aware of the existence of time and the non-existence of a website. I wouldn't, is it true? Is it not true? I don't know. I just know that you can get the facts about the non-existence of this website on this podcast every week.

And then there's just a little bit of gadget news. Google search results are now going to take page experience into account, Deider. I'm assuming that just means they're going to try to weed out even more spam. No, it means that. It means that they're going to look at things that suck about a certain website beyond load time. So if content jumps around or it takes a long time for the main content, the first contentful paint or largest contentful paint to show up. And also if there's like weird delays on it, they basically like all the stuff that sucks about the web that isn't just it didn't load fast, they're trying to weed that out by by downranking it in search. And we'll see.

They're not going to even start doing it for six months. They're like they're going really slow with this. The thing to pay attention to is here is another example of the Chrome team coming with a bunch of web standards and then the search team making incentives based on those web standards. And that seems a little bit scary, but on the other hand, they're objectively trying to fix things that completely sucks, so it's probably fine. Has there been any early word on the page experience at HBO Max from Google's perspective? Are they liking what they're seeing? Actually, that does bleed in sort of the next bit. And then, you know, there's two RCS links in this rundown.

I'm not even going to try. You just go ahead. Look, T-Mobile is now supporting the universal profile properly and truly instead of lying about it and claiming that they do and they don't. And then there are, there's a leaked dog food version of Android messages that has encryption. Nobody's been able to get it to work, but there are flags returning on end-to-end encryption. And I'm just bringing this up because it's like a really interesting TikTok with the web thing. So with RCS, Google is like, they're, I call it like we're part of the United Nations.

We're trying to wrangle all these cats. And so they're slowly trying to make that work and doing a better job of it. But they're also willing to go to loan. And they're doing a similar thing with the web where they're not trying to bring along Mozilla and Safari and everybody else to this new idea of page experience metrics. They're just doing it. So Google's in this weird spot where they're like starting to just push ahead on going their own way on the open ecosystems that they dominate.

And I'm going to be really curious to see if that ends up making those ecosystems feel more closed or more fragmented or if it all just ends up being fine. That's very abstract, but I don't want to like spend the next 45 minutes talking about RCS. I mean, I do want it to spend the next 45 minutes talking about RCS, but we're not going to do it. So this does dovetail into YK San out of you here right now. So we know that the big tech companies, Google and Facebook mostly, have an outsized share of influence over the experience of the web for most people. that is just a fact. They can push their own standards, they can unfairly preference their own services, all the stuff that we talk about every week.

There's a lot of action over how you might regulate those platforms. There's a lot of smart, sort of reasonable debate over what that regulation might look like. And then there's the fucking shit show that happened today with this executive order. And so I want to break it down into two parts. Addie, I want you to help me understand as best as you can. and what's in this order, how it works, what the backstory is. And then Casey, obviously, you spend a lot of time thinking about how platforms moderate. I want you to give me kind of your take on the view from the companies and how this might affect what they do.

So, Addie, just walk me through the chronology here a little bit. Okay. So a couple of days ago, Trump found that some of his tweets about election misinformation had a fact-checking label on them. These are notably not the tweets where he insinuated that somebody killed an intern. But he was very angry about this. And he, according to, I think a protocol piece that just came out, had just said, do something about this. And so for a while, they had been talking in the White House about this executive order that would change Section 230 somehow. And so they apparently modified it and then turned it into something that Trump signed today.

And we still have not seen. But a draft of it leak yesterday. and it's really bad. Yeah. So just to quickly make sure we have all the foundation laid, Section 230 is the law that's part of the Communications Decency Act that says platforms like Twitter are not liable for defamation for the things that other people publish on that. If I go on Twitter and I tweet, Dieter is a jerk and Dieter's like, that's defamation.

He can sue me. He cannot sue Twitter. That's part one of 230. Why am I the jerk in this situation? Well, because you're, I mean, you're just obviously like a litigious human being. Okay. So the first part is the platforms are not liable for what other people post on it in terms of defamation. The second part is they have the opportunity to moderate that content, even if the content is constitutionally protected.

And this all comes out because Section 230 was originally written by Senator Wyden and Senator Cox to allow platforms to moderate porn child abuse material, all this. stuff. So if you ran CompuServe in the 90s and you wanted to make sure CompuServe was safe for kids, you could go through the forms of CompuServe and delete stuff. And that deletion or moderation or hiding or whatever was not considered an editorial function. You were allowed to moderate. So the idea was to incentivize platform moderation at the very beginning. So that's that step. The activity around 230 is you cannot, as far as, as I understand it. You cannot actually have a Twitter without a 230. You cannot have a Facebook without a 230. You cannot have YouTube. You can't have any user generated platform without 230.

You can't have the comment section on the verge without 230 because no company is going to take liability for millions upon millions of anonymous people that they might not know. I promise you, I do not want to be responsible for the commenters on the verge.com. I know that Mark Zuckerberg does not want to be responsible for the actions of the 1.5 billion people use Facebook. Adi, what's the Jeff Kossoff book? It is the 26 words that created the internet. So if you want to get deep into 230, go read that book. He is by far the expert on it.

So if you're mad at Facebook and Twitter and you're the irrational president of the United States, what do you do? You threaten to take 230 away because you will end their business, right? You threaten to make them liable for everything that happens on their platform. And that's effectively what Trump has been threatening. Is that what this executive order actually does? Not really for a lot of reasons, but one of the reasons primarily is that he doesn't even claim directly that he is trying to take away their liability protection for having illegal content on them. He's claiming that he's going to take away the protections that stop people from suing them when they take down content.

It's all pretty incoherent, which we can discuss later. but it's that's the avenue that theoretically they are going toward but then they claim that if you are liable under that then you are also you also lose protection under the whole thing and it's none of it makes a lot of sense what is the there's some part of it where the FCC somehow ends up in charge of Twitter how does that mechanism work okay so there's like a rolling series of steps the first step is that you define section 230 in a way that nobody defines section 230 which is to say that they're, the second part of it, the part that says that you have to act in good faith if you're banning content, actually that applies to everything. And so suddenly you have all of

this legal liability. And the definition for good faith is actually really broad. And then he tells the FCC to draft regulation that will make the definition even broader. So if sites lose their, if sites like don't act in accordance with their terms of service or if they don't provide enough notice or if let me find the exact language that I find really hilarious as someone who has argued with people on the internet, or if it is the product of unreasoned explanation. So, sorry, the FTC or the FCC does this? The FCC. Okay.

The FTC has its own deal. Got it. Chairman Pye of the FCC in this moment, we haven't seen the text yet, has just released a statement on this issue. And I think it's worth reading at its entirety. The debate is an important one. The Federal Communications Commission will carefully review any petition for rulemaking filed by the Department of Commerce. End of statement.

Hi. The mechanism that this EO takes to make the FCC put in charge is the Department of Commerce will file a petition with the FCC saying you should be, you should look at this carefully. And then the FCC has to like do it. So there's like mechanical steps in between. What kills me about this. And I, Adi wrote a great piece sort of unpacking. line by line this executive order and why it doesn't make sense. But the thing Trump wants is access to Twitter, right? Like, he needs it. He doesn't like that there's a label underneath

his tweets when he says wrong things about mail-in voting or whatever. But by regulating Twitter in this way, the threat he's making is, I will destroy Twitter, right? If I take away 230, Twitter cannot exist in its current form. So the only options Twitter has are to moderate less, which I think is what Trump wants, or to say, okay, take $2.30 away and we will moderate more. Because that's what, if you're now liable for everything that the users post, your only option is to moderate way, way more. And I feel like that's not a gamble.

I can confident that's not a gamble that Trump understands. But I think it's, that's the other choice that all of these platforms have, is to increase the amount of moderation they do. Casey, as you've sort of been reporting out in industry, is that, do the platform see it that way? They do see it that way. And let's think about some things that have happened since 2016. The platforms have been under tremendous pressure to moderate more because of all the terrible

things that were going on on the platform like Russian trolls interfering with our election or spreading hate speech and abuse and harassment at people. Or we have a current situation where there is a fairly large anti-vax movement that is growing in this country that is being aided by the platforms. and the platforms are facing pressure to crack down on that. So for all of those reasons, the platforms have been building up their capabilities to do more and better moderation to cleanse the platform of some of the worst stuff. But that has a cost.

I mean, like you report on that cost at length many times. There's only two choices. Either we're going to have Twitter and Facebook and YouTube moderate less or we're going to have them moderate more. No one's happy with the current amount of moderation as far as I can tell. So it's only going to go in one or two ways. Fundamentally what we're talking about is moderation, not just classic sort of internet for moderation like bands or shadow ban. We're talking about Twitter putting labels on the tweets, Instagram saying, hey, do you really mean it when you like type of mean comment? Like all these sort of more advanced moderation options that effectively

either append speech or ask you if this is a speech you want to make. That's a very complicated. Do you think it's going to break towards more or less? I mean, if our court systems hold up, the executive order will be thrown out, and this will just get added to the pile of stupid things that Trump said that went nowhere, right? And that's like the best outcome. I think we can expect that conservatives will continue to complain that there's bias against them on every media platform forever until I'm dead, whether it's on a social network or not. So like, that's not going to end. But look, there's also going to be a perpetual push and pull between leave it up and take it down, right? This is one of the core debates of the internet, and it has to be evaluated on a case-by-case

basis. And the platforms are going to do their best, I think, to respond to regulators and academics and journalists in a way that sort of keeps them off of their back while allowing them to preserve their business model, but, you know, there are just going to be endless controversies about this stuff. I think the thing that hasn't really gotten discussed that much, partly because Trump's take on it is nonsense, is that even if you accept this world of moderation, there's not really a specific rule that says that Facebook can't ban conservatives. Like, even if you get rid of 230, like, the only way the executive order tries to even get at this is by claiming that they are government entities by claiming that they are public squares and should have to follow the

First Amendment, which is complete nonsense. So this is where the sort of weird, as a guy he used to argue with people on like slash dot in 2001 and then the proprietor of a website with a comment section, it is remarkable how many bad troll arguments Trump is literally making in an executive order from the office of the president of the United States. Right. He's like, Twitter's infringing my free speech. I mean, I, like, I learned how that worked when I was 19 years old, and I was mad that a comment was deleted on slash dot, right? Like, Twitter's a private company. The press secretary of the United States got up today and said that president is protecting your right to tweet. You do not have a right to tweet. Like, Twitter owns the platform.

They own the trademark to the word tweet in that context. They can just turn it off. Like, literally Jack could be like, I've had enough and turn off Twitter and your right to tweet would be taken away. Okay. So let me complicate that a little bit, though, because Because like, I agree with you. Yes, these are private companies and I support their right to moderate however they want, right? At the same time, it's also true that they've grown very large and powerful. People's livelihoods depend on them. And if Twitter is a huge part of your personal identity, the way that you make money, what happens to you on that platform can be an existential threat. And if something doesn't go your way, you don't really have any recourse, right? You can file an online form and send it in and pray, but there's no justice. system. There's no real accountability for these folks. And so you see these debates playing out over and over again. And people in some cases even taking violent action going and, you know, it wasn't that long ago that somebody went in and shot up YouTube. And obviously that was abhorrent. And I'm not suggesting that that's, you know, a way that anybody should try to get redress. But I think it speaks to the rage that people

feel against these platforms that on one hand are hugely important to people's lives. But on the other hand, haven't let people get their say, right? At the end of the day, Jack Dorsey, Mark Zuckerberg are not up for re-election and what they say goes. I mean, so I think what you're seeing happen here is that, you know, some members of the government want to renegotiate that power relationship, although, of course, in this case, it's just to claim all that power for themselves. Well, but that's the thing. They're not really renegotiating the relationship. They're kind of just throwing things at Twitter that will hurt Twitter, but they don't really have a legal case for how they would actually fix if you accept that the thing you've said is a problem, they haven't really

put forward a solution for it. Right. It's Trump is mad about the labels. And I mean, so Twitter is mentioned by name. At East time, Facebook is mentioned by name. Google's not mentioned my name. Twitter is so much smaller than Google and Facebook. If you are worried about concentration of online spaces for people, you have to first be worried about YouTube. You have to first be worried about Facebook. Twitter, as near as I can tell, it continues to be like a clown car of a company, and it makes far less money. But, Addy, read the, you had a line here from the EO, where they're saying it's like part of the government. In one of the weird blustery parts of the order, it says, it is the policy of the United States that large social media platforms, such as Twitter and

Facebook, as the functional equivalent of a traditional public forum should not infringe on protected speech. What? Yeah. What is a traditional public forum? The site is to a case about shopping malls, which, as you know, is before the Internet was the traditional public forum of America. I had to spend a bunch of time looking at this yesterday because I was covering the bias lawsuits. And yeah, there's a really long debate over when a public space that's owned by a company is a place where people should have free speech. But it's pretty much unanimously decided that if you run a digital, like a website or an app that doesn't count. like this has just been decided over and over and over and over.

And every single argument that anybody has made over it has failed. So what I come back to is two things. One, it's a distraction. It's a distraction because everyone should go read Addie's piece taking it apart. There are like long paragraphs of nonsense. Then there's some actions taken like the Chamber of Commerce will file a petition to the FCC and the FCC will take over Twitter and that is up for debate. there's a section where they say the government won't like do any marketing activities on the platforms anymore.

Addie, what was the number that the government spent on Twitter marketing last year? Yeah, according to the government transparency report, it was something around $200,000 ever versus, like, since Twitter was founded, versus $808 million that they made in the last three months. So not like a huge blow. Yeah, it's just like there are these like shadow boxing moves. these symbolic moves. But what's next to it, the part that's dangerous to me is you can read, I encourage everyone, just go read 230 yourself. We'll put a link in the show notes.

We have, Adi has written like 15 explainers on 230. There's the book. Like, go read 230. The language 230 is short. It is understandable. It's not written like the Constitution. It was written in the 90s by like two guys who are still around. Wow, major burn on the Constitution.

Geez, Neely. Well, it's not like flowery, right? Like, anyhow. It's easy to understand. There's sentences. The Constitution also written sentences. Look, I support the Constitution. That's all I was looking for.

The position of the Verge cast is that the Constitution is good. Thank you. Well, most of it. There's a couple parts of the Constitution they had to fix up. This podcast is fully off the rest. You can read 230. It's simple to read. It says what it says.

That language was passed by Congress. It is the law. The plain language is not ambiguous. Then, as Addy has pointed out, she just wrote this piece yesterday. it has been interpreted by court after court after court in a very specific way that says websites can moderate and that they're not liable for what happens. And there's no this like nonsense about the platform publisher to end. None of that exists.

There's the plain language and there's the court's interpretation. There's the legislative branch of the government. This is like civics 101. Congress, legislative branch passed the law. Courts, judicial branch have interpreted the law consistently. And then you get the president being like, I've signed a piece of paper that wipes all of that out, that undoes it, that overrules it. That is not uncommon for Trump.

It's like pretty normal for him. But it is, if you just take a step back and think about that, that is absolutely wild and dangerous. Because that becomes the thing that the companies respond to, then the other two branches of government are no longer actually legislating or governing. We're just responding to angry Trump. And so when people say, like, this is just to work the refs. Yeah, maybe. But if it's successful, it means that kind of like the core basis of how we make laws and regulations, the democratic process, is kind of been undone in a very serious way. I feel crazy saying that, right? Because it's a lot about like moderating comments on Twitter or whatever. Like, but there's, there's just a very consistent pattern that keeps happening. Yes. I mean, the whole question is, you know, will the other two branches of government successfully restrain someone who does not recognize either of their power? Right? Like, go back through the past three years.

Trump does not believe or respect the courts, right? He doesn't like recognize congressional power. Look at everything he did to obstruct the impeachment investigation. The only source of power that Trump respects is his own. And if he's allowed to go unchecked, all sorts of terrible things are going to happen. So this is very serious. Do you think, I mean, again, Casey, you spent a lot of time reporting on the companies. Do you think it's a strategy to work the refs, this will be effective?

I mean, I think arguably it has been effective with Facebook, right? Facebook has been much more cautious to do moderation around the content of political speech than Twitter has. And, you know, Facebook will say, well, that's because, you know, we believe strongly in free and open debate. But there's no getting around the fact that it also helps to keep regulators off their back, right? So I think you can make a pretty good case that working the refs has worked at Facebook. You know, Twitter is a much smaller player and has, I think, mostly stayed out of this fray, but now they're in it in a big way. And I expect that the company is going to keep walking down the path that they're on.

Like, I don't think that they're going to shrink away from this. They've gone in since they labeled the two Trump tweets and gone in and labeled a bunch more from other folks, suggesting that this effort is expanding even after the threats of the executive order, but we'll just have to see. 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.

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With Grammarly, you never will. Download Grammarly for free at Grammarly.com. That's Grammarly.com. So while we've been talking just now, the final text of the order that Trump signed has actually been released on the White House website. You can go look at it. Addy, what looks different to you?

What looks new and improved? in the first part of that class. So nothing is improved. Fair. There's sort of some general tone changes. He personally attacks a lot more people in this version. But the important parts, the part that I read is that they've kind of fundamentally changed how they're going to try to attack 230.

In the draft, they seemed like they just didn't understand what the law said. And now they're saying that the FCC should. explicitly propose a rule that basically adds conditions to the part of the text that prevents you from being sued if somebody posts something illegal on your site. So you have to be, quote, in good faith. And that just opens the door to, I think, they are hoping more cases against them. So yes, this does make it more like what we thought it was going to be where it's just trying to erode it in general. So just to sort of walk through the mechanics of that, I have been saying 230 is easy to read.

So now I'm going to torture everyone by reading it to you. So C30, C1, no provider or user of an interactive computer service will be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider. So if you're the platform, you're not liable for what people post on your platform. No qualifications there. That's just a sentence. It's just explicit. What is happening in this order is that C2, the second part, about my... moderation has some light qualifications. So two, no provider or user of an interactive computer

service shall be held liable on account of any action voluntarily taken in good faith, that's the big qualification, to restrict access or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lecine, lecivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected. I just want to boil that down. Any action voluntarily taken in good faith to strict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be otherwise objectionable whether or not such material is constitutionally protected. That's anything, right?

Like that long list of words, lewd, lascivious, filthy, whatever. Like, that's because they were trying to let CompuServe protect children. That's the focus of it. But there's a big, wide open, otherwise objectionable right at the end of that clause that lets platforms moderate, basically anything. the only real qualification here is good faith. You have to be acting in good faith. That's the wedge that they think they can use to crack this thing open.

Yeah, so I have a quote that I will read in just a minute. But yeah, the good faith often just means antitrust. Like, it's the thing you put in to make sure that you don't just have sites trying to kick people off in order to, like, monopolize something. Right. So if Google refused to let you search for Bing, like, they just blocked it out because there's a competitor. that's not in good faith. But if Google in good faith is trying to not show you porn, because I think it's objectionable, that's protected.

So here, what the executive order is saying is we're going to overread good faith to mean political viewpoints. And then if we think that you're breaking two, you're moderating based on political viewpoints, we're going to take away one. We're going to make you liable for everything that people publish on your site. So you've added the qualification to one. by making too harder to achieve. That's the sort of legal mechanism in here.

It seems very hard. Like, again, that is, Addy literally just wrote a piece on this. No court has ever read the good faith requirement in this way, as far as I can tell. Another thing they're saying is, quote, it is the policy of the United States to ensure that to the maximum extent permissible under the law, the good faith provision is not distorted to provide liability protection for platforms that, far from acting in good faith, to remove objectionable content, engage in deceptive or pretextual actions, often contrary to their stated terms of service to stifle viewpoints with which they disagree.

Right now the maximum extent permissible under the law is like, none? But it seems like they're trying to then get the FCC to promote a rule that maybe is passed by Congress. I'm a little fuzzy on that still. That is going to change that. So I want to just bring this out of the weeds of the law. And it's where I want to be, but it's tiresome. So it's... I want to talk about RCS.

I mean, we all make sacrifices in Eli. Well, I just... We've spent 10 years on the show, produced a show before that, from our lives, talking about net neutrality. It is insane to me to look at this and to say the conservative side of our government saying,

these platforms are monopolies, they might restrict speech, we want them to be fair, they have to be transparent, they can't break their terms. These are the net neutrality arguments against ISPs, flat out, that's what they are.

If you go back to our net neutrality coverage from that fight from years ago, you have lawyers from public knowledge literally quoted our piece of saying net neutrality is about the First Amendment. If AT&T is the only provider in error, they're a monopoly and they can throttle speech, that is a speech issue.

And you can either have more competition or you can have regulation. Dead ahead, that was a net neutrality argument. That has now moved one layer up the internet stack to social platforms. At the same time, the FCC, the Trump Ajit Pi FCC

has completely undone the net neutrality regime for ISPs where you have no composition and high switching costs he is being asked to impose some sort of political speech neutrality on social platforms where theoretically

you could just not use Twitter. How does that rationale work? I mean, is there a basis for that? The basis is that Trump does what serves Trump's interests. Trump does not believe the rule of law. Like, that's what makes all these legal analyses so frustrated. It's like, well, if we, you know, look at the statement long enough, we'll divine the mechanism that makes

it all make sense. But it's not. It's never going to make any sense. I mean, weirdly, a G. Pie has been kind of banging this drum for years. Like, it used to be that his explanation for why he didn't like net neutrality was that you could censor people on Twitter and that was really bad. So I'm not sure that there's a logical argument for why he, why he would approve this so much is that there is a loose affiliational relationship that kind of makes sense where they go together. And that's the best we can do now for anything.

Let me try to play devil's advocate here. And I'll try to build on Casey's point. If you're a citizen of America, and it's not the pandemic, because right now, like, the government's rules about what you can and can't do in the pandemic, you're deeply aware of them. But most days, like, you go through your life

and the government's rules are what you can or cannot do, like, don't happen to you. like you're not aware of them, you're not seeing other people affected by them, you're just living your life. If you're on Twitter a lot or you're a YouTuber, like you are deeply aware of YouTube's administrative actions, right? Like, YouTubers are always complaining about being demonetized or having any videos thing or their views going down or whatever. You are deeply aware of Twitter moderating or like a harassment mom on Twitter. Right, the platform dynamics are such that the administration of the platform is happening to you all the time. So there's an

enormous amount of power, the platforms wield, that is apparent. It often feels unfair. I don't think, Casey, I'm just guessing, but like, has anyone ever shut up and been like, the platform's rules are fair? And I like them. I mean, they have some good rules, but yeah, but to your broader point, yes, it's true that unfair things happen all the time, right? Ask anybody who ever lost access to their Facebook account for some weird reason and never got it back. Like, that's a real thing. Yeah. So the, There's just, like, our relationship to the platforms is one where the power is very obvious. It is wielded quite often in an very opaque way. And like when they try to make it less opaque, we end up with things like the Facebook

oversight board, which is literally like an international Supreme Court of speech experts. That's the scale. I have to do it. Doesn't it make sense that the government should show up and say, this is unfair? Like, you have too much power. You are like network effect monopolies. It's hard to build a competitor to Facebook. And if you did, Facebook would buy you anyway.

We actually, we need you to behave. Like, here's a set of regulation. Sure. You could work through Congress to develop legislation and consult with academics and experts to pass a law, you know, that the public has a chance to read and comment on, right? And then that could be enforced through the courts. Personally, I would love to see legislation. that said social networks can't buy other social networks. I think that would do a lot of good

over the long term, right? And that would, I think, solve some of the problems that we see today. But that's not the approach that we're taking because, again, the president doesn't believe in the rule of law. So he just uses whichever tool is around to serve his interests in the near term. Also, so this is another thing that this is a thing that didn't change in the new executive order. And I think it kind of cuts to the heart of why that's a false premise and like why that's just a bad way to talk about this order, is that its definition of the thing it's talking about here is an online platform, and that means any website or application that allows users to create or share content or engage in social networking or any general search engine. This is not Facebook

and Twitter. This is any website. The problem is everyone is trying to talk about these platforms that have tons of power, and they zero in on a thing that helps them be powerful, but that is pretty much vital for things of any size. And in a lot of ways, big platform. are better equipped to deal with the loss of. And so it's just really, like, if anyone were operating in actual good faith in the government, they would try to find a way to deal with this. So there was a Josh Hawley bill from now what seems like an entire lifetime ago where he proposed some 230 carve-outs and what have you.

And he conditioned it based on, like, revenue, like platform revenue or users. So it was anything above a certain size. And it was obviously targeted at the biggest of the big. But it would leave the sort of like knitting forum alone. This executive order you're saying does not leave the knitting forum alone. It is really hard to tell what the intention is behind a lot of stuff Trump rights. But this seems they went out of their way to define this in a way that didn't mention size and didn't mention revenue or scale or really even sort of the specific type of website. Something that allows users to create and share content is like that's Dropbox.

I love the idea that Dropbox has to like deeply moderate. platform now or come afoul of the the Trump administration. That to me is we talk about competition on the show over and over and over and over again. Like it's just like a theme of the verge cast at this point. Why isn't Trump just saying like screw this? I'm going to use gab. Right. Like he could do, his whole audience would go with him. Why is there this rush to regulate these platforms instead of standing up competitors that are more friendly to conservatives, for example? This is McKenna Kelly's point a couple of articles you put on the website that you are we're all talking like the goal here is to actually enact like real change and like do something like legislation but via

executive order the real goal here is the fight the real goal here is for people to be like oh Trump is taken on Twitter Twitter versus Trump Twitter versus Trump blah blah blah blah and have that be like that fight be the story yes they would they would love to work the rest love to change the rules, like all that stuff would be great, but they don't care. Like, Trump specifically, if this comes to nothing and it gets knocked down by the courts and it gets dragged out and like literally nothing comes of this, he still achieves his primary goal, which is a huge fight that like deepens the culture war and, you know, distracts from, you know, any number of other things he'd like us to be distracted from. I also think Trump just has some really astute user interface and user experience critiques of Gab. And if Gab would only implement some of those changes, they could pick up a real high profile user. I have never used Gab, but I'm assuming it doesn't have like, you know, the new retweet functionality,

where you can see you retweet the comment. That's like Trump needs it. Actually, it's wild to me that Gab is the service that Trump wants. Like, if you read this order and you read the moderate, like, that's Gab. it's just, it's full of like racist jerks. So most people won't use it. Also, it's no fun. Because his whole point is that he wants to like troll people and get mad at people. And if everyone agrees with you, there's kind of no point. Addy, one of the things that you said to me ages ago that I have, I kind of want to end this on is sort of the bigger thing. Like, yes,

there's the Trump machinations. There's the whether this is a distraction. It's real. This is a moment where it just feels like our conception of free speech is like changing. And like, Once upon a time, I was very much a free speech maximalist. And I think you said to me something like, I'm going to spend all of my 30s rethinking everything that I believed in my 20s. And like, this is that moment where it's like, oh, I really want these platforms to moderate. Like, I really want them to not allow Nazis on their platform. I really want them to not allow just like blatant abuse on their platforms, blatant harassment.

At the same time, the president, I mean, literally is trying to harass a Twitter employee right now. Like, that's a, he's, he's tweeting the Twitter employees handle. He's conducting an online harassment campaign. Is the, do you see the, like, the broader big, free speech debate shifting? Because that's, under all of this, that's what's happening. Yeah. No, it's, like, I think Casey is right that I think it's really weird and troubling that there are a couple of giant companies that are responsible for kind of policing everything we say. But now we are also in a situation where the alternative to that somehow seems much, much worse.

How do you see that broader speech? Assuming Facebook and Twitter and Google don't get broken up, which maybe they will, maybe they won't. But assuming that doesn't happen, how do you see their relationship to speech changing sort of the policy free speech debate that we've been having? Because it has been true that most of the smart lawyers, academic scholars that we talk to are like Facebook and Twitter are companies with free speech rights that can do whatever they want. But that is just, it feels like it's being compressed and compressed and compressed to. now where the president's saying they're effectively state actors and they have to obey the First Amendment. Do you think that's the right outcome? I don't, I mean, I think that that definitely is not the right outcome as it's being done right now. But I think it's really weird.

I think that it's, I have absolutely no good answers because no matter who wins here, someone is incredibly powerful and kind of controlling what people can say on the internet. And in either case, it's either paternalistic or creepy or pro-Nazi or something that's really terrible. Casey, what do you think? Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, let me stand up for content moderation, right? There's an idea out there that anybody who goes beyond the First Amendment is sort of encroaching on speech in a terrible way. I can tell you, if Facebook and Twitter were to become overrun by Nazi content and

porn, they would disappear in short order. You cannot have the social networks that you want without content moderation. And that does require speech tradeoffs. And because these are commercial businesses, they're going to make stricter tradeoffs than the United States government. And I think we have to keep that distinction in our minds. Yes, the companies often do a bad job at the moderation. Yes, the job of moderation itself is awful. But if you want an internet that you can communicate in, if you want there to be boxes you can type in on the internet and have other people see what you typed, then you have to support content moderation. And you have to support that sometimes it's not going to go your way. And you even have to support that some sites are maybe going

to do things in a way that is informed by politics that you don't share, in which case your alternative is to go build something else on the open internet or go put something somewhere else on the open internet. I was having a long, I hope Walt doesn't mind me saying this, but Walt and I were texting, Walt Mossberg and I were texting back and forth today. And he said, well, if I was going to start a site, I would make sure everything got moderated, which is a fine position. I think that leaves out a lot of people, right? That just installs gatekeepers everywhere. It means that live tweeting a football game is impossible. It means that like-minded communities might never, Reddit couldn't exist, right? Like, the cost structure of Reddit would go upside down and Reddit would just go away. on the flip side he and i was like well you could that's the reason i think you do so what would you do

in my answer to him i just it feels insane i was like my answer is actually what you would think of is like a very traditionally conservative answer which is we should have market competition so that if you hate twitter there's something that competes with twitter directly that you can go to and use and it might have made a different set of tradeoffs or appeal to a different community if you hate Facebook, you could go to something else. That's something else largely looks like Instagram for like five minutes and they bought it. But you don't have any of that. If you hate Google search results, yeah, you can go to Bing, but like no one does it, right?

No one really goes to duck, dot go. And I think that to me is like, I just keep coming back to it. These companies are putting themselves in a position of being regulated monopolies. And I think there's just a part of all of them in their boardrooms where they're like, that's not so bad. Where Facebook says, we will accept whatever rules you want to put on us because they will be so onerous that no startup will ever be able to meet them, and we will be it.

And Twitter is, it already, like, it's bizarre that there's not a competitor to Twitter. Like, it's not even that big, right? Like, compared to the other services. I mean, why there doesn't exist another search engine at Google scale we could do five hours on, but there isn't one. There isn't a competitor to YouTube. There's quibby. For God.

sake, the best we could do is quibby. And like, that to me is it's just so the root of all of this that if there was a vibrant and competitive market, you couldn't just like write this rule because the answer would be if you don't like it, go somewhere else. And because that answer doesn't exist, we're in a position where all these companies are like, yeah, write the law. Like just cement our place. I mean, even Trump, if you just like look at what he said while he was signing this in his like 20-minute signing ceremony, he's like, they're monopolies. I'm treating him like that. I honestly wonder if, Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar are not like, great, we're at. No competition.

We'll just, we'll just take in those monopoly profits and deal with your weird rules. I mean, to your point about like there should just be more competition, I totally agree. We used to have it, right? We weren't having these debates when people on the internet were communicating mostly via like web forums, right? When you keep these things small and you let people enforce their own norms and rules, you know, people don't have the same freakouts. Like, okay, sure. on slash dot in 2001, you're having wars. Every forum. Every forum is going to have its wars, right? But the stakes are lower because if that forum isn't right for you, you go to another one. You see this happen all the time on Reddit, right? There's some drama in a forum. So people

start to like, you know, people get kicked out of that forum and start another one to talk about how mad they are. Right. But I think that's like, that's a better solution. And so we should encourage competition. Let me push back on that solution just a little bit. There are genuine benefits to massive network effects. That's the reason these sites got big in the first place. I don't know, possible exception to Google

because their attempts at networks effects have been horrendous. But people, everybody, everybody didn't end up on Facebook and Reddit and Twitter because they're like,

in their hearts, evil monopolists that were like, that wasn't the only reason at least. There's actual genuine benefit to just knowing everybody's on Facebook. Like, there's like, you get something out of that

that you don't have if you, like, if everybody's on like 50 different forums and is that person's identity controlled by about. Dot me or some other thing. And so the debate isn't just, oh, we want more competition. Hooray, it's actually how big is too big.

And like at what point do you start kicking in these regulations or these like stiffer controls or whatever? So, you know, I'm no Josh Hawley fan, and I'm no fan of just like tossing out 230. But at least he took a crack at saying, well, we got to do something. I'll draw the line at money. You know, like Elizabeth Warren was like, we got to do something. something, I'll draw the line at, you know, self-dealing if you run a marketplace, you can't participate in the marketplace. Like, you've got to have some kind of rule because otherwise you're just, you're like, you're asking for competition. Okay, great. I would love competition too,

but like, we're not going to get it because the incentives of the internet actually push people to larger networks naturally, I think. Unless you have interoperability. I think the counterpoint to this is email. Like email, there were a ton of different email providers. Some, like, eventually Gmail sort of won out. But you could talk. talk to other people on different email services. If social media were more interoperable, there would be much lower barrier. Like, you would get less power from the network effects. Yeah.

Also, if people were just totally satisfied with these spontaneously occurring massive multi-billion people networks, then Facebook wouldn't have to keep acquiring ones every time they stretch into, you know, 30, 40 million users. Okay. Oh, yeah. I'm talking like over time, like five, 10, 15 years ago, right? Like we're in a spot now where like they got big and we have to deal with that. But assuming we do in five or ten years, something else will get big.

And like we need to have some sort of rule or some sort of like thing that we know is like, okay, this happened. Now we know what to do. And like we don't even know how big is too big yet. Yeah. You know, you brought up Holly and Warren. And I would just connect that to sort of Casey's point. Like whether or not you think that Elizabeth Warren is like a communist devil or Josh

Holly is like a totally self-serving ego monster. Like, whatever. There are critiques of both of them out there. They at least proposed, like, legislation that would go before the United States Congress, that would go through 50 lawyers, that would become the law, that would be subject to judicial interpret. Like, that was the mechanism they chose to feed their respective egos at that time. Honestly, like, it doesn't matter what you think of them personally.

Like, they're United States senators, and they engage the appropriate process for proposing a policy in the United States. This is just not that. Like, this is not the appropriate way to do that. This is directing a bunch of agencies that have... The idea that the FTC is going to roll up on Facebook and be like, you're breaking your own terms of service. And so now 2.30 doesn't apply to it.

It is insane. Like, there's just a level of deep insanity to that. Facebook has the ability to change its fucking terms of service whenever it wants. What is the one most common experience? everyone has on Facebook. It is accepting the new terms of service. People are spontaneously write paragraphs and screenshot it and post it to Instagram, being like, I do not accept the new terms of service.

What is the FTC going to do except annoy Facebook into backing down? And that's like the danger here. I'm glad that you all are here. And we've had a reasonably substantive policy discussion bracketed, I think, by all of our collective frustration. The danger here is that the substantive policy discussion is really interesting and, like, really vibrant, and we have been covering it for years. And then this is pure, aggressive chaos.

And it might crowd out that important policy conversation. I really, like, if you've been listening to this, there are many ways to interpret this. There are many ways to feel about YouTube and Facebook and Instagram and whatever. Most people feel aggrieved by them. we run a business on YouTube. I promise you, we often feel aggrieved by it. Like,

it doesn't work great. But there's a, there's like the smart way of doing it. And then there's the like weird power grab campaigning chaos. Yeah. There was like this really important policy discussion going on about how to regulate these giant platforms. And it, it just got hit by a chaos meteor. Yeah.

Like it was like a really interesting, I mean, Casey writes a newsletter about it in those days in the week. And like, gone. And I, that to me is the worst outcome. Look, it's Trump, maybe my next week. Well, I'll just have moved on. Who knows? I would point out also that there's a pandemic going on in the world and 100,000 people are dead in this country. And he has somehow managed to fully distract everybody from that by saying Twitter sucks. I say Twitter sucks every day. No one's distracted by my failings. But that's the move. And I hope we somehow, I think this will get challenged in

short order. It has to be. I think I said this, did I say it to you, Casey, or I think I said it to Russell. Like, Trump rolled out like 50 versions of the Muslim travel ban. And like they each they got struck down and challenged and refined over time. I strongly suspect something like that will happen here. Obviously, the companies that have to do it, like Google and Facebook and Twitter, they're going to have to challenge it. Like I don't, like I can't challenge it the way that you could do that. But we'll see what they do. but man, this just feels like the wrong way to get at a solution to a problem that all of us have seen and like have thought about for so long. All right.

On that deeply frustrated note, we're going to wrap this part up. And then we're going to come back with Julia and talk about HBO Max. It's going to be great. Finally, I've been hearing good things about the Big Bang Theory. So excited to check that out. All right. Thank you, Adi. Thank you, Casey.

We're going to take a break. We'll be right back with Julia Alexander. Support for this show comes from Whatnot. Whether you're selling online or out of a storefront, you already know the challenge. You're simply hoping for people to find your listing or waiting for them to walk in. But What Not flips that. They say they're the live shopping marketplace where you can shop, sell, and connect around the things you love. On What Not, you go live and sell directly to people in real time.

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which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode. clod. aI. slash verge cast. Julia Alexander, welcome back. Thank you.

It's like that we have a more fun thing to talk about with you. It's not Trump and Twitter. Yeah, no. This is a very classic. classic big media owned by a big media company. No user generated content involved. HBO Max launched this week.

Yay. To that sound. Did it launch or did it like? It arrived. It lurched. I will preface this entire section for the listener by saying earlier this morning, Julia and I interviewed Tony Gonzalez, who is the CEO of Otter Media, which is the division of Warner Entertainment.

inside of Warner Media, inside of AT&T, that is responsible for HBO Max. That was very impressive. You will hear it on the interview. The interviews coming out on Tuesday. I'm very excited about it. Julia, in particular, did a great job with it. But I will say my first five questions were just like, so your org chart. From the company that brought you HBO Go, HBO Now HBO Max comes to their org chart.

Why did you need to ask about the org chart? They clearly just shipped it for you this week. You can just look at it in their products and where it's available. It is actually in the interface. You scroll down and it's like, here are all the divisions of WarnerMedia. It's great. Anyway, Julia launched. Tell us about it.

Yeah. It was, I mean, it was a relatively soft launch in the sense that people kind of just rolled up into it. I think a great tweet I saw about it was from BuzzFeed reporter Ryan Broderick, who was like, didn't really know what HBO Max was and it's on my phone. Like, he's like, I didn't even download it, but HBO Now apps became HBO Max apps. And so he's like, it's here. And I think for a portion of the population who cares about watching things on HBO Max, that was one experience.

And the other experience was, I'm interested in HBO Max. And I have no idea of how to get this, which is like a fun polar opposite situation that we found ourselves in. So one thing we confirmed earlier today with Tony, which I, I did not know, and I think HBO did a bad job of explaining to people. They had this built-in win, and they just forgot to tell people about it, which is that HBO Max is built on the bones of HBO Now. It is the same app, the same backend infrastructure, the same subscriber base, the whole deal.

HBO Now, they're over-the-top direct Netflix competitor. All it did was turn in to HBO Max. If they had said this 18 months ago, here's what we're going to do. We're going to take HBO now, our existing streaming service, rebrand it, and put more stuff in it. I feel like a lot of people would have more understood what the hell is going on. But they never actually said that out loud. No. And there's a whole population of people who don't know what HBO Max is in the sense that the marketing for this has been really digital.

Like it's super big on TikTok. On Instagram, there's a lot of it. for people who are just getting HBO through their Comcast subscription or whatever, they had no idea HBO Max was coming. And it's really interesting because I think of HBO Max as more Max than HBO, which is not an insult on what they're doing. It's just like you're getting so much more than what HBO is, which is great, except that they don't like that they don't like the idea that it's like, well, it actually is HBO.

And it's like, it's not because it's got like, we like Cartoon Network shows are on. here. Like the PowerPuff Girls is not on HBO, but it is on HBO Max. Yeah. Also, hilariously, I just want to point out HBO owns Cinemax. So all of, like, there's just a, and Cinemax's, like, streaming app is called Max Go. No. It sure is. It's just walked into it. But like, the idea that we're taking the HBO Now app, adding the ability to log in with your cable provider, which they're adding, and then we got to talk about there's some complexity there. But we're adding that ability. and then pumping it full of other content is actually very simple.

Yep. Somehow AT&T managed to make it very complicated. Isn't that a feature not a bug for AT&T? I mean, I don't know. From my perspective, I wrote this that like AT&T thinks it wins by like being a big multifaceted corporation that does a million things. And I think that's how they think you win in media as well. You like have partnerships with a million companies and all these backdoor deals with

different cable companies and blah, blah, blah. And so they're trying to have. have a direct consumer business, but they don't believe in their hearts. That's what makes you a big, powerful Death Star Corporation. In their hearts, they believe you become a big powerful Death Star Corporation by having really, really complicated backdoor deals with a lot of other big complicated corporations. And that desire ended up becoming the confusion that we shaped because they took all that backdoor stuff and then shipped it as a direct consumer product. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, there's just an element to everything, not to make everything

about the iPhone, but it's a virtual. I'm going to do it. But there's like an element where for so long, your experience as a consumer of cell phones was shaped by like the carrier's business imperative. Right? And so you had their weird app stores and like, you hit the wrong button on your phone

and Verizon charged you an extra $4 because you had lit up like the VZ search service. This is a true story, by the way. They gotten like a lot of trouble for that. And then Apple came along and said, what if we focused on the consumer? Like what if we made a product with it? put the actual human being holding the phone in a position of authority instead of, like, the business imperatives of the company.

That is a very shorthand. But it's still reflected in Android broadly as provisioned and sold by carriers. For example, AT&T, preloading HBO Max on every Android phone it's going to sell. That's just what they're doing. Apple would not let them do that. Again, I don't want to make it entirely about that. Apple will let them put a 5GE logo in the status bar, though, just pointing that out. I mean, how many things am I going to cry about in this podcast today?

But that's AT&T's like version of handling the customer. The consumer is like an endpoint with a fistful of dollars. And then AT&T is like, here's our imperatives and you don't have many choices. So just do what we want. And that's like in many ways the HBO Max story. They didn't turn off HBO Go. They are in big fights. It's not on Roku, which we should talk about.

It's, you can't off it with their Amazon, HBO credentials because they're not a fight with Amazon. And I think they just think over time, they're just going to be AT&T and win, as opposed to, let's go meet the customer where they are. And is that going to last? Is that the sense I get from, I mean, the interface is not bad. The streaming service part of it, the content library Julia has pointed out is very good. So, like, there's good parts to it. And then all of the execution is just to make it direct. Netflix is very good at the customer.

Like Netflix is a very consumer friendly focus service. Disney is, they've just proven that they're great at it. And Disney Plus is quite good. And like things like Disney Plus turning around and immediately understanding that the Simpsons aspect ratio was wrong and promising like on week one, we're going to fix it. We're going to ship a fix to this.

And they just shipped it. That is like very, you have to care, and they did it and they cared, can AT&T through that org chart, through this service, compete at that level? I don't know. But they have good content and they have a good interface. Yeah, the interesting thing to me about HBO Max is that AT&T,

more so Warner Media, although by and large AT&T believes that there will be this kind of learning curve that people will come into and they will learn how to use it and that will make it better. People are already approaching streaming in a certain way. You don't just open up an app. You immediately go to Google and you're like, Where do I go to watch this? Once that's answered, it's, do I have a subscription to this service?

And once you go there, then you can figure out what you're doing. The only exception I can think of in that regard is Disney, which has done a very good job of being like, if it is a Disney title, it is here. Like, it's going to be here. And with HBO Max, the issue that I saw on Twitter play out, and it's the issue I had, is like, I went to open HBO Max, which is Warner Brothers, and I went to go type in the dark night. I said it was like not there.

I went to go watch the Harley Quinn animated show, which is great. And it's not on HBO Max. It's on WarnerMedia's other DC streaming service. So you have to have a subscription to that. And the idea that customers are going to be okay with just like figuring it out on the curve versus making it extremely consumer friendly and meeting them halfway and making it easier. The less that your customer has to Google, the better it will be for your service. But Julia, isn't part of the, I don't know, a weird advantage.

year is that more people know what a Disney movie is and know what a Warner Media property is. And so they're not actually that worried about people knowing that Harley Quinn is a character owned by Warner Media, therefore it should be on their service than they are that they just want you to open the app because it's got the words HBO on it. You know, Friends is in there somewhere and start browsing around until you find something. Right. I mean, that's a really good point. And so I think it's, you actually kind of hit the nail on the head, which is it's an HBO app

and then you said Friends is on there. And like Friends is not HBO title, right? But it is a huge Warner Brother television distribution title, which ran on NBC in the 90s. But this was a conversation that, you know, I'm in this. Like, I get really obsessed with licensing rights of like the 1980s. And so I will have these conversations with people on Twitter. And it's like, oh, yeah, that was an ABC show, but it's a Warner Brother title, which is why it's on HBO Max now. And that's complicated.

And I think at the end of the day, people just want to know where they have to go to stream something. And Netflix via its originals and then Disney. Disney via being a Disney, like they have five tent pole things. Like, that's their whole situation. Makes it easy to just open up and go, I know that probably what I'm going to be looking for is on here. Versus, yeah, exactly. With HBO max, you're like, I know I'm going to get all of HBO because it's in the title. So I'm going to go and get that library. And then everything else is kind of like a crapshoot. You're like, I hope this is here, but it might not be. And like, I think that's the problem. There's a difference. A contributor to the verge, Josh Rivera wrote about

this and I thought it was very good. And he said there's a difference between what they teased and what is there. And that is like the hardest thing to wrap your head around because they teased this would be everything Warner Brothers. So like everything DC, everything Harry Potter whatever is there. And like they're in this weird situation where they have almost all the Harry Potter movies and the great universe of things, but they're missing like one title. And that's a weird situation to come in and people, again, if you can make it less, if you can make it so that people are Googling less, they are going to be so much happier. in the long run.

The library thing, one imagines rights issues that get sorted over time. Julia writes about this a lot. But, you know, these contracts are signed years ago. Things change. They launch an app, like, whatever. Those contracts have to expire. I think you were pointing out, like, Justice League is going to leave H. Joe Max for a while, which is insane.

Wait, what? And then it's coming back because it's a, and a funny thing, because it's a Turner. Like, Turner has the window exclusive on it. And I was like, isn't that you? Turner is owned by Warner Media. Come on. No joke. I mean, it's ridiculous.

But, okay, let's talk about some of the, we've brought up three or four things so far. So what's going on with Roku? They launched, they're not on Roku, which is a mistake. It's the biggest platform that sits under people's TVs. And they're just kind of not there. The, yeah, I think I said this to you earlier.

And I was like, to launch without. one, and by that I mean Roku or Amazon is like devastating to launch without two is like detrimental. It's like those are the way people open, like they find their apps. Like that's how they go and that's how they stream things. What we know

is that basically incoming AT&T CEO John Stanky was like basically told a group of people at a conference, they don't think Amazon's going to happen anytime soon. They're not playing ball with them in the way that Disney played ball with them back in November. But he did say we're probably going to launch with

every other partner, which seems to insinuate that Roku will happen. But it's just, it's not there yet. And this gets into really complicated, but actually old school TV things, which is just what are referred to as carriage disputes. It's just that Roku wants to be able to charge WarnerMedia or AT&T a certain amount of thing. They want to get something out of it to carry the HBO Max app. AT&T WarnerMedia is not meeting them halfway at this point. And so they're going to have this kind of pissing contest with each other until someone gives in. And then it's like, great. Who needs who more? Does AT&T need Roku more? Does Roku want to have the HBO Max app to keep people in that ecosystem? And that I think is actually the most interesting streaming, quote unquote, streaming war story.

It's less so the independent streaming services than the hubs that aggregate all of it. Because if you can control people in that ecosystem and your apps are there, then there's a better chance people will use those apps if they're in it. Like if I'm using Roku and I get out of Netflix and I see an HBO Max app, I'm going to probably click on it. But if it's not there and I'm using Roku, I'm probably not even thinking about it. So you call it a carriage dispute, but it's actually a reverse carriage dispute. Because the old cable companies, they would pay ESPN, perhaps most famously, pay ESPN, and then ESPN would show up on their service. And then subscribers would pay the cable company, the cable company, right?

And that's how that worked. So here you pay, you as a customer, pay Roku nothing. You pay some like $30 for their cheap box. but then all of the apps on the Roku platform, all of those companies are paying Roku. So if you sign up for Netflix on the Roku device, Roku gets a cut. Roku runs an advertising service that puts your app at the top of the store, all the stuff that platforms do. That's where Roku makes all of its money.

And so it seems like here, HPO Max, AT&T, someone wants a better deal than what Roku is offering them in terms of how much does AT&T have to pay Roku? for an HBO Max signup, how much promotion are they going to get, if they start doing premium video on demand, which maybe they might do, like, what's the cut of that? Like, there's just a lot. And we've gone through this as consumers. Anyone with cable has probably experienced a blackout, which is when these companies, usually like the cable companies and the networks are having disputes, one of them will hold back and

say, okay, well, we're not going to give you our content anymore or we're not going to carry this content anymore. And so what you have is like you can't watch Packers. game. I don't know. That's your team, right? Yeah. You can't watch one of those games. Julie, you should pick something that people actually want to watch. That's horrible. I do love Aaron Rogers, but that's getting off. See, it all comes back. But so from the consumer perspective on this side, what you're experiencing is the same thing.

It's basically a blackout. It just means you're not going to get HBO Max on that service. You can go and subscribe to it if you're like meaning you watch everything on a MacBook on your computer and like have it on a a browser, but if you're someone who relies on that Roku ecosystem, when you're watching things at the end of the day, it is not going to be there. And if it's out of sight, it's probably out of mind, especially considering HBO Max has absolutely no tent pole, like, original kind of series that makes you want to come in like a Mandalorian or like a Game of Thrones. So what kills me about all of this is every year these like these weird carriage disputes for these new streaming TV platforms like Amazon or Roku and Apple or whatever,

there's another layer of like complication and things to fight over. So it's, is your app going to be on the platform? Yes or no? Is your app going to be searchable via the platform's universal search? Yes or no? Will people be able to find your show by searching using the default search? Is your app going to be built into whatever the aggregated interface that puts all the different services together in a slurry of content?

Yes or no? And then now it's, is your app? going to be a thing that people can subscribe to via this your platforms like channel interface, Apple's channels and Amazon Fire TV's channels, or not, or will that be a requirement to get the other layers in the first place? And like understanding why HBO Max isn't on Fire TV actually kind of requires you to understand what level in that four level chain it falls on where that fight is and how it affects the fights at the other three levels. It's actually crazy making. Being a consumer in 2020 is being an amateur intellectual property, like, expert.

Like, it is like, you're literally just like, you're like, what agreement was made in 2013. And that makes me so I can't watch this thing. But that's exactly like you're trying to figure out. And at the end of the day, I think of myself as kind of the ideal consumer because I consume a lot. I watch YouTube videos at twice speed, audiobooks are twice speed, podcast or like everything is twice because I just want to get through stuff. And so when I'm thinking of how I'm watching things, how I'm listening to things, if it is not presented to me, I'm probably not searching it out, just because I don't have the time, unless it's something very specific I'm looking for. And when you think about that, when people come home at the end of the day and they, you know, open up broker or whatever and they're looking for something, it's why people open up Netflix, because it's right there. And it's like, there's probably, they're probably going to recommend me something that definitely is tailored made to my interests. And so I think in this, this fight, it's like, yes, Roku would like to have people in that app,

I would like to have the HBO Max app to offer to people, but AT&T needs Roku. Like they need to be in that ecosystem. Yeah. I have two points to make here. One, I love the idea that you, Julia, do not have time to watch new things

because like every three days, I see you live tweeting the entire MCU. So I feel like we could just rebounce your time there. Just an idea, just a time management idea from you. to you. Second, I think that the more we talk about it, it's just the simplest way to think about this, if you were interested in the business of the streaming wars, is that what these devices are, fundamentally, are cable boxes. That's what they, that's what Amazon is made. That's what Apple has made.

That's what Roku has made. The economics of those cable boxes are reversed from the traditional cable box, right? So you might buy the hardware, but instead of Apple paying the channel, the channels are paying Apple and that because the Apple controls the user experience and the search and discovery and all that stuff and they sign up flow. Apple has your credit card. The Amazon dispute here is like literally exactly that

because you can have an Amazon Fire TV inside of their interface you can buy HBO from Amazon and get the classic cable channel HBO and it'll show up and it'll be inside the Fire TV interface. So I have Fios. I can log into HBO Max with my Fios, my Verizon Fios cable credentials, and it lights up and works. If you bought HBO the cable channel from Amazon with this reversed economic system, you cannot sign an HBO Max because AT&T wants a better deal. Amazon wants their data in their Amazon interface.

They want to do search and discovery. And HBO AT&T want you in their app. And so the fight is exactly, to Julia's point, a carriage dispute. The cable operator is Amazon. Like literally the cable operator is Amazon. And HBO is the channel. And they're fighting over who gets what out of the deal. It's just the economics from the traditional cable package are reversed.

And I don't think we have maybe called them cable boxes a handful of times. But I think the broader sense that really what we've made here are more complicated, potentially more expensive cable boxes. that happen to run iOS and Android instead of whatever Comcast garbage. Like, that's all, that's really what we've accomplished here. And the pricing models and the bundling are all headed right back for it. You know what this means? This means AT&T is right. Like, the person that's going to win is the person that's best at having the big Matrix corporate fight.

And that's like AT&T's bread and butter. Yeah, you know what cable provider, MVPD in the industry parlance is most likely to get into carriage disputes and most likely to win, direct TV, which is owned by AT&T. There's just a bunch of like trench warfare direct TV executives. You're like, oh, I know this game. They're all cowboys. I don't know why. I just think of them as like literally cowboys.

Like, y'all need us? But it's funny because like every expert analyst I talk to, which is like daily, they're always very upset about something happening. And whenever I bring up like, okay, let's talk about streaming wars. to talk about Netflix versus Disney or whatever, which I think is outplayed at this point, as we all know, they're the ones who are like, that doesn't matter. Like, it doesn't matter. What matters is like who control, like Apple, Amazon Roku.

Like, that is the story about where you're going to see things. And it's funny because it's a straight up business, like traditional TV business story, but there's such a huge consumer focus to the point that yesterday, way above HBO max trending was Roku because people were like, I just want it here and why can't I get it? And it's like, well, these two companies are having a fight and they're trying to resolve it. Well, also, people have Roku TVs, right? Roque, like, that's a big win for Roku, right? You're not going to, if you have a newer Roku TV, you're not going to go out and buy a

fire stick or an Apple box to get one more channel. If you have a Roku, that's all set up, you're not eager to go out and buy another device just for one of these apps. so the switching cost of the TV platform you're on plays to their advantage in a way that is hilarious because in the course of history, it is the lowest switching cost that has ever existed. Right? If you were mad that A&E was blacked out on spectrum two years ago, you'd be like, well, I have to cancel my spectrum. I have to find another provider, which probably doesn't exist in my area.

Like it was a very high switching cost. But now it's like way lower. You just have to like get rid of your $20 Roku box and like buy a $20 Amazon stick. And people are like, oh, I can't know. Could you imagine? I'll just tweet about it until I win. Like it's still a win for them. I just think we're going to see the roll up, the bundling Apple saying just pay us the fee.

We'll deliver all the channels to you. Yeah. I mean, Amazon sent us a pretty, what I thought was not the word, it's not the word isn't impressive, but just I was a funny statement. Because they reiterated like the five million customers. And they were like, hey, we want to make a deal with AT&T. Like, they're the ones who are just being weird, which is how every company comes across. But Amazon really went in and was like, we have all these customers. They want HBO Max.

Like, we want to work the set with you. And if you, but if you're not going to play fair with us, then we're not going to do it. And that's the other things think the other companies think the other company is being unfair to them. And it's like, that's what they're trying to figure out. It's like, well, we don't want to have to pay this much or we think we should be making more because we're carrying it. And it's like until they figure out a magic, a secret magic number that works for both of them in some context. Like it's not going to be on Amazon fire. It's not going to be on Roku.

And that sucks for customers. I mean, it's just funny because what's next to all of these apps on every one of these boxes is like the YouTube app. Right. It's like, well, I guess I can't watch this. I'll just like watch YouTube instead. Like there's this like immediate slide to another entire universe of content on every one of these platforms that I think. it's just at the end of the day the idea that this is kind of going to

transition to making you talk about the Snyder cut Julia and make you do it. I was going to make a joke about YouTube was actually not always on fire TV and don't take that for granted. Well, no, I was going to say like at the end of the day, there's so much of the premium stuff on almost all these platforms and then there's the other

universe of stuff that people watch which is deeply competitive with the premium stuff whether or not any executive wants to admit it. That I just think unless you have something where there is this like enormous ground swell of consumer demand that's going to make you install the service. That's the Mandalorian, right?

Whether it's Tiger King or it's a Snyder cut, right? And that's, I think that's what they're, that's what HVMAX is going to bank on. They're going to put the stupid Snyder cut, which doesn't exist. It's like, they're just making a new movie. They're going to put it. And that's going to drive all their subs. Only Verge cast readers or listeners could see the smile on your face when you're I'm just like torturing Julia right now.

Oh, the Snyder cut. Again, I said this to Nilai earlier, and it was like, imagine having access and ownership of the entire Harry Potter collection and going, nope, we're going to make a Snyder cut and not a new Harry Potter show, which would also bring people in and would not have caused controversy. I have to sigh. I have to sigh. Yeah, so the Snyder cut is a great example.

The Snyder cut is a tease of what they want to do, right? So as you said, they don't have a Mandalorian. They don't have any tentful thing at launch. They probably won't have anything this year, maybe. But I would imagine not because of the COVID-19 pandemic. No one is shooting anywhere. Like, it's just been rough for every company. So they came out six days before they announced, before HBO Max launched,

and they said, hey, we're going to do this thing that these groups of people on the internet, this intense fandom that has some positives, but is overwhelmingly negative in many ways in the way that they approached trying to get this cut release, this version of the 2017 movie Justice League. We're going to give them the thing they've been asking for, but we're going to make an HBO Max exclusive. And it's like that thing is we're going to get them to sign up. And the minute they did that, Reddit and Twitter was just full of diehard fans being like,

even if we can't afford it, we have to sign up for HBO Max, because we have to support the company that is supporting our guy, Zach Snyder. And it's like, that is a weird situation to watch unfold. like for me as someone who's reported on like fandom and internet culture, it's like a deeply disturbing thing for me to watch unfold. But it makes sense for a company like AT&T. That is a group of people who are going to buy not pirates. Specifically, they will, they know that.

They're going to continue signing up month after month. And they build this kind of personal connection with a very loud fan base, who's going to do free marketing for this company. And so that's a smart bet. It costs them, you know, $30, $40 million to do. And they've, but they've got people. coming in. How many people it turns out to be who knows, but they have that very vocal fan base now who's going like HBO Max is great. They're doing this thing for us.

So I want to talk about that 30 to 40 million dollars. It's good that Dieter's here. Okay. There's like an existential question about what is the user interface of 40 million dollars? Let me tell you what. No, no, no, I'm saying like it's like a philosophy question. It's like a Deeter question in my mind. Yeah. Does the Snyder cut exist? was first of all I'd say it. Yes, does it exist? When there's actually no such thing as a Snyder cut, unless you spend $30 to $40 million. Right? Like there's a $40 million effort delta between now in existence. Does it exist? The medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas came up with this concept of pure potentiality, which is the thing that does that exist in terms of like, being a first mover and so on. And actually, I can't actually remember exactly what Aquinas said about pure potentiality.

No, the Snyder cut doesn't exist. I mean, it, no, it existed. And, like, he had an idea. I don't know, man. Does anything exist really? Because, like, if you take a movie apart, frame by frame, and then put it back together and change nothing, is it still the same movie? Yes.

No. Obviously. If you take one frame out, is it still the same movie? Oh, I see what you mean. I leave this for the people to tweet at us at a different time. That's your homework for the weekend. Here's my question. The reason I ask this is the entire toxic Snyder Cut discourse was based on the idea that

Zach Snyder, because of a tragic family situation, stopped making his movie. Joss Whedon came in and made a different, dumber movie. But that there is such a thing that exists called the Snyder Cut, which, is the original conception of the movie. Right. And that you could release it. So, yeah. But it doesn't exist.

No. And even that, which is the mythology of this cut that has, like, been passed down, like the word of God in certain parts of the internet. Like, even that is not necessarily true because Josh Whedon came in before Snyder left. And he was doing, he was already rewriting certain parts of the script. And he was doing reshoots. And then Warner Brothers offered Snyder certain things. this whole thing goes, it's so much.

Like people are writing books about it. Thank God. Wait. Those are two sentences that I did not expect at all or in that order. Yeah, it just needs to be like really documented finally, like for real. But it's this idea that this large corporation was met with this very loud for close to three years, this very loud fan base who is like, we want this thing. And we will, most importantly, we will support you with money. Like we are going to pay for this thing.

We're not going to pirate it because we know that's important. There's this weird trend that's happened and streaming services are figuring it out to bring it back to the main conversation. Like they get it, which is this idea that like if you can control the passion economy, then you can start to really build revenue off of that. And so they went, hey, these guys are going to come. They're going to spend. They're going to keep subscribing. They're going to tweet about it. Let's just meet them halfway.

40 million for a company like WarnerMedia and AT&T is nothing. It's like, cool. Let's just do it. And then it's there. And they've got this now legion. of loyal fans. And I think that just if loudness of the internet can get major corporations to start doing these kind of things that we've seen terrible precedent for before, like going back to like in video game listeners will know about the Mass Effect 3 stuff in 2012, 2013,

like it just sets a bad precedent for what's happening. But now the streaming services are like figuring it out that it's a way for them to make money. And so I suspect we will see much more of it. This was just kind of like the big one, everyone on the internet has been waiting to see if happens or not. Yeah, I just think the reason I'm, like, fixated on the existence of the thing is that the amount of money and effort it's going to take to finish it means it will not be the 2017 Justice League movie. It just won't be. It will be the 2020 movie that contains all of this backstory in its completion. I just feel bad for Ben Affleck, man. He was, like, done with it. He had, like, moved on. And now he's got to promote HBO Max. No, he's got to

come back and talk about Batman. And really, Ben Affleck loses out the most at all of this. All right. Well, we've taken up a lot of your time, Julie. By the way, one thing I do want to point out, many people ask us about this. And we actually asked Tony about it. You can hear his answer again on Tuesday when that interview goes out. H-O-Max launched no 4K, no HDR, no Dolby Vision, no Dolby Atmos.

My thinking is that they blew it? Like, if they had just told everybody. you can rewatch Game of Thrones in 4K, maybe we pumped up those black levels a little bit. Like, there would have been like a rush to watch that stuff. If all the Harry Potter movies, save one, are on there. Now they're all for free, 4K, like, there were in a rush to watch it. And they just don't have it. Maybe it sounds like maybe it might come, but it, you know, for the purpose of this show,

that's a miss. That's just a miss for me. They didn't do this kind of very natural thing that they should do. Yeah, it all feels ironically because it's taken so many years, including there was like a period where they had to pause on it because of the judicial stuff going on. Murder, it feels very rushed in a lot of ways. And I think there's a reason that Reid Hastings, who's the CEO of Netflix, said about Disney Plus, like, it's an incredibly impressive thing that they managed to do because they came in and within six months was like dominating. Like they figured it out, they had the good quality. They had a bunch of stuff going on.

As you said with Simpson stuff, they heard people's feedback. and fixed it in six months. And HBO Max just kind of feels like, oh, there's things that just don't quite make sense. And if you had taken a little bit more time, maybe you could have launched with the tent pole show. Maybe you could have had 4K, HDR, and instead it's just like another missing thing. Can we connect this to Bamtech? So like Bamtech legendarily is like the best streaming media company from back of the day, started doing MLB stuff. I believe they made the original version of HBO now because HBO Go was a dumpster fire.

and then Disney bought them. And so, like, Disney had the geniuses at Bam to work on its streaming stuff, and AT&T didn't. That might be a bridge too far. I don't know. I can't remember if Bam did Go or now. Oh, Bam definitely did now, because Go is a mess. And they made a whole different app using Bamtech to make now. Yeah, and then Disney bought it for themselves.

But, I mean, like, they have, they've been using the same, the same HBO now for the past few years, has been run by the same team on their own platform. And so it's the same architecture, I think. Like, that's, I don't have an issue with it. Like, for me, it's fine, but I don't use anything like fancy, like voice control. Like, people are like, I ask my TV to look for something. I'm like, whoa, you have a TV. Like, that's so cool.

And so that, I never really think about that type of stuff just because I watch everything on a MacBook. But, yeah, I think it was pretty separate for a few years. by this point because BAMTEC had left and was working with it with Disney. All right, Julia, I can't let you go without 30 seconds of donkey and Quibi. What's up with Quibi? My favorite. There is this beautiful review of Quibi in like an art like website on an art website that like reviews art. They reviewed Quibi and it was the greatest takedown of Quibi I've ever read in my entire life.

I don't know what's going on with Quibi. Someone sent me an email that said Quibi is more well liked than. Netflix and Disney Plus because it had really good reviews on iTunes. And I just was like, that's suspicious to me. That's where I meant. I've been thinking about that email for eight hours. Yeah, we'll see. Oh, now I have to do all the disclosures. Oh, right. Yeah. I just think of this as the Julia block. Like straight up, like Julia's here. Here's 30 seconds of disclosures. NBC Universal is a minority investor in Vox Media, which is our parent company. Vox.com as a Quibi show. Polygon has a Quibi show.

Fox.com has a Netflix show. I think someone at this company made an Apple TV show. It's just like out of control. Just trust me when I say no one's happy with me ever. I think someone at this company someone has always mad at me about something.

It's fine. The verge.com has a new Snapchat show too. Oh yeah. Yeah, we're this account. I don't know, man. We got a Facebook page. Whatever you want. It's all here.

We do our best to leave Juliet a bubble of pure isolation. with only the MCU library and a stack of thoughts about Quibi. It's great. All right, Julie, thank you so much. Thank you. All right. We went super long today.

We've just been doing that every week. We'll try. We're going to try to get back to an hour. We're going to do like a 15 minute episode. We're not going to try so hard. Bang. We're going to bank all the extra minutes. And then at the end, it's like a one minute.

My thanks to Casey Newton. He's at Casey Newton on Twitter. Addy Robertson is at the Dexterityarchy on. Twitter. Julia Alexander is at Loudmouth, Julia, Dieter is at Backlon. I'm at Reckless. You can tweet at all of us. We talked about a lot today. So if you have thoughts, let us know. We'll be back on Tuesday with the interview show. Like I said earlier, Julia and I interviewed Tony Gonzalez. He's the CEO of Audor Media. He's in charge of HBO Max. That's a great interview. We had a great time with him. So check that out on Tuesday. We're back on Friday with the chat

show. Just a slate of interviews coming up. So if there's someone you want us to talk to, we've been having pretty good luck lately. So tweet at me. Let me know somehow who you you want us to talk to you what you wants us to cover. We'll go out and we'll do it. That's it. That's our chest. Rock and roll. Paul.