This is why you should still be ad-blocking online

Having just pointed out how different Google's advertising-fuelled business is from Facebook's surveillance-fuelled shop, I suppose it's only fair to point out that being distinctly different from, and less evil than, Facebook, doesn't automatically make the crew at Google into paragons of virtue.

Por ejemplo, take this report from Huffpost:

The ad caught Gordon Turner’s eye immediately. It was an official-looking online video encouraging viewers to apply for the “Senior Booster Program,” which entitled those 65 and older to government-issued payments of $1,728. For Turner, a 77-year-old Texan on disability benefits who lives alone and financially supports his elderly mother, that kind of cash could go a long way. So he clicked the ad’s link right away to input his personal information, and he waited.

Unfortunately for Turner — and the more than 10 million others who’ve viewed this video — no such program exists, and no check will be coming in the mail. Behind the Google ad, and hundreds of others like it, is 1111 LLC, a little-known affiliate marketing company run by a former pro MMA fighter from the Canadian prairies. The firm, which also operates a network of pro-Trump news sites and MAGA merch e-shops, has quietly erupted into one of Google’s top-performing and highest-spending political advertisers

1111 LLC has pumped out a deluge of slickly produced videos via Google ads in recent months that promote entirely fabricated government handouts [...] Many of these ads are designed to look like news segments, with miscontextualized footage of President Joe Biden at his desk appearing to sign documents related to the bogus payouts. [...] They have collectively been viewed well over 100 million times in a matter of months, according to public Google data, sparking false hope in an untold number of households nationwide as the coronavirus pandemic drags into its third calendar year.

Shady companies fleecing people online is a story as old as the internet, but what’s noteworthy in this ruse is Google’s complicity. The tech behemoth has pocketed more than $2.2 million from 1111 LLC since September to run ads that cruelly con its own users while flagrantly violating its own policies — and, experts say, federal law.

Dammit, Google, must you?

A while back, I was watching The WAN Show, a weekly tech-focused podcast on Linus Tech Tips, when Linus, a YouTuber who makes a significant chunk of his company's revenue from Google Adsense, opined that ad-blocking was tantamount to theft; if not outright piracy, it was at the very least privateering.

Linus was wrong. There's a false equivalency at work in his argument, in which ads served up by Google are essentially the same thing as the ads that you'd see on network television: a minor nuisance which is borne by the audience in exchange for otherwise-free programming. The problem is that online ads aren't at all the same as the TV ads of the long ago time; online ads are lousy with scams and grift, when they aren't actually installing malware on your system when they're auto-executed by your browser. 

Do you remember cryptojacking? Because I do.

And then there's the creepy surveillance aspect of things; even Google, whose business model is still viable if the link between advertising and surveillance is broken, isn't yet a surveillance-free zone. There's a reason why the U.S. Congress is marking up legislation right now which will mandate a stop to the process; a looming legal problem that Google is trying to get ahead of by making cross-app tracking more difficult, much like Apple has already done.

And even if online ads weren't dangerous to your security, invasive to your privacy, and occasionally outright-illegal scams which Google not only fails to detect, but profits from, online ads are intrusive to the online experience, to a truly obnoxious degree.

Do you remember when a U.S. Congress, who couldn't agree at the time to keep their own fucking lights on, came together to mandate a decibel cap for television ads? Because I do.

Do I like LTT's content? Yes, I do. It their content so good that I'd be willing to give up my privacy, my security, my emotional well-being, and subject any number of desperate people to an endless (and apparently unstoppable) fire-hose of lies, scams, phishing attacks, misinformation, radicalization, and addiction? Yes, addiction; our current epidemic of opiate addicts is a direct consequence of Oxycontin advertisements which were pumped into people's homes, depicting an opiate painkiller as addiction-free, side-effect-free, and totally safe.

BTW, Purdue Pharmaceuticals, who were responsible for that ad campaign? They're desperately trying top settle the resulting class-action wrongful-death lawsuit... so far, without success.

Online ads aren't a relatively-innocuous thing which we endure to get access to free content. They're often dangerous, frequently outright evil, and demand far too much in exchange for showing us a few minutes of a movie trailer on YouTube... which, I'll remind you, is already a fucking advertisement, and shouldn't need to also be supported by selling additional pre- and end-roll ads... or mid-roll ads, for that matter.

So, no, Linus, ad-blocking isn't piracy, or privateering, or theft of any description. It's self-defence. If Google want me to stop blocking the ads they're hosting and serving, then that ad stream needs to be independently certified as 100% clean, by people whose word we can trust on the subject. In other words, not by Google themselves, who have a vested material interest in shading the truth on this subject.

A false equivalence debunked, again: Google and Facebook do not share a business model

Lazy pundits are fond of equating the evils of Facebook Meta with the "don't be evil" ethos of Google Alphabet, with the sole reason being that both are in the advertising business, but this past week has laid bare the differences between the two, and NYMag.com's Pivot podcast lays out the differences very, very simply:

Kara Swisher: There are Big Tech winners and losers in this week’s earnings, and Alphabet is making it look as easy as ABC. [...] On Tuesday, Alphabet announced a 20-for-one stock split. But they weren’t popping corks all over the Valley. Shares of Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, fell more than 20 percent, in part due to the impact of Apple’s privacy changes. [Emphasis added.] Also, issues around growth; also, the money they’ve been spending on the Metaverse.

Yes, I know that Zuckerberg blamed recent iOS changes which block apps from sharing data with each other, and the effect that those changes are having on the business of surveillance advertising, but Google Alphabet are also in the advertising business, and their business is booming. Surely something else has to be at work, right? Maybe one of these two companies is in the advertising business, while the other is just in the surveillance business full stop, with advertising as a sideline?

[Swisher:] And again, the spending on Meta is insane — they lost $10 billion on that division, the Reality Labs division [...] 2022 could bring challenges for both Alphabet and Meta [...] but the big thing was this $10 billion cost for the Metaverse investment. So what do you think about the situation?

Scott Galloway: This is the quarter that Google disarticulates from Facebook, much less Pinterest and Snap. Search is its own form of communications and advertising that continues to just grow. [...] Facebook, for the first time in 18 years, had a decline in daily active users. It’s never registered that.

Yes, it's definitely sounding to me like Google Alphabet is in an entirely different business than Facebook Meta... and Facebook Meta's bid to rebrand itself as a real-world Ready Player One product isn't going at all well.

Galloway: He’s doing exactly the right thing strategically. The problem is the tactics make no sense. The people in this universe are not impressed with the universe he envisions, and specifically the portal. [...] The Reality Labs group grew from $1 billion to $2 billion, but to spend $10 billion to get to $2 billion … If he pulls it off, it’ll be one of the most impressive feats in — not even corporate renewal — but vision around maintaining growth. I don’t think they’re going to. I think this thing is already a giant flaming bag of shit.

I think that last line illustrates just how quickly Facebook Meta has fallen from grace, here. As recently as a month ago, it was looking like Zuck had successfully flipped the script, changing his company's narrative from Frances Haugen's whistle-blowing and under-oath testimony to Facebook's plan to shove us all kicking and screaming into a Facebook Meta-dominated VR future.

Now, pundits are openly talking about Meta's VR initiative in the past tense, having noticed that nobody under the age of 25 would be caught dead using this thing, and describing the entire division of the company as a "giant flaming bag of shit." Although, to be fair, that same description would apply equally well to Facebook Meta as a whole.

So, no, Google Alphabet and Facebook Meta are not in the same business. They are not equivalent, or interchangeable. Google Alphabet provides services that people like, and which they use in increasing numbers, while Facebook Meta is a giant flaming bag of shit" which shed a record-sized chunk of their valuation in a matter of days, and whose leader has continued to refuse to change the ethical direction of the company, even as he bets the entire enterprise on a dystopian VR future which nobody wants.

These companies are not related, and they are demonstrably not the same. Clearly, changes to the business environment which chopped the legs out from under Facebook Meta have had no impact on Google Alphabet at all, except to increase the size of their business... at Facebook Meta's expense. There is no equivalence here. So can we please stop lazily equating them? Just... stop.

This has been one of two aspects of the Facebook Meta for the past few years which I've found really, really frustrating. The first was that Facebook Meta, regardless of how evil the actions, or how feculent their headlines, seemed to be immune to consequences: no matter how bad the news, their earnings, profits, and share price just kept going up. That's now changed; Facebook Meta has now shown themselves to be vulnerable to consequence in a way which is going to haunt them for a long time to come.

The other aspect, though, was this false equivalence angle, one which Facebook Meta has been perfectly happy to encourage. Because if Google Alphabet and Facebook Meta are impossible to distinguish from each other, if both of them are equally targets of antitrust actions, and draconian regulations, then Google Alphabet could be forced into the role of reluctant ally with Facebook Meta, in spite of the simple fact that they really have very little in common.

Well, no more; we now have a clear demonstration of just how different these two companies are. We can rein in the evils and excesses of Facebook Meta without having to deliberately kill Google Alphabet in the process. Reasonable rules which pose an existential threat to Facebook Meta, don't present any serious difficulty to Google Alphabet at all. So can we please do that now? Pretty please?

EPIC'S ROLL OF THE DICE COMES UP SNAKE EYES: Judge Gonzalez Rogers rules against the Fortnite publisher on almost every part of their lawsuit with Apple

The verdict is in: The iOS App Store is not a monopoly under the Sherman Act, Epic owes rent for having kept Fortnite on the App Store for months without paying for access to Apple's customers, and the amount owed is 30% of all revenues collected outside Apple's In-App payment system. Also, Apple don't have to put Fortnite back on the App Store, and can go ahead with cancelling Epic's developer accounts, which could push Unreal Engine games out of the App Store, permanently.

On the plus side, developers other than Epic can use other payment collection services now, and can tell customers about those other options in their apps (and link to them from the apps), but Apple has not been ordered to give away access to the App Store for free. Apple is still owed; not only can they continue to charge for access, they can charge whatever fee they wish for that access, specifically including the 30% that Epic was calling excessive and unfair. Epic, of course, are not going to benefit from this point of the ruling because Fortnite is not on the App Store, and the ruling did not enjoin Apple to restore Fortnite to the App Store.

That's the substance of the ruling which just came down from Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers. Apple cannot put themselves between developers and their customers; the 30% App Store fee, however, is still legal, and very much in force, as evidenced by the fact that Epic are being ordered to pay 30% of all monies earned by their iOS app during the months when the app was still available in spite of Epic being in breach of the App Store's Terms of Service.

Be very clear on this point: If Apple is hosting your app on their App Store, thus giving you access to the ecosystem which they built, and which they constantly maintain and improve at considerable cost, then Apple can legally charge you a 30% fee for that access. They just can't intercept all of your revenue in order to deduct that fee, something which they'd largely already stipulated in the other lawsuit which was settled a couple of weeks ago.

So yes, Apple is correct in claiming that this ruling definitively exonerates the app store/walled garden ecosystem business model. The iOS App Store is not, in fact, a monopoly under the Sherman Act, and not a target for antitrust action under that Act.

Apple could appeal the injunction which orders to them to allow developers to use other payment methods, but I don't expect them to; they had already agreed to do basically all of this already, in that other case which was settled in front of this same judge. Apple are not losing anything here which they hadn't already decided to let go.

The same is not true of Epic. Apple do not have to do business with Epic, in any capacity; not only that, but they owe Apple money, since they're in breach of their contract and spent months refusing to "pay their rent." Tim Sweeney has clearly bet the farm on this dice roll, and clearly does not have a viable business with a loss this complete on the book, so I am not at all surprised to see that he is losing his shit over how badly this ruling went against him.

Epic will definitely appeal this ruling; they've already said as much in statements. I don't expect that appeal to go any better than the initial lawsuit did, though, since Apple is not in violation of the Sherman Act, and can't be forced to do business with a company that apparently is not above signing agreements in order to breach them, so that they can use that breach as a pretext to sue.

IGN has a reasonable take on the ruling:

A judge has finally ruled in the Epic vs. Apple lawsuit, most notably issuing an injunction in Epic's favor that forces Apple to permit developers on its platform to link to outside payment options within their apps.

[...]

However, this was the only point on which Epic won its case. The court's final order [...] declared it "cannot ultimately conclude that Apple is a monopolist under either federal or state antitrust laws."

[...]

Apple did counter-sue Epic for breach of contract, and the judge ruled in favor of Apple on this point. The court has ordered Epic to pay out 30% of the $12,167,719 in revenue Epic collected from users in the Fortnite app on iOS through Direct Payment between August and October 2020, plus further damages. In total, Epic will pay Apple at least $3.6 million.

Hoeg Law has another, better take on the ruling, from the point of someone who actually practices law, for anyone who's willing to stare at the text of this ruling for two-and-a-half hours while Phil Hoeg reads and explains it.

Prognostication time

I guess it's time to grade my earlier prognostication on this one, in which I predicted that Epic would lose, and badly; that Epic would end up paying damages to Apple afterwards; that Apple would not be forced to give developers free use of their App Store; and that Apple would not be arbitrarily forced to reduce the App Store's 30% fee. I don't know that Epic will end up paying Apple's legal fees, though; otherwise, I was correct across the board.

I'm calling that an A.

And yes, I'm still expecting Epic to also lose Epic Games v Google, in a similarly resounding fashion. I'm not expecting any court, anywhere, to force Google, or Valve, or any of the Epic Game Store other competitors to basically cease being viable businesses simply because Epic haven't yet figured out how to make a viable digital distribution channel of their own.

Update:

I finally made it all the way through Hoeg Law's two-and-a-half hour video, and can confirm (a) that I'm very glad to have not pursued law as a career, because OMFG, do I ever not want to read 185 pages of mostly padding in legalese, and (b) that Epic will not be paying Apple's legal bills. I've therefore knocked a point off my prognostication grade, from A+ to A. Better you than me, Phil Hoeg; I can only imagine how much work it was to read through all 185 pages of this fucking rock to find the nuggets of gold, and I do appreciate it.

Another point of clarification: while Judge Gonzalez Rogers' ruling didn't specifically disallow the 30% fee that Apple charges for access to the App Store, while specifically ordering Epic to pay for the revenues collected from the iOS Fortnite customers at that same 30% rate, she wasn't particularly convinced by the Apple's attempts to justify the 30% rate. Hoeg Law's video notes several places where Gonzales Rogers calls out Apple for not really having any clear justification for the 30% number; she just declined to mandate a change to some other rate, since she didn't have enough information to decide what that rate should be.

Another thing which becomes clear on hearing two-and-a-half hours of the decision's text is the extent to which Gonzalez Rogers really didn't like Apple or their business practices, and really wanted to rule against them... and might have, had the plaintiff been anyone other than Epic Games, who were bringing the suit only after having deliberately, and needlessly, breached their contract with Apple. There is a lot of the text of this decision which is basically giving other potential litigants, e.g. NVidia, or Microsoft, hints about the lawsuits that they could bring, and the sorts of arguments that might have been made which she'd have ruled in favour of, if Epic had thought to make them.

There was a lot of shade thrown at Epic's "expert witness," too; if that guy's career as a paid expert witness isn't ended by this ruling, then I can only conclude that all of his clients are stupid, and deserve to loose any lawsuits that he's contributing to.

Phil did disagree with me on one point. He assumes that both Epic and Apple will appeal the parts of this ruling that went against them, with Apple appealing the injunction that Gonzalez Rogers based on California law, but declared must apply nation-wide, and Epic appealing basically everything else. Epic have already announced that they will, indeed, appeal the nine points of ten that went against them, declaring that they will fight on, and also hilariously that they will be bringing Fortnite back to the App Store, at least in South Korea, as if Apple don't have a say in that, for some reason.

Apple, for their part, have not decided yet whether they will appeal or not. I still don't think it would be worth their while to appeal an injunction that gives them the rest of the year to do, nation-wide, things that they've already agreed to do elsewhere, or been mandated to do in other jurisdictions (like the aforementioned South Korea). I think Apple might just let this point go; Phil Hoeg, who is a corporate lawyer, thinks otherwise. I stand by my prediction, though, so we can add this to the prognostication list for when Apple do decide what they want to do here.

Epic v. Apple: Round Two. Fight!

Much as Activision Blizzard have deservedly dominated video gaming news for the past few weeks (and look like they'll continue to do so), it bears remembering that ABK aren't the only video game company behaving badly. Tim Sweeney's Epic Games, who:

• agreed to list Fortnite on the Google Play Store last year, bringing it in line with Fortnite's already-existing presence on the iOS App Store...
• only to deliberately violate both of those agreements, resulting in being dropped from both stores... 
• at which point they launched two law suits, and the PR campaign which they had prepped and ready to go, apparently hoping that a wave of bad PR could bully both Google and Apple into caving rather than going to trial... 
• only to have Apple go the mattresses over the bad faith of the whole business, at which point Epic "salted the earth with subpoenas," apparently hoping to learn confidential details of the business practices of Valve and Microsoft, among others...
• only to have Apple's return volley of discovery uncover just how terribly the Epic Game Store is actually doing (spoiler alert: it's not making any money for Epic)...

yes, that Epic; they're still in court, and apparently it's now Apple's turn to start firing back, and whoo boy! are the details ever fun to read.

As reported by PC Gamer:

Various documents have been coming out from the ongoing Apple vs Epic legal case in the state of California, and here's a full rundown of the core of Apple's (pretty decent) defense [...] Apple's lawyers executed what one can only call a drive-by on the Epic Games Store, which Epic's lawyers had been claiming was comparable to the App Store.

"Epic Games Store is unprofitable and not comparable to the App Store" the lawyers began, rather bluntly, "and will not be profitable for at least multiple years, if ever." Ouch! 

Ouch, indeed! 

Apple's legal eagles are just getting started, though -- now it's time to break down just how far from profitable the EGS is:

"Epic lost around $181 million on EGS in 2019. Epic projected to lose around $273 million on EGS in 2020. Indeed, Epic committed $444 million in minimum guarantees for 2020 alone, while projecting, even with 'significant' growth, only $401 million in revenue for that year. Epic acknowledges that trend will continue in the immediate future: Epic projects to lose around $139 million in 2021."

[...]

"Epic lost around $181 million on EGS in 2019. Epic projected to lose around $273 million on EGS in 2020. Indeed, Epic committed $444 million in minimum guarantees for 2020 alone, while projecting, even with 'significant' growth, only $401 million in revenue for that year. Epic acknowledges that trend will continue in the immediate future: Epic projects to lose around $139 million in 2021."

[...]

"At best, Epic does not expect EGS to have a cumulative gross profit before 2027."

But wait! There's more!

Part of Epic's case against Apple is that it wants the ability to have the Epic Games Store on iOS, and the other reason it keeps bringing the store up is that Epic's commission rate on the store is 12%. This is rather neatly countered by the observation that, well, iOS and the Epic Games Store are two entirely different things: "While Epic’s commission is lower than Apple’s, it does not offer all the services that Apple provides. EGS is essentially a storefront—it lacks the integrated features that make the App Store a desirable platform for consumers and developers."

The Apple wonks end by pointing out that Epic's basis for claiming exclusionary conduct from Apple is that the iOS store was not designed to host other stores. Which, I mean, of course it was. "Epic’s allegations thus depend on the notion that Apple’s design and implementation of its own intellectual property can constitute exclusionary conduct. That theory fails as a matter of law."

Now, this is the part where I say, for the record, that I am not a lawyer. Even if I were a lawyer, it would Canadian law I'd be practicing, not California contract law. That said... that looks pretty devastating to me, as far as Epic's case goes.

As I said at the top of this post, I have serious problems with the way Epic went about bringing this suit in the first place. The obvious bad faith that preceded their removal from Apple's App Store just rubbed me raw; the fact that a PR campaign, aimed squarely at Fortnite players, for some reason, was all prepped and ready to go before the removal had even happened speaks pretty clearly to what their intentions had been right off the jump. As a matter of principle, I don't think the courts should be rewarding Epic for that behaviour.

The second problem deals with Epic's creative definition of the word "monopoly" in this context, one which even they admit is on shaky legal ground... while also admitting that current anti-trust law in the U.S. probably doesn't cover the App Store in its current form. So bringing an an anti-trust suit against Apple is, essentially, legally frivolous, since Epic knew from the outset that the law wasn't on their side.

That left only the claim that Apple's 30% cut of the proceeds of App Store sales was excessive and unfair... a claim for which Epic also had no evidence, unless one counts their own Game Store... which, yes, only takes a 12% cut, but is losing money hand-over-fist, with no end in sight for at least another six years. I can see why Epic want the California court system to order Apple, and Google, and Valve to chop their own revenues by two-thirds, reducing them from profitable businesses to money-losing enterprises that the EGS might hope to catch up to, but again, I don't think the courts should be rewarding Epic that richly for bringing what looks like an utterly frivolous, money-and-time-wasting legal action.

Ethically, Epic have acted in bad faith and deserve to lose this one. Legally, it looks like Epic have no case, and deserve to lose this one. And, given how weak Epic's case has looked so far, especially compared to the can of whoop-ass that Apple's legal team just opened up on them... I have a feeling that they're going to lose this one.

Prognostication

I'm calling it now: In the matter Epic v. Apple, the latter will prevail, and Epic will end up adding Apple's legal and court costs to their non-stop Game Store losses. The only reason Tim Sweeney isn't sweating the outcome of this doomed legal adventure is that he is Epic's majority shareholder, and thus can't be fired or reigned in by Epic's board of directors in any meaningful way.

Incidentally... Epic's suit against Google? It's probably weaker that their suit against Apple, since Google only allow the installation of apps outside of Google Play (Apple don't); Epic actually went that route, initially bypassing Google entirely, with no restrictions or retribution from Google over the matter. It's tough to argue monopoly when the alleged monopolist have gone out of their way to create and maintain Android as an open platform, on which users can do basically anything they want. I predict that Epic will lose that case, too.

And, yes, that thought does make me just a little bit happy. 

#FuckEpicGames

Updated Aug. 29th, 2021

We're still waiting for the judge to decide Epic v Apple, but in the meantime, and for people who find my layman's take on these matters less than satisfying, here's a much more expert opinion, from an actual lawyer:

An Antitrust Epic (Playlist)

Now, whether or not you agree with Richard Hoeg (I don't always), I did find it interesting that he had all the same problems with the details of Epic's case, and the ethics of Epic's approach to this matter, that I did. The "pot calls kettle black" nature of Epic, whose own Game Store has been profoundly anticompetitive from its inception, arguing that Apple's App Store is anticompetitive for doing much, much less, feels like hyperbole at the very least, if not outright hypocrisy, and I can't recall if ever I called that out, specifically.

Big Tech anti-trust actions finally aim at correct target

Given the actively evil toxicity of Facebook, and the overtly anti-competitive tactics which Amazon was using to wreak havoc on the entire retail sector of the developed world, it seemed odd to me that so much focus was on "don't be evil" Google. 

It's not that Google weren't also abusing their monopoly position to do anticompetitive things, because it certainly looks like they were and still are, it's just that of all the problematic, amoral Big Tech firms, Google just wouldn't have been high on my priority list, if I were calling the antitrust shots. Even Apple, whose stance against right-to-repair and obsession with trapping consumers on their "ecosystem" for all time are more problematic to my mind than Google giving Android licenses away for free, would have been pretty far down on my antitrust hit list.

Well, apparently someone in the EU has woken up to reality, because they're finally starting to move against the real Big Tech problem children. From HuffPost:

LONDON (AP) — European Union regulators have filed antitrust charges against Amazon, accusing the e-commerce giant of using data to gain an unfair advantage over merchants using its platform.

The EU’s executive commission, the bloc’s top antitrust enforcer, said Tuesday that the charges have been sent to the company.

The commission said it takes issue with Amazon’s systematic use of non-public business data to avoid “the normal risks of competition and to leverage its dominance” for e-commerce services in France and Germany, the company’s two biggest markets in the EU.

[...]

Amazon faces a possible fine of up to 10% of its annual worldwide revenue, which could amount to billions of dollars. The company rejected the accusations.

Better late than never, I guess.

The EU, for their part, claim to have been working on this antritrust case since 2018, in which case I just have to say, OMFG, get a handle on that bureaucracy, folks! And Amazon, naturally, "disagree with the preliminary assertions of the European Commission," which it pretty standard boilerplate for this sort of thing, and should surprise almost nobody. Odds are not in Amazon's favour, though; the EU typically don't bring antitrust actions unless they can prevail, which is the typical outcome, so look for Amazon to face big fines and strong restrictions in the not-too-distant future.

Whether this is a sign of emboldened officials around the world finally find the stones to reign in all of the Big Tech firms remains to be seen of course. If the EU takes on Facebook, in addition to Amazon, Apple, and Google, we'll have our answer. Don't expect that to happen until early next year, though, at the earliest, because... I mean... 2018? Damn.

A busy week for corporate bullshit

After months of keeping low profiles while COVID-19 dominated the headlines, the tech industry has apparently decided to make up for lost time with a one-week barrage of bullshit to close out October. Because who doesn't want to slide into the busiest sales season of the year on a slick of one's own mess, and associated consumer ill will? What do you mean, "Nobody with any sense?"

Anyway, here's a roundup of my favourites from yesterday, complete with pithy snarky commentary.

Is this the beginning of the end of Big Tech?

After months of hinting, and alluding, and leaking, the US Department of Justice has finally decided to actually piss, rather than just sitting on the pot.

As reported by Reuters, via Huffpost.com:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Justice Department and 11 states filed an antitrust lawsuit against Alphabet Inc’s Google on Tuesday for allegedly breaking the law in using its market power to fend off rivals.

[...]

Coming just days before the U.S. presidential election, the filing’s timing could be seen as a political gesture since it fulfills a promise made by President Donald Trump to his supporters to hold certain companies to account for allegedly stifling conservative voices.

Republican Senator Josh Hawley, a vociferous Google critic, accused the company of keeping power through “illegal means” and called the lawsuit “the most important antitrust case in a generation.”

The federal lawsuit marks a rare moment of agreement between the Trump administration and progressive Democrats. U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren tweeted on Sept. 10, using the hash tag #BreakUpBigTech, that she wanted “swift, aggressive action.”

The 11 states which joined the lawsuit all have Republican attorneys general.

Google, who have only just seen the lawsuit themselves, did not respond to Reuters, and will probably let their lawyers do the talking now that the matter is before the courts. I expect that the very pro-Microsoft/ant-Google crew at Thurrott will be gloating about this in a matter of minutes, although I seem to have spotted this one before they did, this time around.

So, the question of which Big Tech firm would be the first to face the US DOJ's antitrust ire has been answered, In spite of the destructive impact and overt evil of Facebook; the profoundly more anti-competitive activities of Amazon; the fact that Epic has been trying to preempt the DOJ and force an antitrust finding against Apple; and the fact that Microsoft are still abusing their position as Windows' gatekeepers to continue loading unwanted Microsoft-branded content, and ads for the same, onto the devices of Windows 10 users, it will be Google who will face official government antitrust action first.

The partisan nature of this action, coming just weeks before an election which Republicans look likely to lose badly, and backed by Republican senators and Republican governors, will likely form the backbone of Google's defense here; the fact that Elizabeth Warren has called for breaking up Big Tech firms like Google will likely not be as much of a factor. I think that's a solid defense; the prosecution case will rely mostly on the fact that Google actually is guilty of doing exactly what they've been accused of, and the matter won't be resolved for years, so for the time being it's business as usual.

Nonetheless, this is something of a watershed moment. The Big Tech firms (Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google) have mostly behaved as if laws do not apply to them for years; what the DOJ has announced today is an intention to apply the laws to them, and I don't expect that Google will be the only one to face a DOJ antitrust lawsuit in the coming months; Apple and Google are already facing multiple antitrust actions in the EU. 

The appearance of impropriety here, with the pre-election timing and largely partisan backing, are unlikely to alter the fact that these companies are behaving like the abusive monopolies that they mostly are, or to change the fact that they are now all faced with a new reality: that their ethos of disruptive innovation has run as far as society is willing to let it. They will now be required to stop disrupting society, and start helping to stabilize it, or at least pay for cleaning up the mess they've made.

Again, it will be years before this finishes playing out, and while Alphabet Inc. might end up looking rather different, I don't expect that Google itself will change very much. But with the conversation now officially underway, there is finally hope that these corporations (and, by extension, all similarly-sized corporations) might finally have reached the end of the era of limitless permissiveness for their largely lawless, corrupting, tax-evading ways. And that can only be a good thing.

Epic v. Apple, round one: A split decision, sort of

I guess that it's time to talk about Epic's war-of-choice against Apple.

For those who haven't been paying attention, here's the Coles Notes version. Epic Games, developers of Fortnite, deliberately breached the terms of the agreements with Apple and Google which allowed them to have Fortnite on both the iOS App Store and Google Play. Apple and Google both acted in accordance with the rules of said agreements, and removed Fortnite from both the App Store and Google Play.

This is when Epic, who very clearly wanted exactly this outcome, launched a well-prepared PR campaign against, primarily, Apple. They clearly intended to mobilize Apple-using Fortnite fans against the Cupertino company, intending to litigate their dissatisfaction with Apple's Apple Store payment terms in the court of public opinion, even as they also filed a lawsuit against Apple seeking an injunction to force their own desired payment terms on them "temporarily," clearly hoping that having those payment terms in place for the years it would take to resolve the lawsuit would essentially make it impossible for Apple to ever go back, whether Epic actually prevailed in court or not.

Apple, naturally, are having none of this. They make billions of US dollars every single year from their 30% cut of App Store transactions, and every incentive to "go to the mattresses" in defense of one of their main sources of revenue. And, as it turned out, banning Fortnite from the App Store was only one way they could express their displeasure with Epic's antics: they revoked Epic's developer license, effectively banning their Unreal Engine, and all games based on that engine, from the App Store as well.

Epic, clearly panicked by this drastic and rapid escalation of a fight that they'd clearly thought would be waged entirely on Epic's terms, filed for another injunction, asking the court to block Apple from killing the Unreal Engine dead. And at the end of yesterday, a federal court judge ruled on both injunctions. The result? Basically, it's a draw. The reasoning behind that draw, however, is quite interesting.

VICTORY!!! After waging a very noisy, one-sided war against Google, Valve, and gamers, Epic Games has quietly surrendered

What a difference a year and a half can make.

And, yes, it has been only that long since Epic Games announced the very first EGS-exclusive title: Supergiant's Hades, an early-access game that announced at the Game Awards in December of 2018, and released the same night. That was only a few months after Epic declared that Fortnite: Battle Royale for Android would be side-loadable only from their own digital distribution channel, rather than just making the game available on Google Play like every other developer with an Android app to flog.

Tim Sweeney's Epic Games would go on from there to declare themselves to be so deeply opposed, on principle, to everything about Valve Software's Steam service that they just had to launch a competing service... which offered absolutely nothing to consumers that Steam didn't, and was actually missing a whole bunch of stuff that Steam users were used to. No worries, though, because Tim Sweeney had a plan: to embrace exactly the same platform exclusivity deals that he'd once called evil, back when Microsoft and Sony were profiting from them, and not him.

The message from Epic to gamers was crystal clear: fuck you, pay me. And gamers got the message; they heard Epic loud and clear... and, en masse, gamers refused to pay.

From the "what took you so long?" file...Seriously, The Verge, what took you so long?

Without further do, I give you this post from The Verge:

YouTube has been pissing me off for weeks. I’m starting to feel like I should pay $11.99 a month to subscribe to YouTube Premium just to get rid of the annoying pop-ups Google sends me almost daily. Google has decided to place pop-up ads in its own YouTube app for Premium subscriptions. This feels slightly acceptable at first, but Google has also decided these should spam you to death, sometimes full-screen, with no option to permanently dismiss them so you see them all the damn time.

It’s a classic growth hack designed to get more people to use YouTube Music or YouTube Premium because, honestly, who cares about either of those services? I already subscribe to Spotify, which is far superior to YouTube Music, and I’d never pay $11.99 just to have fewer YouTube ads and background playback of videos on my phone. It’s a pointless subscription that Google is trying to lazily ram down my throat instead of improving its offering, competing fairly with others, and, most importantly, focusing on its customer experience.

Google’s efforts here have made sure I, and I bet many others, will never touch YouTube Music or YouTube Premium. I absolutely loathe both of these services to the point where I’m left swearing at my phone like an idiot, simply because these stubborn ads keep appearing on top of the YouTube videos I’m trying to watch.

Where to start? How about with the fact that YouTube's mobile app hasn't been exhibiting this behaviour for mere weeks. YouTube has been pissing me off with this bullshit for months. Or with the fact that feeling like making users feel they "should pay $11.99 a month to subscribe to YouTube Premium just to get rid of the annoying pop-ups"is the entire fucking point of the pop-ups.

This is going to take a lot of work...Stadia's launch plagued with missing features, sparse game selection, and unplayable lag

When Google announced Stadia, their first-to-market (if you don't count Sony's PlayStation Now) video game streaming service, there were lots of questions. What would its subscription model look like? What would its game selection look like? What features would the service have? Could even Google get the thing to work? And would Google stick with Stadia for the long haul, even if it wasn't an instant hit at launch?

Well, we now have the answers to those questions, and they're... un-good. One might even call them double-plus un-good. Let's break it down.

Google Stadia is an even worse deal than I thought

It looks like I may have one crucial detail of the Google Stadia package completely wrong.

Like many people, I was thinking that Stadia was basically "Netflix for Games," but if the team at Techlinked are correct, then Stadia may closer kin to XBox Game Pass, with a monthly fee that only gives access to a few free games, with major AAA titles being something you'll need to purchase separately in order to secure access outside of that free period.

This means that the US$1090 over 8 years cost of Stadia that I had calculated as being comparable to the average 8-year cost of console ownership is wrong. The Stadia actually costs US$1690 ($1090 for the service, plus $600 for the games), which amortizes over 8 years to US$211.25 per year, compared to the US$112.50 annual cost of console ownership over the same period. With the added disadvantage, for Stadia, that you own nothing at the end of those 8 years, compared to the console experience which leaves you with a console and 10 games that you own.

Much of Stadia's marketing is still deliberately vague, so clarification on these details could still emerge and magically make the whole thing suddenly awesome, but I doubt it. If this is indeed how Stadia will work, then Stadia... sucks. Even the free version won't actually be a new gaming paradigm; it'll just be a new digital distribution channel. Which nobody wanted. Mazel tov!

Google Stadia is a bad deal for the average consumer, and you should avoid it

Like many people, I was immediately skeptical when Google first announced their Stadia video game streaming service. Details were sparse, and questions abounded, from the technical (several previous efforts at video game streaming had failed because of latency issues), to the basic economics of it all. How much would it cost? Would it be worth its asked-for price?

Well, as of today, we have a few more details, and while the technical issues are still awaiting some hands-on "in the wild" experience to be adequately assessed, we can certainly assess the economics of it all. So here's my ake:

Google Stadia is a rent-to-own scheme, with the added disadvantage that you never actually end up owning anything, and the average gamer should stay far, far away from it all... at least for now, while the "Founder's Pack" is the only version of this thing available.

This isn't based on any subjective aspect of the Stadia "experience," either, even if Google clearly wants consumers to make decisions based on exactly this sort of nebulous, emotional criteria. No, my objection pretty much comes down to simple math. For consumers, the Stadia numbers simply don't add up.

Remember that Firefox is an option

I consume a fair bit of basically-free online content, and don't have anything against "paying" the creators of that content by having a little advertising accompany it, as long as those ads are not intrusive, or disruptive, or loaded with crypto-jacking (or other) malware. I only went nuclear on online ads because advertisers couldn't get their shit together.

So, when Google announced that their Chrome browser's selective ad-blocking functionality would be rolling out worldwide, I was cautiously optimistic. I was even considering switching back to Chrome from Firefox, just to see what sort of a web browsing experience I could have on Google's browser, now that I didn't have to be running multiple extensions in order to block the bad guys.

And then, Google had to go and break everybody else's ad-blockers. Because of course they did; Google sells advertising, and obviously they want you to stop blocking as many ads as possible. Which sucks; they're basically taking away consumer choice, just to line their own pockets. Even worse, though, Google aren't just breaking ad-blocking extensions; they're breaking a whole bunch of other stuff in the process.

As reported by ZDNet:

A planned update to one of the Google Chrome extensions APIs would kill much more than a few ad blockers, ZDNet has learned, including browser extensions for antivirus products, parental control enforcement, and various privacy-enhancing services.

[...]

The biggest of these categories would be extensions developed by antivirus makers and meant to prevent users from accessing malicious sites and for detecting malware before it's being downloaded.

Yikes.

Microsoft makes it official

After word leaked yesterday that Microsoft was redesigning their Edge browser to use Google's Chromium engine "under the hood," Windows-watchers were left wondering just how long Microsoft would make everyone wait before actually acknowledging this shift publicly. The answer, apparently, was one day.

As reported by VentureBeat:

Microsoft today embraced Google’s Chromium open source project for Edge development on the desktop. The company also announced it is decoupling the browser updates from Windows 10 updates, and that Edge is coming to all supported versions of Windows and to macOS. [...] The first preview builds of the Chromium-powered Edge will arrive in early 2019, according to Microsoft.

[...]

Microsoft hopes moving to Chromium will “create better web compatibility for our customers” and “less fragmentation of the web for all web developers.” The former is certainly true, as the Edge web platform will thus become aligned with web standards and other Chromium-based browsers. The latter is not true in the short term (plenty of testing will be needed to accommodate the switch) but it is likely in the long term, as developers will have one fewer browser to explicitly test against.

Fucking Facebook...

As someone who's never installed a Facebook app, I'd totally missed this when it first surfaced back in March, and I don't recall seeing it make headlines either. It should have. As reported by The Verge:

In March, many Android users were shocked to discover that Facebook had been collecting a record of their call and SMS history, as revealed by the company’s data download tool. [...] According to [internal emails released by the UK Parliament], developers knew the data was sensitive, but they still pushed to collect it as a way of expanding Facebook’s reach. [...] Notably, the project manager recognized it as “a pretty high-risk thing to do from a PR perspective,” but that risk seems to have been overwhelmed by the potential user growth.

[...]

Initially, the feature was intended to require users to opt in, typically through an in-app pop-up dialog box. But as developers looked for ways to get users signed up, it became clear that Android’s data permissions could be manipulated to automatically enroll users if the new feature was deployed in a certain way. [...] The group developing the feature seems to see the Android permissions screen as a point of unnecessary friction, to be avoided if possible. When testing revealed that call logs could be collected without a permissions dialog, that option seems to have been obviously preferable to developers.

Yes, that's Facebook, bypassing Android's privacy controls to access data that they knew damn well they had no right to, without bothering to ask permission from anybody at all... because GREED.

Microsoft may finally have stopped trying to make "fetch" happen

Following about a month after the news that Microsoft were finally planning to stop pushing Cortana on consumers who are plainly not interested, comes the news that they're also going to let go of another of their attempts to foist a doomed and unwelcome product on users who couldn't care less. That's right, Microsoft are apparently planning to finally listen to what consumers have been telling them since 2015 about Edge.

As reported by Windows Central:

Microsoft's Edge web browser has seen little success since its debut on Windows 10 in 2015. Built from the ground up with a new rendering engine known as EdgeHTML, Microsoft Edge was designed to be fast, lightweight, and secure, but it launched with a plethora of issues that resulted in users rejecting it early on. Edge has since struggled to gain traction, thanks to its continued instability and lack of mindshare, from users and web developers.

Because of this, I'm told that Microsoft is throwing in the towel with EdgeHTML and is instead building a new web browser powered by Chromium, which uses a similar rendering engine first popularized by Google's Chrome browser known as Blink. Codenamed "Anaheim," this new browser for Windows 10 will replace Edge as the default browser on the platform, according to my sources, who wish to remain anonymous. It's unknown at this time if Anaheim will use the Edge brand or a new brand, or if the user interface (UI) between Edge and Anaheim is different. One thing is for sure, however; EdgeHTML in Windows 10's default browser is dead.

Assuming this is accurate, Microsoft finally cutting the bullshit and doing not only the right thing, but the obvious thing, is great news. The only downside is that Microsoft have taken three years to finally get here, after years of taskbar advertising, questionable battery use statistics, and refusals to allows Google's wildly popular Chrome browser onto the Microsoft store... because Google refused to adopt Microsoft's EdgeHTML rendering algorithm, while ditching the Chromium algorithm which has become the standard for all web browsers.

No official word has yet come from Microsoft, of course, so they might still find some way to screw this up, but considering how well-received this news has been today, it's hard to imagine that Microsoft won't go through with this. If once is an incidence, and twice a coincidence, we're just waiting for Microsoft to prove this to be a pattern by doing it just once more. We'll see if doing that now, after years of coercive bullshit, can win back enough good will among consumers to stop Windows' gradual-but-steady market share decline.

Microsoft's ongoing struggles with QA and Edge

After a terrible month of QA issues with Windows 10's 1809 update, and following revelations that those issues aren't actually over yet, even after 1809's re-release, comes news that Microsoft's other flagship product has similar issues. As reported by betanews:

Microsoft's update procedure for Windows 10 has been a little, er, wobbly of late. The Windows 10 October 2018 Update proved so problematic that it had to pulled, and even the re-released version is far from perfect.

Now it seems the cancer is spreading to Office. Having released a series of updates for Office 2010, 2013 and 2016 as part of this month's Patch Tuesday, Microsoft has now pulled two of them and advised sysadmins to uninstall the updates if they have already been installed.

In both instances -- KB4461522 and KB2863821 -- Microsoft says that the problematic updates can lead to application crashes. While this is not as serious a problem as, say, data loss, it does little to quieten the fears that have been voiced about the quality control Microsoft has over its updates.

So, the bad news is that Microsoft's attempts to reassure consumers and Enterprise customers that their quality assurance procedures really are up to the challenge of delivering software-as-a-service seem to be failing. What's the good news?

Apparently, the good news is that Edge has failed so hard that Microsoft is now collaborating with Google and Qualcomm to bring the Chrome browser to Windows 10's ARM version. Yes, really.

Roller-skates are not VR's missing element

I've seen a few articles making note of this latest patent filing from Google, reported here by AndroidPit:

While the audiovisual side of virtual reality is on track, the more innovative proposals in the technology are now tackling how to immerse our other senses, such as touch and motion. This includes complicated sensor arrangements set up around the room, motion trackers in your pockets and even strapping our VRnauts into special treadmills. 

A new patent from Google, however, points to a solution that seems elegant in its logic: walking naturally starts with the feet, so what about motorized VR footwear?

Google's patent outlines schemes for a kind of motorized VR roller skates that will let the user walk normally, while the motors and wheels work to stop you from actually going anywhere in the real world. This should keep you inside the VR safe zone and stop you from banging your knees against your living room furniture.

Sorry, but this still isn't the solution to VR's locomotion problems.

This week in Facebook

It's shaping up to be another bad week for Mark Zuckerberg.

The NY Times have published a blockbuster piece, reporting that Facebook were not only fighting the spread of fake news on their service, but actually spreading some fake news of their own: in particular, to paint their wave of post-Cambridge Analytica negative PR as some sort of George Soros-funded anti-Facebook conspiracy.

[As] evidence accumulated that Facebook’s power could also be exploited to disrupt elections, broadcast viral propaganda and inspire deadly campaigns of hate around the globe, Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg stumbled. Bent on growth, the pair ignored warning signs and then sought to conceal them from public view. At critical moments over the last three years, they were distracted by personal projects, and passed off security and policy decisions to subordinates, according to current and former executives.

When Facebook users learned last spring that the company had compromised their privacy in its rush to expand, allowing access to the personal information of tens of millions of people to a political data firm linked to President Trump, Facebook sought to deflect blame and mask the extent of the problem.

And when that failed — as the company’s stock price plummeted and it faced a consumer backlash — Facebook went on the attack.

While Mr. Zuckerberg has conducted a public apology tour in the last year, Ms. Sandberg has overseen an aggressive lobbying campaign to combat Facebook’s critics, shift public anger toward rival companies and ward off damaging regulation. Facebook employed a Republican opposition-research firm to discredit activist protesters, in part by linking them to the liberal financier George Soros. It also tapped its business relationships, lobbying a Jewish civil rights group to cast some criticism of the company as anti-Semitic.

This means that Facebook funded anti-Semitic propaganda for no other reason that petty material self-interest. Which means that Facebook now have real blood on their hands, after a wave of anti-Semitic social media content on their own site helped inspire one of the worst incidents of anti-Semitic mass murder in U.S. history. And Jews weren't the only targets of Facebook's fake news campaign.