Dispatch 052: Monopoly Pieces 📧

While these antitrust trials against Big Tech certainly garner a lot of headlines, it's not clear that much of anything will actually change as a result of them. Certainly, I think that will be true of the Meta case, as that seems like a particularly weak case built almost entirely in hindsight around the past. But even with this latest Google case, I suspect it will go down as more historic in that it's their second antitrust loss – in a few month span, no less – and less about the actual outcome of the trial. Part of that is the endless appeals and delays, of course. But the bigger picture element remains that what disrupts these companies is not the law, but competition. And as much as the government might like to believe, it's not competition forced by the law, but rather competition that comes out of left field, that doesn't look like competition at first.

That's how tech monopolies fall. The market, um, finds a way.

More on this in today's Inner Ring column...

Antitrust’s Hindsight Problem

The government keeps trying to litigate problems that are already being naturally disrupted…

SpyglassM.G. Siegler

I Think...

💸 Investors Worry Trump’s Tariffs Could Cause a ‘World of Hurt’ for Startups – I'm quoted a few times in this piece by Lauren Goode about how startups and VCs are dealing with the tariff shitshow. Everyone is clearly still in various states of wait-and-see mode – including many of the startups that had put the wheels in motion to potentially IPO this year, sadly – but for any startup working with hardware – already a daunting proposition – this is potentially a nightmare scenario (including just the uncertainty, as VCs traditionally have hated the complexity of hardware already, and this just exacerbates such fears). Still, there are pockets of relative safety in spaces like defense tech and yes, AI – unless, of course, all of this takes down NVIDIA and creates an even bigger avalanche in the broader market. Or maybe this all goes away just as quickly as it came. Nobody knows. (Not even Apple.) Which itself is insane. [Wired 🔒]

🎞️ ‘Sinners’ Is a Box Office Success (With a Big Asterisk) – By all accounts, Sinners is an excellent film. And its success is even more impressive given that it's a rare original movie in our age of sequel/prequel/spin-off IP. And then there's the "R-rated, slow-burning horror drama set in the 1930s and rooted in Black culture" element. But the most wild part of Sinners – and why it may not ultimately be a huge financial success for Warner Bros (hence the "big asterisk") – is that writer/director/producer Ryan Coogler got the studio not only to give him "first-dollar gross" (money from the box office before the studio earns back their money) but also full ownership rights of the movie after 25 years. That's fairly unheard of, certainly in modern Hollywood. And Coogler is just 38 years old, so this is one hell of a potential nest egg! Will it set some sort of new market for top talent? [NYT]

📲 New Video Shows iPhone 17 Air Thinness Hands-On: ‘That Feels Futuristic’ – Remember in the olden days when people used to do mock-up images of what they thought the new iPhones would look like, perhaps based on whispers from a friend of a friend with a cousin who had an uncle close to someone? Yeah, we're way past that. Thanks to supply chain leaks, not only do we get near picture-perfect renders of what such future devices very likely look like, we even get dummy models now! And those dummy models get hands-on videos now! It's like a pre-review of a preview of a rumored device. And we even get write-ups of those pre-review previews of dummy models of rumored devices. And now links to those write-ups. Personally, I think this has all gone about ten steps too far. But also that you should get off my lawn. [9to5Mac]

🚀 Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin Flop is Bigger Than Katy Perry – A lot of fun lines (and one fun image) in Elizabeth Lopatto's takedown of the "rich women in space" PR backfire. While Perry got most of the headlines – and rightfully so with this absolutely mind-melting stream of gibberish – Gayle King's statement was actually the best: "My question is, have y’all been to space? Go to space or go to Blue Origin and see what they do and then come back and say, 'This is a terrible thing.'" Is this the greatest tone deaf defensive response ever? You decide. Jeff Bezos has one job in making Blue Origin a serious contender in the private space race – and has the opening to do so without all the baggage of you-know-who. And instead, we get this. "Look, the ass has always been in astronaut." [Verge]

🪐 Astronomers Detect a Signature of Life on a Distant Planet – Meanwhile, in actual space news, this is amazing and potentially truly world-changing and life-changing, literally. K2-18b, a planet in between the size of Earth and Neptune (a "Hycean" planet – meaning "hydrogen" and "ocean"), which sits some 120 light years away, has an atmosphere giving off gasses which suggest it's "brimming with life". Well, that's the only known way to explain the signatures they're reading from the James Webb Space Telescope. But obviously there can be plenty of unknown possibilities. Then again, "on Earth, the only known source of dimethyl sulfide is life." Granted, we're not talking about little green men, but instead little green algae. All life starts somewhere, and the amount of dimethyl sulfide they're measuring is "thousands of times higher than the level found on Earth" – as such we get a second "brimming with life" in this story. Also fun to think about: we're seeing K2-18b as it was in 1905, 120 years ago. [NYT]

I Wrote...

The Dumbfounding Dropping of the ‘Google Domains’ Ball

Google’s web registrar was great, so obviously they had to ruin it

SpyglassM.G. Siegler

I Note...

• The Washington Post is the latest publication to ink a content/search deal with OpenAI. No surprise there – how long can The New York Times hold out (and how many more times can I read that lawsuit disclaimer on every NYT story?) – but this still needs to be done in a more scalable manner... [WaPo]
• The Ryan Gosling-led Star Wars is confirmed and going to be called Starfighter. It's a stand-alone story apart from the Skywalker saga, set 5 years after J.J. Abrams last story which retconned the Rian Johnson story which retconned the first J.J. Abrams story. Hopefully Shawn Levy is actually able to make this one with all the fits and starts the franchise has seen of late. 2027 is a long time to go, in a galaxy... [THR]
  • Speaking of Star Wars, ahead of Andor coming back tonight for its second (and final) season, the reviews are off the charts – literally the highest rated Star Wars show or movie (just beating out the first season of Andor – and yes, even currently beating The Empire Strikes Back). And this isn't just for the first few episodes, it's for the whole 12-episode season. [THR]
• Jesse Armstrong's Mountainhead looks to be a sort of (unsurprisingly) Succession meets The Social Network. Everyone is in. [YouTube]
• The checkmarks are starting to show up on Bluesky. Their verification methods seem decidedly more thought-through than Xitter's current version. Which is to say, they're actually thought-through and not just an utterly chaotic and confusing money-grab. [Wired]
• Speaking of blue, is the upcoming iPhone 17 Pro going to match the new MacBook Air with a silver-y ("sky") blue? A leaker with a pretty good track record of late seems to think so... [Majin Bu]
• How coincidental that the EU apparently postponed announcing penalties against Apple and Meta just as the US came to town for trade talks. It's almost as if they're playing politics... [WSJ]
  • Update April 23, 2025: And with Team Trump now gone from Europe, here are those fines...
• How coincidental that Google apparently updated the terms of their agreements with handset makers and carriers to say that use of Gemini didn't have to be exclusive. Almost like such information might come up this week... [Information 🔒]
• How coincidental that Apple quietly removed the "available now" wording on their website around Apple Intelligence – following an inquiry from the National Advertising Division (NAD). [Verge]
• Get this: in order for members of the film Academy to vote for Oscars now, they have to actually seen all the films in contention. No, they didn't have to do that before. Yes, that's crazy. Of course, there are still ways to lie about it, I guess. [THR]
• They also have a comically nebulous policy around the use of AI in films as it relates to contention in the awards. "The academy and each branch will judge the achievement, taking into account the degree to which a human was at the heart of the creative authorship when choosing which movie to award." Sound very scientific. What could possibly go awry? [NYT]
  • But the best element of that story is the part where they note how Demi Moore had to apologize recently for "using an A.I. app to transform her dog into a human in a photograph." The plot has been lost. [NYT]
• If, like me, you want to read more about the thought-process behind this week's (big) episode of The Last of Us, this sit down with showrunner Craig Mazin does the job. Needless to say, spoiler alerts! [THR]

I Quote...

"I’m not screaming, 'aliens!' But I always reserve my right to scream 'aliens!'"

– Nikole Lewis, an exoplanetary scientist at Cornell University, talking about the (potential) discovery of signatures of life on K2-18b (per the link up top).

I Spy...

Lastly, an artist’s conception of what a planet like K2-18b could look like. Yes, sort of like Earth – but again, far larger. And, notably, orbiting a red dwarf star.