Cory Doctorow

He said...

google bribes apple with 20 billion dollars a year every year where will apple get the free cash flow to come up with cool iphone features if i stop them from soliciting bribes from their most direct competitor right that is like that is like not a good judicial decision and you know it's not surprising we have 40 years of bad jurisprudence and so when the judges look to the jurisprudence when they look to the kind of the attitude of their um

you know, their cohort, they don't see this kind of muscular action.

And it's going to take a while.

It took like after the passage of the Sherman Act, which is the first antitrust act in 1890, it took till 1912 to break up John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil.

So it'd be amazing if we could just like reverse that 40 years overnight.

I don't think AI is a real competitor on search.

I think that this is the kind of thinking that has dominated bad antitrust decisions over the last four decades.

And we just saw it again in the Facebook case, where the judge dismissed the case against Facebook by saying that they had all these competitors in the form of TikTok and whatever other things that you could use your attention for.

And, you know, as David Dye wrote in the American Prospect, this is like saying, well, ultimately, because you can sleep sometimes, there's always a competitor for your attention.

Right.

And and it's just wrong.

It's just wrong on its face.

So if the judge felt that the law was so constrained and I don't think that's a good interpretation, but if the law if the judge felt the law was so constrained that a company that was as obviously a monopolist as Google could not be convicted under the law, then that militates for legislative reform.

But it still means that, you know, it's what we got to do.

Like all the best Americans, I'm Canadian.

And in Newfoundland, there's this joke whose punchline is, if you wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here.

I think that is very much where we are right now.

This is not the place we want to start from, but it is where we are.

Well,