Cory Doctorow

And we can do standards that allow stuff to work.

You know, it's very weird when you think about social media that, like, which network you're on matters as to who you can talk to.

That is the most, like, prodigy, copy-serve-ass technology thing to arrive at that you can imagine.

Like, imagine if this were, like, phones, where you would have to care whose SIM was in someone's phone before you could give them a call.

That is, like, a legitimately weird and primitive thing that we've arrived at here.

Well, let me just refine that question in two ways.

So first is Google didn't just lose one antitrust case last year.

They lost three.

So they were convicted three times of having a monopoly.

The other thing is that when the judge talked about Apple specifically, it wasn't because of AI.

It was even weirder.

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.