The Zuck Plays Defense: The Opposing Line Is Huge, Dude
May 15, 2025
The BBC reports that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has been in the news lately for his company being on trial: “Mark Zuckerberg Defends Meta In Social Media Monopoly Trial.” Meta and Zuckerberg are on trail for antitrust allegations that the company has a monopoly on social media. Zuckerberg testified in 2020 when the FTC brought the case to court.
The allegations are that Zuckerberg dominated the social media market when it acquired Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014. The FTC wants Meta to split apart by forcing Instagram and WhatsApp into separate entities. Meta argues there’s plenty of competition with X, YouTube, and TikTok. Zuckerberg was the first to testify in the trial expected to last until July 2025.
The FTC says that Meta bought rivals because it was easier to acquire them than compete with them:
“They decided that competition was too hard and it would be easier to buy out their rivals than to compete with them,” said FTC lawyer Daniel Matheson in his opening statement at Monday’s trial. Meta countered that the lawsuit from the FTC, which originally reviewed and approved both those acquisitions, was “misguided”.
Meta ‘acquired Instagram and WhatsApp to improve and grow them alongside Facebook’, the company’s attorney Mark Hansen argued.
The FTC lawyer cited a 2012 memo from Mr Zuckerberg in which he discusses the importance of “neutralising” Instagram.
Mr Matheson called that message “a smoking gun”.”
Meta argues that when they acquired the competing platforms that it made them better for users. Instagram accounts for over half of Meta’s advertising revenue. Meta also donated to Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. Zuckerberg repeatedly petitions Trump to have the FTC charges dropped. The FTC has a harder case to prove than when Google was sued for monopolizing search. I wonder if the prosecution’s attorneys have read Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism.
Whitney Grace, May 15, 2025
An Agreeable Google: Will It Write Checks with a Sad, Wry Systemic Smile?
May 14, 2025
No AI, just the dinobaby expressing his opinions to Zellenials.
Did you see the news about Google’s probable check writing?
“Google Settles Black Employees’ Racial Bias Lawsuit for $50 Million” reports:
According to the complaint, Black employees comprised only 4.4% of Google’s workforce and 3% of its leadership in 2021. The plaintiff April Curley, hired to expand outreach to historically Black colleges, said Google denied her promotions, stereotyped her as an “angry” Black woman, and fired her after six years as she prepared a report on its alleged racial bias. Managers also allegedly denigrated Black employees by declaring they were not “Googley” enough or lacked “Googleyness,” which the plaintiffs called racial dog whistles.
The little news story includes the words “racially biased corporate culture” and “systemic racial bias.” Is this the beloved “do no evil” company with the cheerful kindergarten colored logo? Frankly, this dinobaby is shocked. This must be an anomaly in the management approach of a trusted institution based on advertising.
Well, there is this story from Bloomberg, the terminal folks: “Google to Pay Texas $1.4 Billion to End Privacy Cases.” As I understand it,
Google will pay the state of Texas $1.375 billion to resolve two privacy lawsuits claiming the tech giant tracks Texans’ personal location and maintains their facial recognition data, both without their consent. Google announced the settlement Friday, ending yearslong battles with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) over the state’s strict laws on user data.
Remarkable.
The Dallas Morning News reports that Google’s position remains firm, resolute, and Googley:
The settlement doesn’t require any new changes to Google’s products, and the company did not admit any wrongdoing or liability. “This settles a raft of old claims, many of which have already been resolved elsewhere, concerning product policies we have long since changed,” said José Castañeda, a Google spokesperson. “We are pleased to put them behind us, and we will continue to build robust privacy controls into our services.”
Absolutely.
Imagine a company with those kindergarten colors in its logos finding itself snared in what seem to me grade school issues. Google must be misunderstood like one of those precocious children who solve math problems without showing their work. It’s just system perhaps?
Stephen E Arnold, May 14, 2025
Google Versus OpenAI: Whose Fish Is Bigger?
May 6, 2025
No AI, just a dinobaby watching the world respond to the tech bros.
Bing Crosby quipped on one of his long-ago radio shows, “We are talking about fish here” when asked about being pulled to shore by a salmon he caught. I think about the Bingster when I come across “user” numbers for different smart software systems. “Google Reveals Sky High Gemini Usage Numbers in Antitrust Case” provides some perjury proof data that it is definitely number two in smart software.
According to the write up:
The [Google] slide listed Gemini’s 350 million monthly users, along with daily traffic of 35 million users.
Okay, we have some numbers.
The write up provides a comparative set of data; to wit:
OpenAI has also seen traffic increase, putting ChatGPT around 600 million monthly active users, according to Google’s analysis. Early this year, reports pegged ChatGPT usage at around 400 million users per month.
Where’s Microsoft in this count? Yeah, who knows? MSFT just pounds home that it is winning in the enterprise. Okay, I understand.
What’s interesting about these data or lack of it has several facets:
- For Google, the “we’re number two” angle makes clear that its monopoly in online advertising has not transferred to becoming automatically number one in AI
- The data from Google are difficult to verify, but everyone trusts the Google
- The data from OpenAI are difficult to verify, but everyone trusts Sam AI-Man.
Where are we in the AI game?
At the mercy of unverifiable numbers and marketing type assertions.
What about Deepseek which may be banned by some of the folks in Washington, DC? What about everyone’s favorite litigant Meta / Facebook?
Net net: AI is everywhere so what’s the big deal? Let’s get used to marketing because those wonderful large language models still have a bit of problem with hallucinations, not to mention security issues and copyright hassles. I won’t mention cost because the data make clear that the billions pumped into smart software have not generated a return yet. Someday perhaps?
Stephen E Arnold, May 6, 2025
Apple and Meta: Virtual Automatic Teller Machines for the EU
April 29, 2025
No AI, just a dinobaby watching the world respond to the tech bros.
I spotted this story in USA Today. You remember that newspaper, of course. The story “Apple Fined $570 Million and Meta $228 Million for Breaching European Union Law” reports:
Apple was fined 500 million euros ($570 million) on Wednesday and Meta 200 million euros, as European Union antitrust regulators handed out the first sanctions under landmark legislation aimed at curbing the power of Big Tech.
I have observed that to many regulators the brands Apple and Meta (Facebook) are converted to the sound of ka-ching. For those who don’t recognize the onomatopoeia for an old-fashioned cash register ringing up a sale. The modern metaphor might be an automatic teller machine emitting beeps and honks. That works. Punch the Apple and Meta logos and bonk, beep, out comes millions of euros. Bonk, beep.
The law which allows the behavior of what some Europeans view as “tech bros” to be converted first to a legal process and then to cash is the Digital Markets Act. The idea is that certain technology centric outfits based in the US operate without much regard for the rules, regulations, and laws of actual nation-states and their governing entities. I mean who pays attention to what the European Union says? Certainly not a geek à la sauce californienne.
The companies are likely to interpret these fines as some sort of deus ex machina, delivered by a third-rate vengeful god in a TikTok-type of video. Perhaps? But the legal process identified some actions by the fined American companies as illegal. Examples range from preventing an Apple store user from certain behaviors to Meta’s reluctance to conform to some privacy requirements. I am certainly not a lawyer, nor am I involved with either of the American companies. However, I can make several observations from my dinobaby point of view, of course:
- The ka-ching / bonk beep incentive is strong. Money talks in the US and elsewhere. It is not surprising that the fines are becoming larger with each go-round. How does one stop the cost creep? One thought is to change the behavior of the companies. Sorry, EU, that is not going to happen.
- The interpretation of the penalty as a reaction against America is definitely a factor. For those who have not lived and worked in other countries, the anti-American sentiment is not understood. I learned when people painted slurs on the walls of our home in Campinas, Brazil. I was about 13, and the anger extended beyond black paint on our pristine white, eight-foot high walls with glass embedded at the top of them. Inviting, right?
- The perception that a company is more powerful than a mere government entity has been growing as the concentration of eyeballs, money, and talented people has increased at certain firms. Once the regulators have worked through the others in this category, attention will turn to the second tier of companies. I won’t identify any entities but the increased scrutiny of Cloudflare by French authorities is a glimpse of what might be coming down the information highway.
Net net: Ka-ching, ka-ching, and ka-ching. Beep, bong, beep, bong.
Stephen E Arnold, April 29, 2025
The Only-Google-Can-Do-It Information Campaign: Repeat It, and It Will Be “True.” Believe Now!
April 28, 2025
No AI. Just a dinobaby who gets revved up with buzzwords and baloney.
After more than two decades of stomping around the digital world, the Google faces some unpleasant consequences of what it hath wrought. There is the European Union’s ka-ching factor; that is, Google is a big automatic teller machine capable of spitting out oodles of cash after the lawyers run out of gas. The US legal process is looking more like the little engine that could. If it can, Google may lose control of some of its big-time components; for example, the Chrome browser. I think this was acquired by the Google from someone in Denmark years ago, but I am a bit fuzzy about this statement. But, hey, let’s roll with it. Google “owns” the browser market, and if the little engine that could gets to the top of the hill (not guaranteed by any means, of course) then another outfit might acquire it.
Among the players making noises about buying the Google browser is OpenAI. I find this interesting because [a] Sam AI-Man wants to build his version of Telegram and [b] he wants to make sure that lots of people use his firm’s / organization’s smart software. Buy Chrome and Sam has users and he can roll out a browser enabled version of the Telegram platform with his very own AI system within.
Google is not too keen on losing any of its “do good” systems. Chrome has been a useful vector for such helpful functions as data gathering, control of extensions, and having its own embedded Google search system everywhere the browser user goes. Who needs Firefox when Google has Chrome? Probably not Sam AI-Man or Yahoo or whoever eyes the browser.
“Only Google Can Run Chrome, Company’s Browser Chief Tells Judge” reveals to me how Google will argue against a decision forcing Google to sell its browser. That argument is, not surprisingly, is anchored within Google’s confidence in itself, its wizards, its money, and its infrastructure. The Los Angeles Times’ article says:
Google is the only company that can offer the level of features and functionality that its popular Chrome web browser has today, given its “interdependencies” on other parts of the Alphabet Inc. unit, the head of Chrome testified. “Chrome today represents 17 years of collaboration between the Chrome people” and the rest of Google, Parisa Tabriz, the browser’s general manager, said Friday as part of the Justice Department’s antitrust case in Washington federal court. “Trying to disentangle that is unprecedented.”
My interpretation of this comment is typical of a dinobaby. Google’s browser leader is saying, “Other companies are not Google; therefore, those companies are mentally, technically, and financially unable to do what Google does.” I understand. Googzilla is supreme in the way it is quantumly supreme in every advanced technology, including content marketing and public relations.
The write up adds:
James Mickens, a computer science expert for the Justice Department, said Google could easily transfer ownership of Chrome to another company without breaking its functionality. … “The divestiture of Chrome is feasible from a technical perspective,” said Mickens, a computer science professor at Harvard University. “It would be feasible to transfer ownership and not break too much.”
Professor Mickens has put himself in the category of non-Googley people who lack the intelligence to realize how incorrect his reasoning is. Too bad, professor, no Google consulting gig for you this year.
Plus, Google has a plan for its browser. The write up reports:
In internal documents, Google said it intends to develop Chrome into an “agentic browser,” which incorporates AI agents to automate tasks and perform actions such as filling out forms, conducting research or shopping. “We envision a future of multiple agents, where Chrome integrates deeply with Gemini as a primary agent and one we’ll prioritize and enable users to engage with multiple 3P agents on the web in both consumer and enterprise settings,” Tabriz wrote in a 2024 email.
How will this play out? I have learned that predicting the outcome of legal processes is a tough job. Stick to estimating the value of a TONcoin. That’s an easier task.
What does seem clear to me are three points:
- Google’s legal woes are not going away
- Google’s sense of its technology dominance is rising despite some signals that that perception may not align with what’s happening in AI and other technical fields
- Google’s argument that only it can do its browser may not fly in the midst of legal eagles.
I don’t think the “browser chief” will agree with this dinobaby. That’s okay. Trust me.
Stephen E Arnold, April 28, 2025
Japan Alleges Google Is a Monopoly Doing Monopolistic Things. What?
April 28, 2025
No AI, just the dinobaby himself.
The Google has been around a couple of decades or more. The company caught my attention, and I wrote three monographs for a now defunct publisher in a very damp part of England. These are now out of print, but their titles illustrate my perception of what I call affectionately Googzilla:
- The Google Legacy. I tried to explain why Google’s approach was going to define how future online companies built their technical plumbing. Yep, OpenAI in all its charm is a descendant of those smart lads, Messrs. Brin and Page.
- Google Version 2.0. I attempted to document the shift in technical focus from search relevance to a more invasive approach to using user data to generate revenue. The subtitle, I thought at the time, gave away the theme of the book: “The Calculating Predator.”
- Google: The Digital Gutenberg. I presented information about how Google’s “outputs” from search results to more sophisticated content structures like profiles of people, places, and things was preparing Google to reinvent publishing. I was correct because the new head of search (Prabhakar Version 2.0) is making little reports the big thing in search results. This will doom many small publications because Google just tells you what it wants you to know.
I wrote these monographs between 2002 and 2008. I must admit that my 300 page Enterprise Search Report sold more copies than my Google work. But I think my Google trilogy explained what Googzilla was doing. No one cared.
Now I learn “Japan orders Google to stop pushing smartphone makers to install its apps.”* Okay, a little slow on the trigger, but government officials in the land of the rising sun figured out that Google is doing what Google has been doing for decades.
Enlightenment arrives!
The article reports:
Japan has issued a cease-and-desist order telling Google to stop pressuring smartphone makers to preinstall its search services on Android phones. The Japan Fair Trade Commission said on Tuesday Google had unfairly hindered competition by asking for preferential treatment for its search and browser from smartphone makers in violation of the country’s anti-monopoly law. The antitrust watchdog said Google, as far back as July 2020, had asked at least six Android smartphone manufacturers to preinstall its apps when they signed the license for the American tech giant’s app store…
Google has been this rodeo before. At the end of a legal process, Google will apologize, write a check, and move on down the road.
The question for me is, “How many other countries will see Google as a check writing machine?”
Quite a few in my opinion. The only problem is that these actions have taken many years to move from the thrill of getting a Google mouse pad to actual governmental action. (The best Google freebie was its flashing LED pin. Mine corroded and no longer flashed. I dumped it.)
Note for the * — Links to Microsoft “news” stories often go dead. Suck it up and run a query for the title using Google, of course.
Stephen E Arnold, April 28, 2025
FOGINT: Pavel Durov Responds to His Problems without Crisis PR Inputs
April 22, 2025
Before the US National Cyber Crime Conference, possibly significant news emerged about Telegram.
In my Telegram lecture at the NCCC 2025, I don’t talk about the psychological and financial impact Pavel Durov experienced as a result of his interaction with the French government. He was greeted at a Paris airport and detained. He talked with French officials. He hired Kaminski and his associates to represent him in the legal matter. Within a few weeks of his being confined to France, although not in St. Denis or Maison d’arrêt de Fleury-Mérogis, he seemed to be showing interest in providing some government authorities with Telegram “user names” or made-up handles and phone numbers (some real and some obtained through services providing temporary phone numbers). Mr. Durov, via indirect communication methods, seemed to indicate that he was doing what he had always done: Followed the rules of the jurisdictions in which Telegram operated. Then, without going to the French equivalent of a trial, Mr. Durov was allowed to return to Dubai, United Arab Emirates, one of the countries which has granted him citizenship.
Upon his return, he took some interesting actions:
- He began fiddling with some knobs and dials in order to get the TONcoin out of its doldrums
- He ramped up the marketing activities of the TON Foundation. (Please, keep in mind that Telegram and its proxy say they do not do marketing. The Telegram entities also do not do personnel or content control either.) Telegram and the Open Network Foundation (aka TON Foundation or ONF) are “there is no there there” or virtual outifts making do with coffee shop meetings, Telegram Messenger interactions, and maybe some face-to-face activity in a rented temporary space.)
- He started talking on CNN, for example.
From one of my team, I learned a couple of new “facts” this morning (April 22, 2025, 6 am US Eastern time). This individual reported:
Telegram has never shared private messages. The source is https://news.az/news/t-elegram-has-never-shared-private-messages-durov-says. Now there are two types of messages on Telegram Messenger. First, there are the default messages. These are encrypted from sender to the Telegram command-and-control system. There the messages are decrypted and processed. Then the messages are re-encrypted and forwarded to the recipient who opens them. The second type of message is the “secret” message which requires that the recipient be on Telegram when the sender creates and sends the message. That message is forwarded by the command-and-control system to the recipient. These “secret” messages remain encrypted for their digital journey. What Telegram shares with law enforcement is the IP address and the phone number of the sender. I will leave it to you to consider the “value” to Telegram’s command-and-control center of logging the metadata for messages and what happens when an investigator receives a bogus or temporary mobile number.,
A second item he shared with me this morning is that Pavel Durov continues to find himself at the edge of chaos with Russia. According to Meduza.io:
Russia slaps Telegram with another multi-million-ruble fine for refusing to take down ‘prohibited content’.
Several observations may be warranted:
- For a company that does not “do” marketing, Pavel Durov has been a busy and willing marketer on behalf of the Telegram operation. In fact, he seems to be sending out the message, “We cooperate with law enforcement.” Then he tries to make clear that he doesn’t reveal too much when Telegram cooperates with investigators.
- As a Russian citizen, Mr. Durov may want to [a] work with certain Russian officials to create the appearance of a problem with Russia in order to reduce the pressure from France or [b] Russia is acting independently to let Mr. Durov know he is a person of interest to the Kremlin. In short, which is it? Is Mr. Durov an asset for a certain country or is he a problem for a certain country in which some of his family and possibly some of his “core developers” reside? Uncomfortable either way I think.
- Telegram and its crypto play are not enjoying significant TONcoin upsides. The TONcoin is not the would-be high flier, Hamster Kombat home run it was prior to Mr. Durov’s arrest.
What’s clear is that Mr. Durov’s legal problems in France have been resolved. What is Mr. Durov’s relationship with the Russia’s government? Fuzzy stuff.
Net net: Mr. Durov’s recent actions appear to be signals that suggest Telegram is going to have to pull a rabbit from someone’s hoodie.
Stephen E Arnold, April 22, 2025
JudyRecords: Is It Back or Did It Never Go Away?
April 22, 2025
Believe it or not, no smart software. Just a dumb and skeptical dinobaby.
I was delighted to see that JudyRecords is back online. Here’s what the service says as of April 19, 2025:
Judyrecords is a 100% free nationwide search engine that lets you instantly search hundreds of millions of United States court cases and lawsuits.judyrecords has over 100x more cases than Google Scholar and 10x more cases than PACER, the official case management system of the United States federal judiciary.As of Jul 2022, judyrecords now features free full-text search of all United States patents from 1/1/1976 to 07/01/2022 — over 8.1 million patents in total.
My thought is that lawyers, law students, and dinobabies like me will find the service quite useful.
The JudyRecords’ Web site adds:
The first 500K results are displayed instead of just the first 2K.
- murder – 926K cases
- fraud – 2.1 million cases
- burglary – 3.7 million cases
- assault – 8.2 million cases
Most people don’t realize that the other “free” search engines limit the number of hits shown to the user. The old-fashioned ideas of precision and recall are not operative with most of the people whom I encounter. At the Googleplex, precision and recall are treated like a snappy joke when the Sundar & Prabhakar Comedy Show appears in a major venue like courtrooms.
If you want to control the results, JudyRecords provides old-fashioned and definitely unpopular methods such as Boolean logic. I can visualize the GenZs rolling their eyes and mouthing, “Are you crazy, old man?”
Please, check out JudyRecords because the outstanding management visionaries at LexisNexis, Thomson Reuters, and other “professional” publishers will be taking a look themselves.
Stephen E Arnold, April 22, 2025
Kiddie Loving Google and Data Hoovering
April 22, 2025
If you do not have kids or grandkids in school, you may have missed Google’s very successful foray into K-12 education. Google’s “Workspace for Education” tools are free to schools, but is the company providing them purely from a sense of civic duty? Of course not. Bloomberg Law reports, “Google Hit with Lawsuit over Data Collection on School Kids.” Apparently, US schools did not learn from Denmark’s 2022 ban on Google Workspace in its schools. Or they decided savings and convenience trumped student privacy and parental consent. Writer Isaiah Poritz tells us:
“Google LLC is unlawfully using its products—ubiquitous in K-12 education—to secretly gather information about school age children, substituting the consent of the school for that of parents, a proposed class action filed in California federal court said Monday. The tech giant collects not only traditional education records ‘but thousands of data points that span a child’s life,’ and ‘neither students nor their parents have agreed to this arrangement, according to the US District Court for the Northern District of California complaint.”
This is a significant breach, if true, considering almost 70% of K-12 schools in the US use these tools. We also learn:
“The company doesn’t disclose that it embeds hidden tracking technology in its Chrome browser that creates a child’s unique digital ‘fingerprint,’ the plaintiffs said. The fingerprint allows Google to ‘to track a child even when she or her school administrator has disabled cookies or is using technologies designed to block third-party cookies.’ The suit said Google has failed to obtain parental consent to take school childrens’ personal data. ‘Instead, Google relies on the consent of school personnel alone,’ the complaint said. ‘But school personnel do not have authority to provide consent in lieu of parents.’”
No, they do not. Or they shouldn’t. It seems like parents’ rights groups should have something to say about this. Perhaps they are too busy policing library shelves. The suit alleges Google is both selling students’ data to third parties and using it for its own targeted advertising. We note it would also be very easy, if the firm is so inclined, to build up a profile of a student who later creates a Google account which is then mapped onto that childhood data.
Naturally, Google denies the suit’s allegations. Of course, our favorite company does.
Cynthia Murrell, April 22, 2025
Google: Keep a Stiff Upper Lip and Bring Fiat Currency Other Than Dollars
April 17, 2025
No AI, just the dinobaby himself.
Poor Googzilla. After decades of stomping through virtual barrier, those lovers of tea, fried fish, and cricket have had enough. I think some UK government officials have grown tired of, as Monty Python said:
“..what I object to is you automatically treat me as an inferior..” “Well, I am KING.”
“Google Faces £5bn UK Lawsuit” reports:
The lawsuit alleges that the tech giant has abused its dominant market position to prevent both existing and potential competitors from entering the general search and search advertising markets, thereby allowing Google to impose supra-competitive advertising prices. The lawsuit seeks compensation for thousands of UK advertisers impacted by the company’s actions.
Will Googzilla trample this pesky lawsuit the way cinematic cities fell to the its grandfather, Godzilla?
Key allegations include Google’s contracts with smartphone manufacturers and network operators that mandate the pre-installation of Google Search and the Chrome browser on Android devices. The suit also highlights Google’s agreement with Apple, under which it pays to remain the default search engine on iPhones. Plaintiffs argue that these practices have made Google the only practical platform for online search advertising.
I know little about the UK, but I did work for an outfit on Clarendon Terrace, adjacent Buckingham Palace, for a couple of years. I figured out that the US and UK government officials were generally cooperative, but there were some interesting differences.
Obviously there is the Monty Python canon. Another point of differentiation is a tendency to keep a stiff upper lip and then bang!
The wonderful Google and its quantumly supreme approach to business may be approaching one of those bang moments. Will Google’s solicitors prevail?
I am not very good at fancy probability and nifty gradient descent calculations. I would suggest that Googzilla bring a check book or a valid cargo container filled with an acceptable fiat currency. Pounds, euros, or Swiss francs are probably acceptable at this particular point in business history.
Oh, that £5bn works out to 5.4 million Swiss francs.
Stephen E Arnold, April 17, 2025
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
