Ten Blue Links, Country Life Edition
Currently holed up in Suffolk. And I almost got away without mentioning Apple…
1. The Atlantic gets it
AI "will change the way people find us, it will change all the architecture of the media business, and we’ve got to figure out how to continue to succeed in it,” says Nick Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic. And he's absolutely right. He's also right to focus on high-quality writing, because one of the things which AI means for publishers is no more mass-market cheap traffic.
2. Twenty five years
Meanwhile Sam Bankman-Fried is going to prison for 25 years, and Molly White wrote a great piece in The Guardian pointing out that, in real terms, nothing in the industry has changed. The only lesson that people in the crypto world learned was "I'm smarter than Sam so I won't get caught".
3. The decline and fall of Elon
I've noted before that the main reason Elon Musk wanted to borg OpenAI into Tesla was he knows that the car company is moving beyond the point at which it will be regarded as a "growth" stock, and he needs to maintain its massive and entirely unwarranted share price. Ed Zitron wrote a great article on Musk's finances which, I think, backs up that point: Musk is almost entirely dependent on Tesla's share price for his wealth, because he has a lot of loans secured against Tesla stock. If Tesla starts to be valued as what it it – a mid-tier company in a much more competitive market – he could soon find himself with debts he can only sustain with difficulty.
4. Britain is so screwed
I have some sympathy with Labour's constant refrain that there's "no magic money tree". The point isn't that the government can't invest: it's that fourteen years of Tory mismanagement has left virtually every part of public infrastructure in desperate need of investment. Schools, transport, NHS, higher education: you name it, it's basically been run down, sometimes for idealogical reasons and sometimes because of sheer ineptitude. The week, it's water taking a turn, and Adam Almeida wrote a lovely piece about the absurdity of London's water being run for the benefit of Canadian pensioners.
5. Masters of the universe, apparently
Speaking of Sam Bankman-Fried, it's well worth reading this 14,000 word hagiography of him which appeared on the website of Sequoia, one of the idiot VC firms that tried to hype FTX stock, just a few short months before the whole thing collapsed. These are people who are so smart that when SBF appeared on a call playing League of Legends and giving the most basic answers to questions, they decided he was a genius. "I LOVE THIS FOUNDER" indeed. And these people think they're smart.
6. AI loneliness
There's a lot of really interesting research starting to appear about the second-order effects of the adoption of LLMs (and AI more broadly). I'm generally a long-term optimist, but there's a plethora of societal effects which are less predictable and will need to be taken into account. This paper looks at how using LLMs (or "AI chatbots" as they call them) affects the social lives of students. Well worth a read.
7. Amazon spends a lot of money
One hundred and fifty billion dollars, in fact, on datacentres intended to provide the cloud and AI services of the future. All of which points to one conclusion: where the personal computer revolution rewarded the individual, the cloud computing and AI booms put the power firmly back into the hands of companies capable of raising vast amounts of capital. We're entering a feudal era.
8. Frank Sinatra has a cold
You have all read this, right? If not, do so now and enjoy what good magazine writing looks like.
9. Speaking of classics
Another one to spend some time reading: Wired's nearly 50,000 word piece from 2000 about the Microsoft antitrust trial. So much good stuff in this.
10. And speaking of feudalism and classics…
This article by Bruce Schneier from 2012 notes the similarity between the way that some commentators think about computer security and feudalism: you are expected to pledge your allegiance to one of the big companies like Apple, Google or whoever if you want to be secure from "the bad guys" out there. But sooner or later, King Richard wanders off and King John arrives in his place…
Weeknote, Sunday 24th March 2024
BOY that was a week. You might have noticed that I didn’t write a weeknote last weekend… well there’s lots of things going on at the moment that I can’t really talk about too much. I’ll no doubt have more to say about that some time soon, but in the meantime it just means that my time has been a bit fractured.
This week also saw me start a new job, as interim head of content at Russell Publishing. Russell – or RPL as everyone calls it internally – is a business to business publisher going through some change, and I’ve been brought on board to help develop some new content strategies and mentor the content team. I’m going to be with them for nine months, which I think should be enough to get the job done, and I’m only doing four days a week so I can continue to have enough time to work on some fiction and some other small projects.
It was slightly odd being back in a business environment after a few months where my time was basically my own. I’m only in the office two days a week (the company is staunchly hybrid, which is good) but it’s the first time for several months that I’ve been working around people like that.
To make things more fun, after my first day in the office – induction on Monday – I came home feeling really under the weather, shivering and aching, so I had to phone in sick on Tuesday. Great start! Not QUITE how I wanted things to go. But we go again this week, and it was nice to meet my direct reports.
What I’ve been writing this week
You might have noticed that the US Department of Justice is taking Apple to court. I know, it’s very much gone under the radar.Antitrust cases are just wonderful for journalists. When Microsoft was going through its cases with the DOJ and European Commission, back in the late 90s and early 00s, I spent quite a bit of time writing about it. So it seemed natural to write something which drew on that experience in terms of the expectations of the kind of stuff you’re going to read and the process it will go through.
I also had to write a post which – horror of horrors – disagreed with something Walt Mossberg had written. Walt is one of my technology journalism heroes. He basically defined the best way to write about technology products at a time when national newspapers really didn’t take computers seriously as something that needed reporting on.
What I’ve been reading this week
This has been that rarest of things: a two-book week. They were, though, two volumes of the same work: Dream Makers by Charles Platt. It’s a set of interviews with science fiction writers, originally published in 1980, and updated by Platt with more historical context – basically what happened next to each author.Apart from some annoying typos and unpleasant formatting (Platt is self publishing the ebook versions) it’s well worth the couple of quid each one will set you back. Everyone is in here, from Asimov and Clarke to members of the New Wave. Even L Ron Hubbard is there.
A History of United States v. Microsoft – Pixel Envy
A History of United States v. Microsoft – Pixel Envy:
In other words, how much is it okay for a first party to advantage themselves over third parties? If there is a line, where should it be, and who should establish it? There is obviously deep resistance to government intervention among the industry and its commentators, but there is also little incentive for operating system vendors to restrain themselves from prioritizing their own products and services. Gates, at this time, could not articulate any reason why Microsoft should not follow any competitive path it chose, even if that meant doing things third-party developers could not.
And that, of course, is exactly where Apple is now. What limits would Apple set themselves? There are none, that I can see.
Sky falls in, Walt Mossberg may be wrong
Over on Threads, Walt Mossberg has commented on the Apple/DOJ case. First up, if you do not respect Walt's opinions, you're a fool. Walt is one of my tech journalism heroes. That said, I think he's missing a couple of points here.
Walt is correct that the vertically integrated model has been Apple's since the start. But what is permissible when you're a small company or in a nascent market is no longer permissible when you are in a position of market power. And no one doubts that Apple is in a position of significant market power, not least Apple itself.
Second, like most people, Walt is being tripped up by the word "monopoly". The DOJ definition makes absolutely no mention of a percentage: it talks only of "market power". That's why the DOJ's filing is careful to refer to Apple having both market power AND significant market share.
Back to market power. Does Apple have it? Well, Apple has certainly -- publicly -- said so. Remember Apple very happily talking about the $1.1 trillion in developer billings and sales made through the App Store in 2022? As Apple owns that app store, it's almost a dictionary definition of market power being exerted.
And this is another thing which people will get tripped up over: market power doesn't just mean power over the market where you sell goods: it's also about your control of markets adjacent to that.
For example: Microsoft had no market power in PC manufacturing. It didn't make PCs. But it did have huge market power in operating system software, which it could (and did) leverage to control things in PCs to its favour. OEMs didn't have to sign the contract which MS put in front of them, in theory. In practice, they did, even though MS wasn't a part of their market, because of the power Microsoft had in operating systems.
This was one of the new aspects of the Microsoft/DOJ case which, outside academic circles, didn't get noted: it was the first major case which focused on the network effects of having monopoly power in one market could mean in other markets. Although the Clayton Act made tying one product to another illegal, generally that was within the same market, not in adjacent ones.
If you are keen to know more about how the Microsoft/DOJ case redefined some aspects of antitrust, this paper from 2010 is a good read.
Walt notes that he doesn't think there's a right for other companies to use Apple's IP, which is proprietary to them. And he's right, up to now. But in a situation where monopoly power exists, the game changes. Remember that IBM's 1956 consent decree forced it to not only publish technical data freely but also license its patents under fair terms (including some which had to be royalty-free).
This is another case of "what was legal becoming illegal". IBM developed those patents: it's monopoly power meant that it was prevented from using them in a way which would otherwise be legal. And, of course, the IBM 1956 consent decree basically created the PC industry as we know it.
All of this is going to trip many people up. How can a company have market power when it doesn't have a 80%+ share of a market? Why are we talking about third-party developers when Apple doesn't compete (much) against them? Isn't Apple just trying to protect their customers?
I would urge everyone to read The Verge's coverage because they really know their stuff when it comes to legals. There's going to be a lot of opinions (including from me, sorry). But it will be fun: writing tech news while Microsoft/DOJ and Microsoft/European Commission were on was some of the best fun I had as a reporter. Settle in for a long ride.
One final point: currently, we only have a filing. This is not the point where the DOJ starts talking about/showing its evidence. Does the DOJ have a case? Until we (or rather, the judge) sees evidence, anyone who says they absolutely know is wrong.
Disclosure of the evidence is where things REALLY get interesting. And it's also where things get dangerous for Apple because it has carefully cultivated a brand which focuses on being pro-consumer. Documents which show collusion, patterns of bad behaviour, and more could damage that brand. Get the popcorn ready.
A few thoughts on the Apple DOJ antitrust case, from someone who isn't riding his first rodeo
From 1995 through to about 2008, I made my living from technology journalism (we called it “computer journalism” then, because technology really was computer). That means my career almost exactly spans the period of the biggest technology antitrust trials of the lot: United States vs Microsoft, and Microsoft vs European Commission. Most of the original reporting I did was about the EC case (after all, that's my side of the pond) but I did enough reporting and spoke to enough sources to have a decent idea of the nuances of both cases.
Depending on how you look at it, US vs Microsoft (which I'll call “the DOJ case”) was either the last hurrah for a DOJ which had become very reluctant to intervene in anything connected with antitrust that wasn't either a cartel or big merger, or the first case where network effects were regarded as an important question in competition law. But either way, it was one of the landmark cases in technology competition law, as notable as the breakup of 'Ma Bell' or the 1956 IBM consent decree.
So, based on my specific expertise, I can tell you: Be prepared, over the coming months, for some lousy punditry.
Tech commentators (and their audiences) are going to have to learn some history
An entire generation of tech commentators and CEOs have grown up not understanding the history of antitrust in tech, or the impact it had in shaping the industry. And they really don’t understand that without regulatory action in the 1950s to 1980s, their businesses would not exist.
One simple example: why did IBM not buy DOS outright, a move which would have killed the PC compatible before birth and made IBM dominate for longer? Bill Gates would love everyone to think it’s because he was smart and IBM was not. In fact, it’s because IBM was wary of yet another antitrust suit. As Bill Lowe put it, “IBM didn’t want to be seen as dominating the market too thoroughly.”
Similarly, IBM could have bought Microsoft — Gates even offered them 10% of the business, and they could easily have afforded more. In the environment of the past 20 years, where big companies are allowed to buy almost anyone, they would have. Back then, antitrust concerns made it a non-starter.
And now antitrust law is being applied again in the way it has been for most of its existence, commentators and tech execs are finding it really difficult to cope with the change. There’s an irony that Tim Cook appears to be affected deeply. After all, Cook started his career at IBM, and moved on to Compaq - a company that wouldn’t have existed without antitrust law. You would think he would get it.
If you would like to know more about the impact of antitrust on IBM behaviour, I’d recommend reading this paper by Tim Wu. In his conclusions, he looks at what antitrust regulators should learn from the case, and I found this paragraph quite relevant to what’s currently happening:
A similar logic suggests prioritizing Sherman 2 cases where the problem isn’t just competition in the primary market, but where competition in adjacent markets looks to be compromised or threatened. The long cycles of industrial history suggest that what are at one point seen as adjacent or side industries can sometimes emerge to become of primary importance, as in the example of software and hardware. Hence, the manner of how something is sold can make a big difference. In particular, “bundling” or “tying” one product to another can stunt the development of an underlying industry. Even a tie that seems like “one product” at the time the case is litigated, as, for example, software and hardware were in the 1960s, or physical telephones and telephone lines, might contribute to such stunting. If successful, an antitrust prosecution that breaks the tie and opens a long-dominated market to competition may serve to have very significant long-term effects
Expect lots of talk about how previous antitrust action (in particular Microsoft) didn't achieve anything
Views I have heard in the past few years from some widely known pundits:
- Microsoft/DOJ did nothing to change the browser landscape
- Microsoft/DOJ didn't make any difference to Microsoft's ability to “win” in mobile
- Microsoft/DOJ didn't matter because the web
To borrow a phrase from Ben Thompson, these opinions are, to use a technical term favoured by analysts, bullshit. All of them have in common a failure to understand the chilling effects that being under investigation, or under a consent decree, have on corporate actions –– at every level.
In organisations that are under antitrust pressure, ideas that might get put forward are held back, because people would rather not spend the time having them checked through legal and compliance teams. Acquisitions which a company might make don't happen, because it would rather not appear rapacious or that it's stifling nascent competition. And contractual clauses with partners can't be as aggressive in locking them out of doing business in a way which doesn't favour you. That, of course, was one of Microsoft's favourite tricks of the 1990s: the “per processor” licence for Windows, for example, meant that computer makers paid them for a licence on every computer, whether Windows was installed or not.
Microsoft tried to tie Internet Explorer to Windows. It was stopped from doing so by the government, and that made it a lot easier for Chrome to gain traction. As Gates said (and Thompson denies!) the “distraction” of antitrust meant that Microsoft wasn't as focused on mobile as it should have been. The “old” Microsoft would also have used specific means to stop the iPhone being as attractive, such as preventing it from connecting to Exchange servers (something that was introduced in iOS 2, in 2008).
Antitrust action works, in part, not just because of the explicit conditions of a consent decree, but because companies limit themselves. They are afraid of getting back into court, because they know that next time a break-up might be on the agenda.
Expect to see a lot of bad commentary because people don't understand “monopoly power” or market definitions
I have already seen a lot of “the iPhone is not a monopoly!” comments, from people who have been in the business for long enough to know better. Let's put that one to bed straight away: “monopoly power” does not require a literal monopoly share of a market. Here's how the FTC defines it:
Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long-term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a “monopolist” is a firm with significant and durable market power. Courts look at the firm's market share, but typically do not find monopoly power if the firm (or a group of firms acting in concert) has less than 50 percent of the sales of a particular product or service within a certain geographic area. Some courts have required much higher percentages. In addition, that leading position must be sustainable over time: if competitive forces or the entry of new firms could discipline the conduct of the leading firm, courts are unlikely to find that the firm has lasting market power.
This is why the DOJ filing talks about “monopoly power” and how Apple “also enjoys substantial and durable market share”:
Apple has monopoly power in the smartphone and performance smartphone markets because it has the power to control prices or exclude competition in each of them. Apple also enjoys substantial and durable market shares in these markets.
Note the “also”. The DOJ case does not rely on a specific high number for Apple market share: it relies on showing that Apple has significant market power.
But one of the key elements in any antitrust case is the definition of the markets you're referring to -- because defining the market helps understand the degree to which a company has monopoly power. The DOJ filing talks about two markets, hence the title of section E: “Apple has monopoly power in the smartphone and performance smartphone markets”
The DOJ claims that Apple itself says it has a 70% market share in the second one:
In the U.S. market for performance smartphones, where Apple views itself as competing, Apple estimates its market share exceeds 70 percent
I can't locate a source for Apple saying this, but I have no doubt at all that the DOJ can back up both the number, the market definition, and that Apple has said -- publicly or internally -- that it is the market it competes in. Market definitions are so important to antitrust cases that the DOJ just would not have included that statement without evidence to back it up.
(And no, Apple, you can't play it like the market share that's relevant is the global number. You're not going to appear in the Global Court of Justice, it's a United States one – and they tend to only care about what's going on in the US.)
Don't believe anyone who says the DOJ complaint is badly written, unless they are an actual legal expert
Exhibit one, Benedict Evans:
“It still amazes me how sloppy this DoJ filing is. It's Apple's fault that LG and HTC could not compete with Xiaomi, Oppo and Samsung? Google Android phones are outsold by Samsung Android phones… because of iMessage? WTF? Ther's [sic] stuff like this on every page. How did this get out of a drafting session? Everyone at the DoJ should be professionally embarrassed.”
Exhibit two, Rebecca Haw Allensworth, antitrust professor and associate dean for research at Vanderbilt Law School:
“They told a very coherent story about how Apple is making its product, the iPhone and the products on it – the apps — less useful for consumers in the name of maintaining their dominance… This is just a more plausible story about consumers, [making it] as a legal matter, a stronger lawsuit.”
Well, I just don't know who to believe here – what do you think?
Ten Blue Links, AI is bad now edition
First up, apologies that there's been no long form post this week. I've had some family stuff which had to take priority over writing. Normal service should be resumed from next week.
And now on to the good stuff…
1. The last refuge of the desperate media
Ahh, low rent native ads — the kind that are designed to fool people into clicking by appearing to be genuine user or editorial posts. Always a sign that a company is desperate for revenue, any kind of revenue, and never mind the longer-term implications on quality. Now, why would Reddit want to do that?
2. Repeat after me: AI is not a thing
More specifically, AI is not a single technology, and what we talk about in the media as “AI” is, in fact, quite a limited, relatively new tool coming out of AI research — the Large Language Model, or LLM. Why does this matter? Because (how shall I put this?) less technically educated executives are likely to read articles like this one, about the successful use of AI in the oil industry, and think that they need to jump on the AI bandwagon by adopting LLMs. These are two very different things: Robowell, for example, is a machine learning system designed to automate specific tasks. It learns to do better as it goes along — something that LLMs don't do.
3. Tesla bubble go pop
The notion that Tesla was worth more than the rest of the auto industry combined was always bubble insanity, and it looks like the Tesla bubble is finally bursting. And this, of course, is why Musk is grabbing on to AI and why he proposed OpenAI merge into Tesla: AI is the current marker for a stock to end up priced based on an imaginary future rather than its current performance. Musk needs to inflate Tesla again, and just being an EV maker won’t now do that.
4. This is fine
I'm almost boring myself now whenever I post anything about the era of mass search traffic for publishers drawing to a close. But then someone comes up with a new piece of researching showing an impact of between 25-60% traffic loss because of Google's forthcoming Search Generative Experience. The fact that Google effectively does not allow publishers to opt out of SGE — you have to opt out of Googlebot completely to do so — should be an indication that Google has no intention of following the likes of OpenAI in paying to license publisher content, too. And I think the SGE is just the first part of a one-two punch to publisher guts: computers and how we access information is going to become more conversational and less focused on searching and going to web pages. As that happens, the entire industry will change, and it could happen faster than we think.
5. Feudal security
I often link to Cory Doctorow's posts, and it's not just because he's a friend -- it's because a lot of the things that he's been talking about for years are beginning to be a lot more obvious, even to stick-in-the-muds like me. This piece starts with a concept that I have struggled to articulate -- feudal security — and sprints on from there.
6. LLMs are terrible writers
Will Pooley has written a terrific piece from the perspective of an academic on why LLMs just don't write in a way which sounds human. They don't interrogate or question terms (because they have no concepts, so can't), there is no individual voice, they make no daring or original claims based on the evidence, and much more. My particular favourite — and one I have encountered a lot — is that LLMs love heavy sectionisation and simple adore bullet points. I've got LLMs to write stuff before, specifically telling them not to use bullet points, and they have used them anyway. As Tim succinctly put it in a post on Bluesky, LLMs create content which is “uniformly terrible, and terribly uniform”.
7. Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto
Craig Wright spent a lot of time claiming he was the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, and suing people on that basis. Finally, a court has ruled that he was lying. Whoever Nakamoto is/was, he's probably on an island somewhere drinking a piña colada.
8. Google updates, manually hits AI-generated sites
You might have noticed that Google did a big update in early March, finally responding to what everyone had been saying — that search had become dominated by rubbish for many search terms. Smarter people than me are still analysing the impact of that update, but one thing which stood out for me is there was a big chunk of manual actions to start. Manual actions are, as the name suggests, based on human review of a site, which means they are a kind of fallback when the algorithm isn't getting it right. And guess what the manual actions mostly targeted? AI content spam. All the sites that were whacked had some AI-generated content, and half of them were 90-100% created by AI. Of course, manual action is not a sustainable strategy to combat AI grey goo, but it should be a reminder to publishers that high levels of AI-generated content are not the promised land of cheap good content without those pesky writers. If you want to use it, do it properly.
9. The web is 35 years old, and Tim Berners-Lee is not thrilled
The web was meant to be a decentralised system. Instead, it's led to the kind of concentration of power and control that would have made the oligarchs of the past blush. That's just the starting point of Tim Berners-Lee's article marking the web's 35th anniversary, and he goes on to provide many good suggestions. I don't know if they are radical enough — but they are in the right direction.
10. A big tech diet
It's a long-standing journalistic cliché to try some kind of fad diet for a short period of time and write up the (usually hilarious) results, but in this "diet" Shubham Agarwal tried to drop products from big tech companies, and of course, it proved harder than you would think. Some things are pretty easy — swapping Gmail for Proton isn't hard (and Shubham missed out some tricks, like using forwards to redirect mail). But it's really difficult to avoid some products, like WhatsApp or LinkedIn, because there are few/no viable alternatives. That, of course, is just how the big tech companies like it because they long-ago gave up on the Steve Jobs mantra of making great products that people wanted to buy in favour of making mediocre products that people have no alternative to using.
Someone’s post just reminded me about “Will it blend?” and now I want to go back and watch things blending.
Weeknote, Sunday 10th March
Last week we went to see Dune. It's a pretty amazing film, the kind that you just let wash over you and experience rather than trying too hard to intellectualise. You definitely need to have seen the first part, though.
I have some news about work which I will be able to share with everyone next week… yes, I am an international man of mystery. But on Wednesday last week I gave a couple of hours training on video content strategy, something that I am surprised to realise I've been doing regularly for about 15 years. One thing I really enjoy about giving training courses is it makes me realise that I actually know quite a lot about something, and also put it all down on paper.
Because there are too many hours in the day, and because a new version of KDE Plasma is out, I spent some time installing it on my ThinkPad. I had a bit of a play with KDE Neon -- the distribution the KDE team created to showcase the most up to date KDE packages -- but then decided to install the pre-release version of the Fedora 40 KDE spin. I've grown pretty comfortable with Fedora as a distro, and it's close enough to release to be stable.
Things I have been writing
I wrote about the future of search-driven affiliate content. The short version is, I don't think there is one, at least not to the degree that many online publishers are relying on now. In particular, I think the impact of conversation-driven search, which incorporates LLMs to create queries from natural language, will make a big difference.
Meanwhile, this week's ten blue links was a "too much Apple edition", thanks to Apple driving off a cliff while shooting itself in the foot.
Things I have been reading
This has been a slow week for reading. Having completed Burn Book I'm doing the thing I often do, which is to bounce around a couple of different books to see what sticks. I've read a little bit of Steven Sinofsky's Hardcore Software, as well as Plunder of the Commons. Too many books, too little time.
Ten Blue Links, Too Much Apple Edition
It's FRIDAY!
1. Substack now has three million paid subscribers
I left Substack because I didn’t want to stay on a platform which lied about its status as a social network (mates, you have algorithmic recommendations – you’re a social network) or which was relaxed about out-and-out Nazis using it to radicalise people. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, but it seems to be doing OK, with three million subscribers in total. Of course, we are in the early stages of a cycle that should be familiar to everyone, where Substack will bend over backwards to get creators on the platform, then at some point pull the rug from under them by giving them less of a proportion of that subscriber money.
2. Why now?
I don’t often link to anything on LinkedIn, which has become the haven for the more serious end of the influencer spectrum, but this post from David Ruddock is an excellent summary of the forces which are pushing numerous online publishers to the brink, and leading to many lay-offs.
3. Meanwhile, The Verge gets it
Pushed down an article about promotions at The Verge was this: “This new leadership team will be tasked with continuing to grow The Verge’s direct loyal audience, a project Patel and Havlak believe to be critical to the future of The Verge’s journalism and business. The Verge has already made considerable progress against this goal in 2023 after an ambitious site redesign in late 2022.” The Verge gets it: the future is direct, loyal traffic rather than one-and-done SEO or Facebook. Everyone, of course, pays lip service to this, but few actually go all out to get it. The temptations of Google are generally too much.
4. How and why Apple gets the EU so, so wrong
You might have noticed that Apple has been acting a little weird lately. Baldur Bjarnason wrote the post I was going to create, which is good as I didn’t have the time. The short version: Apple doesn’t understand that regulating markets and preventing them from splitting away from the single market and into the control of private companies is an existential threat to the EU. The EU was founded to bring peace through a single market. It’s really not going to let Apple, or Google, get away with this.
5. Programmatic, CPMs, and other such barrels of laughs
Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo wrote something about the state of programmatic revenue, illustrated by the actual numbers from his site. Falling from nearly $1.7m in 2016 to just $75,000 in 2023 is quite the decline. There are many factors involved, and as Josh notes, they have focused much more heavily on subscribers than programmatic, but even so, that’s a lot of money to lose in a relatively short amount of time.
6. “If Steve were alive…”
I’m not generally a fan of the “if Steve Jobs was alive this would never have happened” approach to Apple punditry, but there is something in the view that the current shenanigans with the EU would never have happened if Steve were still around. Make no mistake: Steve Jobs was no saint. But his focus was very much on simply making better products than anyone else. This applied to making an App Store in the first place: anyone old enough to remember the pre-iPhone era of mobile software can remember how dreadful discovery, payment and so on were. Having an App Store was a huge step forward. These days, app stores are the default and everyone makes one – but not on iOS because rather than compete to make the best App Store, Apple has chosen to try and maintain a monopoly for its own financial well-being. I like to think that Steve wouldn’t have done that.
7. No, really you should look at LibreOffice
I have grown to love Paul Thurrott. He was once a bit of a nemesis, and a pugnacious one too. Back in the mesozoic era of blogging, I’m pretty sure I spent a fair few words on some punchy opinions about his articles.
These days, there isn’t that much on which Paul and I don’t see eye to eye. We inched a little closer a few days ago, when he wrote a post about how LibreOffice Writer is a viable alternative to Microsoft Word. And he’s right! If you haven’t looked at LibreOffice for a while, I would recommend you do because it’s basically all the good bits from Microsoft Office without the tying to other Microsoft services, constant nags to move things to OneDrive, and so on. And it’s free.
8. How much do developers already pay Apple?
This should really have been a “APPLE WTF?” special edition. In The Guardian, Alex Hern makes the excellent point that even if you assume developers “owe” Apple something for making great software which makes platforms more attractive to users (I do not think this), then they are already paying out quite a chunk of money. Of course, there’s the $99 developer fee. But developers also need to buy Macs to make iOS/iPadOS apps: someone like Spotify might be spending millions of dollars per year with Apple.
9. Is GenAI’s impact on productivity overblown?
A rare Betteridge’s Law exception: this pretty detailed look from the Harvard Business Review shows that yes, it is overblown. And there are consequences further down the line which businesses should be taking account of. Even summarisation, which you would think was low-hanging fruit for LLM use, is risky.
10. The money is in all the wrong places
I love long form writing, and this piece is just a really nice read. It also makes some serious points: the amount of money that creative people earn has stagnated in actual terms, which means it has declined in real terms. Freelance writing is a good example of this. I’ve done work for publications where the word rate hasn’t inched up in 20 years. I know because I literally have the receipts, as I worked for them back in the early 2000s. Meanwhile, executive salaries in creative industries have… well, let’s just say they aren’t having to sell the second home.
On Apple terminating Epic’s E.U. Developer Account
Daring Fireball: Apple Terminated Epic’s E.U. Developer Account:
I guess Epic is implying that the EU government, not Apple, should have that discretion? They don’t say so, but who else but Apple could have that discretion? But the European Commission isn’t set up for that sort of police work. That’s not how the EC works. The DMA doesn’t say that the EC now runs app marketplaces.
Actually, regulating markets is exactly the thing that the European Union is set up to do – the foundation of the EU as a whole is the Single Market, and anything which threatens to fragment the single market into something smaller, under private control, is to be resisted at all costs.
As Baldur Bjarnason put it in an excellent post recently:
Much like roaming, App Stores let private companies subdivide and control the single market to their own financial gain. When much of the digital economy is taking place on phones, tablets, and various other devices that are largely limited to App Stores, this is effectively ceding the single market to a fragmented market that’s entirely under corporate control. This is against the core operating theory behind the EU.
What Apple isn’t getting is this isn’t something that the EU is going to roll over for. As Baldur also notes, this is explicit in the naming and intention of the Digital Markets Act – whenever you see the word “market” in EU regulation it’s a tell that the intention is to bring an area into the scope of the single market, when the EU believes it has been out of alignment.
Regulating markets isn’t just a small thing for the EU. It’s existential. As Baldur puts it:
To Apple, the App Store is a side line. To the EU, the single market is the foundation of its existence. Any time you see two entities of similar size fight, bet on the one that thinks it’s fighting for its life.
Later on, John mentions that Spotify has been as publicly-critical of Apple as Epic, and it hasn’t had its developer account revoked.
Spotify, for example, is just as vociferous a corporate critic of the App Store as Epic is, and Apple hasn’t threatened them with revocation of Spotify’s developer program membership. The difference between Spotify and Epic isn’t in their rhetoric; it’s in their past behavior.
There’s another key difference: revoking Spotify would be a much bigger deal, both practically and politically. Spotify has around a third of all streaming music users, double its nearest competitor – which happens to be Apple. Spotify has 226 million paying subscribers, and a lot of them will use iPhones. Being told they can no longer use their Spotify account would undoubtedly mean that next upgrade cycle some of them would choose to move to Android.
The politics would also be terrible. Using your power over a market to ban the number one service where you are number two is exactly the kind of move which would land Apple in a world of legal pain. By comparison, banning Epic was nothing.
The level of bad behaviour that Spotify would have to get up to in order to Apple to ban them would have to be so egregious, obvious and public that ignoring it imposed a bigger cost than removing their developer status. I’m not sure what that might be. Given that Apple never ever blinked when Facebook was complicit in genocide, I can’t imagine what Spotify would need to do to get banned. Launch its own nuclear weapons? Despite Apple’s protestations, the rules of the App Store game are very different for developers that are strategically important to Apple.
Why is Apple, a company that’s not exactly composed of B-Ark players, getting this so wrong? I wonder about this a lot. In my professional life, I’ve known a lot of people at Apple. I worked there for a short time. I was in daily contact with them while working on MacUser. 99.99% of those I’ve met have been good, smart people. Some of them are still friends.
I’m certain the same is true for John, and I would, not that long ago, have posed a very similar question to him:
But why not take an opportunity to look magnanimous? Apple shouldn’t be expected to grovel, but this looks like they’re going out of their way to look vindictive. I really thought it would be a clever bit of public relations jujitsu to make nice with Epic, even if, in Cupertino, it was through gritted teeth.
I think the answer to this lies in a gradual change I’ve seen in the way the company behaves since (and I hate saying this) Steve Jobs died. In her recent Burn Book, Kara Swisher cites something that Jobs said to her:
By 2010, Apple’s market valuation would surpass Microsoft’s, a major milestone. A week later, Jobs was back on the ATD stage and I asked him if he had a thought or two about that. “For those of us who have been in the industry a long time, it’s surreal,” he responded. “But it’s not why any of our customers buy our product. Remember what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. Sometimes you just have to pick the things that look like they’re going to be the right horses moving forward. We’re trying to make great products. Have courage of our convictions … Customers pay us to make those choices. If we succeed, they’ll buy them, and if we don’t, they won’t.”
Jobs loved making money as much as the next billionaire, but not for the usual reasons. He didn’t regard it as a measure of him, personally. It was a measure of how much people loved Apple products, because they chose to buy the best. And when making products, the question of what delivered the best for the customer was always at the heart of decisions.
Apple today sees the App Store, too, as a product. It regards its role as delivering the best experience for customers, by keeping out crap apps, setting standards, making sure customers aren’t ripped off, and so on.
Which leads me back, again, to the last line of that Jobs quote: “Customers pay us to make those choices. If we succeed, they’ll buy them, and if we don’t, they won’t.” Jobs knew that the pressure of competition was what kept Apple – and all companies – honest.
With the App Store, customers aren’t allowed to choose. Apple doesn’t compete by being the best. Apple succeeds by being the only option – and that is corrosive to any company culture. My fear that it’s corroded Apple’s culture, too.
The future of search-driven affiliate content
This week, rather than focus on a single topic, I thought I would look at a couple of different things – and also point you in the direction of some other great articles I’ve read this week. First, though, something that’s a bit of a theme for me: the long-term unsustainability of the affiliate/SEO content model...
This screen grab neatly illustrates why I think search-driven affiliate content has no long-term future:
If you're a publisher, and you have an affiliate-led revenue strategy, you might want to start thinking about what your revenue model will be in a few years. Conversational AIs are going to massively impact on your ability to monetise.
This is an image from a query performed using Google Gemini Advanced, and the answer to my question includes links directly to retailers for users to just buy the recommended products. No affiliate intermediary required. And remember: Gemini will be the default voice assistant on Android, eventually. I haven’t seen good data on how many affiliate purchases take place on mobile versus desktop, but it’s likely to be the majority.
Conversations generative AI tools like Gemini are not good enough yet for purchasing (and that's true of most generative AI) but it will be, and probably sooner than you think. In nearly thirty years of covering technology, I don't think I have seen a new tech that's improved as rapidly as generative AI. It's gone from laughable to serious in 18 months, and I suspect that pace will continue given the money and resources pouring into it.
For purchasing decisions, conversational interfaces will ultimately be better for users, as they allow them to hone down recommendations based on personal priorities. I could talk to Gemini and say, “OK, I have a mix of hard wood floor and carpets, what would you recommend?” I can change price ranges, asking if there's a really outstanding model just above what I'm looking to spend.
It's going to take, I think, between three and five years to get to the point where the technology is good enough, but it will get there. If you have affiliate revenue now, I would strongly recommend you invest what you're making in a long-term strategy of building more direct traffic, and more direct revenue from consumers (in whatever way is appropriate to your market).
You might have noticed that online media is currently in trouble, with layoffs happening virtually everywhere you look. Dave Ruddock has written an excellent summary of why – and in particular, why now. It’s a quintuple whammy of Google, consolidation, affiliate, AI and the death, for publishers, of the distribution platforms they have come to rely on.
Dave finishes with “get out of media while you can, folks. It’s a bloodbath” and I sympathise with that view a lot. Paul Newman, who is MD of tech at Future, points out in the comments that this may just be the end of a cycle, and he’s right to say that the media business goes in cycles. When I’m optimistic, I think the next cycle will be all about direct traffic, paid for via subscription, and a resurgence of quality over pageviews. But the pessimist in me notes that getting there is going to be very painful, for businesses and for individuals.
The other major concern I have is the loss of experience in the industry. If you’re in your 50s now and someone dangles a decent carrot of redundancy money in front of you, you’re probably going to take it and go off to do something other than active journalism.
But it’s deeper than that. I had a conversation recently with a freelance tech writer of many years standing, who told me he no longer bothers even pitching to write reviews. Publications now want a “best of” with 10 products in it, and want to pay £200 for it – and actually properly testing 10 products takes a lot longer than than half day that £200 should pay for.
That freelancer represents decades of experience in technology and testing products. That’s all now effectively lost to the industry, never to return. Crafts which bleed knowledge like that rarely see an increase in quality over time, and if we are moving to a new era of quality content, we will need – somehow – to get that back.
On a more “admin” note, I’m thinking about expanding what gets emailed out to subscribers, and would like to hear your views.
At the moment, the mid-week newsletter is the only thing anyone gets via email. Other posts are all web-only.
I have started a regular link post on Fridays called “Ten Blue Links”, which covers a broad range of everything that’s interested me. I am thinking of sending this out by email too. I also do occasional longer posts on things which I have found interesting, again mostly in tech. And on Sundays I write a weeknote, which is a more personal reflection of what I’m up to.
As an experiment I’m going to send out Ten Blue Links via email, as well as the mid-week post. I’m hoping this will be of value to you. Ultimately, I want to move to an email system which allows you to sign up to one, or both – but for now it will have to be all or nothing.
Let me know what you think either in the comments below or by email. I’m planning to start emailing out Ten Blue Links from next week.
Weeknote, Sunday 3rd March 2024
I'm a little bit tired: a two hour journey back from Folkestone this morning (thank you farmers, tractor convoys in a mediaeval walled city are fun) and several pints last night make me want a nap. It was a friend's birthday, and there was pizza. I narrowly avoided dad dancing.
Things I have been writing
I'm not entirely sure why this week's Ten Blue Links was the Folsom City Prison edition – perhaps because I mention hacking prison laptops – but it was, and there's some good stuff in there. I also wrote about who AI might indicate the end of the line for Google. Google is a strange company in many ways (someone once described it to me as "a university research division funded by an adtech company) and I suspect it's at a crossroads. Of course, like IBM, it won't vanish – companies can last a long time on momentum alone – but it feels like without a major change of course it won't be seen as a visionary company again.
Things I have been reading
After 80 days of daily reading I broke my streak, and, it seems, had a bit of a break. But I've started again, picking up Guy Standing's Plunder of the Commons. Standing starts off looking at the historical enclosure of common land, but then swiftly moves into the way that everything which we have banded together to do in common is quietly – and sometimes not so quietly – being taken away from us and given to individuals to profit from. Same shit, different century.
I bought and finished Kara Swisher's Burn Book. It’s fairly obvious some of the shall we say more critical reviews have done quite a bit of selective quoting. Like quoting a sentence and then missing out the all-important one which follows, showing exactly the opposite of what the critic is claiming. Good book, and I would recommend it to everyone.
What's the sound? A screeching u-turn, followed by excuses
Craig Grannell on Apple’s u-turn on web apps:
Apple has performed a screeching U-turn on killing web apps, perhaps because the European Commission publicly stated there was no need for Apple to scrap them in the first place. Oh dear. I look forward to certain (mostly US) commentators retracting their “the bad and evil EU is forcing our beloved Apple to do a bad thing” stance and replacing it with a “the bad and evil EU is making it impossible for Apple to know what it should do and that is a bad thing” stance. Fun!
The ability of US-based Apple commentators to both fail to understand how the EU works and make so many excuses for the company’s bad behaviour is really quite a thing.
Ten blue links, Folsom Prison Blues Edition
1. Oh, WordPress!
Not content with their CEO getting into a stupid public spat with a user and apparently revealing information about them which should have remained private, WordPress announced it was doing deals to give access to their customers' posts and content to train "selected AI partners" (although not, at all, people hosting their own version of WordPress, so please shut that rumour down). The most charitable interpretation of this is that the company messed up its comms. The least is that it's started into an enshittification spiral, which will ultimately lead to it becoming the same kind of terrible service as everyone else. Related: I'm pondering whether I should start self-hosting again.
2. Good bus services or a tunnel that sets your skin on fire? Who knows which one is best for America
The Boring Company was always a joke, producing precisely one usable tunnel with money that should have been spent improving public transport infrastructure. Now its one tunnel is causing maintenance workers to get chemical burns from toxic waste. Go Elon. Where's my pitchfork?
3. Apple gets stuck in traffic
Apple's car project was a legacy of the era when Jony Ive ruled the roost and had decided he could design better products than anyone else in the world. I'm actually quite surprised that it lasted as long as it did after he left the company. And now, apparently, it's finally dead. From a business perspective, it never made any sense: historically, car manufacturer margins have been far smaller than the 30-40% that Apple wants. Tesla had higher margins than everyone else mainly because it bilked the government of the US for massive subsidies, cut corners in its manufacturing, and did everything possible to avoid providing any kind of proper customer service. While I'm sure Apple would have loved some of those sweet, sweet corporate welfare cheques, the rest of the Tesla Method of Business™ is probably not where it wants to be.
4. How publishing is losing its soul
There have always been publishers whose relationship with advertisers was a little too cosy. Even back in the days when selling ads was like shooting fish in a barrel with a bazooka, ad sales people would try a little “friendly chat” with a journalist to "check in and see how product X is doing". Most journalists always told them, in a friendly way, where to get off. But as times get tougher and things get more desperate, it's natural that executives are going to lean on journalists to "do the right thing for the company" rather than for their audience. This piece, from a year ago, is about CNET, but I guarantee they are not the only ones doing the same. Private equity companies only care about getting a return on their investment as soon as possible. They aren't concerned about the long-term viability of a brand — and they definitely aren't concerned about the people reading the content. Of course, once they have fired all the journalists and replaced them with “prompt engineers” that will be problem solved because there will be no one left to complain.
5. Prison laptops are a thing?
I didn't know they were, until I read this Twitter thread. Amazing.
6. Desperate times make desperate publishers
It's not that long since publishers were wary of getting into a legal tangle with the likes of Google because they wanted to keep the provider of most of their traffic onside, but these days things are different. I don't know whether this will be successful or not — despite my 'O' level in law, I am not a lawyer — but I'm absolutely certain that Google's 50,000 gorilla-like presence in the adtech market distorts it in a variety of ways. Let's not even start on Facebook. Yet. The one caveat to all this is that $2.3bn is 1% of the amount the company made from advertising last year, so it's another case of what sounds like a high number to publishers actually being cost-of-business to Google.
7. At last, the worst use of AI (special government edition)
I'm not against the use of LLMs for summarisation. In fact, sometimes it's one of the best uses for it. LLMs can be really good at picking out the salient points of an email, for example, and if you have ever worked in a corporate environment you know quite how much long emails are used to hide important points. But using it for creating drafts of routine responses and to summarise reports for ministers is a recipe for worse government. Why? Because good ministers get into the details of this stuff. Yes, they have many decisions to make, but not getting into the details of your brief leads to awful, hand-waving, big-picture-details-are-for-losers government. Most ministers don't know enough about the topic area when they start — this will only encourage them not to be immersed in it.
8. How not to do layoff communications
One of the things I studied on my leadership masters was how to manage layoffs, and later on, I saw at first hand how excellent leaders and managers do it. I've seen the seriousness and discipline it takes to so redundancies in a way which is humane, deeply considers how the communications will work, and also looks hard at the effects of redundancies on the remaining part of the business. It's always horrible, but it doesn't have to be either deliberately cruel or handled ineptly. So, I wonder, what is it about tech companies that makes them so awful at it? My gut feeling is that it's partly down to the culture of the hero founder/CEO: basically, leaders who are not prepared to listen to anyone with actual experience of doing this stuff professionally.
9. Green trade rules are "biased"
When Piyush Goyal, India's trade minister, told the FT that rules inserted into trade agreements with his country designed to reduce carbon emissions were "biased" he got a lot of stick, and a lot of it was classic “greedy Indians” racist nonsense from people who should know better. The fact is that he's mostly right: the West is expecting India (17% of the world's population, 3% of its carbon emissions) to stop lifting people out of poverty while the US (4% of the world's population, 15% of its emissions) doesn't reduce its emissions anywhere near fast enough. As Goyal put it, "all the environmental damage that has been done in the past has still not been made up for. What about that? Before we add new environmental issues, let’s first sort out who is responsible for the environmental degradation. Certain promises were made in Paris. They have to be delivered upon.” Just as it would like everyone to forget quite how much of its wealth came from colonialism, the West would love people to ignore how much it has benefited from pumping vast amounts of carbon into the atmosphere we all share. Climate colonialism is alive and well and living… well, here.
10. How the Tories radicalised me
I often note how the government's Prevent programme, designed to stop radicalisation, ought to look at the role of the Tory party. Recently, Tory party membership has been a bigger marker of someone being against traditional British values like free speech and the right to protest than anything else. Lewis Goodall wrote a very good piece about the radicalisation of the Tory party, and how it's now more or less in thrall to conspiracy theories. Certainly, 14 years of Tories has radicalised me: I've gone from soft left to full-on "end capitalism now", which is an unexpected return to my politics of 40 years ago. I should, at least, thank the Tories for opening my eyes again.
The end of the line for Google
“Personally, I don’t want the perception in a few years to be, ‘Those old school web ranking types just got steamrolled and somehow never saw it comin’…’”
Google engineer Eric Lehman, from an internal email in 2018, titled “AI is a serious risk to our business”
I should, of course, have put a question mark at the end of the title of this, but I very much do not want to fall foul of my own law. And, of course, talking about the end of the line for Google as a company is like talking about “the end of the line for IBM” in 2000, or “the end of the line for Microsoft” in 2008. Whatever happens, Google has so much impetus behind it, so much revenue, that a quick collapse is about as likely as my beloved Derby County winning League One, Championship and Premier League in three consecutive years. It isn’t happening, much as I might dream.
This is one of the reasons I quipped that Google could see the $2.3billion that Axel Springer and other European media groups want for its alleged monopolisation of digital advertising as “just the cost of doing business.” It’s the equivalent of someone having to pay a £250 fine for speeding: annoying, but not the end of the world, and not actually that likely to keep you down to under 70mph in the future.
Google’s problems, though, do run deep. Other than, as my friend Cory Doctorow has noted, the 1.5 good products it invented itself (“a search engine and a Hotmail clone”), the most successful Google products are acquisitions. Android? Acquired. YouTube? Acquired? Adtech? Acquired. Even Chrome, which dominates web browsing in a way which many people (including me) find more than a little scary, was based on Apple’s WebKit rendering engine – which was, in turn, based on the open source KHTML.
The fact is, Google is incredibly bad at successfully bringing products to market, to such a degree that no one trusts them to do it and stick with it for long. It continually enters markets with fanfare, only to exit not long after.
Take social networking. You probably remember Google+ (2011–2019). You may even remember Orkut (2004–2014). Perhaps you know about Google Buzz (2010–2011). But do you remember Jaiku, an early Twitter competitor which Google bought – and buried? The resources of Google could have been used to accelerate Jaiku’s development and – perhaps – win the battle against Twitter and the nascent Facebook. Instead, the company took two years rebuilding Jaiku on top of Google’s App Engine, with no new features or marketing spend to support the product. Two years later, they killed it.
What Google is pretty good at is producing research. Its 2017 paper on transformers directly led to many of the large language model breakthroughs which OpenAI used to create ChatGPT. Failing to spot the potential for its research isn’t unknown in technology history, but really great companies don’t allow others to turn themselves into competitors worth $80 billion on the back of it.
And particularly not when those other companies create technology which directly threatens core businesses, in this case, Google’s “one good product” – search. The bad news for Google is that even in the middle of last year, research showed people using ChatGPT for search tasks performed just as well as using a traditional search engine, with one exception — fact checking tasks. That, of course, is a big exception, but ordinary people use search engines for a lot more than just checking facts.
What’s also notable about the same research is that ChatGPT levelled the playing field between different educational levels, giving better access to information for those who have lower educational achievement. That strikes at the heart of Google’s mission statement, which promotes its goal of “organis[ing] the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful” (my italics). Search, as good as it is, has always required the user to adapt to it. Conversational interaction models, which ChatGPT follows (the clue is in the name), change that profoundly.
In The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christiansen talks about the difficulties that successful companies have in sustaining innovation. Established businesses, he notes, are excellent at optimising their existing products and processes to serve current customers (this is called “sustaining innovation”). However, they often struggle when faced with a “disruptive innovation” – a new technology or business model that creates a whole new market and customer segment.
One of the potential solutions to this which Christiansen looks at is structural: Creating smaller, independent units or spin-offs tasked with exploring the disruptive technology can allow them to operate outside the constraints of the main company. This, of course, is probably what Google intended to do when it changed its structure to create Alphabet, a group of companies of which Google itself is just one part.
The biggest problem with this putative solution is that if you do it well, innovation doesn’t necessarily flow to where it is most needed. Google’s search products needed to seize on the research made in 2017 and integrate it. It didn’t, and – worse still – no one saw this as a potential disruption of the core business. The blinkers were too firmly on.
Perhaps that’s changing. Notably, last year that Google moved all its AI efforts into a single group, Google DeepMind. The “Google” in its name is significant: previously DeepMind was a separate business within Alphabet (and, in true Google style, it was acquired rather than built in-house). Now, on the surface, it looks likely to focus more on continuing Google’s mission, which means disrupting the traditional ten blue links.
Can it succeed? I’m not optimistic (publishers, take note). What we have here is a company which is good at research, but not at exploiting it; whose history is of one good product and a good Hotmail clone; that has a terrible record of announcing, releasing, and killing products, often multiple efforts in different categories all of which fail; and which has failed to keep its core product – search – up to date.
Perhaps the real question isn’t whether Google has reached the end of the line, but how exactly it made it this far?
Ten Blue Links, "Gloom and doom" edition
It's been a gloomy week. Sorry.
1. Surprise! Apple’s sync stuff is entirely cryptic
The magnificent Howard Oakley, who knows more about the technology in the Mac than any man has a right to know, has been digging into the way iCloud sync works, and found it imposes some completely invisible quotas. This is the flip side of Apple’s “it just works” philosophy – it works, but Apple is not going to make it easy for you to troubleshoot if it ever doesn’t.
2. Google, the most disappointing monopoly
Google, on the other hand, loves being open. It publishes papers about AI, takes part in academic malarkey, and generally is open and lovely and cuddly. Except for one area: search, where its openness definitely has some limits. Cory Doctorow, as always, is on the money with his criticism of how big tech companies are enshittifying their products. Search is just the latest, and it won’t be the last.
3. Free money rots your morals, say people who have rotten morals
Some weirdo Republicans in the US are trying to proactively prevent anyone from implementing universal basic income (UBI), because they want wage slaves to stay in their place or something. Like the four day week, UBI is one of those things where no amount of actual tests and data will convince right wingers that it’s a good thing.
4. It shouldn’t need saying, but it does need saying
Corporations are not to be loved. Even the good ones.
5. Measles infected kids can skip quarantine in Florida
I could make this post into ten things which demonstrate that Republicans are stupid, ignorant, and liable to get people killed. They really are the worst.
6. And speaking of not loving corporations…
One of the things that amateur commentators about the EU DMA Apple shenanigans don’t appear to have understood is that the EU aren’t going to start investigating whether Apple is complying until after the deadline on 7th March. The pundits currently doing victory dances about how the EU can’t write clear laws or about how Apple has done an end run around them are going to end up amending a few blog posts.
7. Leadership is in the details
On a very different topic, this article from Gaël Clichy on Pep Guardiola’s leadership style is well worth a read. What often gets lost in leadership theory is the role that attention to detail plays. Pep gets it.
8. Federation, uh huh. Federation
Bluesky is finally federatable. This is a big deal: federated services are the future, and I always had some doubts over whether Bluesky would, in fact, ever release it. I take my hat off to them, and possibly eat it too.
9. Google to Apple: "hold my beer"
Google, which generates 30 percent of its sales from Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, views the DMA as disrespecting its expertise in what users want.
I am so looking forward to the flurry of investigations which start after the 7th March deadline for DMA compliance. I wonder if the big tech companies are just thinking that if they're all shady about the way they comply, the EU just won't have enough people to investigate them all?
10. VICE pivots to… not posting
Remember VICE? The company that pivoted to a strategy of giving its senior executives big bonuses days before it entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy? Well it's latest pivot is to not posting anything on its website, and becoming a "content studio" (whatever that is) which licenses its content to other publishers. No, I have no idea what that means either, other than it undoubtedly means more layoffs in an industry that has already seen quite a lot this year. And it's only February.
HouseFresh and the challenges of affiliate content
You might have noticed a post from HouseFresh doing the rounds, especially if you have anything to do with creating content intended to generate affiliate revenue. It’s caused quite a stir, particularly among publishers.
My background is in product testing. My first job in publishing was in MacUser's testing labs, where we would regularly have 10–20 products in and – literally in some cases – take them apart to decide which one was best. Next door was the PC Pro labs, which did the same thing, on an even bigger scale. On a visit to New York a few years later, I went to the testing labs of a US publisher: even bigger, with people who looked like they should be wearing lab coats picking over the bones of machines. The product testers were real experts, often devising unique tests designed to stretch the products in ways which matched up the real-world pounding they would take.
But those were proper group tests. What HouseFresh is writing about is not those. Their focus is the “best” article, written specifically to deliver affiliate clicks and sales, and designed to hit a specific keyword.
The HouseFresh article rips the lid off some of the worst aspects of content written to deliver sales though affiliate links (I refuse point-blank to call it “comtent”, which has to be one of the worst words ever invented). Their biggest complaint is that a lot of the pages you will see which rank highly on Google for affiliate-led keywords are written by people who have never had the products in their hands, let alone tested them. They may have done desk research, which involves, at best, scouring spec sheets for hidden details and, at worst, just scouring the user reviews on Amazon. But that doesn't tell you all that much about a product and whether it's any good or not.
Of course, this is really Google's fault because it is rewarding low-quality content by ranking it highly. This content, which is far cheaper to produce than a real group test, can be churned out quickly. A quick writer can do one or two a day, while a group test might take two weeks to organise, test and write. Use an LLM and you can probably make that process even faster. Just make sure to write your prompt to make it include phrases like our lab tests and our experts said to satisfy Google's pretty surface-deep view of how content based on real-world experience works.
HouseFresh’s hope is that Google will improve its algorithms and start rewarding content which is of higher quality, but I have my doubts. I suspect that the company’s focus is on creating “answers engines”like Gemini, rather than the traditional ten blue links. And even if it can improve its algorithms to prioritise in-depth reviews, gaming the SEO system will often look like a better option to many of the kind of publishers HouseFresh is attacking: the ones who have bought well-known brands but now use them to churn out lower quality content.
There are, and will be, exceptions, mostly from publishers who have a heritage in creating brands, rather than the ones that buy brands just for their heritage. But the sheer volume of content created by others could drown them out—especially as LLMs make it easier to generate entire sites within days.
As I have pointed out, I believe businesses based on this kind of affiliate-led content will also be disrupted over the coming few years by conversational AI. Once people have the option of having a conversation with a smart recommendation engine to tailor buying advice to exactly their needs, “best XXX” articles based on desk research or mining Amazon reviews just won’t be good enough.
Google is a choke point for the affiliate content business, but it’s not the only one. The second is Amazon, where most publishers derive a large chunk of their affiliate revenue. Although reliable numbers are difficult to find, Datanyze estimates Amazon has around 48% of the market share in affiliate networks, and anecdotally, I suspect the amount of revenue that brings in for publishers is higher still. Every publisher I know has sought to reduce their exposure to Amazon, especially after the effective demise of its Onsite Associates programme (known internally as OSP), changes in policy from Amazon would have a massive effect on publishers. But the reality is that if Amazon turned off the taps, or even reduced them, publishers with big investments in affiliate content production would be in trouble.
Would Amazon do this? It depends if you believe that Cory Doctorow’s enshittification cycle applies to it:
First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.
Are we at the point where Amazon starts to claw back the revenue it shares with its “business customers” – affiliate partners? Currently, probably not. But it’s worth thinking about the longer term, too. Already, 61% of US shoppers begin their buying journey on Amazon regularly. That’s traffic which Amazon has to pay no extra commission on, and so it’s something that it would love to do more of.
Plus, of course, Amazon has hundreds of millions of reviews of its own that it could tap to automatically create recommendations for users, including by layering conversational AI on top of it to allow users to get “intelligent” recommendations. The potential is there for Amazon to be a trusted source of reviews, as well as the retailer of choice for online.
The “good” news is that presently, Amazon is struggling with its own grey goo of content in the form of fake reviews generated by AI. It’s responded with more AI to try to trim them out. But the key question is really what happens at the point it decides that the money it spends on delivering affiliate revenue would be better off spent on ads, or on-site AI, or whatever else.
Ironically, the kind of content mills which HouseFresh is railing against would be less bothered if Amazon does ever scale back on its focus on affiliates: they are, most likely, pretty aware that the brands they are using are near the end of their life, and if the affiliate cash cow moves on the private equity companies will have long since made a sizeable return.
The relationship between Amazon and publishers, like that of Google and publishers, is some kind of symbiosis. Amazon gains revenue from the clicks that publishers drive their way. Publishers get a slice of that money, enough for them to survive and grow. But the key question is whether that symbiosis is obligate – where each depends on the other for survival – or facultative, where each benefits but could survive alone. If it’s the former, affiliate content has a long and profitable future. If it’s the latter, then eventually, publishers who go all-in on it may have a problem.
Weeknote, Sunday 19th February 2024
The good thing about not writing a weeknote for a week is you have plenty of things to write about. The bad thing is that you have plenty of things to write about.
We’ve managed to fit in two movies in the past fortnight: All of us strangers, and The zone of interest. What a pair of absolute crackers. Go and see them in the cinema, don’t wait till you can stream them or whatever. But then I would say that because I love the cinema, something I have only recently rediscovered.
On a trip to that there London, we managed to squeeze in both exhibitions on at the Courtauld – Cute, and Frank Auerbach – as well as a wander around the newly renovated National Portrait Gallery. Cute was a little disappointing: lots of great objects, but the curation didn’t really tell a story that had any narrative to it. It was more “here’s a thing, here’s a thing, oh and another set of things”. Auerbach is a brilliant artists, but not totally my cup of tea – but he is Kim’s, so that’s fine.
The NPG was a place that I was very familiar with. When I worked at Redwood, we were just across the road in a building which is now a hotel, so I often dropped into the NPG at lunch time for a sit and think. The renovation is a huge improvement, not simply for the fabric of the building but also for the way it’s curated. The Victorians, which used to be a gallery of Dead White Men(TM) now actually tells a story of colonialism and empire through almost exactly the same pictures. Also: whoever decided to put Radclyffe Hall in between Churchill and George VI is a genius.
We also headed over to Oxford for an overnight trip, seeing our lovely friends and their lovely children and also William Kentridge doing the fifth of the Slade Lectures Hilary 2024. I wish we had been able to go to the whole series – Kentridge is a brilliant lecturer as well as an artist I greatly admire. Seeing things like that makes me wish I lived in an academic city, instead of in a city which just happens to have two universities bolted on to it. There is a profound difference, and it’s one of the things that I most dislike about Canterbury.
At the Ashmolean, we saw Colour Revolution, which will have closed when you read this. I liked it: in particular I liked the bust of Maharajah Duleep Singh, heir to the Punjab who was forced into exile in England when we stole his land. The bust on display has his actual skin tone. Queen Victoria insisted on a classic, plain white version for herself. If that isn’t a nod to how Indians – even noble ones – were seen by the Victorians, I don’t know what is.
While there, we also caught Monica Sjöö’s The Great Cosmic Mother at Modern Art Oxford. I was not impressed. There is something about the retreat into mysticism which radical politics of the 60s and 70s succumbed to which irritates the heck out of me. It’s particularly true for second-wave feminism: as Michael Moorcock said in The Retreat from Liberty, “being Mother of the Universe cannot offer much consolation while Father is always in evidence somewhere, even if he spends most evenings at the pub.”
Coincidentally, Moorcock was also critical of the Greenham protests, which he saw as faux radical with zero chance of actually changing anything, and with little/no consequences if you got arrested. It’s not popular to say so now, but he was right – Greenham changed nothing, and the energy which went into it would have been far better spent campaigning, say, for the police to take rape seriously (which they very much didn’t at the time).
This week I have been reading…
Having finished the 500+ page Babel I dived into the 500+ page The Whispering Swarm by Michael Moorcock, and finished it. It's the closest thing Moorcock is likely to write to an autobiography, but of course includes huge strands of fiction in it. Weirdly, he includes many real names of people, but disguises others -- perhaps to make it clear that this is a fictional "real" Moorcock too (it's not down to actually needing the disguise people for legal or other reasons -- changing Ballard to Allard isn't going to fool anyone, and with JGB dead there's no issue of libel anyway).
I also finished Zoe Schiffer’s Extremely Hardcore, which is the story of Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. If you haven't been obsessively following it this book is an excellent romp through all that's happened. But if you have, there's probably not a lot in here which will either surprise you or that you won't be aware of.
Musk is, of course, the main character. But until the day when he tells his own story, he's a main character that is almost entirely absent. That allows the reader to paint in whatever their own feelings are about him, but it doesn't really answer the question of why he is like this, why he takes these dreadful decisions. Nor does it really tell us mush about how he manages to get away with it, although having more money than is right for any human being is probably part of the answer.
The Emperor’s New Clothes definitely applies to those around him, and one of the more interesting parts is the accounts of those who attempted to play along with the Musk regime at Twitter, mollifying him and trying to find ways to do what he wanted without destroying their own values in the process. There will no doubt be a few more of those stories come out over the next few years, and I hope there is ultimately a revised version which tells those too.
This week I have been writing…
Last week’s Ten Blue Links was really a collection of bad things that are happening in tech at the moment. It really is quite grim: between Apple deciding it’s more likely to achieve growth through rentier capitalism than making high-quality products that ordinary people can afford, VCs turning out to be utter morons, and Sam Altman being, well, what we all know he is (but aren’t really saying) I don’t think there has been a more depressing landscape in the tech industry.
As I said at the end of that piece, it’s best to sup with a long spoon.
Meanwhile I made some progress on Orford. Not as much as I would have liked, but I solved a knotty problem in the plot by bringing the introduction of a character to much earlier in the work.
Michael Tsai - iOS 17.4 Changes PWAs to Shortcuts in EU
Michael Tsai - Blog - iOS 17.4 Changes PWAs to Shortcuts in EU:
Apple had two years or so to prepare for the DMA, but they “had to” to remove the feature entirely (and throw away user data) rather than give the third-party API parity with what Safari can do. I find the privacy argument totally unconvincing because the alternative they chose is to put all the sites in the same browser. If you’re concerned about buggy data isolation or permissions, isn’t this even worse?
Michael neatly collects together the responses to Apple’s frankly pathetic removal of proper PWA support in the EU, but I think his own quote above hits the nail on the head. The company has had years to prepare for this. If it got blindsided, that’s a management failure. If it’s being petulant, that’s a management failure. If it can’t devote the resources to make this work, that’s a management failure. And if this is an attempt to enforce using native APIs and the App Store rather than PWAs… well, that too is a management failure.
Apple’s whole response to the DMA ruling has been nothing but disastrous for its credibility amongst developers, but unfortunately the company seems to have forgotten that without developers, its platforms are nothing but pretty user interfaces for copying files around.
Daring Fireball: The European Commission Had Nothing to Do With Apple’s Reversal on Supporting RCS
Daring Fireball: The European Commission Had Nothing to Do With Apple’s Reversal on Supporting RCS:
China, unlike the EU, seemingly knows how to draft effective regulations to achieve specific goals.
China, unlike the EU, is a repressive regime with a chokehold over Apple’s business. I don’t think Apple caving in to it has much to do with the quality of how China drafts its laws.