Linked List: December 17, 2020

Thursday, 17 December 2020

Google Faces Third Antitrust Lawsuit Brought by Bipartisan Coalition of States 

Diane Bartz, reporting for Reuters:

Alphabet Inc’s Google, already facing lawsuits by the U.S. Justice Department and attorneys general led by Texas, is expected to be sued for anticompetitive behavior on Thursday by another group of attorneys general, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Like the Justice Department complaint brought in October, this group of at least 36 state and territory attorneys general, which is bipartisan, will accuse Google of violating antitrust law to maintain its dominance of online search, one of the sources said.

The new lawsuit will allege that Google favored its own products rather than presenting a neutral search result, disadvantaging rivals to such Google subsidiaries as YouTube, the sources said.

It’s an early Christmas for the anti-Google crowd.

Texas Accuses Google and Facebook of an Illegal Conspiracy 

Gilad Edelman, writing for Wired:

A lawsuit filed today by a coalition of state attorneys general, led by Texas’ Ken Paxton, accuses Google of making an “unlawful agreement” that gave Facebook special privileges in exchange for promising not to support a competing ad system. […]

As described in the complaint, the scheme between Google and Facebook has its roots in 2017, when Facebook announced it would start supporting something called “header bidding.” The details are too wonky to get into here. Basically, Google, which runs the biggest online ad exchange, likes to make publishers give it first dibs on bidding to place an ad. (“Publisher” just means any website or app that runs ads.) Header bidding was a technical hack that allowed publishers to earn higher prices by soliciting bids from multiple exchanges at once. Google hated this, because it created more competition. When Facebook declared that it would work with publishers that used header bidding, it was seen as a provocation. The millions of businesses that advertise with Facebook don’t just advertise on Facebook; through the Facebook Audience Network, the company also places ads across the web, making it one of the biggest ad buyers on the internet. If it began supporting header bidding, that could cause Google’s ad platform to lose a lot of business.

Drawing on internal documents uncovered during its investigation, however, the Texas attorney general claims that Facebook’s leaders didn’t actually want to compete with Google; they wanted Google to buy them off. This seems to have worked. In September 2018, the companies cut a deal.

Good write-up that cuts to the chase.

MKBHD’s Full AirPods Max Review 

Marques Brownlee:

These headphones check a set of boxes that no other set of headphones that I’ve ever tested can claim to check. It’s a really odd combination of pieces here.

Solid review that boils down to this: “These are fun to listen to.” His main dings against them are the same as mine: the cheapjack pouch and their weight. But their weight is really only noticeable when you (or just your head) are in motion. When you’re sitting still or just walking, they’re comfortable. And you can’t beat their build quality.

Brownlee suggests that the battery drains when the AirPods Max are not in use but outside their pouch (err, “case”) at about the same rate as when they’re in use. I haven’t found that to be close to true. They do drain when unused but idle outside the case, but slowly. Maybe like at a rate of about 10 percent in 24 hours? They go into different levels of low-power the longer they’re off your ears but out of the case, but Apple ought to document it exactly.