United States v. Google

Manage your Stratechery subscription. So it finally happened: the U.S. Department of Justice has filed a lawsuit against Google, alleging anticompetitive behavior under Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act. And, as far as I can tell, everyone is disappointed in the DOJ’s case; Nilay Patel’s tweets were representative: If you are Google, you...

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Twitter, Responsibility, and Accountability

Manage your Stratechery subscription. On September 8, 2004, longtime CBS anchor Dan Rather presented four documents about then-President George W. Bush’s Texas Air National Guard service in the early 1970s. Bush’s service had been a matter of some controversy throughout the 2004 presidential campaign, particularly given the rather suspect way in which...

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Disney and Integrators Versus Aggregators

Manage your Stratechery subscription. Disney just announced that Soul, its next Pixar film, will be released exclusively on Disney Plus,1 setting it up to be the most idealized piece of Disney content ever. I’m not referring to the actual movie, which looks great; rather, consider how Disney is poised to make money from Soul: Disney will earn money...

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Anti-monopoly vs. Antitrust

Manage your Stratechery subscription. William Letwin, in Law and Economic Policy in America: The Evolution of the Sherman Antitrust Act, argued that the only way to understand the Sherman Antitrust Act, and by extension antitrust in America, was to understand an ancient strand of American politics: Hatred of monopoly is one of the oldest American...

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2020 Bundles

Manage your Stratechery subscription. If the famous Jim Barksdale quote is to be believed — the one about there only being two ways to make money in business, bundling and unbundling — then I am long past due for a follow-up to 2017’s The Great Unbundling. I wrote in the introduction: To say that the Internet has changed the media business is...

Sep 2020

Nvidia’s Integration Dreams

Manage your Stratechery subscription. Back in 2010, Kyle Conroy wrote a blogpost entitled, What if I had bought Apple stock instead?: Currently, Apple’s stock is at an all time high. A share today is worth over 40 times its value seven years ago. So, how much would you have today if you purchased stock instead of an Apple product? See for yourself...

Sep 2020

Rethinking the App Store

It seems appropriate that the first ruling in Epic v. Apple was a split decision: Fortnite remains out of the App Store,1 but Epic may continue to use Apple’s developer tools in order to support Unreal Engine. Apple v. Epic The truth is that, from a philosophical perspective, both Epic and Apple make valid points. Epic CEO Tim Sweeney wrote in an...

Aug 2020

Apple, Epic, and the App Store

Manage your Stratechery subscription. Circuit Judge Consuelo M. Callahan, in last week’s decision by the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, reversing the District Court’s ruling that Qualcomm was guilty of antitrust violations, opened her opinion thusly: This case asks us to draw the line between anticompetitive behavior, which is illegal...

Aug 2020

Antitrust Politics

Manage your Stratechery subscription. The only thing more predictable than members of Congress using hearings to make statements instead of ask questions, and when they do ask questions, usually of the “gotcha” variety, refusing to allow witnesses to answer (even as those witnesses seek to run out the clock), is people watching said hearings and griping...

Aug 2020

India, Jio, and the Four Internets

Manage your Stratechery subscription. One of the more pernicious mistruths surrounding the debate about TikTok is that this will potentially lead to the splintering of the Internet; this completely erases the history of China’s Great Firewall, started 23 years ago, which effectively cut China off from most Western services. That the U.S. may finally...

Jul 2020