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- [00:05]
Brian McCullough
Welcome to the Tech Meme Ride home for Friday, April 18th, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough. Today Google is ruled an illegal monopoly again, but for a different reason this time. Switch to pre orders are back on. Americans are flocking to TEMU and Shein alternatives and in the weekend long read suggestions. What if I told you 25% of community college applicants are now AI bots? And not only that, the bots are now, quote attending classes. Here's what you missed today in the world of tec. Well, it's happened again. A US Judge says Google acted illegally to maintain a monopoly in some online advertising tech. This is the second time in a year a court has found Google acted illegally in a monopolistic context, though this time is different from last time. Quoting the Times, Judge Leoni Brinkaima of the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia said in a 115 page ruling that Google had broken the law to build its dominance over the largely invisible system of technology that places advertisements on pages across the Web. The Justice Department and a group of states had sued Google, arguing that its monopoly in ad technology allowed the company to charge higher prices and take a bigger portion of each sale. In addition to depriving rivals of the ability to compete, this exclusionary conduct substantially harmed Google's publisher customers, the competitive process, and ultimately consumers of information on the open Web, Judge Brinkema said. The government argued in its case that Google had a monopoly over three parts of the online advertising market, the tools used by online publishers like news sites to host open ad space, the tools advertisers use to buy that ad space, and the software that facilitates those transactions. Judge Brinkema ruled in the government's favor in two of those finding that Google illegally built a monopoly over publisher tools and the software system. She dismissed the third, the tools used by advertisers, saying the government had failed to prove that it constituted a real and defined market. Another federal judge ruled in August that the company had a monopoly in online search. He is now considering a request by the Justice Department to break up the company, with a three week hearing on the matter scheduled to begin on Monday. Judge Brinkema, too, will have an opportunity to force changes to Google's business. On Thursday, she gave both sides seven days to propose a schedule for the next phase of the case. In its lawsuit, the Justice Department preemptively asked the court to force Google to sell some pieces of the ad technology business it had acquired over the years. The government will now assess the ruling to determine what to ask the court to do to remedy the monopoly. We won half of this case and we will appeal the other half, said Leanne Mulholland, Google's vice president of regulatory affairs. Publishers have many options and they choose Google because our ad tech tools are simple, affordable and effective, end quote. U.S. attorney General Pam Bondi called the ruling a quote, landmark victory in the ongoing fight to stop Google from monopolizing the digital public square, end quote. Those last two quotes are interesting to me because number one, by my math, two thirds is different than one half. But also that quote from Bondi is red meat for tea leaf readers trying to suss out how this administration will think of big tech antitrust cases going forward. Now, again, the DOJ and the 17 US states that brought this antitrust case are apparently seeking to force Google to sell off its network ad business, which is around 12% of Alphabet's total revenue. So what would this mean? Quoting Axios Forcing Google to give up its ad tech arm would be punitive, but wouldn't fundamentally change Google's business. The company still makes makes mountains of money selling ads alongside its own YouTube videos and search results. But a forced divestiture would almost certainly impact Google's top line enough to force it to recalibrate its spending on new areas of investment, such as its AI and cloud businesses. Google largely relies on ad revenue to fuel its new bets. The court drew a distinction between the markets for advertising exchanges and ad servers, where it found Google has an illegal monopoly, and the general market for display ads online, where it found Google does not. The ruling means that the judge will move on to a phase in the trial that considers what sort of penalties or remedies to impose. The search case is now in that phase as well. There the government is seeking to force Google to divest its Chrome search engine. It's also possible Google will be forced to give up its lucrative search partnership deals with device makers like Apple as a result of that case as well, end quote. Now, I don't always agree with him, but I thought Matt Stoller made an interesting point on this ruling in his the Big Newsletter newsletter. Mainly, Google is now facing momentum, sort of like a snowball going downhill, accumulating mass. Actually, this decision is now the third loss for Google. In 2023, Google lost a monopolization case to Epic Games over its control of the Android App Store. Last year the company lost a case over its control of search, and today it lost a third case over yet another line of business. These decisions build on each other. Brinkhama cited the decision in the search case to describe why Google had control over so many small advertisers. Referencing across the cases will continue to happen as we into the remedy phase. Additionally, private and state antitrust cases, like a case led by the Texas Attorney General on ad tech currently working its way through the courts, will benefit from this decision as well. End quote Nintendo this morning announced Switch to Pre orders will start in the US on April 24, with the price staying at the initially announced $450 for the console, but price of accessories will go up Quoting The Verge, the Switch 2 Joy Con Pro controller and Switch 2 camera have all gone up in price. Originally, the Joy Con was priced at $89.99 and is now $94.99. The Pro Controller has also gone up $5 from $79.99 to $84.99. Finally, the Switch 2 camera has gone from $49.99 to $54.99. Nintendo closed its announcement with an apology stating, we apologize for the retail pre order delay and hope this reduces some of the unce be experiencing. End quote not too long ago, we did a story where Insiders were suggesting ChatGPT was cutting corners to ship product, and if so, this is the sort of thing they might have caught if they had more time for testing. ChatGPT users are figuring out the location of photos using O3's image analyzing capabilities paired with its web search functionality, thereby raising privacy concerns. Quoting Tech Crunch, users on X quickly discovered that O3 in particular is quite good at deducing cities, landmarks, and even restaurants and bars from subtle visual clues. In many cases, the models don't appear to be drawing on memories of past ChatGPT conversations or EXIF data, which is the metadata attached to photos that reveal details such as where the photo was taken. X is filled with examples of users giving ChatGPT restaurant menus, neighborhood snaps, facades and self portraits, and instructing O3 to imagine it's playing Geodes, an online game that challenges players to guess locations from Google Street View images. It's an obvious potential privacy issue. There's nothing preventing a bad actor from screenshotting, say, a person's Instagram story and using ChatGPT to try to dox them. Of course, this could be done even before the launch of 03 and 04 mini. TechCrunch ran a number of photos through 03 and an older model without image reasoning capabilities, GPT4O, to compare the model's location guessing skills. Surprisingly, GPT4O arrived at the same correct answer as O3 more often than not and took less time. End Quote TechCrunch says that US consumers are flocking to Chinese shopping apps Dhgate and Taobao, which let them buy directly from Chinese manufacturers as Shein and Temu prices rise amidst tariffs and whatnot. Quote the Chinese e commerce marketplace app Dhgate, which is now the number two free iPhone app in the US isn't the only one that's oddly benef from President Trump's tariffs on US imports from China. Another Chinese shopping app, Taobao, has now also entered the top five as of Thursday. US Consumers began flocking to these apps over the past several days in the wake of numerous TikTok videos from Chinese manufacturers explaining how much of the luxury goods market operates out of China. The videos claim that many products from top luxury brands like clothing, handbags, shoes and accessories are actually originally made in China. The items are then shipped over to the brand's home country, like Italy or France, where they're repackaged after the brand's label is applied, according to these videos. Other US and Chinese TikTok creators then pointed to e commerce apps like Dhgate and Taobao as a way to buy directly from the Chinese manufacturers, foregoing the huge markup the luxury brands charge. Already wary of increasing prices on popular apps like shein and Temu, US consumers quickly began downloading these alternatives. In April, Taobao's estimated downloads totaled approximately 150,000, a 514% increase from the 30,000 it saw during the same period last month, according to news data from app intelligence provider App figures. As with dhgate, Taobao's downloads surged over this past weekend, with installs increasing 5.7x between last Friday and Saturday, the firm said. Taobao also grew from the number 49 shopping app on Saturday to become the number two app, topping Walmart, Amazon, Shein and Temu. Chinese app Alibaba.com is also climbing the charts here. Now the number six shopping app on the US App Store. Notably App Figure says that Taobao has never been in the top overall charts on the US App Store before, according to its data, which goes back to January 1, 2017. While switching shopping apps won't actually save US consumers from tariffs on Chinese imports, shoppers likely think buying direct from manufacturers could potentially lower the overall cost of their purchases. For other consumers, it's simply a way to seek out luxury style goods or dupes at a better price.
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Brian McCullough
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- [12:56]
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- [13:02]
Brian McCullough
Time for the weekend long read suggestions and first up, this is straight up the wildest story I've read about AI to date. We know that AI is potentially great for doing scams, right? Especially for aping actual humans. When doing that scamming well, get this. U.S. community colleges are suddenly battling a flood of fake or BOT students who bilk financial aid by enrolling in online or REMOT classes and then submitting AI generated coursework. Quoting Voice of San Diego Ever since the pandemic forced schools to go virtual, the number of online classes offered by community colleges has exploded. That has been a welcome development for many students who value the flexibility online classes offer. But it has also given rise to the incredibly invasive and uniquely modern phenomenon of bot students now besieging community college professors. The bot's goal is to bilk state and federal financial aid money by enrolling in classes and remaining enrolled in them long enough for aid disbursements to go out. They often accomplish this by submitting AI generated work. And because community colleges accept all applicants, they've been almost exclusively impacted by the fraud that has put teachers on the front lines of an ever evolving war on fraud, muddied the teaching experience and thrown up significant barriers to students ability to access courses. What has made the situation all the more difficult, some teachers say, is the feeling that administrators haven't done enough to curb the cris. Colleges first started seeing bots managed by fraud rings invade classes around 2021. Those bots seem to generally be real people managing networks of fake student aliases. The more they manage, the more financial aid money they can potentially steal. Four years later, there are no clear signs it's slowing down. During 2024 alone, fraudulent students at California community colleges swindled more than $11 million in state and federal financial aid dollars, more than double what was stolen the prior year. Year. Last year, the state chancellor's office estimated 25% of community college applicants were bots. Despite the eye popping sum, state leaders are quick to point out that amounts to a fraction of the around $3.2 billion combined state and federal financial aid dispersed last year. But for many community college teachers, particularly those who teach online courses, the influx of BOT students has changed what it means to be a teacher, said Eric Mag, who has taught at Southwestern for 21 years. We didn't used to have to decide if our students were human. They were all people. But now there's this skepticism because a growing number of people we're teaching are not real. We're having to have these conversations with students like are you real? Is your work real? Mag said. It's really complicated, the relationship between the teacher and the student. In almost like a fundamental way. Those teacher led investigations have become more difficult over the years, professors say. While some bots simply don't submit classwork and hope they can skate by. They also frequently use AI programs to generate classwork that they then submit. Determining whether a student is a bot can be a confusing task. After all, even real students use AI to do some good old fashioned cheating in classes. There are some patterns, though. Asynchronous online courses tend to be the heaviest hit. So are classes with large sizes and shorter term courses like those that run for only eight weeks. Some teachers also said classes whose names start with letters at the beginning of the Alphabet are harder hit as well. The time spent doing Blade Runner esque bot detection has also stretched professors thin, said Kerry Language, a counselor and the president of Southwestern College's Academic Senate. It's really hard to create a sense of community and help students who are struggling when you're spending the first couple weeks trying to figure out who's a bot, she said. Finding the fraudulent students early is key, though. If they can be identified and dropped before the third week of the semester, when Southwestern distributes aid funds, the bots don't get the money they're after. It also allows professors to open the seats held by scammers to real students who are crowded out. But dropping huge amounts of enrollees can also be frightening to teachers who worry that should their classes not fill back up, they may be axed. Even after dropping the fraudulent students, though, the bot nightmare isn't over. As soon as seats open up in classes, professors often receive hundreds of nearly identical emails from purported students requesting they be added to the class. Those emails tended to ring some linguistic alarm bells. They feature clunky phrases that are uncommon for modern students to use, like I kindly request or Warm regards or I look forward to your positive response. Much of that stilted language lines up with what has been seen from the AI generated content submitted by Bot Studio. That mad bot powered dash for enrollment has left some students unable to register for the classes they need. It has also given rise to a sort of whisper network where professors recommend students reference them by name when trying to get added to other classes. Finally, this week, longtime listeners will know my longtime fascination with the Fermi paradox. In a different, maybe more ideal timeline, I'd be the host of a podcast devoted to nothing other than debating solutions to the Fermi paradox. Well, from my literal Fermi Paradox, Google Alert scientists have found the strongest signal yet that could indicate life on another planet. Quoting the New York times while inspecting K2 18B, Dr. Madhusadan and his colleagues discovered it had many of the molecules they had predicted a Hycean planet would possess. In 2023, they reported that they had also detected faint hints of another molecule and one of huge potential importance, dimethyl sulfide, which is made of sulfur, carbon and hydrogen. On Earth, the only known source of dimethyl sulfide is life in the ocean. For instance, certain forms of algae produce the compound, which wafts into the air and adds to the sea's distinctive odor. Long before the Webb Telescope was launched, astrobiologists had wondered whether dimethyl sulfide might serve as a sign of life on other planets planets last year, Dr. Matt Hussudan and his colleagues got a second chance to look for dimethyl sulfide as K2 18B orbited in front of its star. They used a different instrument on the Webb Telescope to analyze the starlight passing through the planet's atmosphere. This time they saw an even stronger signal of dimethyl sulfide, along with a similar molecule called dimethyl disulfide. It's a shock to the system, Dr. Matt Hussein said. We spent an enormous amount of time just trying to get rid of the signal. But no matter how the scientists revisited their readings, the signal strong. They concluded that K2.18B may in fact harbor a tremendous supply of dimethyl sulfide in its atmosphere, thousands of times higher than the level found on Earth. This would suggest that its hycean seas are brimming with life. Now obviously there are still questions to answer around all this and plenty of doubts and doubters as well. Otherwise this would be a much bigger news headline, but still fun for folks like me who geek out over this stuff. No weekend bonus episodes for you this weekend for obvious reasons. In fact, as I think I told you, we've already gotten 6 to 8 inches of snow this morning where we are on this side of the mountain on Czech's calendar April 18. We believe and hope we will be able to get safely down the mountain to the Denver Airport tomorrow afternoon and won't be snowed in all weekend. But who knows, maybe I'll be coming to you again from the side of this mountain on Monday. Hopefully not talk to you then.
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