Transcript
Linus Sebastian (0:00)
Mike and Alyssa are always trying to outdo each other. When Alyssa got a small water bottle, Mike showed up with a four litre jug. When Mike started gardening, Alyssa started beekeeping. Oh, come on. They called a truce for their holiday and used Expedia trip Planner to collaborate on all the details of their trip. Once there, Mike still did more laps around the pool. Whatever. You were made to outdo your holidays. We were made to help organize the competition. Expedia made to travel. What is up? Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to WAN Show Theater. I'll be your host. Linus, Sebastian and Luke will be there and I will probably talk over him a lot, but not right now because he isn't talking. We've got a great show lined up for you guys today. One of the big headline topics this week is of course that Amazon will pay $2.5 billion in a settlement for their prime subscription Traps. Freaking got em. Probably not enough, but hey, at least it's some semblance of justice. In other news, this is cool. Google reveals that its Android PC is coming in 2026. That's right. The often rumored merging of Android and Chrome OS into one dark, unholy and driven platform. Well, doesn't sound like that's quite what's happening, so.
Luke Lafreniere (1:36)
I was so mesmerized by your speech, I don't have anything repaired at all.
Linus Sebastian (1:40)
Nice.
Luke Lafreniere (1:40)
That was fascinating. Spam GPT is a thing and it's gonna suck. And I think it might already be happening.
Linus Sebastian (1:49)
Actually. It looks really good. Which is bad.
Luke Lafreniere (1:53)
Oh yeah, yeah, big time. The other one is. Oh, this made me question things. We'll read more about it. Ascent rivals the game I showed out last week has like really strong crypto connections. Maybe.
Linus Sebastian (2:09)
Oh, really? That's a headline top? No, it doesn't matter. The point is, the show is brought to you today by Corsair Factor and Rove Lab, along with our rap partner, dBrand, our laptop partner, Dylan, our chair partner, Secret Lab. Why don't we jump right into our headline topic? This is a really great, uncharacteristically good question from YouTube chat. And the scrolling broke. Nope. Chowee Komba says Amazon owes everyone two and a half billion. Or Amazon owes you two and a half billion. Us. The collective us. That's the title. Amazon owes us two and a half billion. And us, actually, in this case, doesn't even include us because this appears to be a us thing. To settle an FTC lawsuit that accused Amazon of deceptive prime enrollment and cancellation strategies, the company will end the practice of this is a Nice little W we call it will end the practice and pay a $1 billion civil penalty and send out 1 1/2 billion dollars in refunds to 35 million customers. It is the largest FTC penalty ever in a case involving an FTC rule violation. And the refunds are the second highest restitution award ever obtained by FTC Action. So bravo ftc. I mean Luke and I and everyone knows how Amazon prime and Barley grows. Like it has been such an obvious blatantly anti consumer approach that Amazon has taken with their prime subscriptions pretty much since ever and the kinds of mazes that they created. Wasn't it your grandfather that couldn't figure out how to cancel his prime and he had like multiple subscriptions or something like that? Yeah, like, like the whole thing was just nasty and it's nice to see for freaking once. For freaking once these agencies actually hold companies account with nice big fines that might actually incentivize them to do things properly going forward. Now I obviously would have preferred if that one click to cancel thing had gone through because yeah, big time, like we're in Canada. Right. So we don't necessarily benefit from things that the FTC does in the US except that a lot of the time we do because whatever flies in a company's biggest market tends to kind of trickle over into various other markets. It's one of the reasons that I.