The USA's Federal Trade Commission and 17 state attorneys general have sued Amazon, alleging that Amazon "is a monopolist that uses a set of interlocking anti-competitive and unfair strategies to illegally maintain its monopoly power". The total list of things that piss off the FTC is long, so read their press release for a deeper summary (or the 172-page complaint in full if you're really keen), but the core of the the FTC's beef is that Amazon does a whole bunch of shifty acts that make life as a seller on their platform really difficult. Bias towards Amazon's own products, banishing products that are cheaper elsewhere to the end of search results, forcing sellers to cough up more and more fees to be eligible for Prime shipping, muddying organic search results with paid results and more.
Apple's Eddy Cue has taken the stand in the court case between Google and the US government. Most of the interesting stuff was behind closed doors due to commercial sensitivities (boooo), but what was public is kinda interesting. The government argued that Apple's devotion to privacy is at odds at making Google the default search engine, in an attempt to prove that Apple doesn't pick the default browser based on what's best for its users like they vehemently claim, but because Google keeps dumping truckloads of cash (billions!) on Apple's doorstep. Cue's responses are evasive at best and said that they don't present an option to select your own search engine on device setup as "showing people a bunch of search engines they've never heard of would just be a bad user experience". Hmm, I wonder why they've never heard of them???
A bloke on Twitter noticed that if you ask Google "can you melt eggs", its Featured Snippet (i.e: the top/prime/first thing a user sees) says that "yes, an egg can be melted" - which is wrong, you can't melt an egg. How did the incorrect answer get there? Google pulls the answer from Quora, which is SEO'd to the eyeballs specifically to be that top result (and for some reason Google still trusts this dumpster fire). Quora's website reckons you an melt an egg because it has infused GPT-3 into its platform, adding its responses to common questions alongside human responses. Welcome to the human centipede of information.
Apple 1 Schematic Diagram, March 10, 1976 (The Henry Ford)
📻 Shake Some - The Hovercrafts
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