 I see right here on CBS News, so it must be true that quote, users have long been frustrated by discrepancies when sending messages between Apple and non-Apple products, including lower media quality, diminished editing capabilities and even different colors for the messages themselves. And quote, I had not been aware of that frustration, though I am admittedly a little bit slow on understanding technology products. Is there indeed a consumer harm underlying all this stuff and does antitrust law the way to address it? Right, so obviously referencing the green text bubbles as the justification for an antitrust action is flatly ridiculous. I associate myself just this once with a tweet by Ben Dreyfus, who noted this weekend that he, this has made him a libertarian. This is the moment, the green text is an antitrust violation, is the thing that made him a libertarian, and he correctly notes that what Apple owes to Android users is nothing because they are not its customers. And I think that that is a really pretty legit point. Nick, first of all, Ben Dreyfus, you should associate more than just once and has been a secret libertarian for a long time, but you are an Android user. You're also, first of all, I like Catherine who is just an Android. Yes, good looking out on you. Can you tell us, can you give us a brief commercial for Androids? I don't really understand what they are. Yeah, they are for the same money. They're cheaper and you get a much better phone with more capabilities. The one thing I want to point out to Merrick Garland, who is an idiot, is that- Look in the camera and point. I'm trying to, I'm not sure where the camera is now. There are cameras all over my apartment. I'm never sure which one is on. No, but on the Android system, I have a Samsung phone on the Verizon network. My text bubbles are green and I'm happy to have them as green. So the idea, I really don't know a single person who gives a flying fuck about what color a text bubble is and I don't care that I could pay more money to get an iPhone. I mean, it's just, it's an absurd case and it exemplifies everything that is wrong with Joe Biden's approach to the economy. I suspect we'll be talking about other minions in his administration later in the show, but this is the type of thing. Apple has a 60% market share in the United States for smartphones and globally, Android phones are bigger and more used. This is such a nothing burger and if your attorney general is focusing on stuff like this, they are just being anti-capitalist or they have some bone to pick. That is not quite visible or is the actual cause of action here. This is absurd and it should cause a mass defection from everybody who's not an idiot when it comes to supporting somebody like Merrick Garland or for that matter, Joe Biden. Peter, just to counter, Mr. Gillespie here. Dr. Gillespie. Dr. Gillespie here. There has been a lot of what have been called con-servatives. This is literally a headline I read this morning of people who like Lina Khan because there's an increased national conservative interest in antitrust and using the big stick against Silicon Valley. Google has also come under some antitrust excitements under the Biden administration. If I'm not correct a little bit on the Trump administration as well, is laissez-faire America becoming more like deregiste Europe these days, Peter? Well, to start with, I just wanna say that while I'm not a conservative, I do think the wrath of Khan is the best Star Trek film and I'm a contrarian. No, I don't have that. I think another thing I think here. You're a real Khan. You're a contrarian. That's right there, guys. That's it. I'm a con-servarian. Oh my goodness. Thank you, Catherine. As always, the best editor here. There is a real sense in which the United States is following Europe's lead here. Europe has passed a whole bunch of tech regulations and what you see with a lot of them is that they fly under the banner of, we're gonna help consumers. This is just about making the market more fair and more competitive but what they're actually doing is just giving bureaucrats the power to play product designer and that is exactly what is happening here with the Biden administration suit against Apple. They've decided that they don't like how Apple has designed their products. That is the core contention here. Oh, Apple. Wait, your iMessage should be, it should work. It should have exactly the same capabilities when you're talking to Google users. It's just, it's incredibly petty, small ball stuff and it seems to work from the presumption. This is a little bit of an exaggeration but the green bubble is something like a human right, like DoorDash. It's not, I mean, don't be crazy here, right? It's just kind of nutty. There was an exchange in an NPR report on this that I thought was really telling. So you've got the host who's asking NPR tech correspondent Derek Kerr about what the harms are here. He says, well, you know, so the Justice Department has given the example of, you know, you might not get that green bubble if you're not on the iPhone. So how else has Apple made the user experience worse for other people? And the tech correspondent for NPR responds, well, you know, iMessage in iPhone is a good example. If you're not an iPhone user, you're basically locked out of having a fun experience because you will not see those fun stickers like the heart or the thumbs up. And remember, this is the world that young people live in. Justice Department says when Apple designs its products this way, it's basically locking people into the iPhone family. The hearts and the stickers and the green bubble, they're making a federal case out of that. It's just bonkers. I also love- Catherine, they should make the federal case out of it. You can't plug in your headphones anymore, right? That's- I mean, whatever you say, grandma. You in fact can, you just need the dongle. By a little adapter. The thing that blows my mind about this is that there are people from the Justice Department, from the FTC, they're looking straight into the camera and just saying the Microsoft case was a huge success and we're gonna do it again, right? So this is a wild historical counterfactual. Like the idea that somehow antitrust action gave us the competitive ecosystem that we have today in terms of technology is just flatly untrue. The idea- I mostly failed antitrust action to be clear. Right. And the idea that this is, as Peter said, the idea that this is worthy of the attention of, this level of details worthy of the attention of, kind of what will end up being billions of dollars of the great legal minds of our government. I listen to the Motley Fool podcast sometimes because I'm attempting to be a little bit less stupid about the markets and what they said about this this morning, I thought was pretty good, which was, they just said, hey, Apple's gonna make this go away with money and time and Apple has a lot of money. They just have a ton of money laying around as a general matter and that what the real cost will be is that they're going to be distracted by this extremely complex, extremely expensive, extremely lengthy regulatory action and they're not gonna, they're gonna be less innovative and that that's a huge problem for this company which, you know, customers expect a certain amount of whiz bang innovation, I guess. I would certainly like to see the next cool thing that Apple is doing and not have them be distracted by this. You know, this is like a very, very, very direct illustration of the trade-offs that this type of antitrust action or other regulatory interference has, which is that a lot of smart people at this company spent this whole week and many months before and will spend many years after worrying about, you know, what Jonathan Cantor has to say instead of how to make the next cool thing that's gonna make our lives better. We should talk just a little bit more about that Microsoft comparison because if you go back to the Microsoft case, the Justice Department's argument was that Microsoft had basically a monopoly on desktop soft OS software and it used that monopoly to push their own internet browser, Microsoft Explorer. At the time they had about 80% of the market. Apple has, in the United States, about 60, 65% of the smartphone market. So that's a big share, but what the Justice Department has done is that they've made up a kind of a fake stat where Apple has 70% of the, I can't remember what the- And they call it, it's like the fancy schmancy smartphone category. Yes, it's the elite phone or the business phone, but yes, that is exactly what it is. It's the fancy phone category. There is a further element of this, which is cultural and I'll explain it to you, Apple users, people who use Apple products, and I have an iPad and you know, my first, one of my first big jobs out of college was actually working on an early Mac system for the publisher of Mac user, et cetera. But Apple people think the whole world exists in Apple universe and that, you know, everybody is desperate to be an Apple user, et cetera. And nobody fucking cares. If you like Apple products, you buy Apple products. If you don't, you buy Android, you buy Google, you buy Windows, et cetera, and you buy things, you know, even Kindle, which is its own version of an Android operating system and things like that. This is such a high functioning market where winners and losers are pretty fluid. They go up and down. There's a lot of innovation. And to, you know, to kind of underscore Peter's point, if 60% of the US smartphone market for Apple is enough to trigger some kind of antitrust action, Windows still has a 55% market share of computers, PC, you know, of desktop and notebook computers. So then this means the next action will be another case against Microsoft, which nobody is pretending is dominating and destroying markets, you know, through its monopoly power. I mean, these are functioning markets. And if, you know, they, if Merrick Garland is going after this kind of stuff, it's just like, it's a sign of just absolute stupidity. That was a clip from the latest episode of the Reason Roundtable. 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