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Guaranteed human. CallZone Media. Hello and welcome to Better Offline, and of course I'm show notes for links to back up everything I'm saying. I'm not creative enough to make this stuff up. It's real, I promise. Anyway,

the start of August felt kind of surreal. For the first time since JetGPT launched in November

2022, there were signs that the markets were finally starting to wake up to the bullshit of

generative AI and kind of seeing that it wasn't making anyone money, really. You know, the very

obvious thing that some of us have been saying for quite some time anyway, though.

It was remarkable, but not as remarkable as what happened on August 5th,

when a federal judge delivered his ruling in an antitrust case filed against Google by the US Department of Justice.

In 300 pages of dense legal text, Judge Amit Meta confirmed an excruciating detail that lengthen the breadth

of what all of us kind of sort of knew. The Google has a monopoly in search and online general

text advertising, and that's a specific term of art. For many reasons, this ruling was a humiliating

one for Google, not least because it showed the sordid, nasty little

details of how it's maintained its market dominance and actively impeded any chance of fair

competition in the search market. Documents obtained through discovery revealed the incredible

amounts of money that Google's been paying to companies. They paid Samsung $8 billion over four years, and Apple $20 billion in

2022 alone, to remain the default search engine on their devices, as well as Mozilla that makes

a Firefox browser who they pay about half a billion dollars a year. To be clear, this is one of the

grizzly a pots. Mozilla is an organization I actually admire, and they do a lot of

cool stuff technologically. But it also kind of revealed how dependent they are on Google's money to

stay afloat. Anyway, Judge Meta found that Google had violated the Sherman Act, a century-old

Dantotrust legislation that, among other things, led to the breakup of Standard Oil in 1910, as well as the

breakup of AT&T in 1982. This is a significant moment in Silicon Valley history, and it's an

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