Welcome to the Tech Meme Ride Home for Wednesday, January 13th, 2021.

I'm Brian McCullough today.

The Plaid Visa merger is called off and I'll tell you why I think this is a sign of the current situation for tech.

More tectonic shifts in the chip industry including Qualcomm acquiring a chip startup and Intel losing its CEO.

More smoke around the fire story of an Apple car and Facebook has noticed that you've started

downloading alternatives to WhatsApp.

Here's what you missed today in the world of Tech.

This has been a weird news day where several threads that we've been discussing of late have all

converged and are sort of spilling all over each other. First, when we vaguely talk about

the new winds of antitrust and anti-competition regulation blowing

and how that might have real world impact on the tech sector and tech markets. This is what we mean. Visa has announced it is abandoning

its 5.3 billion-dollar planned acquisition of FinTech firm Plaid after the DOJ sued over antitrust

concerns back in November. Now maybe Visa Plaid is a unique case and I'm open to

people's opinions about this but I feel like this is the sort of acquisition that would have sailed through without anyone blinking an eye five or six years ago.

Quoting the journal, Plaid the argued, was a nascent but important competitive threat to Visa

and eliminating that threat would lead to higher prices, less innovation, and higher entry barriers for online debit services.

Visa initially vowed to fight the government and a trial was scheduled for June in a California federal court.

Visa and Plaid mutually agreed to end the deal.

Plaid Chief Executive Zach Parrot said in an interview that Plaid is in good shape to prosper as an independent

company because consumers flocked to the digital finance apps Plaid powers during the

coronavirus pandemic.

The number of paying plaid customers has increased more than 60% since the visa deal was

...