Adam Kovacevich

The most galling thing about this "movement" is that it claims to speak for consumers when it's actually disdainful of consumers' choices.

Because millions of consumers are choosing "obviously" awful co's like Amazon & Google, consumers must be clueless!

Ivory tower populism.

It's no wonder that the anti-corporate populist crowd love "Enshittification."

It endorses their world view that consumers are ignorant and unable to choose alternatives, and that technology markets are static with no new entrants or innovation.

x.com/ChopraUSA/s...

In Doctorow's world, an unhappy Amazon user is incapable of shopping at Target or Walmart.

An unhappy Google search is incapable of using ChatGPT.

And yet, Doctorow himself promotes decentralized alternatives to Twitter...

x.com/doctorow/st...

And Doctorow's "policy solutions" are all deeply anti-consumer ideas that would raise prices for consumers, and force Amazon packages to be delivered less slowly.

That would all make Amazon's alleged "enshittification" worse!

220M people worldwide belong to Amazon Prime, but Doctorow can't imagine that people actually value the service. In his view, all it sells is "low-quality, high-priced junk."

Apparently those 220M people are mindless idiots, incapable of assessing the true value of Prime.

In Doctorow's world, consumers aren't choosy - they're fools. They stand by idly while services and products get worse, without pursuing alternatives.

If they still like the service, they're "prisoners of neoliberal mind palace."

x.com/doctorow/st...

Cory Doctorow's @doctorow"Enshittification" really ought to have been called "Ensheepification."

It claims to be pro-consumer, but in truth it perpetuates an elite view of consumers as mindless sheep incapable of judging quality/value for themselves.

x.com/linamkhan/s...

Angwin developed an acute case of Google Derangement Syndrome years ago, which looks increasingly out of touch with the competitive Internet of today as well as the AI revolution. This op-ed reads like something from ten years ago - not at all relevant today.

5. Congress should impose mandatory data sharing b/c Google is too vulnerable to govt's whims.

Does Angwin really believe smaller companies are *more* likely to withstand Trump pressure?

4. We need new rival search engines - for shopping, scholarly papers, and custom news search

I suggest Angwin check out:
Shopping → Amazon
Scholarly papers → JSTOR, SSRN
Custom news search → ChatGPT

This all exists already.

3. Angwin: Courts should break up Google bc Trump is trying to censor speech

Reality: DOJ antitrust head Gail Slater argued that Google should be broken up *because* she didn't like the way it had allegedly censored conservatives!

Of course, the case was never *about* speech

The LLM Leaderboard ranking the quality of LLMs doesn't even put Google's Gemini in the top 10!

artificialanalysis.ai/leaderboard...

2. Angwin: "Even the best AI models can't compete without regular access to Google's search index."

Tell that to OpenAI, Meta (Llama), and Anthropic. AI models are a lot more complicated than just access to a web search index. And

Trump Wants To Control Google's Search Results | Opinion President Donald Trump stands to gain unprecedented influence over the world's most powerful information tool.

I wrote about this in @Newsweek: if you don't want Trump overseeing Google's search results (and I don't), be glad Judge Mehta rejected the DOJ's proposed technical committee that would have done exactly that:

www.newsweek.com/trump-bendi...

1. Angwin worries that the remedy opens door for the Trump Admin to start pressuring Google on search results.

But Trump has already been doing that, just like Biden Admin did before him. But the technical cmte Trump's DOJ was seeking in the G case would have gone further!

NYT's @JuliaAngwin has a new piece out on the Google search case, long on Google panic and short on facts and reality.

A few things that jumped out...

🧵

5. The original liability finding will be appealed, and it’s likely that these remedies will also be put on hold until those appeals are exhausted.

So Google is unlikely to be required to adopt these changes soon - and maybe never, if it wins its appeal.

4. Google can’t do exclusive search distribution deals, but it can still pay for non-exclusive deals.

Google will have to adopt a ballot screen on Chrome and its own hardware, and can incentivize its partners to do the same.

3. Biggest thing here is Google being forced to hand over its search index to help rival search engines.

Google must share a list of "ingredients"(search index), not "recipes" (how they rank based on it).

And it excludes the Knowledge Graph and sponsored shopping results.

2. Mehta spent 29 pages of his ruling discussing how competitive the AI space has become, and how that threatens traditional search engines.

It’s a reminder of how competitive innovation is a hare to antitrust law's tortoise.

x.com/Sherman1890...

That led him to reject a slew of far-reaching proposals, including:
- the breakup of Google
- divestiture of Chrome and Android
- a proposed campaign by Google to educate consumers on alternative search engines
- sharing of user queries/clicks
- remedies for website publishers.

In rejecting Google critics' fantastical remedies, his ruling today cited the MSFT precedent nine different times: Remedies must be “tailored to fit the wrong creating the occasion for the remedy.”

Takeaways on the Google search antitrust remedies:

1. Longtime Google haters wanted Judge Mehta to throw the book at Google. But he was mindful of the precedent from the Microsoft case.

🧵

x.com/nytimes/sta...

Lina Khan: Woke and anti-woke serve Big Business

Link:
unherd.com/2025/08/lin...

It wasn't that Bidenomics or anti-corporate populism failed, Khan says. It's that they needed more time to unwind neoliberalism.

The self-delusion runs deep.

This was a political and policy dead-end that Dems need to chuck for good.

Then she goes on to say that voters were focused on cost of living (true). And that was only due to corporate price gouging, which she was working on.

But as @mattyglesias has noted, Khan's ZIRP-era antitrust claim to fame was that some things mattered more than low prices!

Lina Khan (@linamkhan) just got asked the $64,000 question by @SohrabAhmari :

If post-neoliberalism was what working class voters wanted, why did Trump stomp Harris among the working class?

Of course, Khan can't admit that the whole theory was flawed.

Whatever Judge Mehta decides, his remedies will likely be paused pending Google's appeal of the original liability verdict. The appeals courts reversed the remedies in the Microsoft antitrust case for being overbroad. The same thing could happen here if Mehta overshoots.

The Trump Administration’s “Trickle-Down Competition” Plan Against Google: The Justice Department’s risky plan to break Google’s products, help rivals, and hope that consumers somehow benefit - Chamber of Progress Last summer, a federal court found that Google was liable for maintaining a monopoly over general search engines and general search text advertising through

Our @vidushi_law attended the trial, and called the DOJ's theory "trickle down competition":

Bulldoze Google’s most popular products today, hand the blueprints to its rivals, and hope the benefits of competition eventually “trickle down” to consumers.

progresschamber.org/insights/tr...

As I wrote in @Newsweek ⬇️ it's easy to see where this road leads.

Just look at how Trump ousted the Kennedy Center board over a drag show.

Imagine Googling "Donald Trump" and seeing only glowing coverage.

x.com/adamkovac/s...