Justiça

Elon Musk’s lawyers sent a cease-and-desist letter to Nitter’s maintainer, a legitimate service that displays X posts through a different interface. The person, who goes by zedeus, complied with the threat, took down their own Nitter instance, and stopped development.

These guys don’t even bother hiding the hypocrisy anymore. They scrape the entire internet to feed their AI parrots, but turn around and use financial muscle and legal harassment to go after individuals doing the same thing — for more honest reasons and on a garage-shop scale.

XCancel, the popular Nitter instance I’ve been using for several months now, is still up.

Update (19h33): XCancel is down, too.

The US ruled the “remedies” to be applied to Google in the case where the company was found guilty of monopolistic practices in the search market:

  • Prohibition from entering or maintaining exclusive contracts relating to the distribution of Google Search, Chrome, Google Assistant, and the Gemini app
  • Requirement to make certain search index and user-interaction data available to rivals and potential rivals.
  • Requirement to offer search and search text ads syndication services to enable rivals and potential rivals to compete.

And that’s it.

It wasn’t much and everyone complained. Well, almost everyone: Apple and Mozilla — which receive huge payments from Google to keep its search engine as the default in iOS/Safari and Firefox, respectively — are relieved.

In the lawsuit where the US Justice is deciding which “remedy” to give to Alphabet, following its conviction for monopolizing the search engine market, Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice-president of services, said that in April, the volume of searches made via Safari shrank for the first time in history — that is, in almost two decades.

Eddy attributes the decline to the rise of generative AI assistants that deliver pre-digested search results, such as Perplexity (with whom Apple is reportedly in talks), ChatGPT, and Claude.

Alphabet (Google) shares took a 7.5% dive following the Apple executive’s statement, as reported by Bloomberg. The company released a statement disputing the information, saying that “we continue to see overall query growth in Search. That includes an increase in total queries coming from Apple’s devices and platform”

Who to believe? I don’t know, but if there were doubts that a seismic shift is underway, data like this helps dispel them.

Eddy Cue also said that Apple is considering changing Safari so that the browser can incorporate AI assistants, and that he has lost sleep over the possibility of losing the annual USD 20 billion that Google pays as a “sweetener” to be Safari’s default search engine. I almost feel sorry for him.