The Near Memo, Episode 20

Part 1 Video: Google makes it easier to upload products & services and give Pointy away for free

Part 2 Video- Starts 9:41: Google Local Food Order is so easy it's magical & shows exactly where Google & Local search is going

Part 3 Video- Starts 18:35: Anti-trust and local consolidation

Reference Articles:

1- Now it’s easier to show what your business offers on Google

2- Google's Online Food Ordering Is Magical, and the Future of Local Search

3- The Cicilline Salvo

4- Momentfeed acquired by Uberall

Transcript:

Greg: Okay, welcome everybody to our 20th, uh, edition of the near memo. And today you have just me and Mike Blumenthal, David Mim is off and golfing somewhere, uh, hopefully doing well with that. And this is our summer solstice slash junior. Addition. So we're going to do something a little bit different. Uh we're we're going to talk about different things that happened this week, but we're going to try and weave them into a kind of a larger conversation and how all the pieces fit together.

And, um, Mike, do you want to say anything before we get started?

Mike: No just that, uh, if you're listening to our podcasts and not watching this on video, you need to join us on YouTube because Greg's due this week looks very much like Medusa. And when, when he pointed it out to me told me I would turn to stone.

Greg: Yes, it's the Medusa cut. That's specifically what I asked for.

Mike: No. Very casual. Well, the, it is very casual based on the fact that I didn't, I just went into the shower and that was it. The, the, the challenge, you know, I used to have much shorter hair. I grew it

Greg: out. People seem to like it, but then it got really heavy and bulky.

And so I cut it recently. I had a cut for the first time in 16 months or something, or almost 16 months. And, um, I said, well, don't

Mike: take, don't take it all the way back. And, and, you know, you get this sort of

Greg: awkward kind of neither fish nor fowl kind of hair. So. Okay. Uh, well,

Mike: once at some point you become like me where he'd had the same hairstyle for 50, 40 years.

It doesn't change just, yeah. You don't even look when they cut it. It's just kind of I'm, I'm

Greg: almost at that point.

Mike: All right. So, so, uh, what, what, what did Google,

Greg: uh, what did Google do? Just a couple of days? I mean, Google is always doing things, but they, they made it, they made a blog post. That that was pretty interesting.

Mike: Yeah, the black post was one about their new merchant experience. Prime was the sort of lead story where a merchant can now edit their listing directly from the search interface, as opposed to having to go all the way. The Google my business, but what was interesting to me about it was several things.

One was they're giving much more granular ability to input much more granular information directly from search. So things like business services being like product can be entered now directly from a search interface. So it's very simple. And then the other piece was that they're giving away pointy their point of sale, uh, sort of scanning.

Automatically sees what product you are selling at point of sale, and then uploads them to the cloud for inclusion in the pro merchant center. They're giving that away for free until

Greg: September. I mean, the thing just to digress about pointing for a second, I mean, it was originally an Irish company. It was acquired, I think in January of 2020, but I may be mistaken about that by Google.

And they, you know, for years, companies have been trying to work with small businesses to get real-time inventory on them. And pointy had this kind of genius approach that required no, literally no investment of time from the business owners, just to plug in to their point of sale. And then they capture the inventory data and they use an algorithm to make assumptions about what's in stock, based on the frequency of items sold if I'm oversimplifying, but it's, it was just really a brilliant kind of solution to the, uh, to the problem of getting small business inventory online.

And so

Mike: a good bridge solutions. For our business, that's got point of sale, but isn't ready for, or hasn't implemented Shopify or something. Right. So it works for smaller places, less sophisticated places and opens up the world of product inventory to Google.

Greg: Right. And I think, I think Google doesn't really care who what the source of the product inventory data is.

As long as they get the. And, um, you know, the various players in the ecosystem that are providing that at different levels of sophistication. And I w

Mike: I would posit that the success of Shopify and all the other players getting into this, we saw us square introducing a point of sale system last weekend,

Greg: where and Wix it was, um, it was a Stripe actually.

That's right,

Mike: sir. Right straight then. But all of them getting into it, I think Google would get out and we'll get out of the hardware at some point. I think the hardware would be a distraction.

Greg: Yeah. I mean, what's, what's interesting. Just briefly about Wickson Stripe is, um, you know, I mean, in the sort of pan, uh, I almost said Pantheon, that's not exactly right.

You've got me on this kind of Greek, uh, uh, thing, uh,

Mike: in Greek, the Greek gods syndrome. Yes.

Greg: In the, in the sort

Mike: of a range of services that these companies are offering their, their small business customers, um, you know, point of sale. Uh, you know, for awhile, Groupon had a point of sale, a

Greg: hardware, uh, point of sale system.

And, and I think Yelp did as well. Um, but, but it's, it's very interesting to sort of see these e-commerce companies are these digital companies, you know, coming into the physical world and, and complementing their services with this, you know, physical point of sale system, which of course gives them access to a tremendous amount of data, which is really valued.

Uh, as we're talking right now, right.

Mike: And it gives Google access to all this data, more importantly, right? One of the big trends in Google that we've been seeing is this more granularity in the, in the knowledge graph. So if they have a business location, they want to know what services that business has or what products that business has.

And this PR this process has been going on obviously, or at least visit. For 10 years. Uh, in fact, what I said about this morning was how some ideas from Google are ahead of their time. Like frugal was 12 years too early, almost right. Pre-product merchant center now makes sense because. There's so much more online available data, but Google is collating all of that and trying to, to assess it in real time, building out an incredible knowledge graph of locations of hours of phone numbers, products, attributes, every attributes event.

Everything that's right. I mean, it's almost, it's almost, it's too much in a certain way. I mean, I think

Greg: Google is insatiable when it comes to data, but, but, uh,

Mike: you know, I, I typically,

Greg: when I use Google maps, I'm just using it for, you know, quick local searches or I'm using it for directions. Although increasingly I use apple maps for directions in my car.

And, and when, when you spend any time with Google maps, if you drill into it and you examine all the buttons and all the features, I mean, it's, it's, it goes down and

Mike: down and down and down, and there's just an enormous amount of

Greg: content there. Um, you know, I, I, I wonder sometimes whether it's like Excel or something, you know, I can do three things on Excel, but, you know, P people who really master it can do an enormous number of things.

And I just wonder if all that informational depth, I mean, Google will certainly put it to you. Um, but, but ordinary people can't take full advantage of that. It seems to me, um, we'll have to serve it up in a really, uh, right time, right place kind of

Mike: way. That's correct. And I think maps you right. Is getting very complicated as an interface, but I think that they are working on multiple simpler interfaces to services.

One example of that is searched by photos that we're seeing on the right mobile desktop, where you're just all you're seeing about a business. The shift away from a yellow page listing to just a visual image of the product you searched for locally, plus a star rating from the business. And you can compare the engagement rings from Barbara Oliver to the engagement rings from Andrew jewelers in market.

Very, very Instagram. He liked display. So they are exploring interfaces that are much simpler, at least as an interface. Transactions. So I was reading some 2017 research from Google that said that one out of two searchers went to, did local searches on Google with the goal of setting up an appointment.

Right? Yeah. Um, so I mean, I think people have the expectation that they will be able to, and certainly Google has been building features that allow that messaging, uh, is one of those, um, the integration with very EnCap, various calendaring. Uh, companies is another. And as I explored the other day in the blog post ordering food for delivery or pickup is another well Google for a few years,

Greg: at least, um, has been saying that, uh, one of their sort of informal mission statement.

Is, um, and I can't remember it verbatim right now. Sundar Pichai said it at one of their developer conferences, something, something, something like organize all the world's information and get things done. Right. So they've added get things done, right? So they added this sort of transactional dimension to their discussion of what their purpose was.

And this is exactly what you're talking about. You know, bringing all these capabilities together into the, into the search or maps interface that then allow, allows people to go to the next one. The transactional step and make a connection to a business or secure, you know, make an order or secure an appointment or whatever it is, um, which, which also enormously helps them in terms of proving value, delivers a good experience to the customer, but it also enables them to prove value to the, to the business owner sort of helps boost their general proposition.

Mike: And because they also have a payment system they're able to extract at least some rent from every transit.

Greg: Right. And so, so diversifying revenue, uh, there. So, so talk

Mike: a little bit for people who

Greg: haven't read the article about, um, Google's food, ordering experience, talk a little bit about what that was like, and we can get into the broader implications of that.

Sure. So

Mike: I saw somebody mentioned on Twitter that burger came seemed to be having an X or they S they saw on Twitter where burger king now had an order button next to the location. In the three pack. So I did the search on my phone and I had a slightly different experience where I saw what was essentially a branded pack result, which is an integration of the NA of the full brand knowledge graph, plus the local information into a singular display and it, where you could learn about the brand as well as see the three nears locations.

And at the top of that big, bold, very easy to see our dimiss where two options order for pickup in order for today. And I was curious, so I clicked the order for delivery and it took me into their new backend ordering system for restaurants that they've built on their platform. That, and this is based

Greg: on the ordering app.

Mike: It's not based on the ordering app. It's different from the ordering app. Um, this is a backend that's being built out simultaneously to the ordering app. The ordering app is again for smaller businesses. Uh, this is for bigger businesses. Enterprise level. Right. And it was amazing. They knew where I was located.

They guessed of the three burger Kings that were near me, the guests, the one that was closest, they presented in a very fluid way. The whole menu, I was able to easily add the main items I wanted and the condiments clicked order. And because I've transacted with Google in the past, they knew my credit card information.

All right. So the only thing I had to enter, wasn't the CVC. So literally. I mean from beginning to end, it took one minute and 16 seconds. I timed it. I only had to enter, there was eight clicks, four keystrokes, and that was done. Uh, so it was very, very fluid. It was like magic and I wasn't even sure there was no indication who was delivering it.

Uh, there was no. Little, the guest to my location. I'm in a seven floor building. I wasn't even sure how they were going to find me, although I am on the main directory. And I thought, well, and I placed an order for $2 and 98 cents because it said there were no delivery fees. I thought, God, this is going to cost me $10 to get a bag of nuggets.

As the experiment. Of course I would have pushed you. Did you eat them? I did. Yes. That's the one failure in the experiment that I couldn't resist them. And I've been so good throughout the whole pandemic. And I hate the fucking Mick, uh, burger king nuggets, but they weren't bad. They weren't bad. God only knows what was in them.

Anyways, they, you know, literally 22 minutes. There's a knock on my door and I opened the door and there's a gentleman there with a door dash hat and a beautiful bag with this one, the light a minute that he hands over to me and I have everything. I mean, it was, and they can only do this because they have all this great local graph.

They have the great platform to deliver it on. They have all my credit card information. They have a relationship with burger king and obviously somebody's subsidizing the DoorDash component because the only fee was the 44 cent tip the driver. What a, what a, what a worthless tip

Greg: for the driver. That's unfortunate.

Mike: Yes. Uh, but there was no option to like leave an additional tip or anything, and I didn't have any cash with me, so yeah. S so, so, you know, there's a lot of discussion about

Greg: personalism and, um, you know, it comes up in the context of ads often with Facebook sort of complaining about the, the, um, how I was 14 dot five is, is, is going to, uh, you know, destroy, personalized advertising or adversely impacted.

But it strikes me that what you've described as the kind of personalization that people read. Want right. They want the convenience of having to do less the, the, the efficiency and convenience that, that experience exemplifies is really what embodies personalization, I think is the consumer thinks about it.

Yeah.

Mike: Yes. And it's largely based on localization by virtue of them knowing so much about me through my phone and my Google identity.

Greg: And look, localization has always been, uh, the sort of low hanging fruit of personalization or the core personalization, depending on how we want to talk about it.

Mike: In this case, it's the core of personalization because it doesn't have the privacy implications or that well, creepiness of personal interest.

Right because they're not inferring anything. I mean, they're

Greg: inferring location, but they're, but, but you have given them, you, you have, um, explicitly consented to a lot of stuff with payments and giving them your location, what they're using your current location, as opposed to your home location. But most of that information you've given them willingly and voluntarily.

That's absolutely correct.

Mike: Yeah. So that, so, so, and it's, and it's a great user experience. I mean, one of the interesting. You know, we were talking before we

Greg: started that, that, uh, you know, Amazon in a way is the model for all of this, with it's kind of one-click checkout, uh, approach where they've got so much information on file.

They've got all your addresses, your address, book, your payment information. And they've really made, uh, transacting with them, especially in a mobile phone, very fast and easy. And now Google is trying to do that, not just for food ordering, but presumably for a range of other kinds of categories as well.

Mike: Hotels products we're seeing it. Right. Um, but what was fascinating too though, is done without an app one, right. I think. Right. So totally web based. Right. So that was,

Greg: that's really interesting. Um, and, and it's something that I really didn't focus on when I initially read your article, edited your article is, is that that's, that was something that Google was very.

Focused on in the very beginning when apple initially introduced the app store and there was a lot of discussion about Google being disintermediated by apps because, you know, Steve jobs famous quote about search hasn't really happened on online. Um, because the belief was a Google was a middleman. Why would you need a middleman when you could go directly to these apps and transact, or get the information you wanted directly from the brands and not have to do this, uh, kind of 10 blue links thing and so on and so forth.

And so Google was working very hard for a long period of time to improve the mobile web experience, to make it more competitive with apps. You could see amp as a version of that, right? I mean, the amp is in an attempt to speed up, which they've now sort of walked away from somewhat. Uh, speed up the mobile web, the core web vitals, um, uh, update, uh, is, is about making the mobile web a, a faster, more, more user-friendly place.

So a lot of Google's thinking and effort and carrots and sticks has gone into making the mobile web a more, uh, user-friendly app, like, uh, environment, frankly, so that Google. Can continue to be central to everything, right? And, and, and, and if they succeed in inserting themselves into all these different commerce scenarios, that's even going to be more true.

And the fact that they can do that without an app, you know, is, is really significant because only the most loyal customers will download apps typically. And so you, you, you lose, you know, 90, 80, 90% of the audience, if you're compelling them to do something on an app.

Mike: Yes. One has to ask though, who, how, who got screwed into delivery?

Who's either who's subsidizing the delivery because I paid nothing for delivery of a $2 98 something, or, you know, it's got, it's gotta be, it's gotta be Google. Who's paying for

Greg: it because door dash has no interest in commoditizing itself. Right? I mean, the, the, the, the thing that Google is, is, is going to do is make, is, is make delivery completely a commodity.

If they, if they remove it, Uh, the, the, the direct relationship between the user and the delivery service, which is trying to disintermediate the restaurant in a certain way. Um, then they just become a commodity and it's sort of this, you know, anybody can deliver it. Who's the cheapest, et cetera. Right.

Mike: Which is where Google really wants to be. They'd never have done that well in the real world. And this gives them the ability to inter you know, somebody has to flip the burgers. Somebody has to deliver the burgers. Google doesn't want to get their hands dirty with that sort of greasy as the case may be as good or Gracie as the case may be.

Right. Uh, correct. They want to just sit, you know, help with discovery and take discovery through the transaction. They're very happy sitting in that space, but, and it's very convenient, but this is exactly why. We have antitrust now. I mean it's yeah. Yeah. So, so, so w what's

Greg: interesting about your experience is that it was a terrific experience.

The Amazon experience is a terrific experience from a consumer standpoint, but what the, what the Europeans and the, um, house of representatives want to do is really break down the gatekeeper role that, uh, that Facebook, Google, apple, and,

Mike: um, uh, Amazon Amazon. Yes. Are, are

Greg: playing. They, they want, they want third parties to be able to break into these systems.

These, these walled gardens are these very heavily controlled environments and be able to break through to the consumer. But the, the irony of that, I mean, so for example, in, uh, Tim, Tim cook, the CEO was complaining that the, the digital markets act, I think, is what it's called in Europe, which has been proposed, would.

Um, compel apple to allow sideload loading, um, to break through that gatekeeper role. Um, but what we have here is sort of a paradox. The best consumer experience is provided arguably by the monopolistic practice, whereas that's harmful to the ecosystem of businesses. Um, but if you fragment, you know, if you allow sort of for the multi, multiple parties, Uh, value chain then it's makes for a fragmented or more difficult.

Mike: And the question becomes which products shouldn't become features in a platform. I mean, historically, like I think that Benedict Kevin's maybe said this, that originally you had to buy the TCP IP stack separately from windows. When you bought a networking card, wasn't integrated into windows and. It obviously became integrated and it's no different with this, right?

So w by integrating these products and making them features, you're getting much better user experience. Um, I th I think to me, that type of bill might really limit some of the innovation. We see. I think that the bill that prevents or makes it greater scrutiny when they're buying up competitors. Uh, to me is a better way to approach this and dictate what they can and can't do on their platforms.

Well, historically, at least

Greg: in the United States, the anti-trust standard has been consumer harm. So you have to prove the burden has been on the government. Who's seeking to block the merger or the acquisition or the intended action, um, or, or break up the company, I guess. And the, the standard has been.

Is the behavior in question harming consumers in some way. And Google has always argued, uh, no nothing that we're doing is harming consumers. We're doing things that are benefiting consumers and in a certain sense, they're exactly right, because what you're describing is a much better experience than, uh, you know, clicking through to a burger king website and then having to do that.

You know, it, it, it's, it's a much more cloogy thing if you have multiple parties, but the

Mike: winner. Are changing the new head of the chairperson of the FTC made her career. She's very young, but she made her career looking at the broader question of how these monopolies impact culture and society and business innovation and consumers.

Um, and she's not a believer in the Bork theory of consumer harm and, and some of these bills clearly are trying to create a legal. In which the FTC can consider other harms beyond consumer harm when they're making this analysis.

Greg: But it is, it is very interesting to think about, um, to, to think about the sort of tension between the consumer experience and the broader health of the ecosystem.

I mean, that may be a false dichotomy, but it doesn't seem that way, at least through the lens of your burger king or your chicken nuggets. No, I was going to say chicken McNuggets, but what do they call them? What do they call it? Burger king, uh, Royal with cheese.

Mike: I can't even remember there. Good chicken nodules chicken nuggets.

That's what they call them. All right. So w um, so, so, uh,

Greg: in the, in the sort of vein of mergers and acquisitions, uh, this week also, Um, the company I work for Uber all acquired, uh, one of its partner slash potential competitors moment feed in north American based company that does this listings management and reputation and social media, and has, has an ad product and some other stuff.

Um, and you know, it was, it was, uh, on the heels of MAs. Acquired by an email company. Um, Rio SCO was rolled up as part of another transaction by the, by the, the firm that now owns doctor.com I believe. And there are yeah,

Mike: a company I'd never com company I'd never heard of.

Greg: Um,

Mike: and then, and very big in the medical field, which is interesting because it's not clear to me they're going to hang onto it.

Well, it's, it's, it's a, it's a marketing,

Greg: it's a marketing tool for their healthcare providers, theoretically.

Mike: Right? Real well, real got acquired by a company. And that company who was doing that was then acquired was then acquired. And Rio's been left as an independent, right?

Greg: Oh. So that suggests that they might be spun out.

They

Mike: may be

Greg: spun out or soul to soul to somebody, right.

Mike: Okay. And yeah, the other big trend, you know, we know that Sochi raised $80 million in January with the express purpose of acquisitions. That's what they said, right? Yeah. So they're, they're

Greg: likely to, we, we, we know of some rumors in that department as well.

And so it's, it's, it's likely that there are at least one or two other, uh, acquisitions like this that will, uh, occur in the, in the immediate immediate period. So the question becomes an Andrew schottlander wrote a piece. Um, about consolidation in the local space, uh, and his thesis while he, he was arguing that it just took a little bit longer than he anticipated.

And he thought there would be a lot more of it right. Immediately on the heels of the XDA IPO, but it's taken four years for there to be some moments. And

Mike: to some extent, I think the ex you know, one that is his other thesis is that it's driven by the ext IPO, which was very lucrative and other people and driven by the current valuations of like SEMrush, uh, on the stock market and a desire to get to the scale in terms of, and have the multiples that would warrant an IPO, uh, having enough marketing in the marketing space.

Right. So. Look, it, it demonstrates to me a couple of things. This is something you want said about spam demonstrating the legitimacy of local. Now capital is demonstrating the legitimacy of local that they perceive it as a critical part of the marketing stack. And it's going to be rolled up into a larger companies that integrate it with social integrated with website building for enterprise perimeter.

Well, there's a couple of interesting, interesting points there. One is that, uh, I mean, I can tell you

Greg: the rationale behind the acquisition, it was to help the company to help Uber all expand into north America. There was already a wellness.

Mike: Yeah. Right? The question on that though, does it put them in direct contact?

Uh, uh, direct, uh, is there channel conflict as a result? Because moment feed is like a brand of fire. I mean, they sell directly and now Uber, all which wanted to become sort of a wholesaler of listings like they were for MAs is now perhaps. In direct conflict with some of their clients. Hmm. Maybe. Oh, well I, I'm not, I'm not just saying don't mean to put you on the spot.

No, no, I'm, I'm not the, I'm not the, uh, I'm not the sales guy. Um, uh, yes, there is a perception. I think that th th there will be

Greg: a perception among some people that there's, that there's some channel conflict. Um, but thankfully I'm not involved in those companies. Uh, but, but sort of expanding directly into north America and then filling in blanks in the product suite was another one, right?

So they had, so Uber all had this product roadmap that had a number of pieces that had yet to be built out. The core product was, was listings management, then reputation. They had store locators and landing pages and they were, and they were sort of working toward a number of other things. And moment feed has some very complimentary capabilities.

Um, and moment's feed is an existing Uber partner. So there's already an integration. Uh, but, but it raises this question of, of, of what space is this. You know, one of the things that, that we, I think as an industry, to the extent that we can call ourselves that have struggled with is definitions. I mean, we can use the word local.

Nobody

Mike: has, you know, local is, is a much, much,

Greg: much, many times larger deal than eCommerce, but yet has never gotten. So this is Rodney Dangerfield of digital marketing. It's never gotten the respect that it deserves because people have failed to really understand and see it clearly. And now you're saying, I think some, some of that is going on, but it's still,

Mike: you know, I, there's an internal struggle at

Greg: Uber.

Uh, brown messaging and branding, um, with people wanting to use omni-channel and wanting to use language that has historically been more appealing to you. Brands because brands often, you know, these multi location brands often don't see themselves in this local discussion. Right? I mean, even though they are,

Mike: and even though they absolutely are.

And as my experience demonstrated with burger king, it's all local a hundred percent, right. It was a brand search that surfaced a local burger king that then delivered an order to, but you're, but you're not ordering from the corporate headquarters or some corporate morphous in the cloud thing. You're ordering from a local risks.

Being delivered by a local, you know, service. Yeah. One of the other arguments in Andrew's article is that this is listing management. And while everybody says they do these other things, listing names, Is still the core sort of money generator, uh, because it's perceived by enterprises. One of the more difficult tasks that they have, I don't know why, but keeping track of their locations, it seems to be hard, expensive.

It's very, it's very

Greg: challenging for many. And you know, the, the irony is that on the very low end of the market, that's very small businesses that you need a very high touch service. A lot of handholding, a lot of, a lot of do it for me. Yeah activity.

Mike: And that's also sort of true at the highest end,

Greg: right?

In the middle. There's a lot of self-service and there's a lot of in-house activity and, you know, uh, but, but at the, at the highest end, at the very, you know, at the Starbucks level, um, You're you still people, people then demand a very high degree of service there and they have trouble internally, organizationally operationally managing review local reviews at scale business, location, data, they, for whatever reason, it's not in their operational DNA to do that.

So they do need to outsource that. Um, and some people outsource listings management as a way to

Mike: keep

Greg: track of. Business data that they should have completely organized in

Mike: house, right? Yeah. Becomes a big deal. I mean, Yext or Uber I'll becomes the canonical source for businesses then feeds Google feeds.

Facebook feeds the corporate website, um, because it is for whatever reason, the comings and goings are difficult to keep track of. Precisely. I, I would, I would mostly agree

Greg: with Andrew that the, that the cash cow has been listings, but I don't think that. Uh, entirely true. And I do think that the market is moving away from that toward a more, more holistic offering.

And, you know, this is partly why Uber all bought moment fetus to build that out more, more rapidly. And you've got, you know, as we were talking about with Wix and, and, uh, and, uh, Stripe, you know, everybody in one form or another is expanding the range of services that they're offering. You know, they have a core proposition and they're building out.

Is

Mike: there any irony in the fact that Shopify and Wix and Stripe are all doing the same thing apple and Google or Amazon are doing is building more features into their products so that it's more convenient and easier to do well. There's a, there's a lot. And there's a logic there, obviously, and, and once, and they get customer feedback,

Greg: Hey, it would be great if you did this and this and

Mike: this, right.

And once you get to a certain scale, you can start moving into finance because you have enough credit cards on file, which Shopify is doing, right. One of their big P and L lines is finance. They degenerate

Greg: and square does that as well. Right? Th th th the thing about these antitrust bills is that they have a kind of, uh,

Mike: Revenues threshold or other

Greg: comparable thresholds that have to be met before, before they would kick in.

Yeah.

Mike: So they clearly are meant to target the big, the big ones. Although I read an article that they likely sooner or later visa will fall under the guys Microsoft probably already does, which would be a great irony because I know Microsoft's probably even behind the scenes cheering this effort on very strongly be tremendously ironic if they were hit by it.

Um, but I mean, if, if there, if, if these are, if these are, I mean, in an ideal world, you would have legislators that would devise

Greg: neutral principles that were designed to benefit, uh, the economy as a whole. And not simply be a targeting of specific companies, even though that's, what's inspired. Yes,

Mike: it's a complicated world and I don't, you know what I mean?

It's gonna be interesting because to some extent, consumers are not the focus, even though they stated that they are, it is, they are often not the focus of antitrust actions frequently. It's like the Sumo wrestlers, the big corporations aligning against each other as who can, who can disadvantage the other than most through this, because.

Lost out in some marketplace. Well, the consumers is, is rarely. If ever, as you say,

Greg: behind any of these complaints that then generate. Legislation or the, or the regulatory behavior. It's, it's a competitor who's been disadvantaged. Who's looking to government to address their competitive disadvantage in the marketplace, rightly or wrongly.

And, and one of the, one of the challenges with a lot of the shopping competitors in Europe to Google that were complaining so vigorously. I know we're almost at a time here, uh, against Google's control of shopping. Um, and, and maps also, uh, some of those companies had shitty products. Those products

Mike: were just bad.

And so it was it's murky, you know, is, is

Greg: Google winning because it's got control of everything end to end, or is it winning because

Mike: it has the better product and these competitive products are crappy. I mean,

Greg: both are sort of true,

Mike: right? It makes it incredibly complicated and difficult to even parse these many bills.

I think I'm going to wait for you to write some insightful. Well, I, you know, I am, I am, I am wanting to write it, something about that.

Greg: I mean, my time has been in short supply. There's a good piece. Um, um, uh, that I linked to in the short takes that, um, um, Ben was, was it checkering? Yes. , um, has, has written that, that kind of unpacks each of the bills and, and talks about them in a pretty thoughtful way.

That's a really good. Uh, and I would recommend that, but on that note, we're out of time, we Ms. David this week, but we still so had

Mike: a, I think a pretty interesting conversation. Should we even invite him back? This was actually pretty good conversation. Okay. Right here. You're going to go on vacation so well, so yeah, I am, I'm going to be on, um, the around, I'm taking

Greg: a couple of days off around the July 4th holiday.

So I will probably miss one of those, uh, probably miss the, whatever the Friday is before the holiday. I don't know if that's the third or whatever, so. Have a good weekend. Yes, everybody, uh, enjoy your weekend. And if you're in one of the Western states where it's really hot, uh, stay cool. Um, and we'll see you next week, right?