Ben Thompson

Andrew Sharp × Ben Thompson

Apple has acknowledged that looser App Store rules are weighing on its $100B+ services business, alongside a proposed 15% U.S. commission and Germany’s ATT ruling.Growth has shifted attention from zero-sum App Store fights, but restrictions on Replit-like services may constrain future AI app development.Germany’s ruling is favorable but four years late, while TikTok’s possible influence over AI data-center buildouts and premature AI regulation remain risks.

Andrew Sharp × Ben Thompson

Judge Amit Mehta found Google’s nonexclusive default agreements foreclosed competition but preserved its payments, leaving Apple with more than $20 billion annually in “pure profit from Google for doing nothing.”The remedy gives challengers one-time index access without Google’s accumulated data or crawling capabilities, while AI may intensify the need to prevent Google from carrying its distribution advantage into Gemini.

Andrew Sharp × Ben Thompson

Judge William Alsup’s Anthropic ruling treats training on purchased copyrighted books as fair use while allowing claims over pirated inputs, separating transformative use from unlawful acquisition.Liability focused on infringing outputs rather than ingestion could preserve competition, but requiring aggressive filters or costly compliance would structurally favor closed incumbents; lawful public training corpora remain a congressional catalyst.

Andrew Sharp × Ben Thompson

Apple’s iPhone user base anchors the App Store moat, while its 30% commission and anti-steering rules invite regulation.Apple’s roughly $20 billion to $25 billion in annual, pure-profit Google payments meet a first reported Safari search decline in two decades, sharpening AI substitution risk.Google’s commercial-query dominance and ad infrastructure may endure, while ChatGPT exposes higher education’s weak economics.

Andrew Sharp × Ben Thompson

Meta’s three eras—from Facebook’s social graph to monopoly-era control and TikTok-driven competition—make the FTC’s historical evidence and breakup remedy look temporally mismatched.The feed and Stories converted attention into an auction-based advertising engine, but perfect competition pressures sellers while regulation could trade platform dysfunction for scarcity, surveillance, and red tape.

Andrew Sharp × Ben Thompson

DeepSeek is Moneyball for AI: its $6 million V3 figure covered one final run, while mixture-of-experts and low-level optimization delivered efficiency breakthroughs without surpassing the US frontier.Cheaper reasoning models may manufacture training data and expand aggregate compute demand, preserving opportunities in power, networking, cooling, and inference; Microsoft retains optionality as export controls gamble on a durable US lead despite China’s industrial strengths.