I'm going to put Apple and other technology giants on the therapist's couch: To understand their motivations and actions, it's helpful to examine their vulnerabilities.
I've been surprised this year that Apple mostly hasn't budged as regulators and some app companies complain loudly about the downsides of the app system that Apple created more than a decade ago. The gripe essentially is that Apple abuses its control over iPhone apps to impose unfair fees and complexities on app developers. That's the claim in a lawsuit that Epic Games, the maker of the Fortnite video game, has pending against Apple.
Apple says that it is right to exercise control over apps and collect commissions for some things that we do on our phones. But there's also something else at work: fear.
Connecting the dots between Apple's business predicaments and its choices helps us understand why the company does what it does — and by extension how those actions affect everyone, whether we own an Apple device or not. Apple's strategy bends the world.
Why should Apple be worried? It is wildly successful and has so much cash that … well, corporate employees sit in desk chairs that might cost more than your sofa. Or your car.
But the reality is that sales of smartphones will probably never again have a growth spurt like the one in the 2010s that made Apple a superstar. Smartphones have become a necessity of modern life in many countries, like refrigerators, but there are fewer potential first-time smartphone buyers every year, and people are waiting longer to replace phones they already own.
Apple and lots of people who keep tabs on the company don't think it's a problem if Apple has a harder time selling more iPhones each year. Instead, the company has shifted its strategy to make more money from the gadgets that we have in our homes and pockets — in the form of app downloads, subscriptions like Apple Music, AirPods headphones and other Apple products or services connected to company devices.
It's a smart strategy that's working very well, but also one born of necessity now that the peak smartphone era seems to be over.
There's also a long shadow cast by Apple's need to become more than the iPhone company. Would Apple, for example, be more willing to reconsider aspects of the app store if it weren't so reliant on generating money from sources other than iPhone sales? And how much are Apple's tactics changing all of the technology that we use?
The Vox writer Peter Kafka recently wrote that Facebook decided to start newsletters that people read outside of Facebook's apps in part to avoid paying the fees that Apple demands from digital subscriptions sold inside its iPhone apps. The billions of people who use Facebook are affected by Apple's strategy to squeeze more cash from apps.
We aren't completely at the whims of big companies' tactics to make money. But I find it useful to examine the ways that our technology choices are not accidents, nor are they purely driven by what we want.
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A win for Facebook in a likely long war: A federal judge said that a Federal Trade Commission lawsuit that wants to break up Facebook lacked too many essential facts to move ahead. The judge told the government to try providing evidence that Facebook meets the legal definition of a monopoly, Cecilia Kang reported. DealBook has an analysis of the opinion from the judge, who also said that more than 40 states had waited too long to bring their own antitrust case.Related: All of the antitrust investigations and lawsuits against Big Tech companies are terrific for lawyers, Cecilia and David McCabe write. One example: 51 lawyers from 21 law firms have appeared in court related to antitrust cases against Google.
Life is just fodder for online posts: Residents in a rural county in China dress up as old-style farmers and fishermen to stage scenes of a bygone China for local and foreign tourists to photograph and post online, my colleague Vivian Wang writes. The setups are elaborate, including burning straw to simulate mist.
That's why I appreciate a holistic approach taken by Facebook that smartly considers the complexity of the challenge.
The company's initiative started a few years ago with the simple but profound premise that everyone — governments, citizens and companies including Facebook and businesses that sell internet service and equipment — needs to benefit from the internet in order for it to spread everywhere. That required finding ways to lower the costs to connect the world.
If this sounds a bit ho-hum or difficult to grasp … yes. Facebook's approach is mostly boring, which I love, and far less visible than billionaires' satellites, drones or helium balloons used to beam internet service to more places. Instead, Facebook is doing things like sharing internet fiber lines to move data and inventing software for cheaper cellphone equipment. (Yes, Facebook is doing something really helpful!)
Connecting billions requires a million different tactics and some big-picture — and often boring — strategies.
Here are some examples of what Facebook is doing: In North Carolina, Facebook is sharing fast internet lines that it built for its computer centers with a nonprofit internet provider that is delivering service to rural schools and health care institutions. Fast internet connections cost a fortune, and sharing them eases the burden.
Facebook also designed a technology — and released its blueprints for free — that companies are using to make relatively inexpensive internet equipment to attach to light poles or rooftops in places where it's impractical to tunnel underground to lay conventional internet pipelines. Alaska Communications said recently that it's using gear based on Facebook's designs for speedier internet connections in Fairbanks and Anchorage.
And imagine if Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile owned a mobile network together. That's essentially what Facebook did with partners in Peru to collaborate on a mobile internet network in a sparsely populated area. Otherwise, it might have cost too much for too little potential revenue for companies to wire those areas. Facebook said the project has covered about 1.5 million Peruvians with 4G service since it started two years ago.
It's not only Facebook; other companies and organizations like the Alliance for Affordable Internet, or A4AI, and the Omidyar Network are also taking holistic approaches to expanding internet use.
Facebook's tangle of internet connection projects may not all be effective. The company is not great at explaining to normal humans what it's doing, as you'll notice from this information the company released on Monday. Facebook, though, may have learned some lessons from the justifiable gripes about its higher-profile projects to expand internet access in ways that largely benefited itself.
What's different about these internet connection projects is that Facebook is mostly taking a back seat. It's trying multiple ways to help the cottage industry that already exists around the internet, including government agencies, internet equipment sellers and cellphone service providers.
Facebook is also laser focused on the mostly invisible parts of expanding internet access: digging internet pipes into rocky terrain or under water, making cellphone towers a little bit more capable and finding sustainable profit models.
Facebook's self-interest is also out in the open. The company acknowledges that it benefits if more people get online. But so do countries and their citizens and many other companies that profit from selling stuff to billions more internet-connected people and businesses.
"There is no silver bullet for connecting the world," Dan Rabinovitsj, a Facebook vice president who leads its internet connectivity project, told me. He and his colleagues have repeated that sentiment a lot. It may be the most important statement about the challenge of improving the internet for everyone.
Facebook's approach isn't perfect, and it will take more time to assess how well it's working. But in principle, this is what an internet revolution should look like — methodical, collaborative and largely focused on the nuts and bolts to bring more people online. Changing the world is sometimes very dull.
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Deception that brings in the cash: My colleague Shane Goldmacher reports on the "dirty little secret of online political fund-raising" — that both Democrats and Republicans use aggressive and misleading texts and emails that are far more likely to trick older Americans who aren't internet savvy. The tactics include fake bill notices, breathless exaggerations and pre-checked boxes that automatically repeat donations.
The shrinking TV hit: The Washington Post writes about how subscription streaming services have contributed to the accelerating disappearance of wildly popular TV shows that used to draw tens of millions of people. Making many TV shows for the few tends to be a better bet for subscription services than creating a few shows for the many, The Post says.
