So Tuesday everyone with a keyboard was watching the Apple livestream, myself included, and I'll admit the new camera bump on the iPhone 11 Pro got more of my attention than it probably deserved. Three cameras arranged in a little square, starting at $999 for the Pro, $1099 if you want the Max, and a regular iPhone 11 for $699 that's honestly the one I'd actually buy if I were buying one this year. But that's not what I want to write about today, because everybody and their cousin is going to be writing iPhone 11 posts this week and I don't have anything to add that six other blogs won't say better.
What I keep thinking about instead is something that happened three days earlier and got buried under all the Cupertino noise. On Monday, attorneys general from 48 states plus DC and Puerto Rico stood on the steps of the Supreme Court and announced a joint antitrust investigation into Google. Texas AG Ken Paxton led the announcement, flanked by a pretty bipartisan lineup, and this wasn't a red state thing or a blue state thing, it was nearly every state in the country agreeing on something, which these days feels almost as newsworthy as the investigation itself.
The focus, as far as I can tell from what's been reported, is on Google's advertising business and whether its dominance in search and ad tech has crossed the line from "really good at what it does" into "actually anticompetitive." That's a distinction regulators have struggled with for years now. Only California and Alabama sat this one out, and nobody's fully explained why, though I have my guesses about which state has the more complicated relationship with a company headquartered forty minutes from its own Capitol.
This comes right on top of the New York AG's investigation into Facebook that got announced the week before that, which had eight states signed on. So in the span of about ten days we've had two separate multistate investigations into two separate tech giants, and somehow the thing everyone's talking about instead is whether the new iPhone camera app has a weird yellow tint issue (it does, from what I've read, though I haven't seen one in person yet).
I don't think either investigation is going anywhere fast. These things take years. The DOJ opened its own broader review back in July and nothing visible has come of that either. But there's something to the sheer number of states involved here that feels different from the usual regulatory theater. When you get Texas and New York and Florida and basically everyone else nodding along at the same target, that's not a partisan stunt. That's a genuine bipartisan consensus that something is off, even if nobody agrees yet on what the fix should look like.
My honest, non-lawyer opinion: I use Google for basically everything, my email, my search, half my browser history is probably sitting in a data center in The Dalles, Oregon right now, and I don't think that makes me a chump. It makes me a normal person who found the product genuinely useful for two decades running. But usefulness and market power aren't the same axis, and pretending they are is exactly how you end up with one company owning the pipes for search, video, email, maps, and mobile operating systems all at once. That's the part that should worry people more than whichever iPhone has three lenses instead of two.
Anyway, I've still got the Apple keynote open in another tab because I wanted to go back and check something about the Watch pricing (Series 5 starts at $399, always-on display finally, in case you were wondering) and now I've spent forty minutes writing about antitrust law instead. That's how blogging goes sometimes around here. You sit down meaning to write about cameras and end up writing about state AGs.