So this week gave us two tech stories happening basically back to back, and I think its worth talking about the one nobody's actually talking about.
Tuesday was the big Apple event. You've seen it by now: iPhone 11 starting at $699, the Pro and Pro Max at $999 and $1099, the whole camera bump thing that's already turned into approximately four thousand memes about stovetops and Solo cups taped to the back of a phone. Apple Watch Series 5 got an always-on screen, finally, which is nice I guess if you're the kind of person who checks the time by looking at your wrist instead of just picking up the phone that's already in your hand. They also confirmed Apple TV+ launches November 1st at $4.99 a month, and if you buy any new device you get a year free, which tells you a lot about how confident they are that people will pay for it on its own merits after that year is up. Apple Arcade lands next Thursday, the 19th, same day as iOS 13 finally rolling out to everyone. I'll probably write something about Arcade once I've actually poked at it instead of just reading the press release like everyone else did Tuesday afternoon.
But that's not really what I sat down to write about, because literally the day before all that, something happened that got about a tenth of the coverage and matters a lot more long term.
Monday, a coalition of attorneys general from pretty much every state in the country — 50 states and territories, all but California and Alabama sat this one out — stood on the actual steps of the Supreme Court building and announced a formal antitrust investigation into Google. Texas AG Ken Paxton is leading it. The photo of all these state officials lined up on those steps is a genuinely striking image and I don't think it got nearly the attention it deserved, partly because it landed the day before Apple pulled everyone's eyeballs toward camera bumps and Face ID upgrades.
What gets me about this one is the bipartisan part. This isn't a California thing or a Texas thing, its Democrats and Republicans from states that agree on basically nothing else, standing together to say the same company needs a serious look. Europe's been fining Google for years now, the shopping search fine back in 2017, the Android bundling fine in 2018 that ran into the billions, another one this past March over AdSense ad placement rules. I wrote about a couple of those when they happened, if you dig back through the archive far enough. But this is different because its domestic, and its coming from the people who actually regulate a lot of how business gets done in this country day to day.
Nobody's said yet exactly what the investigation will focus on, though early reporting points at ad practices and search dominance, which, sure, that tracks. Google runs something like 90 percent of search in the US depending whose numbers you trust, and the ad tech stack underneath basically the entire internet. Investigating that is not exactly a stretch. What I find more interesting is the optics of the timing, whether intentional or not. You get fifty state AGs on the Supreme Court steps making a serious antitrust announcement, and less than 24 hours later the news cycle is entirely camera bumps and whether the Pro Max is too heavy in your pocket. I don't think Apple planned their event around burying that story. I just think it's a pretty good demonstration of how much oxygen a shiny new phone eats up compared to a press conference about competition law, even when the press conference is arguably the bigger deal five years from now.
I'll be honest, my own phone is a cracked-screen iPhone 7 held together by a case that's seen better days, so the iPhone 11 stuff barely registers for me personally. New camera, sure, fine. What I actually want to know is where this Google investigation goes over the next year, because an antitrust case that actually sticks against a company this size would be the first genuinely consequential one in tech since Microsoft in the 90s, and I was in elementary school for that one so I don't really remember it firsthand. This time I'll be paying attention as it happens instead of reading about it later in a book.