Everybody's phone is going to look slightly different this week. Apple did its September thing on Monday, new iPhones, new AirPods, the works, and I'll admit I watched about four minutes of the keynote before getting bored and closing the tab. Not because it's bad, just because I've watched that exact show fourteen times now and I already know how it ends (you'll buy the Pro, you'll regret the cable situation, everyone will argue about whether "Apple Intelligence" is real AI or just autocomplete with better PR).
What I actually want to talk about barely made a dent in the headlines, and it's arguably a bigger deal for how the internet works than another camera bump.
On Monday, the same day as the Apple event, opening statements started in United States v. Google down in Alexandria, Virginia. This is the ad tech case, not the search one. Judge Leonie Brinkema is hearing it as a bench trial, no jury, and the DOJ (along with a pile of state AGs) is arguing that Google built and then locked down basically the entire pipeline that decides which ads you see and who gets paid for them: the publisher-side ad server, the ad exchange, the advertiser tools, all of it, all owned by one company, all talking to each other in ways competitors can't replicate.
If you're not steeped in adtech jargon that probably sounds abstract, so here's the plain version. When you load a page with a banner ad on it, there's an auction happening in the background that takes something like 100 milliseconds. Google, through products with names like DFP (now Google Ad Manager) and AdX, sits on both sides of that auction a huge chunk of the time, the side selling the ad space and the side buying it. The DOJ's argument is basically that this is like owning the stock exchange and also being the biggest trader on it, and using that position to make sure your own trades clear first.
This is the government's second swing at Google in about a month. Judge Amit Mehta already ruled back in August that Google's search business is an illegal monopoly, which was the bigger, splashier ruling and got the front-page treatment it deserved. This adtech case is quieter but honestly the remedies being discussed are more interesting to me, forced divestiture of AdX, maybe even the ad server. That's not a fine. That's breaking off a piece of the company.
Small personal aside here: I ran display ads on this blog for about two years, 2013 to 2015ish, back when I was naive enough to think a personal tech blog could cover its own hosting costs that way. It made something like eleven dollars a month and the ad code slowed the page down so badly that I eventually just ripped it all out and went back to nothing. I never fully understood the plumbing behind those ads, who was auctioning what to whom, and reading through some of the unsealed court filings this week was the first time in a decade I actually got a clear picture of it. Turns out the plumbing was kind of the whole scandal.
I don't think this trial is going to resolve fast. Bench trials like this tend to run for weeks of testimony and then months of deliberation before a ruling even shows up, and whatever Judge Brinkema decides will get appealed regardless of which way it goes. So don't expect a verdict by Halloween or anything close to it. But the opening arguments this week laid out something worth sitting with: two federal judges, in two separate cases, in the same six-week window, hearing arguments that Google's dominance isn't just big, it's structural, built into the wiring of two different multi-billion dollar markets it happens to run.
Meanwhile the new iPhone has a camera button now. I'm sure that'll also be a big deal to someone.
If you want to actually read the court stuff instead of takes about the court stuff, PACER has the filings, though the mobile PDF viewer is somehow worse than anything Google or Apple shipped this week combined.