The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 103 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Evans: Meta spends billions inventing tech, unlike Apple's original off-the-shelf iPhone
“Meta is spending tens of billions of dollars every year on all of that Moore's law, because where Apple could basically sit on top of an awful lot of technology that already existed, like they didn't need to create ARM from scratch. They didn't need to invent …”
Evans: AI summarizing news without links raises deeper issues than search engines
“If you're going to, you know, build a new system that will just tell you what the story was without linking or giving you credit, that's very different from you know, what Google and Facebook do, which is you search for a new story and they tell you where to r…”
Evans: TikTok fundamentally competes with YouTube, not Instagram or Facebook.
“I think there's a sort of it's almost like an incorrect analysis, which was, I'm trying to think of the right word, which is like, we kind of went down the line of thinking that TikTok competed with Instagram and Facebook, as opposed to thinking that it compet…”
Evans: Tech markets consolidate via S-curves where incremental improvements cannot win
“The competitive threat in tech is generally not someone doing the same thing as you, but better. Or let me kind of qualify that. Each market sort of goes for an S-curve, and there's like an early period where everyone's fighting it out to win. So this is like …”
Evans: UK CMA forcing Meta to unwind Giphy was an over-rotation
“And so that gets you to, for example, the UK CMA making Meta unwind its acquisition of Giphy, which I don't think anybody thinks is like a market in its own right, but they thought, and I think I would argue that was sort of over-rotation the other way.”
Evans: FTC Meta-Within case is very aggressive; Activision case is much less aggressive
“I think within is kind of a test case to try and push the you know, really kind of move the flag post, move the goal much further over. You know, it's a very aggressive case. I think the Activision case is actually much less aggressive.”
Evans: Enterprise 3D manipulation is niche because knowledge work is non-spatial
“Most people don't design cars for a living. Most people do not work in three D. Still pretty niche. Salesforce or email, or like most people are not actually editing, doing work that involves a three D object.”
Evans: Meta struggled with Reels because it requires an interest graph
“Facebook has struggled a lot more to get reels working because that's actually a different graph. It's not just another thing you would share with your friends. It's a whole other graph of different people.”
Evans: Modern tech company returns occur mostly in private markets pre-IPO
“Tech companies of the eighties and nineties, like 80 or 90% of the returns to investors came in after the IPO. Let's say IPO at a hundred million dollars, and then they end up being a fifty billion dollar company. Whereas for something like Google or Facebook …”
Evans: Meta's purchase of Within was likely a low-priced soft landing
“And I have no information on this at all, but I strongly suspect that that means it wasn't really working and they didn't pay very much for it because when stuff works and it's a big deal and you hear about it and I kind of suspect this was a soft landing or a…”
Evans: Public wants Facebook to moderate content more, not less
“And I'm not sure there's very many people on earth who think the problem with Facebook is that it controls too much about what happens on Facebook. Almost everyone would say it's exactly the opposite problem, that it doesn't control enough.”
Evans: Book publishing holds zero strategic value for Big Tech
“Books is a much bigger industry, but it has no strategic value to Google or Apple or Facebook.”
Evans: Facebook bought WhatsApp primarily to keep it from competitors
“WhatsApp is this sort of weird thing off by its side that isn't really part of, certainly not part of the US conversation, and doesn't have an ad business, and so it's a slightly weird thing that they bought to stop someone else getting it.”
Evans: Facebook has not invented anything in a very long time
“It's a very long time since Facebook actually invented anything, as opposed to copying and executing, executing stuff that other people have invented.”
Evans: Meta wants VR to replace PCs and smartphones entirely
“And when they say we're building the metaverse, in the end, they want to replace PCs and smartphones with VR and pull everything into VR.”
Evans: Apple kept a VR headset in its lab for five years
“Meanwhile, Apple has had a VR headset in the lab for five years and looks at it every year and say, nah, we don't think this is good enough yet.”
Evans: Breaking up Big Tech does not make competition easier
“If Instagram's a separate company, that doesn't make it easier to build an Instagram competitor. If YouTube's a separate company, it's not easier to build a search engine or build a competing video sharing site.”
Evans: Western tech produces vertical winners, whereas Chinese tech produces horizontal empires
“The sort of text structure in The rest of the world is you tend to have vertical winners. So Google won search, and there's a couple of other people trying to do search. Amazon won sort of generalized e-commerce, not market-specific e-commerce, won general e-c…”
Evans: The claim that Facebook sells user data is factually untrue
“I think the phrase Facebook sells your data is fascinating here, not primarily because it's just factually untrue, but because it's sort of an attempt to come up with a clearer way of describing what somebody thinks the problem is.”
Evans: Lost print ad revenue mostly vanished or migrated elsewhere cheaply
“The money that was going to newspapers, a lot of it just isn't spent at all, or it's spent income not on Google and Facebook, but in other places at a 10th or a 100th of the price.”
Evans: Facebook tried to copy WeChat and failed completely
“Clearly like Facebook tried to copy WeChat and failed completely.”
Evans: The US company-by-company tech regulation approach will not work
“Whereas the US approach is we'll see Google and then we'll see Facebook and we'll see TikTok and we'll see like one by one which will be like, and that's just not going to work guys.”
Evans: Facebook would engage in the same practices without Instagram or WhatsApp
“Supposing WhatsApp didn't happen, supposing Instagram hadn't happened, supposing they'd happened and failed, supposing they'd happened, gotten bought by Fox, rolled into MySpace and killed. And so Facebook was the only thing. And Facebook would be doing all th…”
Evans: FTC seeks contradictory consent decrees on Facebook data APIs
“Today's FTC is demanding a consent decree that says Facebook has to open up Data APIs. And two years ago, they got another consent decree that said Facebook has to close down its data APIs.”
Evans: FTC knew Instagram was a competitive threat when approving acquisition
“The FTC basically knew everything that they knew, know, that they know now. They knew that these were competitive. They knew that Facebook must see them as competitive threats. Nothing's actually changed, except that the FTC has just changed their mind. And I …”
Evans: Breaking Up Facebook Only Relocates Moderation Power to Five Companies
“Now you could argue that's, that means that you should just break up Facebook, but that just relocates the problem because it's now it's five people collectively who are making that decision instead of one, but the decision is still there.”
Evans: Private platform moderation affecting billions is a free speech issue
“Well, it's a private corporation that controls how billions of people talk to each other. If they decide that billions of people can't say that, that is ipse fact to a free speech question. Doesn't matter that they're not the government or not.”
Facebook's Oculus acquisition is a failure if VR remains just gaming
“They didn't buy Oculus to make a games device. And if it's only ever games, it's a failure.”
Evans: Big Four tech capex will jump from $400B to $650B
“The big four companies, platform companies, spent four hundred billion dollars on capex last year. This year, they've said they'll spend 650, more or less. Microsoft hasn't been given full year guidance. But Meta and Google and Amazon have more or less doubled…”
Evans: Big Tech funds AI capex out of cash flow, unlike OpenAI
“Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta are funding it out of cash flow, Meta less so than the others, whereas OpenAI has to do these innovative funding structures because it has no cash flow, and Oracle is basically going to borrow a hundred percent of revenue to…”
Evans: Meta aims to turn LLMs into generic commodity infrastructure
“Meta is trying to make LLMs into generic commodity infrastructure that's sold at marginal cost. Because they want to differentiate on the features on top.”
Evans: EU and UK moderation laws force global compliance everywhere
“The UK and the EU now have laws requiring, that basically require you to have what most people would consider like best practice content moderation, which is basically you've got to do what Facebook is kind of doing anyway. And applying it to country companies…”
Brown: TikTok Has Stricter Political Ad Rules Than Meta
“And they also have the strictest policy when it comes to political advertising, much more stricter than Meta”
Evans: Tech giants cannot stop open-source AI image generation
“One of them is that the models are open source and the compute will get better and the models will get more efficient. And so if you want to do the scenario or just outlined, it's not like Facebook or Google or Adobe can stop you.”
Evans: News is a low single-digit share of social platform posts
“And for them, news is a very small and peripheral thing.
You know, it's whatever it is.
It's low single digit shares, even all the posts that have links, nevermind all the posts that don't have links.”
Evans: ChatGPT breaks consumer internet economics with compute costs per query
“The idea that it actually costs money to press enter on a consumer internet site, like posting a pic, you're actually like a Facebook if it'd cost money to do a post. And you had to wait 30 seconds for it to appear. Well, that's kind of what ChatGPT is now. Li…”
Evans: 20M VR headsets sold, only 5M-10M active users
“There's like 5,000,010 million people actually using a device, so it's twenty million people, they've sold twenty million headsets, there's five or ten million people using them.”
Evans: UK regulator's initial assessment of Instagram was very myopic
“Sort of famously the UK regulator looked at Instagram and said, well, they don't have ads, so that's not part of Facebook's Market, market, which was clearly like a very, very myopic way of thinking about how the market worked.”
Evans: Amazon ad revenue makes it a top-four global media owner
“And they did, I think, thirty one billion dollars last year, and they've done like 36, thirty seven billion dollars in the last 12 months which gets them to being like a top three, top four media owner. Globally. It's like Alphabet, Meta, ByteDance and then I …”
Evans: Meta has sold roughly 15 million VR headsets
“Facebook probably sold fifteen million. So there's maybe ten million people using one.”
Evans: Big Tech exits markets that require manual labor instead of software
“They want to turn it, particularly for Google, Facebook, Amazon, they want to turn it into automated self-service software. And if it turns out that you kind of can't do that, and you need a bunch of salespeople, or you need a bunch of offices, or you need a b…”
Evans: Music is not a top five strategic priority for Big Tech
“Nobody at Apple is sitting there thinking about music anymore. I mean, well, very few people at Apple, they have a music business, but it's not like the top five strategic priorities at Apple nor Google, nor Facebook.”
Evans: Meta's 13 million VR headsets yield only 5 million active users
“I think Facebook's probably sold 12, thirteen million of them. There's maybe five million people actually using them.”
Evans: Rebranding a toxic brand fails without fixing underlying problems
“If your brand is bad, or uncool, or toxic, or whatever, and you change the brand, if you haven't actually fixed the reasons why the brand was toxic, then those things will just leach into the new brand, and you won't fool anyone.”
Evans: Facebook Tried and Failed to Turn Messenger into a Super App
“Can you turn a Facebook messenger into a super app? Answer. And they clearly tried to do that, and the answer was no.”
Benedict Evans: China tech features horizontal competition, unlike Western vertical champions
“Which is that China has sort of many champions that compete with each other across many fields. Whereas, you know, Google doesn't have an e-commerce delivery business, and it doesn't really have a social network. And Amazon doesn't have a social network or a s…”
Evans: Social media platforms killed mainstream blogging in the early 2010s
“I feel like Instagram, Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter between them sort of killed mainstream blogging.
In the 2000 and the early teens.”
Evans: Big internet platforms operate as Mechanical Turks powered by human biases
“You should think of any big internet platform as basically a Mechanical Turk. So PageRank is a Mechanical Turk. Because PageRank, the whole point of PageRank is instead of trying to work out what that webpage is, Probably should have said this earlier. Instead…”