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 118 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 2 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
The Microsoft antitrust case did not create Google or the iPhone
“This is kind of bizarre assertions that somehow the DHA Microsoft case resulted in the rise of Google or resulted in the iPod and the iPhone, which is just ignorant nonsense.”
Evans: Requiring Google and Meta to pay news publishers for links is ludicrous
“Completely ludicrous idea that Google and Facebook should somehow pay newspaper companies to link to that.”
Evans: The idea that Big Tech buys up all startups is nonsense
“And they're actually a very small percentage of all the acquisition, all the startups in the field, or indeed all of the exits, because, you know, I think it was something like 60 or 70 of those 400 were more than fifty million dollars, which is the point that…”
Evans: Nest and Within probably would have failed without Big Tech buyouts
“The practical effect would probably be that Nest would have gone out of business. Within would probably have gone out of business.”
Benedict Evans: Search and social networks are natural monopolies like water utilities
“There are clearly structural reasons why it's very hard to create a new search engine or to create a new social network. There are very strong network effects, which I, the last, one of the last pieces I wrote, I described as basically a natural monopoly. And …”
Evans: OpenAI and Anthropic lack distribution and cannot out-innovate startup ecosystem
“You don't have the existing feature set that Google and Meta and Microsoft and Apple and Amazon and everybody else have where they can add it and Salesforce and, you know, Workday and, you know, Figma and everyone else, some of them, some of which will survive…”
Evans: AI assistant usage remains tiny compared to Google search
“Use of all of these AI assistants is still tiny compared to Google. And there is this sort of bubble talk in the valley that, oh my god, no one uses Google anymore, which is just not true unless you're in the valley.”
Evans: Lack of network effects makes ChatGPT's early lead fragile
“Given that there's no network effects, or don't, or not yet any network effects in LLMs, that feels very fragile. Like, you know, if you remember, you know, I cannot, you know, remember, like, everyone used Yahoo, and then everyone switched to Google, because …”
Apple is more likely to replace ChatGPT than build a search engine
“It's much more likely, I think, that Apple will shift questions from ChatGPT to its own foundation model than it would shift questions from Google to its own general search engine, I think.”
Apple will maintain Google defaults while routing specialized queries to AI
“Apple will carry on treating Google as the default general search engine. They'll just peel more stuff out into their own foundation model or into chat TPT or into booking.com.”
Google paid $25 billion last year in device revenue share
“Google is paying a revenue share of 25 to 35% of the revenue they get from each search back to the device, and that was twenty-five billion dollars last year.”
Google pays Apple $20 billion annually to prevent vertical query routing
“And Apple is being paid twenty billion dollars a year not to do anything else here. So they're being paid twenty billion dollars a year not to say this is a hotel's query, maybe we'll send you straight to booking.com. They're being paid twenty billion dollars …”
General web search is a natural monopoly comparable to utility companies
“The general web search engine is a natural monopoly because you need a lot of money, and then once you spend the money, no one else can do it. So it's like a water company or phone company.”
Divesting Android and Chrome leaves Google's text ad monopoly completely intact
“Breaking up Android and Chrome doesn't change Google's control of text ads.”
The US court cannot compel Apple to add Safari choice screens
“The court can't make Apple put a choice screen in Safari. Like, Apple isn't in court. Like, they haven't been convicted of anything.”
Evans: Newspapers' core crisis is losing their former distribution monopolies
“The problem, newspapers problem is not that Google and Facebook have a monopoly. The newspaper's problem is that the newspapers used to have a monopoly and they don't anymore.”
Evans: Generative AI does not destroy search advertising economics
“I mean, this is kind of, you know, like the kind of the, like the first five minute reaction to GPT, 3.5 is this is a catastrophe for search advertising, which you kind of pull back and think, well, it's already not actually, you know, if I get, I can go to ch…”
Evans: Product search moved almost entirely from Google to Amazon
“What's happened in the last decade or so is product search has moved almost entirely from Google to Amazon.”
Evans: Radically new AI UX will reset default consumer search habits
“Presume that the chat GPT will be 10% worse than Google. I mean, maybe not, maybe it'll be 10% better, but the point is consumers will not care anymore. They will, the experience will be so different that you'll kind of reset people's presumptions and people's…”
Evans: Most Big Tech sub-threshold acquisitions were under $10M and 10 employees
“And the vast majority of them were less than 10 people, and less than ten million dollars.”
Evans: Amazon's ad business almost certainly creates more cash flow than AWS
“So it's got to have at least the same margins as Alphabet, which is like 60% operating margin if you exclude the R&D. And there's no CapEx. There's no incremental CapEx. So this thing is almost certainly producing significantly more cash flow than AWS.”
Evans: Australian court ruled Google is not a publisher in defamation suit
“There was a fascinating court case a couple of weeks ago in which some, someone, a newspaper would describe somebody as a gangster, and the newspaper story is in Google, and the person accused of being a gangster sued Google for defamation, and the court said,…”
Evans: Mozilla would go out of business without Google search payments
“And the second problem is, of course, that almost all of Mozilla's revenue comes from this. And so if Google stops doing this, Mozilla goes out of business by default, and there's no competitive web browser, or the main competitive web browser, the main compet…”
Google's next decade is moving all television advertising onto the internet
“The next 10 years of Google is turning everything, all TV advertising, into the internet. So they've taken everything else, but, you know, TV is a bit that hasn't really moved yet.”
Evans: Linear TV ad slots will disappear within 10 years
“Half of the ad, global ad industry is still on TV. And that's not going to be there in 10 years' time, or it won't be quote unquote TV. I mean, this is this whole, what is TV? You know, is Disney, you know, if you watch it on your smartphone, if you watch YouT…”
Evans: Banning profile-based ads benefits Google and could bankrupt The Guardian
“You want to ban advertising based on the user profile rather than on the context. Okay, well, that's probably good for Google and terrible for the New York Times, and the Guardian might go out of business.”
Evans: Dozens of massive tech companies do not compete with Google or Amazon
“There's an awful lot of fifty, hundred, two hundred billion dollar tech companies out there. You know, how does that model account for everything from Coinbase to Stripe to Shopify to Spotify to you know, Okta to Databricks to UiPath to, you know, there's doze…”
Evans: The 30% App Store commission rule is toast
“Look, the 30% rule is toast, but we don't really know quite how and what and where”
Evans: Legacy carmakers will be able to buy autonomy from Google
“It's much easier to say that the screen on a Tesla is an enormous challenge, or even that the autonomy is an enormous challenge, but then they'll be able to buy the autonomy from Google.”
Evans: Cookie Deprecation Only Truly Impacts One-Third of Digital Advertising
“The whole cookie apocalypse thing and the privacy thing and all of this stuff is actually only about sort of a quarter to a third of online advertising because there's YouTube. Which is where video advertising is, there's, well, let me put it another way, ther…”
Google and Facebook Will Face Regulation Like Banks and Telcos
“You are going to get regulated like a telco or a bank. You know, if you work at Google or you work at Facebook, you are going to have the same kind of scrutiny that a telco or a bank have. And it doesn't really matter if you think you shouldn't. That's just wh…”
Evans: Spinning off Instagram or YouTube will not make competing easier
“If Instagram was a separate company, that wouldn't make it easier to compete with them. Because the network effects that make it hard to compete with Instagram are part of Instagram. They don't come from it being owned by Facebook. The same thing with YouTube.…”
Evans: Breaking up Instagram or YouTube would not reduce harmful content
“If Instagram was a separate company, that wouldn't have any effect on teenage girls looking at self-harm content on Instagram. If YouTube was a separate company, that wouldn't have any effect on the prevalence of jihadi content. That's not a competition proble…”
Evans: 10% of Google's workforce will work in compliance by late 2025
“I think the only certainty is that when we come back in five years' time, 10% of people who work at Google will work in compliance.”
Kevins: Google is the new Microsoft and Salesforce is the new Oracle
“Google has become the new Microsoft. I think that's pretty obvious to everyone. Google is the new Microsoft. And Salesforce is the new Oracle.”
Evans: Content moderation is unscalable without architectural constraints
“The creation of bad stuff is fundamentally infinitely scalable, because it's people. It's four billion people saying, retweeting stuff that fits their prejudices. And the content moderation or the virus scanning is fundamentally unscalable, because you're one …”
Evans: A DOJ antitrust win against Google Search will have little effect
“And I think this is the problem with the DOJ's case on search distribution, which is even if they win, it's not really going to have much effect.
Because it's, A, it's not actually getting at the levers of power.
It's quite a long way away from the actual sear…”
Evans: Splitting YouTube from Google would not spark video competition
“Today, if you split YouTube into a separate company, that wouldn't result in 10 new social media video sharing sites exploding.”
Evans: Google Search Network Effects Will Defeat Microsoft's Spending
“Google search has network effects, so Microsoft can spend, doesn't matter how much money Microsoft spends, so Google search is still better.”
Evans: Telco stocks were flat for 20 years while apps captured value
“Giant industry, trillion dollars of revenue, two hundred billion dollars a year of CapEx stocks have gone nowhere in 20 years, and all the value is built by other people.”
70% of US search happens on Google default placements
“About 70% of search in the US happens on a device where Google's made it the default.”
Building a search index 75% as good as Google costs billions
“And so just being, like, 75% as good as Google costs hundreds of millions of dollars or billions of dollars just to have the whole thing. It's like, it's, there's a fixed cost to indexing the web.”
Competitors cannot afford to match Google's default search distribution payments
“Well, no one can afford to match what Google's paying and even Bing, because in fact their monetization per search is worse for the same reason that their search engine results are worse, and no startup could afford to spend a billion dollars a year building i…”
Spinning out Android as a Google antitrust remedy is structurally irrelevant
“Spinning out Android to me is, like, completely irrelevant, because, like, read back what I just said, like, if Android's a separate company, that's not, why is it going to choose Bing? It's going to have the same decision process that Motorola does.”
Ending Google default search payments will not automatically improve Microsoft Bing
“There's nothing, nothing in ending the TOC per se that is going to make Bing better.”
Benedict Evans lacks sympathy for Yelp over Google favoring native maps
“If I search for a restaurant, Google should show me a map. They should just give me a list of links, and Yelp are still very upset about that. Like, I have no sympathy at all”
Benedict Evans: Many impressive ChatGPT use cases are just basic Google searches
“It drives me crazy as people doing say, oh my God, have you seen what chat GPT can do? And I say, yeah, you've just done a Google search. That's a Google search. Google does that.”
Benedict Evans: ChatGPT's chat UI deceptively implies definitive answers
“To me, this is part of the challenge of ChatTPT versus Google is that Google says here are 10 links that might be the answer. Whereas ChatGPT says this is the answer, and it's, this is the answer. But it's not, you could argue that what it should be saying is …”