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
Evans: Publisher link tax demands against Google and Facebook are flawed
“And this is, in many ways, just a kind of, it's one of those arguments that just sort of disintegrates as soon as you poke at it, in any way at all, because they don't argue with, they don't, they think they're the only people that should get paid, not anyone …”
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: Incumbents treat AI as a feature, but disruption requires new products
“The incumbent's always trying to make the new thing a feature. And so that's very obviously what's happening with Microsoft and Google, including this in PowerPoint and office and of course in search and everything else. But what actually happens is, is then p…”
Evans: Legacy Gatekeepers Held More Power Than Google or Amazon Do Today
“They were old gatekeepers, and they were generally much bigger and much more powerful than Google or Amazon which is kind of a counterintuitive thing to say, but, you know, we came from a world in which there were three TV stations, and mostly Most cities in A…”
Evans: AI search answers will drain web traffic from lifestyle publishers
“But if I'm going to say, you know, write me an itinerary for hotels, restaurants, and architecture in Barcelona, I'm going to get, that's going to produce less click-through, and so that's going to be less traffic for Condé Nast Traveler, it's going to be less…”
Evans: Google's AI search will likely be better than Microsoft Bing's
“And one should presume that it's not that Google's version of doing this will be worse than Bing's, in fact it wouldn't surprise me if Google's version of doing this will be better”
Evans: Google pays Apple nearly $20B for default iPhone search
“Google pays, Apple pays, Apple probably close to twenty billion dollars to be the default search engine on the iPhone.”
Evans: A novel search interface could seize market share from incumbents
“Simply doing a new search engine with a completely new user interface could be an opportunity to take share, even if it's actually just a Up front and onto the same thing you had before.”
Evans: Statista is search spam that Google should remove from its index
“The first link, which was Statista, which is spam that Google should take out of the index, and Statista had got a number that was just wrong, and it wasn't like, I disagree with that number, it's like, no, there are not eight billion people on Earth with a mo…”
Evans: Apple and Google suffered a complete strategic failure in TV
“This is another piece of the story is Apple and Google sort of complete strategic failure in TV. What Apple and Google wanted to do and what Apple wanted to do with the Apple TV and indeed with the Apple TV app they have now. And remember the Apple TV original…”
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: 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: Tech regulation is just an operating cost, not structural disruption
“Google has to have a bunch of compliance people. Okay. That doesn't change anything for anyone in Silicon Valley. It's just compliance people. It's just cost. It's just money on the EPS.”
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: a16z Never Passed on Deals Fearing Big Tech Competition
“When I worked at Andreessen Horowitz, we saw three or 4000 companies a year. You know, I don't think we ever said, you know, what if Google does this? Or, you know, you can't invest in that because Microsoft might do that or because Amazon might do that.”
Evans: Tech platforms cannot prevent synthetic media proliferation
“Okay, well, that's fine, but there's 20 Chinese companies that are already making them, and there's nothing you can do about it. So you're just going to have to get, think about what that means. In the same way, like anything could be fake, Google can't stop t…”
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: Tech Workers Outside Ad Teams Do Not Understand Advertising
“My basic thesis on advertising is that no one who doesn't work in ad tech understands any of it. Particularly people in tech. No one in tech who doesn't work on an ad tech team understands advertising. Like no one at Google who doesn't work on the advertising …”
Evans: Distinguishing on-device from server ad profiling is purely theological
“What exactly is the difference between Google knowing you're a woman with young children, and having that on a data center in Oregon, and Apple knowing, and your iPhone knowing that you're a woman with young children, and showing you an ad targeted at women wi…”
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: TikTok's innovation is its discovery mechanics, not the video format
“The new thing about TikTok is the swiping and the recommendation. So it's the, you could call that a network, but it's the mechanics that you build around how you show people what the video is. As opposed to YouTube, which is a basically a very desktop, very l…”
Alphabet's moonshot projects have largely failed to materialize
“The moonshots, none of the moonshots really worked.”
Evans: Google's UX is inherently bad; TikTok's UX is the innovation
“YouTube is a utility that distributes video. But the UX itself, A, it's a Google UX, so Ipso facto is shit, but B, like, the UX is like a utility UX, whereas for TikTok, the whole point is the UX. That's where the innovation is, and the UX is pop culture.”
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: The idea that a standalone YouTube would build a search engine is insane
“Like, I genuinely heard somebody say the other day that if YouTube was a separate The company, the first thing it would do would be make a general purpose web search engine and compete with Google. You're out of your fucking mind. That's like saying that if yo…”
Evans: Microsoft's calls to regulate Google are self-serving
“One of them is of course that when Microsoft says that you should regulate Google, they're being tremendously self-serving. When Microsoft says, ah, regulation had a big effect on us and you should do it to Google now. You can't just take that at face value as…”
Evans: Broad omnibus tech regulations like the EU's DSA cannot work
“The alternative is the Digital Services Act, which just tries to define, like, the entirety of the tech industry.
As being covered by a standardized set of rules, and it just doesn't really work.
I mean, trying to cover how Amazon treats its suppliers, it's at…”
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 companies run 10 to 20 AI pilots without systemic clarity
“Every big company now has had, like, 10 AI presentations. They've had one from Microsoft and Google, they've had the one from their ad agency, they've had the one from Bain or BCG or McKinsey, they maybe had one from OpenAI, they've had stuff from Accenture, a…”
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: Generative AI had four primary use cases in 2023
“It seems to me that there were sort of four use cases. Use case one is coding. Secondly, brainstorming and suggesting ideas. Thirdly, and this is more like a corporate thing, knowledge management pointed at an internal corpus of thousands of documents or PDFs …”
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: Google, AWS, and Microsoft Cloud Capex Will Near $100B in 2023
“Google AWS, Microsoft probably spent, will probably spend a hundred billion dollars on cloud capex this year.”
Evans: Google did not invent search advertising
“Search advertising wasn't invented by Google, it was invented by somebody else, and they presented, I think it was at a TED talk, and everyone started booing, and they thought this was evil, like, you're corrupting search results. You're letting pay to people …”
Evans: Amazon and YouTube have successfully unbundled Google Search for specific queries.
“Clearly both Amazon and YouTube have unbundled Google in that sense that you go to Amazon for product and you go to YouTube for not just for quote unquote video, but for a lot of other stuff that might previously have been text.”
Evans: Google search intent shifted from price comparison to product discovery
“It used to be that, that, that cheap was high. Cheap has gone from high to low. Best has gone from low to high. And the story, the hypothesis here is that people used to use the internet for a price comparison. You already knew what you wanted. You went to Goo…”
Evans: Google has always stayed years ahead of Bing
“Google has been sort of two or three years ahead of Bing, and has always been two or three years ahead of Bing, and Bing never had a hope of catching up.”
Evans: Single-text AI answers project certainty, unlike multi-link search results
“What the four images and the 10 links are doing is communicating uncertainty, whereas the one answer that's in text presents itself as the certainty far more than you get with than you get with the others, and”
Cowan-Brown: Bing has nothing to lose against Google in search
“Microsoft and Bing had absolutely nothing to lose, but Google is on that back foot of we do have something to lose here”
Evans: ChatGPT's natural language presentation creates an illusion of certainty
“But if you go to ChatGPT and you ask it a question, it gives you one answer, and it presents that in natural language, which looks, which creates this impression of certainty. This is this phrase, it's a confident bullshitter. It might have exactly the same de…”
Evans: Generative search acts as a synthesizing librarian, not an index
“Google started, is the internet was a library, Google was the index, and you could go and you could find the thing you wanted.
If you go to the librarian and say, what's a good book about this?
And the librarian would tell you, and you would go and you would…”
Evans: AI answers create an economic dilemma by eliminating ad-generating clicks
“If we just give you the answer, then you're not clicking on an ad. And there's always that tension of like, what's the real estate here? Do we show you the answer when you click on it? If I said, oh, what's the best right to do this? You just, you give me a li…”
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: Specialized vertical software on iPads captured restaurants, not Big Tech
“That didn't get eaten by Google, or Amazon, or Apple. It's a generic iPad in a case, and then there's However many software companies, a bunch of software companies that go and solve, this is what restaurants need.”
Evans: Google pays roughly $15B for default search in Safari and Mozilla
“And so Google is paying something like fifteen billion dollars to be the default search engine in Mozilla and Safari and whatever else is out there, basically Mozilla and Safari.”
Evans: YouTube historically relied on watch data rather than video understanding
“Until very recently, or, you know, maybe now, YouTube doesn't know what's in the videos. They have no idea what's in the videos. They know who watched them.”
Evans: Google employees internally nicknamed early Hulu 'Clown Co'
“Google people nicknamed it Clown Co because they thought it was obvious it was going to fail because it was, you know, a private equity firm and two giant old media companies.”
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…”