I have been trying to stay informed of the hostile relationship between WordPress, Automattic, and Matt Mullenweg, and third-party hosting company WPEngine. Aram Zucker-Scharff put together a helpful and massive set of links to news coverage. Michael Tsai has a good collection of links, too, and Emma Roth and Samantha Cole have published notable articles.

From a distance, it looks like an expensive pissing match between a bunch of increasingly unlikable parties, and I would very much appreciate if it never affects my self-hosted version of WordPress. Maybe it is a little confusing that WPEngine is not affiliated with WordPress, but I only learned this week that WordPress.org is personally owned by Mullenweg and is not actually affiliated with Automattic or WordPress.com. From Mullenweg’s perspective, this confusion is beneficial, but the confusion with WPEngine is not. From my perspective, I would not like to be confused.

Also, if Mullenweg is mad about WPEngine — and Silver Lake, its private equity owner — benefitting from the open source nature of WordPress without what he feels is adequate compensation, I am not sure he has a leg to stand on. It does not sound like WPEngine is doing anything illegal. It is perhaps rude or immoral to build a private business named after and on the back of an open source project without significantly contributing, but surely that is the risk of developing software with that license. I am probably missing something here.

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Ashley Belanger, Ars Technica:

Google just lost a massive antitrust trial over its sprawling search business, as US district judge Amit Mehta released his ruling, showing that he sided with the US Department of Justice in the case that could disrupt how billions of people search the web.

“Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” Mehta wrote in his opinion. “It has violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act.”

Google will surely contest this finding when its implications are known; Mehta has not announced what actions the government will take against Google.

The opinion is full of details about the precise nature of how Google search and its ads work together, Google’s relationship with Apple and other third parties, and how its business has changed over time. For example, the judge notes Google adjusted ad pricing to maintain a specific growth target, and increased it incrementally to mask it in the typical fluctuations of ad costs. He also cites a finding that “thirteen months of user data acquired by Google is equivalent to over 17 years of data on Bing” in informing the quality of search results. Meanwhile, Google pays Apple a redacted amount through its revenue sharing agreement for default placement in Safari, and it pays for searches performed through Chrome on Apple devices as well. There is a lot more in here, and I fully intend on re-reading the opinion with a bunch of questions I have in mind.

Google really does have great search results a lot of the time, even though it has stumbled in recent years. DuckDuckGo is my default but I find myself often turning to Google for local results, very old results, and news. (DuckDuckGo is powered by Bing, which prioritizes MSN-syndicated versions of articles that I do not want.) Google has not fallen into the same trap as Bing by wholly cluttering the results page. Microsoft still has no taste.

But two things can be true: Google can be the best search engine for most people, most of the time, because it is very good; and, also, Google can have abused its market-leading position to avoid competition and maintain its advertising revenue. Those are not inconsistent with each other. In fact, per the judge’s citation of how long it would take for Bing to amass the same information about user activity as Google does in a year, it is fully possible its quality and its dominance are related, something the judge nods toward. In fact, Google’s position is now so entrenched “it would not lose search revenue if were to significantly reduce the quality of its search product”.

Notably, Mehta did not sanction Google for failing to preserve evidence in the case, writing:

On the request for sanctions, the court declines to impose them. Not because Google’s failure to preserve chat messages might not warrant them. But because the sanctions Plaintiffs request do not move the needle on the court’s assessment of Google’s liability. […]

In cases where the judge found evidence of monopolistic and abusive behaviour, the lack of supporting text messages and other communications would not have made a difference; this is also true, the judge says, for his finding of a lack of anticompetitive behaviour in SA360.

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Patrick McGee, Financial Times, August 2022:

In interviews with 15 female Apple employees, both current and former, the Financial Times has found that Mohr’s frustrating experience with the People group has echoes across at least seven Apple departments spanning six US states.

The women shared allegations of Apple’s apathy in the face of misconduct claims. Eight of them say they were retaliated against, while seven found HR to be disappointing or counterproductive.

Ashley Belanger, Ars Technica, last week:

Apple has spent years “intentionally, knowingly, and deliberately paying women less than men for substantially similar work,” a proposed class action lawsuit filed in California on Thursday alleged.

[…]

The current class action has alleged that Apple continues to ignore complaints that the company culture fosters an unfair and hostile workplace for women. It’s hard to estimate how much Apple might owe in back pay and other damages should women suing win, but it could easily add up if all 12,000 class members were paid thousands less than male counterparts over the complaint’s approximately four-year span. Apple could also be on the hook for hundreds in civil penalties per class member per pay period between 2020 and 2024.

I pulled the 2022 Financial Times investigation into this because one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit filed last week also alleges sexual harassment by a colleague which was not adequately addressed.

Stephen Council, SFGate:

The lawyer said that asking women about pay expectations “locks” past pay discrimination in and that the requirements of a job should determine pay. Finberg isn’t new to the fight over tech pay; he represented employees suing Oracle and Google for gender-based pay discrimination, securing $25 million and $118 million settlements, respectively.

Last year, Apple paid $25 million to settle claims it discriminated in U.S. hiring in favour of people whose ability to remain in the U.S. depended on their employment status.

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The U.S. Federal Trade Commission:

The Federal Trade Commission is taking action against software maker Adobe and two of its executives, Maninder Sawhney and David Wadhwani, for deceiving consumers by hiding the early termination fee for its most popular subscription plan and making it difficult for consumers to cancel their subscriptions.

A federal court complaint filed by the Department of Justice upon notification and referral from the FTC charges that Adobe pushed consumers toward the “annual paid monthly” subscription without adequately disclosing that cancelling the plan in the first year could cost hundreds of dollars. Wadhwani is the president of Adobe’s digital media business, and Sawhney is an Adobe vice president.

The inclusion of two Adobe executives as co-defendants is notable, though not entirely unique — in September, the FTC added three executives to its complaint against Amazon, a move a judge recently upheld.

The contours of the case itself bear similarities to the Amazon Prime one, too. In both cases, customers are easily coerced into subscriptions which are difficult to cancel. Executives were aware of customer complaints, according to the FTC, yet they allegedly allowed or encouraged these practices. But there are key differences between these cases as well. Amazon Prime is a monthly cancel-anytime subscription — if you can navigate the company’s deliberately confusing process. Adobe, on the other hand, offers three ways to pay for many of its products: on a monthly basis which can be cancelled at any time, on an annual basis, or on a monthly basis locked into an annual contract. However, it predominantly markets its products with the latter option, and preselects it when subscribing. That is where the pain begins.

The difficulty and cost of cancelling an Adobe subscription is legendary. It is right up there with gyms for how badly it treats its customers. It has designed a checkout process that defaults people into an annual contract, and a cancellation workflow which makes extricating oneself from that contract tedious, time-consuming, and expensive. If Adobe wanted to make it obvious what users were opting into at checkout, and easy for them to end a subscription, it could have designed those screens in that way. Adobe did not.

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Kashmir Hill, New York Times:

[Clearview AI] A facial recognition start-up, accused of invasion of privacy in a class-action lawsuit, has agreed to a settlement, with a twist: Rather than cash payments, it would give a 23 percent stake in the company to Americans whose faces are in its database.

This is an awful move by an awful company. It turns U.S. victims of its global privacy invasion into people who are invested and complicit in its success.

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