Senator Scott Wiener Press Conference at YC

1. SWScott Wiener0:01

   Actually, or... Okay. Welcome everyone, and, uh, welcome to those who are viewing us, uh, remotely, including a number of members of the press who are remote today. Uh, and thank you for joining us, uh, to announce this, uh, critical piece of pro-competition legislation to ban the largest, uh, mega internet platforms, uh, from self-preferencing their own products at the expense of startups and mid-sized companies. Uh, I first wanna thank Y Combinator for hosting us today and for co-sponsoring the bill, and also the Economic Security California Action, uh, for partnering with Y Combinator to sponsor the bill. Um, when you have, uh, startups and mid-sized tech companies, uh, standing hand-in-hand with, uh, pro-competition civil society advocates, uh, it sends a very powerful message, um, about how transformative this legislation, uh, will be. Uh, and the issue we're addressing is sweeping in scope. Right now, the largest, uh, online platforms in the world, in the history of the world, um, are rigging the internet to undermine and box out their competitors, including startups who are trying to be the next, uh, large players. Um, each of us experiences the impacts of this anti-competitive behavior every day. Apple, for example, on its iPhone blocks users from downloading competing app stores, thus forcing, forcing apps and startups and smaller companies to continue to pay Apple's exorbitant fees to access the App Store. Google manipulates search results to prioritize those that the company either owns or is invested in over other sources of information. Amazon sets anti-discount policies, so-called most favored nation policies, that raise prices by preventing vendors from selling the same products more cheaply elsewhere because they'll get kicked off the platform if they do that. Uh, Amazon also, uh, in unfair ways competes against, with its own products, against smaller companies' products that are on the platform to try to destroy, uh, those companies. Uh, Meta demotes links from competing platforms in its news feed, which influences what information reaches the hundreds of millions of people who rely on Meta platforms to get the most basic information. Uh, the harms of these anti-competitive practices cause cons-- uh, consumers, uh, harm with higher prices, um, undermine competition, uh, degrade the user experience, uh, fuel misinformation, uh, and stifle innovation. Uh, the-these practices also at times completely cut out startups and mid-sized companies out of the marketplace unless they play by the rules set by their competitors. [sniffs] This is incredibly important, this issue right now, as all across the city and the country, uh, a new generation of entrepreneurs are vibe coding incredible new companies at an unprecedented speed and volume using AI. We want the public to have confidence that they are going to benefit from this innovation, and for the public to see the full benefit of the AI boom that we're seeing in San Francisco right now, we must have a level playing field for people to compete on. That is a critical way to build public confidence, that this is going to improve people's lives, it's gonna make things, uh... it's gonna lower their cost of living, and it's not just all gonna get sucked into the largest tech companies in the world for their bottom line and their benefit, uh, only. At the end of the day, all of these behaviors come down to one thing: massive, dominant corporations favoring their own products and services over their competitors. Uh, it's called self-preferencing. Self-preferencing completely distorts people's experience on the internet. It blocks the public from accessing products and services that might be better, uh, or more impactful for them just because, uh, it would hurt the platform's enormous bottom lines. And this anti-competitive behavior flies in the face of our country's long tradition of fostering competition and innovation. Our economic system is premised on fair competition and open markets, uh, with over a century of federal law. But a few platforms have gotten so big that the old tools have proven inadequate. There have been several attempts to rein in this anti-competitive behavior, uh, including bipartisan legislation similar to this in the United States Senate. Uh, there's also been litigation. In 2023, uh, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals found that Apple had violated California law with its anti-steering policy in 2023. The same year, the Federal Trade Commission sued Amazon, uh, for its anti-discounting, uh, policies. And last May, Google was found guilty of violating federal antitrust law. But these victories have proven incapable of reining in big tech's anti-competitive behavior. We need new tools that go beyond decades old, at times outdated federal law to protect com-competition and innovation online, uh, in the world as it exists today. That is this bill.SB ten seventy-four, uh, the Blocking Anti-Competitive Self-Preferencing by Entrenched Dominant Platforms Act, otherwise known as the BASE Act, uh, will level the playing field and restore competition to the online marketplace. The bill prevents any digital platform with a market capitalization of greater than a trillion dollars and serving one hundred million or more monthly users in the US from favoring their own products and services on the platforms that they operate. It's modeled after the Cartwright Act, which is California's nation-leading competition law, but with a twist for the current phase of the digital era. SB ten seventy-four specifies a range of prohibited self-preferencing behaviors, including everything from manipulating search results, to the, uh, most favored nation, um, clauses, to using non-public data from platforms to develop competing products, which Amazon has done, and more. People are frustrated with the internet landscape, and they have every right to be. People want a free and open internet. Uh, they want to have choices of products, uh, that they can purchase and use. This bill will get us closer, uh, to achieving that, uh, and I'm proud to be bringing it forward. Again, uh, thank you, Y Combinator, for hosting us today, and I'd next like to bring up Garry Tan, the CEO of Y Combinator and co-sponsor of the bill. [audience clapping] Thank you, Garry.

2. GTGarry Tan7:46

   Twenty years ago, if you wanted to build something on the internet, you could. You opened a browser, you dragged and dropped some HTML, and you had a website. The web was open. Anyone could build. Anyone could reach anyone. Today, we have something much more powerful. Vibe coding, AI that lets a first-time founder build a real web service, a real app, in an afternoon. The creative barrier is basically gone. We're living through the most extraordinary moment in the history of building software and technology. And yet, when that app is done, when the founder hits publish, they run straight into a wall. If they want to reach users on a phone, they have to go through Apple's App Store, the worst DMV in the world. Arbitrary rules, opaque rejections, a thirty percent tax on every dollar their users spend. No appeal, no alternative, just the line. And if they want users to find them, they depend on Google. Except Google's search results now terminate on Google. Google Flights, Google Shopping, Google's AI answers. The open web, the thing that made the first generation of great internet companies possible, is being quietly swallowed. Here's what gets me. When a computer sits on your desk, you have a-- you have real freedom. You can install whatever you want on your MacBook Pro. You can customize it. You can mod it. You can run software from anywhere. We take that for granted. But the minute that same computer fits in your pocket, the minute it becomes a phone, you lose almost all of that freedom. Apple decides what you can install. Apple decides what payment systems you can use. Apple decides whether your app exists at all. The form factor shrank. So did your rights as a user and as a builder. And that's not inevitable. That is a choice, and it is a choice that has been made for us, not by us. Now, I wanna be direct about something here, because opponents of this bill will mischaracterize it. The BASE Act is not an attack on vertical integration. Vertical integration in technology is, more often than not, a good thing. Apple making its own chips made the iPhone better. Google building its own data centers made search faster. We're not here to punish companies for being good at what they do. And we're not against big tech, but we are for little tech. What this bill targets is a narrow set of genuinely anti-competitive behaviors. The edge cases where pla- a platform uses its control over essential infrastructure to tilt the playing field against competitors, little tech, tiny startups, people in garages trying to create technology for one another. Using third-party data to build competing products, burying rivals in search results, forcing tying arrangements, blocking interoperability. Let's call this what it really is. It's market corruption, not innovation, not integration. Corruption. Using structural powers to rig outcomes that the market itself would never produce. That's pulling up the ladder for little tech, and our work here is simply anti-corruption work. Y Combinator has funded over five thousand companies. We see up close what happens when a f- great founder with a great product hits one of these walls. They don't lose on merits. They lose on access, and that is a problem that the market cannot fix on its own because the people controlling access are the same people who benefit from restricting it. Senator Wiener and his team have written a bill that is careful, targeted, and right. At Y Combinator, we exist for one reason, to make sure the best idea wins for the consumers, for the people, for our society. Not the best-connected idea, not the idea with the biggest platform behind it, the best idea. That is the bet we make on every founder who walks through our doors. Today, you're gonna hear directly from founders who have gone head-to-head with Goliaths trying to restrict their access to the market. Shane Gill built an alternative app store and had to go to Europe to do it.To leave California, to leave San Francisco, to leave America to build the future, that's not the America that I wanna live in. Eric Migicovsky built Beeper and watched Apple shut him down in real time. Marten Von Hagen is fighting closed messaging ecosystems to build the next generation of AI assistants. These are not hypotheticals. These are people in this room at YC right now in San Francisco who built something great and hit one of the walls we were talking about. The BASE Act says this should never happen again, that the next founder who walks through the doors to get... They need to get-- they need to be able to compete on the merits, not on who controls the pipes. That is what we're here to fight for. Let's get it done.

3. SPSpeaker13:19

   [clapping]

4. SPSpeaker13:26

   Good morning. I'm Teri Oley with the vice president Economic Security California Action, and really happy to be here today with Senator Wiener and with Garry Tan. Thank you for having us here at YC. At my organization, we work every single day to build an economy where everyone has the freedom and stability to thrive. Central to this goal is a well-functioning economy, and that, of course, relies on robust competition between rivals that, uh, are playing on a level playing field. But in the digital marketplace right now, that playing field has been systematically rigged by a small number of dominant platforms. And that's why I'm here today, and I'm a co-- a, a proud co-sponsor of SB ten seventy-four, the BASE Act. Right now, that handful of dominant players effectively controls the digital marketplace. About four companies, we've heard them named earlier, set the rules for everyone else, giving them the ability to ice out competing businesses that depend on them for their own survival. I'm surrounded here by plenty of people who understand these harms and, and can articulate them way better than I can. My colleagues can speak to what this feels like firsthand, but let me try to put it into plain terms for the rest of us. Imagine a toll road, the only road in and out of town. Every trucker has to use it. The toll collector sees every shipment, knows every route, understands exactly what the buyers in town want to purchase. And then one day, the toll collector's like, "Huh, maybe I should just launch my own trucking company." And now every toll you pay actually funds that competitor. And because they own the road, their trucks get the green lights while you get the red lights. You can still make your business the most amazing and efficient, uh, business in the world, but still, you'll lose out every time because the road is blocked by the one who owns it. No one would think that this is fair, and certainly, no one would think this is good for anyone except that one toll collector. And that's what's happening in digital platforms every single day. Platforms that manipulate search results to push their own products to the top, regardless of quality or price. Platforms that harvest data from third-party sellers to clone those products and then sell them. Platforms that don't let customers take their own data and leave. These platforms are infrastructure for digital commerce. They're the roads, and the same few guys who own the roads also own the trucks, and they're able to do this because, frankly, no one has been trying to stop them. When the biggest few companies exploit their dominance to stifle competition, everyone pays. I'm thinking about the last time that I Googled a flight. It was actually just the other day, and I was kinda shocked at how expensive [chuckles] it is. I assumed that I was getting the best results, but in the EU, they found that actually Google was pushing its own travel and shopping services to the top, ahead of competitors, and regardless of what might have been a better, a better deal. I didn't get the, the best answer, or maybe I did, I'll never know, uh, but I did get Google's preferred answer. Europe, of course, said, "We're not gonna accept that," and they fined Google two and a half billion dollars for exactly this conduct. There's no reason that I or you or any Californian should have to accept this. We can have nice things. It's frankly quite axiomatic, and we've heard it said a million times already today. Less competition means higher prices, fewer choices, less innovation, and lower quality. For those of us who aren't the builders but actually the users of tech, this just creates a worse experience when we don't have this kind of level playing field. And that's by design because it's meant to enrich those few who can drive up the costs and the market share. This is the affordability crisis playing out in real time behind a computer screen. California built the template for what the tech economy can look like at its best. We all know the lure of the scrappy startup in a garage becoming the company that changes the world. That's a California story, and it is actually one of our greatest exports. Precisely because of that, California is uniquely positioned, and I would say we are uniquely obligated, to make sure that that story remains possible. We can make sure that the next generation of builders gets a fair shot at competing on the merit of their products. Frankly, the federal government has completely failed to safeguard this most crucial part of our economy, and it's left small businesses and startups to really fend for themselves and the consumers to suffer. And this is just really not a fair fight. Legislation that would have addressed self-preferencing in Congress stalled out despite bipartisan support. And antitrust enforcement, enforcement, which has had a bit of a renaissance over the last few years, has, uh, really slowed to a trickle, and this administration is frankly walking back from even enforcing the laws that we do have. No one is coming to save us. California must lead because right now it's really quite unclear who else will. SB ten seventy-four makes it clear: self-preferencing by trillion-dollar platforms is just no longer allowed. If your product is genuinely better, great, you can win at the marketplace. Compete on merit, but you don't get to use your control over the infrastructure to smother your competition. If any place can lead on this, it's right here in California. Let's do this. Thank you to Senator Wiener for his fierce leadership on this issue.

5. SPSpeaker18:16

   [clapping]

6. SWScott Wiener18:20

   Uh, thank you. We're now gonna hear, as Garry mentioned, from a few startup founders, uh, who will talk about their experience. I'm gonna start with Shane Gill, f- uh, founder of, uh, AltStore.

7. SPSpeaker18:36

   Hi, everyone. Uh, so my name is Shane Gill. I'm one of the co-founders of AltStore. Uh, and today I just wanted to give a brief story that I think best exemplifies why we're here. Um, my co-founder, Riley, and I started AltStore for one reason, and that was we wanted to release apps that Apple wouldn't allow us to release on the App Store. Ten years ago, Riley submitted his retro Nintendo game emulator app, Delta, to the App Store and was eventually rejected with Apple simply saying that they would not allow emulators on the App Store. This wasn't for any particular reason, like they were unsafe, but just because Apple decided it didn't fit with what they wanted on the store. So with no other alternative, AltStore was then developed and launched in twenty nineteen as a tool for people to install apps unofficially, also known as sideloading, and it required users to plug their phone into a computer on a weekly basis. It was a hacky passion project that we entirely funded from donations on Patreon, and we kept working on it hoping that maybe one day things might change. Fast-forward to twenty twenty-two when the EU passed the Digital Markets Act, paving the way for alternative app stores to be allowed on iOS. We began preparing our sideloading tool to be an official app store, and by the time Apple was required to comply with the DMA in twenty twenty-four, we were ready to launch with our new EU version, AltStore Pal. However, Apple still required that all apps on alternative stores be approved by them, and they held Delta in review for weeks without any reason given. And then just before approving it, Apple changed the App Store rules worldwide to allow for emulators, taking away our opportunity to launch with a killer exclusive app. We decided to still go ahead with the launch of AltStore Pal in the EU, but we also released Delta in the App Store worldwide for everyone else. Delta then became the number one app on the App Store for two straight weeks, and even though it wasn't exclusive, it proved that competition works. Apple would never have allowed emulators if we hadn't been ready to launch with Delta on AltStore. Since launching, we've continued to develop AltStore as a marketplace for all kinds of apps, and we were able to raise six million with Pace Capital to continue building AltStore as a true alternative to the App Store. And we now host over a hundred developers on our store. We allow for all kinds of business models, such as community donations, all without taking a cut. We've also been able to launch in Japan and are later planning to launch in Brazil and Australia as more markets continue to open up. All this exists only because European law required Apple to allow us to exist, not because Apple wanted to, but because regulators said, "You don't get to own the platform and the playing field." SB ten seventy-four is that law for California, and when California moves, the country follows. Thank you.

8. SPSpeaker21:40

   [clapping]

9. SWScott Wiener21:45

   Thank you, Shane. Uh, next I wanna bring up Eric, uh, Mitnickowski, uh, founder of, uh, Pebble Keeper-- uh, Pebble Beeper.

10. SPSpeaker21:52

    Thanks. Uh, thank you very much, Senator. Thank you, Garry and YC. Uh, it's a pleasure to be here. My name is Eric Mitnickowski. Um, I founded a company called Pebble way back in the day, and more recently I founded a company called Beeper. Both have been, uh, involved in the, uh, [chuckles] in this kind of battle to, um, to bring new features to users on platforms that are being gatekept by extraordinarily large companies. The impact of self-preferencing, though, is really hard to detect as a consumer. How do you know what you're missing? You can name dozens of amazing products that you've tried from startups, but there are so many more that you haven't had the chance to try because they die on the vine because of self-preferencing and other mechanisms that gatekeepers use to block new and innovative startups from creating products that you would probably love to use. That's the true impact of these, um, [tsking] uh, of these systems. I started a company called Pebble, um, more than fifteen years ago now. We were the first people to build smartwatches. Um, now we're, we're back making smartwatches again, but we're finding it incredibly hard to offer a great experience on the iOS platform-- on, on the iPhone platform. Compare this to the Apple Watch. Apple Watch has been out for now ten years on iPhone. Um, Pebble is, uh, is quite different. Pebble offers, you know, a different set of, um, c-- features and capabilities, and we're being blocked from offering those on iPhone, or for people who use an iPhone. Uh, the impact is that customers don't actually get to make a choice. They're, they're almost forced to use the same products that come with the, uh, the platform that they've chosen. Um, here's a good example. So Apple goes out of its way to make products like Pebble not work when connected to an iPhone. Uh, if you've got an Apple Watch and you receive a notification, you can respond by voice to that notification. You're running late, you've missed the bus, whatever, you can raise your hand, uh, talk right into your watch, and it sends a response to that notification. Apple does not allow third parties access to that same feature. So if you have a Pebble and you have an iPhone, you are literally not allowed or not able to respond to a notification on your watch. This makes it really difficult for our customers to use the product with iPhone, and it makes it more likely that they're gonna pick an Apple product over a Pebble product if they have an iPhone. This doesn't have to be the case. In Europe, they passed a law called the DMA. This mandates that large gatekeepers offer interoperability. That means that they have to offer the same services that, that they, that they use on their first-party products to third-party products like Pebble. So if you're a European customer-With a Pebble, you can actually respond to your notifications by voice from your watch. That feature is only available to Europeans right now. I'm really excited to see legislation like this new, new bill put forward because we know that these gatekeepers are keeping artificial constraints on their features and their capabilities and blocking startups like ours to, um, uh, to offer these, these features to our customers. They allow them in Europe, they don't allow them in the US. This bill hopefully will put pressure on these large gatekeepers to allow the same capabilities that they're allowing to people in Europe, uh, to have them in Canada or in, in the US. Thanks.

11. SWScott Wiener25:21

    Thank you. [clapping] Thank you, Eric. Uh, next is, uh, we're gonna ask up Mar-- uh, Marvin von Hagen, uh, founder of Poke.

12. SPSpeaker25:35

    Thank you. I'm Marvin, and I want to tell you about the day I flew to Rome to fight Meta. And our company Interaction builds Poke, a proactive AI system that lives directly inside of messaging apps like iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram, you name it. And, um, we raised twenty-seven million dollars from some of the best investors in Silicon Valley, and our users have near-perfect retention and sent millions of messages. Our product works, people love it. But then one day in October, Meta announced they were going to ban us from WhatsApp. Um, and we were like, "What? What happened? Did anything bad happen here?" And, um, it turns out that it wasn't because we were doing anything wrong, it was just, uh, because they introduced their own AI assistant and then decided, "Hey, we still want to get money from all the other businesses, but not from those that compete with a new product, a new business line that we're investing in now." And half of humanity uses WhatsApp. In Europe and Brazil and India, it's not just a messaging app, it's the communication infrastructure for your digital life. And, uh, Meta decided that infrastructure should belong exclusively to their AI because they invested billions into that new business line. Um, so I flew to Rome, three companies in that room, Meta, OpenAI, and us, and Meta's defense was that AI is putting a strain on their systems. And I knew we, we would win the case, um, immediately from that moment because we literally pay Meta for every message we send. Um, users don't, like normal users don't. Um, billions of humans are using WhatsApp every day and putting a strain on their systems, but they don't have to pay for it because there is no strain. Um, so while billions of consumers don't pay, businesses like us do. We are how WhatsApp makes their money. It would clearly be in the interest of WhatsApp to do this, but not in the interest of the bigger conglomerate that also has an AI business line. So, um, Italy, not surprisingly, ruled in our favor, and the European Union opened an investigation. And eventually Meta backed down, kind of. They replaced the ban with fees so high that real competition is nearly impossible, and, um, one barrier for another. So now I'm from Germany, and I'll be the first to admit that Europe gets teased, um, often very correctly, uh, for over-regulating its way into irrelevance while America actually builds things. I moved here because this is where you come to build something people want. And at the same time, I now have to give credit where cr- where it's due. Right now, people in Berlin, in Milan, have more choice in which AI assistant they wanna, uh, they can use than Americans in the Bay Area. That should embarrass us, and it certainly embarrasses me. And SB ten seventy-four fixes that. The free market won in Rome, and let's make the free market win here too.

13. SWScott Wiener28:39

    [clapping] Thank you. Thank you, Marvin. Uh, and then our final speaker, I wanna, uh, uh, bring up Peter Krogue, founder of Blue.

14. SPSpeaker28:54

    Uh, first, thanks for your leadership on this, uh, Senator Wiener and Garry. Uh, it's great. Uh, my name is Peter Krogue. I've spent the last twenty-five years working with speech technology, uh, the last seven at Google, first working on the Google Assistant, um, and then Gemini and Gemini Live mode. [clears throat] Um, uh, last year, my, uh, co-founder, Omar Abdelaziz, and I left Google, uh, because we wanted to build something, uh, radically more powerful, and that is Blue, uh, a voice assistant that lets you do everything. So let me tell you what that means and why I'm here today. Um, we thought, what if you could give an AI model full control over your phone, and then you just talk to the model and got stuff done? Um, not just a couple little things like sending a message, but catching up on Slack, filling out expense reports, uh, shopping for a new blingy phone case, and then sharing an image of it on social media, having playdates with Claude. These are all things you can do with it. So the vision resonated. Um, we sold out our first drop in twenty-four hours. Uh, Y Combinator backed us. Um, but here's what you have to understand. [clears throat] In order to do this, um, we had to design, prototype, and then manufacture, overseas of course, this tiny little USB dongle that you might be able to see, uh, that slides into the bottom of your phone, and then that gives us the ability to tap, type, um, and use your phone exactly the way you would. [clears throat] We actually had to bring in a, a third co-founder, uh, to develop this little fella, and while it's an impressive piece of kit, um, it's also technically irrelevant and only exists because the hardware incumbent has not shared access to these basic actions on their devices. So for us right now, it is a practical necessity. Uh, I wanna tell you about our users. Um, they're not just tech enthusiasts and early adopters. Um, these are folks with motor impairments, with visual impairments... uh, people who drive for a living. Uh, in fact, our, our number one user, far and away, is somebody with Parkinson's disease. So for these people, uh, voice access is not just a convenience, it's their independence. So I find it ironic that Apple, a company that has a reputation, a great reputation for accessibility, um, would make it impossible for innovators like us to make their phones universally usable for everyone. [clears throat] Um, SB ten seventy-four says, uh, if you control the platform, you cannot control that, that-- uh, use that control to foreclose competition. Uh, you cannot self-preference. You have to provide access on equal terms. So if this bill passes, um, Blue will not require this little dongle that sticks into your phone. Um, it will just be available to everyone. No hardware required, just software. Um, and everybody I know has been waiting for Apple to do something like this. We can do it right now. So, uh, from our perspective, this is what's at stake. Um, it's not just startup economics, but it's real people with real needs who want real independence. Thank you.

15. SWScott Wiener32:05

    Thank you. [audience clapping] Thank you, Peter. Uh, so that concludes our speakers. We have... I know we have a few press here and then a whole bunch more watching remotely, so we're happy to take questions, uh, from the press. Anyone has any? Yes.

16. SPSpeaker32:21

    Thank you, Senator Wiener. Um, Chase from Politico. I just... Could you just kind of run through some of the specifics of what the bill would prohibit? Um, I know it's, it's a threshold of one trillion, but the specific kind of behavior that you're really aiming to, um, stop here.

17. SWScott Wiener32:35

    Yes. So it is, um... So... One second. Um, great. Uh, so yes, it applies to, um, as of next year, when it will go into effect, publicly traded companies. By twenty thirty, it will apply to everyone, including like privately held with a trillion dollars in market capitalization. So we're talking about the massive platforms that have the ability to, to do this, uh, and with, uh, at least a hundred million monthly, uh, users. Uh, and it would ban them from, uh, a number of different specific practices: manipulating the order of search results; uh, using, uh, non-public data to favor their own products. For example, when Amazon, uh, uses non-public data about someone selling on their platform and then rips that off to try to, uh, destroy that other, uh, that competitor. Um, employing policies, charges, or practices, uh, uh, that put users at an unreasonable cost, uh, disadvantage. For example, what we just heard with the WhatsApp, uh, AI add-on, just like, "Let's just jack up the cost and make it impossible for you, uh, to use it." Um, uh, favoring your own products, uh, um, uh, to try to ace out competitors. Um, conditioning access on purchasing product from you. So you can only go on our platform if you buy X, Y, and Z products that we offer, and you can't buy anyone else's, uh, products. Uh, the most favored nation, uh, clauses that we mentioned, uh, before. Um, in addition, the... there are some other practices that are banned. Uh, uh, pro-- uh, banning the provision of a service to a consumer that preferences a third-party entity with whom the provider has a relationship, so forcing you to use only a certain kind of, uh, service. Um, denying access, uh, to a platform, uh, uh, to, you know, try to favor your own product over someone else's. Uh, and then also preventing consumers from obtaining a portable copy of their own, uh, of their own data. Um, uh, so it's a, it's a series of different kinds of practices. Uh, and from the consumer perspective, uh, I think we can... Uh, you've heard about some of the impacts today, but one of the most famous, of course, has to do with, uh, with iMessage, the green versus the blue. Uh, and although that has gotten less horrible in recent years, it's still horrible, and it's completely and utterly intentional on Apple's, uh, um, uh, part to try to, uh, really push people to get into iPhones. And we all see that on a daily basis, where those of us with friend groups who make, make fun of the people who have the, the green bubbles because it makes it more complicated for, for everyone. And that's completely avoidable. That's anti-competitive behavior, uh, by, by Apple. And we see it also when you go and search on Amazon and what products come up and what don't. And sometimes you scroll down for a while, and you're like, "Oh, wait, that product seems like the best. Why is that like the forty-fifth thing that's listed?" And of course, we... You know, with, with Meta, with the link, um, suppression, uh, and what links the... That's like a real danger to democracy in terms of promoting misinformation and what information you're seeing. And for better or for worse, people get their information from these platforms, from Meta in particular. Uh, and so it is, uh, not okay for Meta just to decide what you see and what you don't see. So it's a range of different practices. Yes.

18. SPSpeaker36:22

    A couple remote questions. Can you repeat the question and then, and then the answer?

19. SWScott Wiener36:25

    Yes.

20. SPSpeaker36:25

    Um, uh, what are the enforcement mechanisms?

21. SWScott Wiener36:29

    Um, yeah. The enforcement mechanisms are the same as under the Cartwright Act. There can be a private lawsuit or a lawsuit by the attorney general.

22. SPSpeaker36:37

    Um, well, do you have a read yet on Governor Newsom?

23. SWScott Wiener36:40

    Uh, no, I don't. I would-Oh, oh, sorry. The, the, the first question was e-enforcement, and I... it was enforcement, as I indicated, under the Cartwright Act, private lawsuit where the attorney general can sue. Uh, this question is, uh, do I have a read on Governor Newsom on this? And the answer is, um, no. I'm sure that, uh, if we're-- This is-- I wanna be very clear. This is gonna be... This is a tough bill that will be very hard-fought. We're going up against some of the largest corporations in the history of planet Earth, uh, and it's gonna be a, a bruising fight, but we're on the right side, and we're gonna have a, a big grassroots coalition, uh, behind this bill. Uh, and, uh, we're gonna have to fight every step of the way, and we will make the case to Governor Newsom. And, and the governor has always been a supporter of, uh, startups and innovation. Garry, there's a question for you from API.

24. GTGarry Tan37:35

    Okay.

25. SWScott Wiener37:40

    Uh.

26. GTGarry Tan37:40

    About, uh, blasting Apple's, uh, App Store, um, what do you say to consumers who wanna be protected from malicious actors by including new attack vectors? Well, the great thing about, uh, coding is that you actually-- that's a meta thing. Like, you-- uh, I don't know if people have used Claude Code's, uh, security review tool, for instance, but, um, it turns out that it's, uh, very, very good as well. So, you know, I, I think, um, this is a classic argument that big tech uses to say, like, "We're here to protect you," but the way that the d-- This technology is so democratizing that, like, having a truly secure computing environment is now in the hands of the end user and, and the founder, and to a degree that was not possible before. And so, um, I think we're in a new age. Like, even two years ago, I think easily you could say that, uh, maybe only the big tech companies could afford, uh, the millions of dollars in, like, the extreme level of security that you might have, um, inside an Apple device. Uh, I don't think that that's true anymore. Uh, and with the advent of smarter and smarter models, we are at this moment where, um, the technology has changed, and that argument is no, no longer valid.

27. SWScott Wiener39:01

    Yeah, and I, and I just wanna add to that. I think what we, you know, see is these platforms which are, you know, very powerful and can provide a good user experience in a lot of ways. And so they basically say, "Well, this is-- we're gonna just do, like, wall it off, and you're inside the wall, and we're gonna give you a lovely, pleasant experience," and then you're missing out on all of these other options because they've just walled that off. And so I, I, I think consumers should be able to make those, uh, choices and, and not have someone make those choices for you. Any other questions? We have no other... Yes, Chase.

28. SPSpeaker39:39

    One other one. Um, the, uh, this is actually the folks at the, um, Chamber of Progress just sent this out talking about the, uh, California Law Review Commission studying competition issues over the last few years saying this bill would, um, negatively interact with that. I just wonder if you have any response to that since they just sent that out.

29. SWScott Wiener39:59

    Um, what?

30. SPSpeaker40:02

    [crosstalk]

Episode duration: 42:30