Google Makes an Epic Compromise - DTNS 5140  ## Metadata - Author: [[Daily Tech News Show]] - Full Title: Google Makes an Epic Compromise - DTNS 5140 - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/2cf2d5a5-c2d8-451d-b964-d680d10578c0 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Android Opens Worldwide Under Settlement** - The Epic–Google settlement opens Android globally and prevents another appeal by incorporating most of Judge Donato's remedies. - Google must allow third-party stores, in-app payments, and reduced fees worldwide through at least 2032. Transcript: Tom Merritt Let's start with what you need to know with that big story. Peace in our time. Epic Games and Google have agreed to settle their five-year antitrust case over the Google App Store. The settlement includes many, if not most, of the remedies that were ordered by Judge James Donato in his ruling from October 2024. It will prevent an appeal from taking place. And here's what stays. Google will still have to allow third-party app stores, which it has already done complying with, and in-app payment systems on its version of Android without additional fees or unnecessary Impediments. Google will not use revenue sharing as a way to stop a company from making its own app store. It will not enter into exclusivity agreements. It will not get OEMs and carriers to restrict pre-installation or placement of Google Play Store. And the three member dispute panel with members approved by both Epic and Google will still be created to resolve any disputes over the settlement. Now, the settlement goes beyond the judge's ruling in a few ways. This will apply worldwide. So the court is just in the U.S. Google would only have to do this in the U.S. But Google is going to say, you know what, we're going to do this everywhere. It will last for six and a half years at the least. They can go longer if they want, but this will go through 2032. The judge had only required three for the initial order. Google will lower its fee structure. Now, it gets complicated when you wade into the details, but right now it's either 30 or 15%. It's going to get a lot more complicated about what percentage applies when, but the max will be 20% and the minimum 9% that has to go to Google from developers for purchases made using The Google in-app payment system. And Google will certify makers of alternative app stores and payment systems for safety. Hold on to that thought because there's a little spin on that that makes it different than the original order. There are two ways that, two significant ways that it differs. Google can require that devs include an option alongside third-party payment methods. Apps can still set their own prices and offer lower prices if you skip Google's system, but Google can require you to have them as a payment option. Registered app stores, so if you register with Google, will be able to install from a website with a single click. No scare warnings, no bouncing through sideload methods. This replaces something in the original order where Google would have been required to distribute the third-party app stores. Now, U.S. District Court Judge James Donato has to review the settlement and sign off on it before it can go into effect, partly because they changed some stuff. Like you were going to make Google distribute them, Epic saying, we're okay if we do this one-click install from the web thing instead. And the judge is probably going to sign off on it and then we're off to the races. ([Time 0:02:50](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ee112bdc-3425-4435-a504-656f2a3fcad7)) - **New Google Fee Bands And Payment Option Rule** - Google will cap its maximum developer fee at 20% and a minimum of 9% for its in-app payment system, replacing the simpler 30%/15% structure. - Developers may need to include Google's payment option alongside third-party methods, which limits pure bypasses. Transcript: Tom Merritt Google will lower its fee structure. Now, it gets complicated when you wade into the details, but right now it's either 30 or 15%. It's going to get a lot more complicated about what percentage applies when, but the max will be 20% and the minimum 9% that has to go to Google from developers for purchases made using The Google in-app payment system. And Google will certify makers of alternative app stores and payment systems for safety. Hold on to that thought because there's a little spin on that that makes it different than the original order. There are two ways that, two significant ways that it differs. Google can require that devs include an option alongside third-party payment methods. Apps can still set their own prices and offer lower prices if you skip Google's system, but Google can require you to have them as a payment option. Registered app stores, so if you register with Google, will be able to install from a website with a single click. No scare warnings, no bouncing through sideload methods. ([Time 0:04:18](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b5e9b7da-0405-41f7-a620-f75094fab30e)) - **One-Click Web Installs For Registered Stores** - Registered third-party app stores can install apps from websites with a single click, replacing a mandated distribution requirement. - That one-click web install reduces friction but keeps Google involved via registration and certification. Transcript: Tom Merritt There are two ways that, two significant ways that it differs. Google can require that devs include an option alongside third-party payment methods. Apps can still set their own prices and offer lower prices if you skip Google's system, but Google can require you to have them as a payment option. Registered app stores, so if you register with Google, will be able to install from a website with a single click. No scare warnings, no bouncing through sideload methods. This replaces something in the original order where Google would have been required to distribute the third-party app stores. Now, U.S. District Court Judge James Donato has to review the settlement and sign off on it before it can go into effect, partly because they changed some stuff. Like you were going to make Google distribute them, Epic saying, we're okay if we do this one-click install from the web thing instead. ([Time 0:04:52](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1f96c75e-1ae6-4240-a4a9-e806cec2f035)) - **Prepare For Developer Identity Registration** - Developers should prepare for identity registration requirements to distribute Android apps and plan compliance accordingly. - Expect some paperwork and verification steps as Google aims to certify developers and reduce fraud. Transcript: Sarah Lane A couple of questions here. I guess my first, what I'm most interested in is that three member dispute panel. So it's like, all right, three people, Epic and Google both say, yes, you're the three people who are going to settle disputes between us as we go forward. Who are those people? And, you know, how does it benefit both companies? And also the applicable worldwide, not just in the US, and for more than twice what the judge required, six and a half years rather than three. I would assume a lot of this is Google being like, get off our back. Let's just let's make nice with Epic. We don't have to worry about this for a while. And everybody's happy. Tom Merritt I think that's the key to all of this is Google wants to make Epic agree not to sue them again. Because if they follow the judge's order and then they do something that Epic doesn't like, and then it goes to that panel you're talking about and Epic still doesn't like it, they might Bring a lawsuit again. This is going to make that much less likely because Epic is very happy with this. The statements from both Google and Epic were all like, this is going to do for Android what it should have been like the whole time, etc., etc., just praising it to the high hills. So I think Google is avoiding this continuing to be a problem. That's why they want to make it six and a half years, too. It keeps Epic off their backs, like you say, for another six and a half years. And it makes that three member panel less of an important question because you're right. If this was a contentious dispute ordered by a judge, then who goes on that panel is really interesting, right? If these two are getting along with the settlement, that panel is still probably going to be necessary here and there for some judgment calls. But by and large, the two companies are going to try to get along because they made this settlement. Yeah. Sarah Lane For any devs out there who are listening to all these details and have been following the story, I would assume there's a lot of happy people out there today. Tom Merritt Yeah, especially with that drop from 30 and 15 percent to 20 and and 9%. Right. A little more paperwork there. The one thing I've seen people upset about is the idea of registering. Developers will need to register their identity to distribute apps that can run on Android at all. That's something Google, we covered that last week. And some folks are upset with that. They don't believe that is in the true spirit of openness to have to have any kind of identity associated with an app. But that is not prohibited by this settlement. It's not particularly named. It's sort of left vague how this registration process is going to work. ([Time 0:05:54](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f66375a1-7a2e-4f32-91a5-8f8780d0ea70)) - **AI Forecasts Improved Hurricane Prediction** - Google DeepMind's hurricane forecasts outperformed many traditional models across the Atlantic season, particularly at five-day lead times. - The AI matched or beat expert human-led forecasts on track and did well on intensity predictions, offering faster, cheaper forecasts. Transcript: Tom Merritt Let's get to the briefs. Sarah Lane Sony's PlayStation Portal handheld was released back in 2023 for $200, supporting remote play of games on your PS5. However, and you may recall, your PS5 had to be on, had to be connected to the internet, and that connection had to be good enough to stream your game, which wasn't always the case. However, not anymore. We're on the up and up, everybody. The PlayStation Portal now supports cloud streaming There's of games directly from Sony's servers, as long as you subscribe to PlayStation Plus Premium, which will cost you $18 per Month. That does let you game side by side with somebody using your PS5 under another account, or could let somebody watch a movie on your PS5 while you use the portal to play a game at the same Time. Tom Merritt I can already hear somebody saying, well, you still need a good internet connection to stream to the portal, which is true. But you had to have it on both ends before. Now you only have to have it on the one end. And Sony servers are probably not going to be the bottleneck on this. But the bigger thing is that last stuff you said, where if you were doing this, you couldn't use your PS5 for anything else. Probably not a big deal all the time, but occasionally an annoyance. And now you'll be able to just do the cloud game if it has the game you want and you're paying for the service. I get that. But you'll be able to, if you have that going on, let somebody use your PS5 to do something else with it. Sarah Lane Yeah. Yeah. Seems like a win for PS5 folks. Tom Merritt Yeah uh and it doesn't take away the ability to stream from the ps5 if you're like i don't want to pay that subscription fee right like you can still use it the way it's been used up until Now without having to pay anything we have options we mentioned back in june that google's deepine Weather Lab had begun releasing forecasts for hurricanes, cyclones, typhoons, The like. There were high expectations for the model. And now that the Atlantic hurricane season is winding down, we can see whether it met those high expectations. The official numbers are going to come a little later from the U.S. National Hurricane Center in a few months. But senior researcher Brian McNulty at the University of Miami got a hold of the raw data and crunched a bunch of the numbers to give folks a preview. Out of 11 forecast models, the U.S. National Weather Service's global forecast model had the most track forecast errors across the 13 name storms this season. That's actually not a surprise. That model is not always that great, but it was particularly bad. And set against Google DeepMind, the difference between the two was significant. DeepMind was almost twice as good at the five-day maximum forecast level as the National Weather Service forecast. However, the official forecast from the National Hurricane Center, or OFCL, is the one to beat. That's the gold standard. It is actually made by human experts consulting data from multiple models. The two of those, the OFCL and the Google DeepMind, were almost identical for the first 12 hours out, right? Like when you're very close to the storm and you kind of know where it is. Google deep mine did slightly better until about four days out when the two converged so five days away they were both really good right before the stone storm they were both really good Uh but in the interim google deep mine was better um the gold standard of all these models is the european center for medium range weather forecast that data was not included in this analysis. That's why we want to wait a couple months for the official stuff. But typically, that one does about the same as the OFCL, just a little better. So it'll be interesting to see how it matches up. Google DeepMind also performed well at predicting intensity changes, which is also important, not just where it is, but how bad it is. Is it Category 5? That kind of stuff. Ars Technica quoted a hurricane specialist, Michael Lowry, noting that how much more quickly the DeepMind product can produce a forecast compared to the traditional physics-based Counterparts that require some of the most expensive and advanced supercomputers in the world is quite notable. And he also pointed out that neural networks like DeepMind have the ability to learn and improve on the fly. So it's only going to get better the more it does this. Sarah Lane Yeah. I mean, I think that that's kind of the key, right, is it's cheaper and it can reverse course. Ha ha. No pun intended. But it can kind of go like, oh, wait a second. Now we've got a little bit more information. I know I said this two hours ago, but now I'm going to go ahead and update the forecast for something that is extremely important to somebody, for example, a level five hurricane. This is stuff that the more you know ahead of time, very, very, very important for anybody who's affected. So yeah, I mean, listen, we all love to talk about the weather ad nauseum, depending on where we live. Weather is very important. It affects your life one way or another. So, yeah, the better we can get using some of these models, you know, I'm into it. I wonder how much some of the old guard of weather folks are like, ah, Google deep mind. They think they're so smart. I don't know. Tom Merritt I certainly haven't talked to all the weather experts out there, but the folks I read today, and I read two or three different folks were pretty excited about this. They were like, this is great. Because their goal is to make sure they can tell people to get to safety ahead of time and not have to waste time preparing for a hurricane in a place it's not going to hit. Right. They want both of those. And this made it better. This made it easier to do that. It made it more more effective. And that's really what's important. And not for nothing, you know, let's point out that this is this is A.I. This is that AI that people are often railing about being used to make a demonstrably better prediction about something that will in fact save lives. So I don't think we should lose sight of that. And this is not a like, well, we'll see how it does. Maybe it was a blip. This was over the course of an entire season compared against dozens of models like it did well. And it's probably going to continue to do well, if not better. ([Time 0:12:16](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d10c2e99-0a47-4c2c-84b7-d2e86b116c59)) - **Amazon Sues Over Agentic Shopping Bots** - Amazon sued Perplexity alleging its Comet browser scraped Amazon while masking as Chrome and violated terms banning automated data extraction. - Amazon worries agentic shopping hides ads and undermines its ad-driven revenue model, prompting legal action to protect its ecosystem. Transcript: Sarah Lane Is suing perplexity for computer fraud. The retailer alleges that perplexity's Comet browser doesn't disclose when it's shopping on a person's behalf, which Amazon says is a violation of its terms of service. Amazon terms prohibit any use of data mining, robots, or similar data gathering and extraction tools. Perplexity agreed back in November of last year not to let its agent shop on Amazon sites. But then this August, 2025, the Comet browser started accessing Amazon, identifying itself as a Chrome browser user. Amazon obviously took issue with that. Sent a cease and desist letter on Friday to Perplexity, filed a lawsuit on Tuesday. Amazon is offering its own automated shopping, including Buy4Me, which can shop brand sites within Amazon, and Rufus, an assistant that can find and recommend items and put them in The cart. So there's a little bit of competition going on here, but likely even a bigger concern is that if you're a user and you're using the comment browser, you're not seeing ads when that agent Is doing your shopping. Tom Merritt Yeah, that's the one, right? Amazon makes a lot of money off putting ads on the page to direct you to like, maybe you want to buy this, maybe you want to buy that. Sarah Lane Which is very effective. Tom Merritt And yeah, they've been making more and more money off of it as time goes on. If people aren't seeing those ads because the agent is doing it, those ads aren't very effective anymore. And what Amazon wants to do is figure out a way to say, let's make an agreement with every agentic browser out there that they will somehow pass along ads or bring in the user into the loop And make the process less good. Like this is going to be a fight. And this is not going to be the only company that does this that says, we have built a system based on people seeing things. ([Time 0:18:24](https://share.snipd.com/snip/040facdc-7466-4136-87c8-18ac07b816b1)) - **Google's Space Data-Center Concept** - Project Suncatcher explores placing TPU-powered data-center satellites in low Earth orbit powered by near-continuous solar energy. - Google expects launch costs to fall by 2030, potentially balancing energy gains with launch emissions and enabling space-based compute. Transcript: Tom Merritt Google announced a research effort called Project Suncatcher, which will explore the possibility of launching a cluster of satellites to act as a data center in space. Google would put its tensor processing units on the satellites, outfit the satellites with solar panels, and those solar panels would generate electricity almost continuously. That would make them an estimated eight times more productive than a solar panel would be on the surface of the planet. The satellites would have to stay within a kilometer or two of each other to support the tens of terabits per second of links needed to make it work. That sounds like a long way, but in space, it's not a long way. Satellites usually stay much farther away from each other. The TPU chips also need to be hardened against radiation. They have tested Trillium TPUs, which survive a dose equivalent to five years in space without permanent failures. So there's promise there. Cost of the launch would be too much right now. It would be prohibitive. But what Google is saying is they expect it to get cheap enough by 2030 to mean the energy savings from the solar panels would balance it out. So rockets get cheaper, solar panels make it more energy efficient, and then it's going to be at least about the same as a data center on Earth. And then you say, well, OK, and maybe it's cleaner because it's using solar and it's up there in the clouds. Don't forget that you have CO2 emissions coming from the rocket that has to launch the satellites. And even when you amortize that over the life of the satellites in space, the CO2 emissions right now would be much more for getting these satellites into space. However, once again, there is hope SpaceX's Starship has lower emissions, and it has to be reusable, by the way. Any throwaway rocket is going to be way off the charts on pollutants. But a reusable Starship rocket from SpaceX might just have low enough emissions to make it balance out there as well. So not better than on the surface, but at least equal to it. Google plans to launch a prototype in collaboration with a company called Planet by 2027. ([Time 0:21:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2fb9d816-efbd-48c1-b1d3-e7de31afc9e1)) - **Watch The Prototype Before Judging Suncatcher** - Expect Project Suncatcher to face engineering and environmental trade-offs, including radiation hardening and launch emissions. - Watch for prototype results with Planet by 2027 to evaluate viability before making conclusions. Transcript: Sarah Lane Now, how often do these rockets have to go up and, you know, just do, you know, perform maintenance on these solar panels? I don't think they would. Tom Merritt I don't think they would. Maintenance is pretty low. And I think the satellites would have to perform their own maintenance. You wouldn't be sending rockets up to do maintenance. Yeah. Sarah Lane Because I'm thinking of, you know, for anybody who's got a bunch of solar panels on their house, and Tom, I know that you, you went solar some years ago with good results. And, you know, it's's something that you invest in to get more out of it after a certain amount of time. So I think for anybody who's kind of like, all right, well, solar panels either work for me or don't work for me right now, is this going to change the game for homeowners? Tom Merritt Yeah, I don't think it does much for me as a homeowner. It would be nice not to have to go up there and clean the solar panels. I assume that the solar panels on the satellites won't have to be cleaned because there's not a lot of dust up in space. But yeah, I think that's one of the things that they're going to look for in Project Suncatcher is to figure out like, okay, what unforeseen problems are there when you put this up in space? And that's why they're going to do the test plan first. But they're hoping that the cost of rocket launches has come down quite a bit and will continue to come down. And then putting them up in space, I think, has some other benefits in that you don't have them near anyone. So it's not bothering anybody. It's not making the landscape look ugly or anything like that. ([Time 0:23:08](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e13d5369-6745-4f64-829c-4d1a09e0e000)) - **AI Replaces Assistants Across Consumer Apps** - Google replaced Google Assistant with Gemini in Maps to enable more natural, multi-question interactions. - OpenAI and other companies continue releasing consumer-facing generative tools like Sora and Sora for Android. Transcript: Tom Merritt If you're reading the news in the future, you're like, oh, wait, I heard about that. I knew about that. We got lots of stuff for you to listen to right here. Sarah Lane Two former Meta employees launched the Sandbar Stream Smart Ring. It has a mic and also a touchpad, which in conjunction with an iOS app, and it is iOS only for now, lets you take notes and interact with an assistant by voice going throughout your day. Tom Merritt A little gesture. Tap it. Tap, tap, tap. Google has been replacing Google assistant with Gemini in Google maps. That means you'll be able to use more natural language and ask multiple questions at a time. Sarah Lane The motion picture association sent a cease and desist to Meta ordering it to stop using the term PG 13 when describing its Instagram contents rating system. The MPAI said, you're not doing well enough. That is not PG-13 content. Tom Merritt That word does not mean what you think it means. You need to stop. In a crackdown on one of the greatest sources of online scams, China has sentenced five members of a Myanmar scam organization to death on charges of homicide, as well as lots of other Crimes, with 16 more people convicted of fraud, injury, and other crimes, receiving life sentences, commuted sentences, and rather severe sentences there as well. Sarah Lane Australia added Reddit and live streaming platform Kik to the list of organizations that have to restrict anyone younger than 16 from using their platforms. Tom Merritt A bunch of 15-year Reddit users got really upset at this. Fairphone has launched its repairable Fairbuds 11 earbuds in the U.S. And plan to launch its repairable phones in the United States as well. Sarah Lane Apple Podcasts will soon automatically generate chapter markers. This is something that a lot of people are always asking us to do. And links to related content. You can, as a podcast maker, opt out if it doesn't work for you. I will not opt us out. Tom Merritt I will let it automatically make chapter markers because my only resistance was like, it takes time and we want to get the news out as fast as possible. Yep, yep. OpenAI launched its Sora video generation app on Android. If you're in Canada or the US, you can get it now. I downloaded it yesterday. ([Time 0:26:31](https://share.snipd.com/snip/21fabd37-adf4-4a86-b481-f00bbc57201d))