Google's reckoning Google and DOJ tussle over how AI will remake the web in antitrust closing arguments Google and the DOJ get one last chance to make their cases. Ryan Whitwam – May 30, 2025 5:40 pm | 15 Credit: Ryan Whitwam Credit: Ryan Whitwam Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only   Learn more From its humble beginnings in the late 20th century, Google has come to dominate online searches, putting it squarely in the US government's antitrust crosshairs. The ongoing search antitrust case threatens to upend Google's dominance, giving smaller players a chance to thrive and possibly wiping others out. After wrapping up testimony in the case earlier this month, lawyers for Google and the Department of Justice have now made their closing arguments. The DOJ won the initial trial, securing a ruling that Google used anticompetitive practices to maintain its monopoly in general search. During the time this case has taken to meander its way through the legal system, the online landscape has been radically altered, making it harder than ever to envision a post-Google Internet. To address Google's monopoly, the DOJ is asking United States District Judge Amit Mehta to impose limits on Google's business dealings and order a divestment of the Chrome browser. Forcing the sale of Chrome would be a major penalty and a coup for the DOJ lawyers, but this issue has been overshadowed somewhat as the case drags on. During closing arguments, the two sides dueled over how Google's search deals and the rise of AI could change the Internet as we know it. Collateral damage This case has examined the myriad ways Google used its influence and money to suppress competition. One of the DOJ's main targets is the placement deals Google signs with companies like Apple and Mozilla to be the default search provider. Google has contended that people can change the defaults anytime they wish, but the DOJ produced evidence at trial that almost no one does, and Google knows that. During closing arguments,  Mehta asked both sides about testimony from a Mozilla executive alleging that losing the Google search deal could destroy the company. Similarly, Apple's Eddie Cue said he loses sleep over the possibility of losing the Google revenue—unsurprising as the arrangement is believed to net the company $20 billion per year. Should Firefox die to teach Google a lesson? Credit: Santiago Mejia/San Francisco Chronicle Should Firefox die to teach Google a lesson? Credit: Santiago Mejia/San Francisco Chronicle The DOJ's David Dahlquist admitted that there could be some "private impact" but contended Apple and Mozilla are overestimating the risk. Mehta didn't seem totally satisfied with the government's position, noting that he didn't want to damage other markets in an effort to fix search. Google's counsel also went after the government on the privacy front. One of the DOJ's proposed remedies would require Google to license its search index and algorithm, which CEO Sundar Pichai claimed was no better than a spinoff of Google's core product. Google also claims that forcing it to license search would put everyone's privacy at risk because it has a vast amount of user data that fuels search. Google attorney John Schmidtlein said the DOJ's treatment of user privacy in the remedies was a "complete failure." Mehta questioned the government lawyers pointedly on the issue of privacy, which he noted was barely addressed in the remedy filings. The DOJ's Adam Severt suggested an independent committee would have to be empaneled to decide how to handle Google's user data, but he was vague on how long such a process could take. Google's team didn't like this idea at all. Case may hinge on AI During testimony in early May, Mehta commented that the role AI plays in the trial had evolved very quickly. In 2023, everyone in his courtroom agreed that the impact of AI on search was still years away, and that's definitely not the case now. That same thread is present in closing arguments. Mehta asked the DOJ's Dahlquist if someone new was just going to "come off the sidelines" and build a new link-based search product, given  the developments with AI. Dahlquist didn't answer directly, noting that although generative AI products didn't exist at the time covered by the antitrust action, they would be key to search going forward. Google certainly believes the AI future is already here—it has gone all-in with AI search over the past year. At the same time, Google is seeking to set itself apart from AI upstarts. "Generative AI companies are not trying to out-Google Google," said Schmidtlein. Google's team contends that its actions have not harmed any AI products like ChatGPT or Perplexity, and at any rate, they are not in the search market as defined by the court. Mehta mused about the future of search, suggesting we may have to rethink what a general search engine is in 2025. "Maybe people don’t want 10 blue links anymore," he said. The Chromium problem and an elegant solution At times during the case, Mehta has expressed skepticism about the divestment of Chrome. During closing arguments, Dahlquist reiterated the close relationship between search and browsers, reminding the court that 35 percent of Google's search volume comes from Chrome. Mehta now seems more receptive to a Chrome split than before, perhaps in part because the effects of the other remedies are becoming so murky. He called the Chrome divestment "less speculative" and "more elegant" than the data and placement remedies. Google again claimed, as it has throughout the remedy phase, that forcing it to give up Chrome is unsupported in the law and that Chrome's dominance is a result of innovation. Even if Mehta leans toward ordering this remedy, Chromium may be a sticking point. The judge seems unconvinced that the supposed buyers—a group which apparently includes almost every major tech firm—have the scale and expertise needed to maintain Chromium. This open source project forms the foundation of many other browsers, making its continued smooth operation critical to the web. If Google gives up Chrome, Chromium goes with it, but what about the people who maintain it? The DOJ contends that it's common for employees to come along with an acquisition, but that's far from certain. There was some discussion of ensuring a buyer could commit to hiring staff to maintain Chromium. The DOJ suggests Google could be ordered to provide financial incentives to ensure critical roles are filled, but that sounds potentially messy. A Chrome sale seems more likely now than it did earlier, but nothing is assured yet. Following the final arguments from each side, it's up to Mehta to mull over the facts before deciding Google's fate. That's expected to happen in August, but nothing will change for Google right away. The company has already confirmed it will appeal the case, hoping to have the original ruling overturned. It could still be years before this case reaches its ultimate conclusion. Ryan Whitwam Senior Technology Reporter Ryan Whitwam Senior Technology Reporter Ryan Whitwam is a senior technology reporter at Ars Technica, covering the ways Google, AI, and mobile technology continue to change the world. Over his 20-year career, he's written for Android Police, ExtremeTech, Wirecutter, NY Times, and more. He has reviewed more phones than most people will ever own. You can follow him on Bluesky, where you will see photos of his dozens of mechanical keyboards. 15 Comments

Warning: contains finale spoilers for Dept. Q See it? Blink and you won’t have, but it was there for a good half second: a smile on the face of DCI Carl Morck. It’s a rare enough occurrence across nine episodes of this Netflix crime drama to make it worthy of note. Matthew Goode’s irascible detective frowned, scowled and spitted out sarcasm through his new department’s search for missing prosecutor Merritt Lingard, until the show’s very last moment, when he smiled. He’d earned it. Three months earlier, Morck’s cold case unit had rescued Lingard and used dirt dug up during the investigation to blackmail the Lord Advocate (the most senior law officer in Scotland) into a funding hike, a new work car, and fast-tracked DI status for Syrian copper and calmly proficient muscle Akram Salim. And now, Morck’s partner Hardy, formerly thought to have permanently lost the use of his legs after they were both shot in the line of duty, was walking again. It was a happy ending, or at least as happy as things get in a dank Edinburgh basement filled with unsolved case files detailing terrible crimes. With major Dept. Q finale spoilers, let’s dig into the revelations about Merritt’s kidnappers, what we learned about the Leith Park shooting, and more. Who Kidnapped Merritt Lingard and Why? Merritt’s kidnappers were Lyle and Ailsa Jennings, respectively the younger brother and mother of Harry Jennings, Merritt’s boyfriend as a teenager. She was being held on their property on her childhood island home of Mhòr, in a pressurised hyperbaric chamber inside a condemned building that was formerly part of Ailsa’s husband’s oceanography business Shorebird Ocean Systems – the logo for which was the cormorant symbol identified by Merritt’s brother William as on the hat of her stalker and kidnapper. Ailsa was a twisted and abusive mother to Harry and Lyle, as well as a murderer who killed her husband by burning the house down by flicking lighted matches at him while he slept. As a result, Lyle grew up to be a violent psychopath whose teenage crimes were covered up by the family and by the island’s police officer John Cunningham. John knew that Lyle was responsible for Merritt’s disappearance, but didn’t know she was still alive, having believed Lyle when he lied that Merritt had died by falling off the ferry from the mainland, just like Lyle’s brother Harry had done years earlier. Lyle and Ailsa blamed Merritt for Harry’s death because he jumped from the ferry while being pursued by John, who was chasing him because he was suspected of having severely beaten Merritt’s brother William into a coma during an interrupted robbery of the Lingard home. The robbery plan had been seeded by Merritt to steal her mother’s jewellery from her alcoholic father in order to sell for money to run away from home. In fact, Lyle was the one who had attacked William, being unhinged and thinking that he was protecting his brother. Harry and Ailsa covered up Lyle’s guilt and before his death, Harry took the blame. Lyle Jennings, Godhaven, and Sam Haig Lyle, who had a history of stalking, breaking-and-entering, and animal murder, spent time in youth psychiatric facility Godhaven, where he stalked another patient named Sam Haig. The pair fought, and Sam injured Lyle’s eye so severely that it was left permanently discoloured. Years later as an adult who had become an investigative journalist with no online presence, Sam sought Lyle out to apologise for the injury and invite him to come climbing at his favourite spot. Lyle used the information he had on Sam to assume his identity and stalk Merritt Lingard, who didn’t recognise him as an adult. He pretended to be investigating corruption at Merritt’s workplace, and targeted her, eventually starting a sexual relationship still pretending to be Sam. When Merritt told Lyle-as-Sam that she was leaving to go to Mhòr on the 10am ferry the next day, Lyle used that information to kidnap her during the crossing. Merritt’s brother William, who had been unable to speak since his teenage coma, had spotted Lyle on the ferry and because of Lyle’s distinctive hat, recognised him as the man who’d been stalking their house. He tried to communicate this to Merritt by throwing his own hat, and then struck her when he became afraid. It was when Merritt went to retrieve William’s hat that she was taken. Join our mailing list Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox! Two days after Lyle kidnapped Merritt, he returned to the mainland to tie up loose ends and kill the real Sam Haig. He lured Sam to a remote spot, beat him to death, staged his corpse to look as though he had been climbing, and threw it off a cliff. Eventually, Morck and co. worked out that somebody else was pretending to be Sam Haig when they had evidence that Merritt had been with “Sam” at a hotel at the same time that the real Sam was having an affair with his friend’s wife at a different hotel. What Happened to Lyle and Ailsa Jennings? Merritt’s kidnappers both died – Ailsa by her own hand as she shot herself in her car before being taken into custody by the police, and Lyle by Akram’s hand, or rather, his trigger finger. After Lyle shot buckshot into Morck’s shoulder, Akram threw a knife at him, disarmed and shot him. Previously, Lyle had brutally killed Constable John Cunningham with a hammer when he learned that Merritt was still alive. Mark Bonnar’s character Stephen Burns had disallowed the appearance of a key witness in the Graham Finch murder trial after Burns’ daughter was run off the road by one of Finch’s goons as an intimidation tactic. Prisoner Kirsty Atkins was willing to testify that she had previously met Finch’s now-dead wife at a shelter for survivors of domestic violence, and that Finch routinely hit her. Because Burns wouldn’t allow her testimony, Finch was acquitted of his wife’s murder despite clearly having been guilty of it. Perhaps he also passed on the information about Kirsty Atkins to Finch’s lawyer, which led to Kirsty being viciously attacked and partially blinded in prison on Finch’s orders to keep her quiet. Who Is the Leith Park Shooter? We still don’t know who shot PC Anderson dead, and attempted to shoot Morck and Hardy dead at the Leith Park flat. If we can take the contents of Morck’s dream as gospel, then the shooting was done on the orders of Leith Park criminal kingpin Eugene Errington, whom we’ve yet to meet. According to Morck’s dream, in which he shot Errington’s muscle Charlie Bell in the head, Errington has a baby with Caroline Kerr – the witness who was intimidated into withdrawing her statement about the shooting. We also know, or at least have a pretty good idea, that PC Anderson was a corrupt officer working for Errington, and that he may even have been the one to stab the victim – thought to have been a police informant – in the head. Anderson was a top recruit pretending to be a klutz, Morck realised, in order to cover up the fact that his fingerprints were all over the victim’s flat. He also lied about being at the flat for a routine welfare check after being alerted by the victim’s daughter – that was a quick-thinking ruse to explain his presence when Morck and Hardy showed up there unexpectedly. The last we saw of the Leith Park case, Moira looked to be taking it away from its lead investigator and possibly closing it, unsolved, which may point to her also having been compromised by Errington. As Hardy was one of the shooting’s victims, surely that can’t be the case file that she gave to Hardy to investigate without Morck in the season’s closing moments? Dept. Q is streaming now on Netflix.

Crypto criminals can’t hide The single largest cryptocurrency heist in history took place one day in late February, when hackers exploited system vulnerabilities in Bybit, a Dubai-based crypto exchange, siphoning off a whopping $1.5 billion in digital assets within minutes. Bybit’s security team immediately launched an investigation that would eventually involve the FBI and several blockchain intelligence companies. Among those involved from the beginning were the experts at TRM Labs, a San Francisco-based company of around 300 that analyzes the blockchain networks which power cryptocurrency transactions to investigate—and prevent—fraud and financial crimes. “Literally from the first minutes, we were involved,”  says Ari Redbord, the company’s global head of policy, “working with Bybit and law enforcement partners like the FBI to track and trace funds.” The attack was soon attributed to a North Korean state-sponsored hacker organization commonly known as Lazarus Group. Lazarus has been blamed for a series of high-profile cybercrimes in recent years, including the 2014 hack on Sony Pictures Entertainment, the 2016 digital heist from the Bangladeshi central bank and, more recently, billions of dollars in digital currency thefts. TRM was among the first to attribute the Bybit attack after detecting an overlap between the blockchain resources used here and those used in Lazarus’s previous thefts. Since then, the company has harnessed its expertise in tracking crypto to keep law enforcement abreast of where the stolen funds are headed, following them from blockchain to blockchain and through clever concealment mechanisms. “We were very much built for an investigation like this,” Redbord says. Today, TRM’s investigators probe cryptocurrency thefts, ransomware attacks, and phishing scams. They help investigate other crimes that involve digital currencies, from child pornography to drug trafficking. The company’s free, public platform Chainabuse, launched in 2022, helps people report fraud, hacking, blackmail, and other crypto-related crimes. Clients in the cryptocurrency and finance industries harness the company’s software and data about blockchain transactions to identify funds associated with criminal activity and to flag suspicious transactions. Law enforcement agencies around the world enlist TRM’s tools—and sometimes even the company’s own investigators. Demand for such investigators is growing. TRM—which stands for Token Relationship Management—has raised about $150 million in total funding to date, from notable backers that include the venture arms of PayPal, American Express, and Citi, as well as Goldman Sachs. The investment bank led TRM’s most recent, late-stage funding round, which closed in January for an undisclosed amount, according to the research firm PitchBook. Meanwhile, the crypto ecosystem is likely to experience positive growth throughout 2025, according to a recent analysis by PitchBook. So too will crypto crimes: Illicit operations took $40 billion worth of crypto last year, according to Chainalysis, another blockchain security company—far more than the roughly $10 billion in venture capital funding that flowed into the above-board crypto sector in the same span, and more even than crypto’s 2022 VC funding peak of $29.8 billion. Roles like TRM’s will become more urgent if the government continues to abdicate its regulatory duties. Last month, the Trump administration shuttered a Justice Department unit that targeted crypto-related crimes. Yet crypto sits at the nexus of so many of the president’s domestic interests—fentanyl, counterterrorism, border security, and fraud. For TRM and rivals like Chainalysis and Elliptic, all of which have already won millions of dollars in federal contracts, the future is bright. From NFTs to crypto fraud One paradox of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrency systems is that while they’re widely thought to provide anonymity, with users exchanging funds based not on real names and physical addresses, but on so-called digital addresses—unique and lengthy strings of alphanumeric characters that serve as a given account’s sole identifier—the records of those transactions are still public. A common ledger logs every payment, tying each transaction to those that came before, all the way back to the tokens’ minting. And once information becomes known about one transaction and the people or organizations behind the addresses involved, it becomes possible to trace those funds back and forth through time and from address to address. That allows clever observers to follow the money and deduce where funds came from, who other counterparties may be, and which transactions likely involved some of the same parties, like how investigators might piece together who used an anonymous burner phone based on the numbers they called. It’s a limitation to anonymity that Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto alluded to in the groundbreaking paper describing cryptocurrency’s underpinnings. And it’s one that computer scientist Sarah Meiklejohn and colleagues at the University of California San Diego showed to be a reality in a widely cited 2013 paper that demonstrated concretely how Bitcoins could be grouped by likely common owner—and how those owners could sometimes be identified from a database of known addresses. And that database, Meiklejohn and colleagues showed, could be assembled by a determined researcher simply doing ordinary business on the blockchain and recording the addresses used by the various vendors, exchanges, and other parties they transact with. While not the first company to run with Meiklejohn’s ideas on tracking the transfer of cryptocurrencies—rival Chainalysis, for one, launched in 2014—TRM offered the first-ever platform compatible with the Ethereum blockchain, widely used both for its own currency and assets like non-fungible tokens, or NFTs. At the time, “all of these blockchain intelligence companies had built their entire data architecture on the Bitcoin blockchain,” Redbord says, “because Bitcoin was entirely synonymous with cryptocurrency, and vice versa.” TRM began in 2018 as CEO Esteban Castaño and CTO Rahul Raina’s effort to capitalize on NFTs’ trendiness. After demoing an easy-to-use analytics tool they’d built to help understand NFT market movement to a friend with his own blockchain-based startup, Castaño and Raina decided to pivot. Their creation could be its own product with wide appeal—the same blockchains which track NFTs also manage cryptocurrencies—Castaño says that while “nobody had ever gotten excited about any of the other NFT applications we were building,” this was different. Describing their friend and his employees’ reactions, he says, “it was the first time they’d seen on-chain activity visualized in a way they could understand.” Talking to potential customers soon revealed a critical use case beyond basic customer analytics: understanding the flow of funds on the blockchain to avoid unwittingly participating in money laundering. A now-pivoted TRM publicly launched in 2019 with a tool it planned to sell to blockchain businesses looking to comply with anti-money-laundering regulations. But a more proactive use case soon arose that suggested even bigger opportunities. A friend reached out to say he’d fallen victim to a cryptocurrency hack and wanted to know if TRM could help find the missing money. With the company’s tool, “we could see in clear daylight where the money was,” Castaño says. “So we got in touch with the Secret Service, we got in touch with the FBI, and that was the initial pull into that market.” By the time TRM Labs emerged from Y Combinator, in 2019, fighting and preventing fraud and other crime had become its primary focus. ‘They’re threat hunters’ Many TRM senior leaders and investigators honed their expertise over years in law enforcement, working at police agencies across the world. Redbord, the global policy head, served for more than a decade as a U.S. federal prosecutor and spent two years working on money laundering and national security at the Treasury Department before joining the company. Chris Janczewski, head of global investigations, previously served as a special agent at IRS Criminal Investigations, where he was instrumental in recovering cryptocurrency stolen in the infamous 2016 hack on the Bitfinex exchange; in the time between theft and recovery, the digital coins’ value had ballooned to $3.6 billion, making it the largest federal government seizure in history. The laptop Janczewski used in the investigation is now in the Smithsonian’s permanent collection. “They’re threat hunters,” Redbord says of TRM’s investigators. “Our terror financing expert is out there communicating on password-protected Telegram channels with mujahideen, who will send him a crypto address. He’ll take that address and label it terror financing, and then we use AI and machine learning to build on that attribution.” With investigators around the globe, the company is able to track illicit funds around the clock. “Things like Bybit, you can’t have just one investigator doing that,” says TRM senior investigator Jonno Newman. Being based in Australia, in a time zone close to that of North Korea, made it easy for Newman to help out in the early days of the still-ongoing Bybit investigation. It also helped that he had previously led TRM’s investigation into an earlier hack attributed to North Korea, in 2023, where more than $100 million in cryptocurrency was reported stolen from thousands of blockchain addresses on the digital coin storage tool Atomic Wallet. Then, Newman says, the hackers began obfuscating the stolen funds’ origins and ultimate destination, shuffling their plunder between different virtual addresses and cryptocurrencies. They relied on so-called mixers, which hold and combine coins from multiple sources before disbursing them to new addresses, and cross-chain bridges, which let users convert funds from one cryptocurrency to another. Hackers would later use a similar playbook in moving the Bybit funds. As a result of TRM’s automated fund tracker across bridges, a service it has offered since 2022—an industry first, CEO Castaño says—investigators were able to closely monitor where the Atomic Wallet funds headed, tipping off law enforcement as needed about opportunities to freeze or seize them. “It was early mornings and late nights trying to keep up with the laundering process.” says Newman of the investigation. The former head of South Australia Police’s cybercrime training and prevention unit and author of a recent children’s book about the crypto world, he says “it becomes this almost cat-and-mouse game about where they are going to go next.” TRM’s products at least make the game playable. “When you’re following the money, it used to be that you would reach a dead end when the money went to a different blockchain,” Castaño says. “But with TRM, tracing across blockchains is seamless.” Cautious optimism for blockchain security Not everyone believes TRM’s tech can fully deliver on its promise, at least from a legal perspective. J.W. Verret, an associate professor at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School who has testified as an expert witness in crypto-related matters, cautions that most testimony based on blockchain forensics tools should be viewed as potentially fallible, “They are useful for developing leads at the start of an investigation,” he says, but can be overly relied on like “the long history of junk forensic science—handwriting analysis, bitemark analysis, stuff that’s all kind of later proven to be unreliable.” For its part, Verret says, TRM Labs offers tools that are less prone than some of its competitors to false positives because the company is more careful about how it establishes associations between blockchain addresses and criminal activity. Meanwhile, last September, TRM announced the creation of the T3 Financial Crime Unit, a partnership with the organizations behind the Tron blockchain and Tether stablecoins to combat the use of those technologies for money laundering. By January, TRM said the partnership had helped freeze more than $100 million in USDT—Tether’s stablecoin pegged in value to the U.S. dollar—found to be tied to criminal activity. That figure has since more than doubled, with the total now including nearly $9 million linked to the massive Bybit heist. “In the seven months since launch, T3 has worked with law enforcement to freeze over $200 million linked to illicit activity ranging from terror financing to money laundering to fraud,” Castaño says. “And when you think about how much crime is financially motivated, adding a $200 million expense to criminals’ balance sheet is a huge win for deterring crime.” But even as TRM jockeys for pole position in a competitive industry, cybercriminals continue to develop new methods of stealing and hiding funds through complex blockchain machinations, often by taking advantage of crypto efficiency gains that make it easier to move more money faster. That will only continue as criminals deploy AI to automate scams and potentially even money laundering—and investigators use new AI and machine learning techniques, along with ever-growing blockchain datasets, to track them more efficiently and coordinate with law enforcement to stop them and seize their funds. And since blockchain ledgers last forever, crypto criminals are risking more than perhaps they realize, according to Castaño. “You’re betting not only that TRM and law enforcement won’t be able to identify your illicit activity today, but that we won’t be able to do it in the future,” he says. “Because the record is permanent.” And that’s the most powerful advantage investigators possess.

May 28, 20257 min readWhy Is NASA Shuttering This Iconic Institute in New York City?Since 1966 NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies has been at the forefront of Earth and planetary science from its location in upper Manhattan. Now a Trump administration directive is ejecting its scientists to parts unknownBy Christopher Cokinos edited by Lee BillingsPhoto of the building housing NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, at the corner of Broadway and West 112th Street in New York City. Cirofono via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)In the early 1980s, then real estate developer Donald Trump famously tried to evict a group of New York City residents from a rent-controlled building that he wanted to replace with a luxury high-rise. The tenants eventually beat back the plan.Today President Trump is having more luck with NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS).Ensconced on six floors of a building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, GISS has been a small-but-mighty source of world-changing scientific research for more than a half-century. NASA scientists first moved into the building, which another federal agency leases from GISS’s institutional partner, Columbia University, in 1966. Last month, at the behest of the Trump administration, NASA officials told GISS it had to move out before the end of May. In response, more than 100 staffers have abandoned the facility, leaving its tastefully decorated halls and offices littered with boxes, papers and packing tape.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.Although it may be best known to the public indirectly (its building often appeared in the hit sitcom Seinfeld as the site of “Monk’s Café”), GISS has been a leader in Earth science and climate research for decades. The work within its halls was crucial for sparking broader public awareness of anthropogenic climate change in the 1980s and has contributed to cutting-edge weather forecasting and multiple interplanetary missions, as well as the underpinnings of the past, present, and future habitability of Earth and other worlds.Yet now that rich legacy and prospects for further breakthrough research are at risk, GISS personnel say, jeopardized by the White House’s demands for notionally better government efficiency. Ironically, however, the effective eviction of GISS may well result in more costs to taxpayers rather than less.A Federal Mandate to “Institutionally Couch Surf”GISS itself has not been disbanded. But without a physical home and under the looming threat of a White House–proposed 50 percent cut to the entirety of NASA’s science for the 2026 federal fiscal year, the Institute’s future can only be called uncertain. Many of its staff are now operating as academic nomads—working remotely and scrambling to secure office space at other locations in the city.“We’re being told to institutionally couch surf,” says one senior GISS researcher, who, like many others in this story, asked not to be identified because of the possibility of reprisal.In April Makenzie Lystrup, director of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, which technically includes GISS, e-mailed GISS personnel about the eviction, explaining it was part of White House efforts to review government leases.Sources familiar with the situation, however, tell Scientific American the termination was specifically set in motion earlier this spring by an employee of the U.S. DOGE Service (a newly minted federal entity that was, until recently, led by the world’s richest man, Elon Musk). That employee, the sources say, approached NASA administrators, who ultimately agreed to the move out of fear of losing their jobs.A GISS scientist recounts the sudden events: “On Wednesday afternoon of April 23, NASA GISS workers were informed that there would be an all-hands Thursday morning meeting (the next day) with folks from HQ ... the topic of which was not mentioned,” the scientist says. “The next morning, we were promptly told ... the decision was made to vacate our building by the end of May and that the decision was made as part of a broader DOGE assessment of federal leased spaces. They also mentioned that this decision was made by NASA within just a few days.” According to this scientist, the move deadline changed several times. This account is supported by others who spoke to Scientific American.Multiple GISS personnel consulted for this story say there will be no cost savings because the $3-million-per-year lease on the space remains in place through 2031. That lease is between Columbia and the General Services Administration (GSA), a federal agency that is tasked with providing workspace for some governmental employees. Even if a new tenant is found, the lease is likely to remain in force because terminating it will result in major financial penalties per the leasing agreement. The lease, they say, is about half the current commercial rate in New York City, and for now, the GSA continues to pay rent.“Columbia is fully committed to our longstanding collaboration with NASA and the scientific research at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies,” said Millie Wert, a spokesperson for the university, when reached for comment for this article.The suddenness of the move has stunned GISS researchers and personnel, one of whom calls the decision “idiocy.”“One hundred and thirty scientists must move all their books and office equipment,” the senior researcher told Scientific American shortly after GISS received the eviction notice. “A library and $400,000 in tech must be moved out. We also have historical items here: Where are we supposed to put them?” Much of this material is reportedly going into storage at warehouse space in New Jersey.Another staffer adds that “we have no information about what will be discarded.... Ironically, many of us decided not to accept new furniture [recently] because our existing 1950s furniture is perfectly good—and that would save the taxpayer money.”As GISS employees packed their belongings, they saw workers dismantling a recently renovated conference room and a brand-new security system, according to documents obtained by Scientific American from the departing staff. The documents also note that computers and servers are “at risk of damage while being moved in haste.”Two protest letters against the eviction that were sent from the International Federation of Professional & Technical Engineers (IFPTE) to particular congressional representatives and senators, respectively, noted that a recent renovation of GISS is nearly complete at a cost of more than $6 million. In the letter to members of the House of Representatives, IFPTE called the dispersal of staff and equipment “blatantly wasteful financially.”An Institutional “Diaspora”GISS is globally renowned for tracking and predicting climate conditions with GISTEMP (GISS Surface Temperature Analysis), along with other datasets and modeling that involve planetary science beyond Earth and that are focused on weather, fire and agriculture on our world. GISS also has played roles in missions across the solar system, the discovery of the big bang’s all-sky afterglow, and more.According to firebrand climate researcher and former GISS director James Hansen, now retired from NASA, the institute was deliberately located in New York City because physicist Robert Jastrow, its founder, wanted a NASA center that was not a closed campus. Being in the heart of a city with academia and industry outside the door has been an asset to GISS, according to Hansen and others. The process of developing GISS began modestly, with “Jastrow ... interviewing people in an office over a furniture store in Silver Spring, Md.,” Hansen says. “The ‘GISS Formula’ ... was to have a minimum government staff, which allowed the research focus to change with time as the need dictated.”One such focus was the high levels of carbon dioxide on Venus, which Hansen was studying decades ago. That led to his trailblazing work on what was then called “the greenhouse effect,” including his famous testimony before Congress on human-driven climate change in 1988.Climate modeling, says a different senior GISS researcher, “is what drove the development of supercomputing, [and] we continue to use the same Earth climate modeling to understand Venus and Mars and constrain their potential habitability.” From climate feedback loops to ocean heat transport, GISS is at the center of important science, its researchers say.But the GISS dispersal, along with other disruptions, such as frozen grants and proposed science budget cuts at NASA, the National Science Foundation and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, among other agencies, “represent a monumental step backwards,” a GISS scientist says, “not just for understanding a climate that will still change due to human activities ... but also for operational weather prediction that saves lives due to forecast and warnings, pollution and contamination assessments.”GISS’s current director Gavin Schmidt tells Scientific American that “the issue of whether to do something with the GISS lease goes back a year or two due to a shift in how these things are paid for at NASA.... [The agency] commissioned an external panel to look at [this], and they concluded (last year) that the status quo was the most efficient plan. I am not privy to who decided to raise that idea again in recent weeks.”Other GISS researchers complain that, to their knowledge, no administrators above Schmidt went to bat for keeping the institute in its building.“I think there was pushback initially at HQ,” Schmidt says, “but by the time we were told at GISS, it was a done deal.”Concerns now include the lack of in-person interaction and a general loss of support for postdoctoral researchers. “It’s pretty dire,” one scientist says.“I’m now watching people who have dedicated their entire careers to understanding the most pressing issues of our time deciding whether they might have to leave the place they’ve built their life around,” says Alessandra Quigley, an early-career scientist, who is affiliated with GISS. “This is the only positive takeaway I can find: the fact this administration cares so much about ending climate science just demonstrates how important [this science] is, and I hope the public comes to see that, too.”While Lystrup called GISS’s work “critical” and promised support during the transition in her e-mail, which was obtained by Scientific American , Schmidt says that “people are shell-shocked and anxious—and that is not conducive to doing high-quality science.”He adds that “we will nonetheless push through and try and make the GISS diaspora function as well as it can. We have been contacted with many offers to help.”Asked for comment by Scientific American, a NASA spokesperson referred to the situation as “part of the administration’s government-wide review of leases to increase efficiency.” While NASA “seeks and evaluates options for a new space for the GISS team,” the spokesperson added, the institute’s work remains “significant” and “critical.”But at least one GISS researcher isn’t convinced. Angry that the agency didn’t do more to stop the eviction and even had tasked officials with frequent check-ins to ensure the move was underway, the researcher says, simply, “NASA is the new thug.”

Republican lawmakers have been battling over a bill that includes massive tax and spending cuts. Much of their disagreement has been over provisions intended to reduce the cost of Medicaid. The popular health insurance program, which is funded by both the federal and state governments, covers about 78.5 million low-income and disabled people—more than 1 in 5 Americans. On May 22, 2025, the House of Representatives narrowly approved the tax, spending, and immigration bill. The legislation, which passed without any support from Democrats, is designed to reduce federal Medicaid spending by requiring anyone enrolled in the program who appears to be able to get a job to either satisfy work requirements or lose their coverage. It’s still unclear, however, whether Senate Republicans would support that provision. Although there are few precedents for such a mandate for Medicaid, other safety net programs have been enforcing similar rules for nearly three decades. I’m a political scientist who has extensively studied the work requirements of another safety net program: Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). As I explain in my book, Living Off the Government? Race, Gender, and the Politics of Welfare, work requirements place extra burdens on low-income families but do little to lift them out of poverty. Work requirements for TANF TANF gives families with very low incomes some cash they can spend on housing, food, clothing, or whatever they need most. The Clinton administration launched it as a replacement for a similar program, Aid to Families With Dependent Children, in 1996. At the time, both political parties were eager to end a welfare system they believed was riddled with abuse. A big goal with TANF was ending the dependence of people getting cash benefits on the government by moving them from welfare to work. Many people were removed from the welfare rolls, but not because work requirements led to economic prosperity. Instead, they had trouble navigating the bureaucratic demands. TANF is administered by the states. They can set many rules of their own, but they must comply with an important federal requirement: Adult recipients have to work or engage in an authorized alternative activity for at least 30 hours per week. The number of weekly hours is only 20 if the recipient is caring for a child under the age of 6. The dozen activities or so that can count toward this quota range from participating in job training programs to engaging in community service. Some adults enrolled in TANF are exempt from work requirements, depending on their state’s own policies. The most common exemptions are for people who are ill, have a disability, or are over age 60. To qualify for TANF, families must have dependent children; in some states pregnant women also qualify. Income limits are set by the state and range from $307 a month for a family of three in Alabama to $2,935 a month for a family of three in Minnesota. Adult TANF recipients face a federal five-year lifetime limit on benefits. States can adopt shorter time limits; Arizona’s is 12 months. An administrative burden Complying with these work requirements generally means proving that you’re working or making the case that you should be exempt from this mandate. This places what’s known as an “administrative burden” on the people who get cash assistance. It often requires lots of documentation and time. If you have an unpredictable work schedule, inconsistent access to child care, or obligations to care for an older relative, this paperwork is hard to deal with. What counts as work, how many hours must be completed, and who is exempt from these requirements often comes down to a caseworker’s discretion. Social science research shows that this discretion is not equally applied and is often informed by stereotypes. The number of people getting cash assistance has fallen sharply since TANF replaced Aid to Families With Dependent Children. In some states caseloads have dropped by more than 50% despite significant population growth. Some of this decline happened because recipients got jobs that paid them too much to qualify. The Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan office that provides economic research to Congress, attributes, at least in part, an increase in employment among less-educated single mothers in the 1990s to work requirements. Not everyone who stopped getting cash benefits through TANF wound up employed, however. Other recipients who did not meet requirements fell into deep poverty. Regardless of why people leave the program, when fewer low-income Americans get TANF benefits, the government spends less money on cash assistance. Federal funding has remained flat at $16.5 billion since 1996. Taking inflation into account, the program receives half as much funding as when it was created. In addition, states have used the flexibility granted them to direct most of their TANF funds to priorities other than cash benefits, such as pre-K education. Many Americans who get help paying for groceries through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program are also subject to work requirements. People the government calls “able-bodied adults without dependents” can only receive SNAP benefits for three months within a three-year period if they are not employed. A failed experiment in Arkansas Lawmakers in Congress and in statehouses have debated whether to add work requirements for Medicaid before. More than a dozen states have applied for waivers that would let them give it a try. When Arkansas instituted Medicaid work requirements in 2018, during the first Trump administration, it was largely seen as a failure. Some 18,000 people lost their health care coverage, but employment rates did not increase. After a court order stopped the policy in 2019, most people regained their coverage. Georgia is currently the only state with Medicaid work requirements in effect, after implementing a waiver in July 2023. The program has experienced technical difficulties and has had trouble verifying work activities. Other states, including Idaho, Indiana, and Kentucky, are already asking the federal government to let them enforce Medicaid work requirements. What this may mean for Medicaid The multitrillion-dollar bill the House passed by a vote of 215-214 would introduce Medicaid work requirements nationwide by late 2026 for childless adults ages 19 to 64, with some exemptions. But most people covered by Medicaid in that age range are already working, and those who are not would likely be eligible for work requirement waivers. An analysis by KFF—a nonprofit that informs the public about health issues—shows that in 2023, 44% of Medicaid recipients were working full time and another 20% were working part time. In 2023, that was more than 16 million Americans. About 20% of the American adults under 65 who are covered by Medicaid are not working due to illness or disability, or because of caregiving responsibilities, according to KFF. This includes both people caring for young children and those taking care of relatives with an illness or disability. In my own research, I read testimony from families seeking work exemptions because caregiving, including for children with disabilities, was a full-time job. The rest of the adults under 65 with Medicaid coverage are not working because they are in school, are retired, cannot find work, or have some other reason. It’s approximately 3.9 million Americans. Depending on what counts as “work,” they may be meeting any requirements that could be added to the program. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that introducing Medicaid work requirements would save around $300 billion over a decade. Given past experience with work requirements, it is unlikely those savings would come from Americans finding jobs. My research suggests it’s more likely that the government would trim spending by taking away the health insurance of people eligible for Medicaid coverage who get tangled up in red tape. This article was updated on May 22, 2025, with details about the House of Representatives’ passage of the budget bill. Anne Whitesell is an assistant professor of political science at Miami University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Observation Rocket Report: SpaceX’s expansion at Vandenberg; India’s PSLV fails in flight China's diversity in rockets was evident this week, with four types of launchers in action. Stephen Clark – May 23, 2025 7:00 am | 7 Dawn Aerospace's Mk-II Aurora airplane in flight over New Zealand last year. Credit: Dawn Aerospace Dawn Aerospace's Mk-II Aurora airplane in flight over New Zealand last year. Credit: Dawn Aerospace Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only   Learn more Welcome to Edition 7.45 of the Rocket Report! Let's talk about spaceplanes. Since the Space Shuttle, spaceplanes have, at best, been a niche part of the space transportation business. The US Air Force's uncrewed X-37B and a similar vehicle operated by China's military are the only spaceplanes to reach orbit since the last shuttle flight in 2011, and both require a lift from a conventional rocket. Virgin Galactic's suborbital space tourism platform is also a spaceplane of sorts. A generation or two ago, one of the chief arguments in favor of spaceplanes was that they were easier to recover and reuse. Today, SpaceX routinely reuses capsules and rockets that look much more like conventional space vehicles than the winged designs of yesteryear. Spaceplanes are undeniably alluring in appearance, but they have the drawback of carrying extra weight (wings) into space that won't be used until the final minutes of a mission. So, do they have a future? As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar. One of China's commercial rockets returns to flight. The Kinetica-1 rocket launched Wednesday for the first time since a failure doomed its previous attempt to reach orbit in December, according to the vehicle's developer and operator, CAS Space. The Kinetica-1 is one of several small Chinese solid-fueled launch vehicles managed by a commercial company, although with strict government oversight and support. CAS Space, a spinoff of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said its Kinetica-1 rocket deployed multiple payloads with "excellent orbit insertion accuracy." This was the seventh flight of a Kinetica-1 rocket since its debut in 2022. Back in action ... "Kinetica-1 is back!" CAS Space posted on X. "Mission Y7 has just successfully sent six satellites into designated orbits, making a total of 63 satellites or 6 tons of payloads since its debut. Lots of missions are planned for the coming months. 2025 is going to be awesome." The Kinetica-1 is designed to place up to 2 metric tons of payload into low-Earth orbit. A larger liquid-fueled rocket, Kinetica-2, is scheduled to debut later this year. The Ars Technica Rocket Report The easiest way to keep up with Eric Berger's and Stephen Clark's reporting on all things space is to sign up for our newsletter. We'll collect their stories and deliver them straight to your inbox. Sign Me Up! French government backs a spaceplane startup. French spaceplane startup AndroMach announced May 15 that it received a contract from CNES, the French space agency, to begin testing an early prototype of its Banger v1 rocket engine, European Spaceflight reports. Founded in 2023, AndroMach is developing a pair of spaceplanes that will be used to perform suborbital and orbital missions to space. A suborbital spaceplane will utilize turbojet engines for horizontal takeoff and landing, and a pressure-fed biopropane/liquid oxygen rocket engine to reach space. Test flights of this smaller vehicle will begin in early 2027. A risky proposition ... A larger ÉTOILE "orbital shuttle" is designed to be launched by various small launch vehicles and will be capable of carrying payloads of up to 100 kilograms (220 pounds). According to the company, initial test flights of ÉTOILE are expected to begin at the beginning of the next decade. It's unclear how much CNES is committing to AndroMach through this contract, but the company says the funding will support testing of an early demonstrator for its propane-fueled engine, with a focus on evaluating its thermodynamic performance. It's good to see European governments supporting developments in commercial space, but the path to a small commercial orbital spaceplane is rife with risk. (submitted by EllPeaTea) Dawn Aerospace is taking orders. Another spaceplane company in a more advanced stage of development says it is now taking customer orders for flights to the edge of space. New Zealand-based Dawn Aerospace said it is beginning to take orders for its remotely piloted, rocket-powered suborbital spaceplane, known as Aurora, with first deliveries expected in 2027, Aviation Week & Space Technology reports. "This marks a historic milestone: the first time a space-capable vehicle—designed to fly beyond the Kármán line (100 kilometers or 328,000 feet)—has been offered for direct sale to customers," Dawn Aerospace said in a statement. While it hasn't yet reached space, Dawn's Aurora spaceplane flew to supersonic speed for the first time last year and climbed to an altitude of 82,500 feet (25.1 kilometers), setting a record for the fastest climb from a runway to 20 kilometers. Further along ... Aurora is small in stature, measuring just 15.7 feet (4.8 meters) long. It's designed to loft a payload of up to 22 pounds (10 kilograms) above the Kármán line for up to three minutes of microgravity, before returning to a runway landing. Eventually, Dawn wants to reduce the turnaround time between Aurora flights to less than four hours. "Aurora is set to become the fastest and highest-flying aircraft ever to take off from a conventional runway, blending the extreme performance of rocket propulsion with the reusability and operational simplicity of traditional aviation," Dawn said. The company's business model is akin to commercial airlines, where operators can purchase an aircraft directly from a manufacturer and manage their own operations. (submitted by EllPeaTea) India's workhorse rocket falls short of orbit. In a rare setback, Indian Space Research Organisation's (ISRO) launch vehicle PSLV-C61 malfunctioned and failed to place a surveillance satellite into the intended orbit last weekend, the Times of India reported. The Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle lifted off from a launch pad on the southeastern coast of India early Sunday, local time, with a radar reconnaissance satellite named EOS-09, or RISAT-1B. The satellite was likely intended to gather intelligence for the Indian military. "The country's military space capabilities, already hindered by developmental challenges, have suffered another setback with the loss of a potential strategic asset," the Times of India wrote. What happened? ... V. Narayanan, ISRO's chairman, later said that the rocket’s performance was normal until the third stage. The PSLV's third stage, powered by a solid rocket motor, suffered a "fall in chamber pressure" and the mission could not be accomplished, Narayanan said. Investigators are probing the root cause of the failure. Telemetry data indicated the rocket deviated from its planned flight path around six minutes after launch, when it was traveling more than 12,600 mph (5.66 kilometers per second), well short of the speed it needed to reach orbital velocity. The rocket and its payload fell into the Indian Ocean south of the launch site. This was the first PSLV launch failure in eight years, ending a streak of 21 consecutive successful flights. (submitted by EllPeaTea) SES makes a booking with Impulse Space. SES, owner of the world's largest fleet of geostationary satellites, plans to use Impulse Space’s Helios kick stage to take advantage of lower-cost, low-Earth-orbit (LEO) launch vehicles and get its satellites quickly into higher orbits, Aviation Week & Space Technology reports. SES hopes the combination will break a traditional launch conundrum for operators of medium-Earth-orbit (MEO) and geostationary orbit (GEO). These operators often must make a trade-off between a lower-cost launch that puts them farther from their satellite's final orbit, or a more expensive launch that can expedite their satellite's entry into service. A matter of hours ... On Thursday, SES and Impulse Space announced a multi-launch agreement to use the methane-fueled Helios kick stage. "The first mission, currently planned for 2027, will feature a dedicated deployment from a medium-lift launcher in LEO, followed by Helios transferring the 4-ton-class payload directly to GEO within eight hours of launch," Impulse said in a statement. Typically, this transit to GEO takes several weeks to several months, depending on the satellite's propulsion system. "Today, we’re not only partnering with Impulse to bring our satellites faster to orbit, but this will also allow us to extend their lifetime and accelerate service delivery to our customers," said Adel Al-Saleh, CEO of SES. "We're proud to become Helios' first dedicated commercial mission." Unpacking China's spaceflight patches. There's a fascinating set of new patches Chinese officials released for a series of launches with top-secret satellites over the last two months, Ars reports. These four patches depict Buddhist gods with a sense of artistry and sharp colors that stand apart from China's previous spaceflight emblems, and perhaps—or perhaps not—they can tell us something about the nature of the missions they represent. The missions launched so-called TJS satellites toward geostationary orbit, where they most likely will perform missions in surveillance, signals intelligence, or missile warning.  Making connections ... It's not difficult to start making connections between the Four Heavenly Gods and the missions that China's TJS satellites likely carry out in space. A protector with an umbrella? An all-seeing entity? This sounds like a possible link to spy craft or missile warning, but there's a chance Chinese officials approved the patches to misdirect outside observers, or there's no connection at all. China aims for an asteroid. China is set to launch its second Tianwen deep space exploration mission late May, targeting both a near-Earth asteroid and a main belt comet, Space News reports. The robotic Tianwen-2 spacecraft is being integrated with a Long March 3B rocket at the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwest China, the country's top state-owned aerospace contractor said. Airspace closure notices indicate a four-hour-long launch window opening at noon EDT (16:00–20:00 UTC) on May 28. Backup launch windows are scheduled for May 29 and 30. New frontiers ... Tianwen-2's first goal is to collect samples from a near-Earth asteroid designated 469219 Kamoʻoalewa, or 2016 HO3, and return them to Earth in late 2027 with a reentry module. The Tianwen-2 mothership will then set a course toward a comet for a secondary mission. This will be China's first sample return mission from beyond the Moon. The asteroid selected as the target for Tianwen-2 is believed by scientists to be less than 100 meters, or 330 feet, in diameter, and may be made of material thrown off the Moon some time in its ancient past. Results from Tianwen-2 may confirm that hypothesis. (submitted by EllPeaTea) Upgraded methalox rocket flies from Jiuquan. Another one of China's privately funded launch companies achieved a milestone this week. Landspace launched an upgraded version of its Zhuque-2E rocket Saturday from the Jiuquan launch base in northwestern China, Space News reports. The rocket delivered six satellites to orbit for a range of remote sensing, Earth observation, and technology demonstration missions. The Zhuque-2E is an improved version of the Zhuque-2, which became the first liquid methane-fueled rocket in the world to reach orbit in 2023. Larger envelope ... This was the second flight of the Zhuque-2E rocket design, but the first to utilize a wider payload fairing to provide more volume for satellites on their ride into space. The Zhuque-2E is a stepping stone toward a much larger rocket Landspace is developing called the Zhuque-3, a stainless steel launcher with a reusable first stage booster that, at least outwardly, bears some similarities to SpaceX's Falcon 9. (submitted by EllPeaTea) FAA clears SpaceX for Starship Flight 9. The Federal Aviation Administration gave the green light Thursday for SpaceX to launch the next test flight of its Starship mega-rocket as soon as next week, following two consecutive failures earlier this year, Ars reports. The failures set back SpaceX's Starship program by several months. The company aims to get the rocket's development back on track with the upcoming launch, Starship's ninth full-scale test flight since its debut in April 2023. Starship is central to SpaceX's long-held ambition to send humans to Mars and is the vehicle NASA has selected to land astronauts on the Moon under the umbrella of the government's Artemis program. Targeting Tuesday, for now ... In a statement Thursday, the FAA said SpaceX is authorized to launch the next Starship test flight, known as Flight 9, after finding the company "meets all of the rigorous safety, environmental and other licensing requirements." SpaceX has not confirmed a target launch date for the next launch of Starship, but warning notices for pilots and mariners to steer clear of hazard areas in the Gulf of Mexico suggest the flight might happen as soon as the evening of Tuesday, May 27. The rocket will lift off from Starbase, Texas, SpaceX's privately owned spaceport near the US-Mexico border. The FAA's approval comes with some stipulations, including that the launch must occur during "non-peak" times for air traffic and a larger closure of airspace downrange from Starbase. Space Force is fed up with Vulcan delays. In recent written testimony to a US House of Representatives subcommittee that oversees the military, the senior official responsible for purchasing launches for national security missions blistered one of the country's two primary rocket providers, Ars reports. The remarks from Major General Stephen G. Purdy, acting assistant secretary of the Air Force for Space Acquisition and Integration, concerned United Launch Alliance and its long-delayed development of the large Vulcan rocket. "The ULA Vulcan program has performed unsatisfactorily this past year," Purdy said in written testimony during a May 14 hearing before the House Armed Services Committee's Subcommittee on Strategic Forces. This portion of his testimony did not come up during the hearing, and it has not been reported publicly to date. Repairing trust ... "Major issues with the Vulcan have overshadowed its successful certification resulting in delays to the launch of four national security missions," Purdy wrote. "Despite the retirement of highly successful Atlas and Delta launch vehicles, the transition to Vulcan has been slow and continues to impact the completion of Space Force mission objectives." It has widely been known in the space community that military officials, who supported Vulcan with development contracts for the rocket and its engines that exceeded $1 billion, have been unhappy with the pace of the rocket's development. It was originally due to launch in 2020. At the end of his written testimony, Purdy emphasized that he expected ULA to do better. As part of his job as the Service Acquisition Executive for Space (SAE), Purdy noted that he has been tasked to transform space acquisition and to become more innovative. "For these programs, the prime contractors must re-establish baselines, establish a culture of accountability, and repair trust deficit to prove to the SAE that they are adopting the acquisition principles necessary to deliver capabilities at speed, on cost and on schedule." SpaceX's growth on the West Coast. SpaceX is moving ahead with expansion plans at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, that will double its West Coast launch cadence and enable Falcon Heavy rockets to fly from California, Spaceflight Now reports. Last week, the Department of the Air Force issued its Draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), which considers proposed modifications from SpaceX to Space Launch Complex 6 (SLC-6) at Vandenberg. These modifications will include changes to support launches of Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, the construction of two new landing pads for Falcon boosters adjacent to SLC-6, the demolition of unneeded structures at SLC-6, and increasing SpaceX’s permitted launch cadence from Vandenberg from 50 launches to 100. Doubling the fun ... The transformation of SLC-6 would include quite a bit of overhaul. Its most recent tenant, United Launch Alliance, previously used it for Delta IV rockets from 2006 through its final launch in September 2022. The following year, the Space Force handed over the launch pad to SpaceX, which lacked a pad at Vandenberg capable of supporting Falcon Heavy missions. The estimated launch cadence between SpaceX’s existing Falcon 9 pad at Vandenberg, known as SLC-4E, and SLC-6 would be a 70-11 split for Falcon 9 rockets in 2026, with one Falcon Heavy at SLC-6, for a total of 82 launches. That would increase to a 70-25 Falcon 9 split in 2027 and 2028, with an estimated five Falcon Heavy launches in each of those years. (submitted by EllPeaTea) Next three launches May 23: Falcon 9 | Starlink 11-16 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 20:36 UTC May 24: Falcon 9 | Starlink 12-22 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 17:19 UTC May 27: Falcon 9 | Starlink 17-1 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 16:14 UTC Stephen Clark Space Reporter Stephen Clark Space Reporter Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet. 7 Comments

A five-year court battle between tech titans Apple and Epic Games may finally be coming to a close.After months of explosive back-and-forth that went as high as the Supreme Court, Apple has reinstated Epic Games' landmark game, Fortnite, back onto its App Store.Fortnite — a free-to-play game which makes money from gamers spending cash on flashy cosmetics — began prompting users to bypass Apple's iOS payment system and pay Epic directly back in August, 2020. The move helped Epic get around Apple's 30 percent fee, a flat tax it charged all developers for selling on the App Store.Apple didn't like that, as Fortnite had over 116 million downloads through the App Store at the time. Apple argued Epic's payment portal violated the App Store's terms of service, and took the massively popular game off its platform.In response, Epic filed suit against Apple on antitrust grounds, launching an admittedly corny "Free Fortnite" campaign, which nonetheless posed a serious question: does Apple have the right to restrict developers' access to the billions of devices that exclusively use the iOS App Store?It's a question that took years to answer, and more twists and turns than a viral Fortnite dance. Apple countersued Epic, seeking damages from Epic's terms of service violation. In September 2021, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers issued a split decision, ruling with Apple on nine of ten counts, but awarding Epic a crucial injunction ordering Apple to allow apps to link to external payment platforms.Notably, Gonzalez Rogers found that Apple wasn't a monopoly, but rather a duopoly alongside Google, which was engaged in a similar legal battle with Epic over the Google Play store. She likewise ordered Epic to pay Apple $3.6 million in damages.Unhappy with the decision, both companies appealed, eventually escalating the issue to the Supreme Court, which declined to hear either appeal. Forced to allow developers to bypass Apple Pay, the company begrudgingly complied, but with on caveat. Apple now required developers to fork over 27 percent of the revenue made this way within 7 days of each transaction — a tactic known as malicious compliance.That, of course, spawned another series of lawsuits in March 2024, as Epic vowed to continue the fight and prove that Apple was acting in bad faith.Though Apple put on a cooperative face as the next phase kicked off, it would later emerge that the company's execs withheld documents, delayed proceedings, misled the court, and lied under oath.On the final day of that trial, Epic introduced a series of messages between senior PR executives at Apple, showing the tech giant's frustration at having to follow the law."How is this still going," wrote Apple corporate communications worker Hannah Smith during an earlier day of trial."I have no idea. I am stunned," replied Marni Goldberg, Apple's director of public affairs, and former press secretary for Senator Joe Manchin. "It's our F****ING STORE," she roared in a message minutes later. "This is very much pissing me off."Now knowing exactly who she was dealing with, Judge Gonzalez Rogers issued her scathing ruling on April 30, 2025, finding Apple "in willful violation" of the court's earlier decisions."In stark contrast to Apple’s initial in-court testimony... documents reveal that Apple knew exactly what it was doing and at every turn chose the most anticompetitive option," Gonzalez Rogers wrote."To hide the truth, Vice-President of Finance, Alex Roman, outright lied under oath," the judge found. Though Roman testified that Apple decided on the 27 percent fee in January 2024 — a split-second decision made after the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal — other records prove the tech giant was plotting it as early as July 2023.The ruling found that the decision to ignore the injunction went as high as Apple CEO Tim Cook, who ignored advice to follow the court's decision, and instead went with his "finance team," which convinced him to go through with the 27 percent fee.  As Gonzalez Rogers wrote: "Cook choseSomehow, that wasn't enough hot water. After the April 30 decision, Apple began quickly approving updates to apps linking to third-party payment platforms, according to antitrust journalist Matt Stoller. However, there was one exception: Epic's Fortnite, which Apple had "determined not to take action on the Fortnite app submission" until after all lingering legal appeals were done.Presumably at her wit's end, Gonzalez Rogers issued a brutal one-page order, demanding Apple either make amends with Epic, or else sacrifice an Apple executive to the full wrath of the law."Obviously, Apple is fully capable of resolving this issue without further briefing or a hearing," the judge raged. "However, if the parties do not file a joint notice that this issue is resolved, and this Court’s intervention is required, the Apple official who is personally responsible for ensuring compliance shall personally appear at the hearing."Within a day of that final order, Apple folded, and has officially allowed Fortnite back on the app store (it's now estimated that the five year legal battle cost Apple $1 billion in lost revenue and legal fees.) Though the appeals battle still rages with Google, this one's a major win for software developers, publishers, and phone gamers everywhere.More on Apple: Tim Cook Has a Strange ObsessionShare This Article

Not prospering The Pentagon seems to be fed up with ULA’s rocket delays "The ULA Vulcan program has performed unsatisfactorily this past year." Eric Berger – May 22, 2025 6:32 pm | 16 The second flight of United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rocket took off in October. The test flight was successful despite a malfunction with one of its solid rocket boosters. Credit: United Launch Alliance The second flight of United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rocket took off in October. The test flight was successful despite a malfunction with one of its solid rocket boosters. Credit: United Launch Alliance Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only   Learn more In recent written testimony to a US House of Representatives subcommittee that oversees the military, the senior official responsible for purchasing launches for national security missions blistered one of the country's two primary rocket providers. The remarks from Major General Stephen G. Purdy, acting assistant secretary of the Air Force for Space Acquisition and Integration, concerned United Launch Alliance and its long-delayed development of the large Vulcan rocket. "The ULA Vulcan program has performed unsatisfactorily this past year," Purdy said in written testimony during a May 14 hearing before the House Armed Services Committee's Subcommittee on Strategic Forces. This portion of his testimony did not come up during the hearing, and it has not been reported publicly to date. "Major issues with the Vulcan have overshadowed its successful certification resulting in delays to the launch of four national security missions," Purdy wrote. "Despite the retirement of highly successful Atlas and Delta launch vehicles, the transition to Vulcan has been slow and continues to impact the completion of Space Force mission objectives." Bringing unhappiness into the open It has widely been known in the space community that military officials, who supported Vulcan with development contracts for the rocket and its engines that exceeded $1 billion, have been unhappy with the pace of the rocket's development. It was originally due to launch in 2020 and ferry critical national security missions shortly afterward. But this displeasure has largely remained out of the public eye. However, behind closed doors, missives have been flying. About a year ago, another Air Force official, Frank Calvelli, wrote to ULA and said he was "growing concerned" about the company's ability to scale manufacturing of the Vulcan rocket and meet the military's cadence needs. Calvelli noted that ULA had a backlog of more than two dozen national security missions that were sitting on the ground due to delays. Some of the displeasure was apparent in April when the US military announced that it would ask SpaceX to launch a plurality of its missions during the next round of national security launches, reversing the preeminent role that ULA had held for the last two decades. ULA retired its Delta IV Heavy rocket in April 2024, and the handful of Atlas V rockets that remain are committed to other missions. This has left the Air Force dependent on SpaceX, with its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy vehicles, as the only provider of launch services to get its most expensive and highest priority satellites into orbit. ULA must “repair trust” In his testimony, Purdy said ULA completed certification of the initial variant of its Vulcan rocket for military launches from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on March 25, but added that "open work" remains. The military and the company are currently working through "risk reduction plans" to limit the chances of an issue with the first launch of a military payload on Vulcan. "To address these challenges ULA has increased its engineering resources and management focus to resolve design issues," Purdy wrote. "Government and Federally Funded Research and Development Center personnel have increased involvement in technical and program management challenges. Vulcan's first military mission, USSF-106, currently has a no earlier than launch date of July 2025, Purdy wrote. These outstanding risks will ultimately be assessed during a Flight Readiness Review a week or two prior to this launch. At the end of his written testimony, Purdy emphasized that he expected ULA to do better. As part of his job as the Service Acquisition Executive for Space (SAE), Purdy noted that he has been tasked to transform space acquisition and to become more innovative. "For these programs, the prime contractors must re-establish baselines, establish a culture of accountability, and repair trust deficit to prove to the SAE that they are adopting the acquisition principles necessary to deliver capabilities at speed, on cost and on schedule," Purdy said. Eric Berger Senior Space Editor Eric Berger Senior Space Editor Eric Berger is the senior space editor at Ars Technica, covering everything from astronomy to private space to NASA policy, and author of two books: Liftoff, about the rise of SpaceX; and Reentry, on the development of the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon. A certified meteorologist, Eric lives in Houston. 16 Comments

The trade association backing some of the biggest news publishers in the US slammed Google’s newly expanded AI Mode, which trades traditional search results for an AI chatbot-like interface. In a statement on Wednesday, the News/Media Alliance said the new feature is “depriving” publishers of both traffic and revenue. During Google I/O on Tuesday, the company announced that it’s expanding AI Mode to all users in the US, which appears in a new tab directly within Search. When users enter a query, AI Mode serves up an AI-generated response alongside a list of relevant links.  “Links were the last redeeming quality of search that gave publishers traffic and revenue,” Danielle Coffey, the CEO and president of News/Media Alliance, said in the statement. “Now Google just takes content by force and uses it with no return, the definition of theft. The DOJ remedies must address this to prevent continued domination of the internet by one company.” This week, an internal document disclosed as part of Google’s antitrust trial over its search dominance showed that the company decided against asking publishers for permission to have their work included in its AI search features, as reported by Bloomberg. Instead, publishers must opt out of search results completely if they don’t want their work included in AI features.  Google Search head Liz Reid said during her testimony that allowing publishers to opt out of individual features would add “enormous complexity,” according to Bloomberg. “By saying a publisher could be like, ‘I want to be in this feature but not that feature,’ it doesn’t work,” Reid said. “Because then we would essentially have to say, every single feature on the page needs a different model.”

Friend requests Meta hypes AI friends as social media’s future, but users want real connections Two visions for social media’s future pit real connections against AI friends. Ashley Belanger – May 21, 2025 9:38 am | 1 Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only   Learn more If you ask the man who has largely shaped how friends and family connect on social media over the past two decades about the future of social media, you may not get a straight answer. At the Federal Trade Commission's monopoly trial, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg attempted what seemed like an artful dodge to avoid criticism that his company allegedly bought out rivals Instagram and WhatsApp to lock users into Meta's family of apps so they would never post about their personal lives anywhere else. He testified that people actually engage with social media less often these days to connect with loved ones, preferring instead to discover entertaining content on platforms to share in private messages with friends and family. As Zuckerberg spins it, Meta no longer perceives much advantage in dominating the so-called personal social networking market where Facebook made its name and cemented what the FTC alleged is an illegal monopoly. "Mark Zuckerberg says social media is over," a New Yorker headline said about this testimony in a report noting a Meta chart that seemed to back up Zuckerberg's words. That chart, shared at the trial, showed the "percent of time spent viewing content posted by 'friends'" had declined over the past two years, from 22 to 17 percent on Facebook and from 11 to 7 percent on Instagram. Supposedly because of this trend, Zuckerberg testified that "it doesn't matter much" if someone's friends are on their preferred platform. Every platform has its own value as a discovery engine, Zuckerberg suggested. And Meta platforms increasingly compete on this new playing field against rivals like TikTok, Meta argued, while insisting that it's not so much focused on beating the FTC's flagged rivals in the connecting-friends-and-family business, Snap and MeWe. But while Zuckerberg claims that hosting that kind of content doesn't move the needle much anymore, owning the biggest platforms that people use daily to connect with friends and family obviously still matters to Meta, MeWe founder Mark Weinstein told Ars. And Meta's own press releases seem to back that up. Weeks ahead of Zuckerberg's testimony, Meta announced that it would bring back the "magic of friends," introducing a "friends" tab to Facebook to make user experiences more like the original Facebook. The company intentionally diluted feeds with creator content and ads for the past two years, but it now appears intent on trying to spark more real conversations between friends and family, at least partly to fuel its newly launched AI chatbots. Those chatbots mine personal information shared on Facebook and Instagram, and Meta wants to use that data to connect more personally with users—but "in a very creepy way," The Washington Post wrote. In interviews, Zuckerberg has suggested these AI friends could "meaningfully" fill the void of real friendship online, as the average person has only three friends but "has demand" for up to 15. To critics seeking to undo Meta's alleged monopoly, this latest move could signal a contradiction in Zuckerberg's testimony, showing that the company is so invested in keeping users on its platforms that it's now creating AI friends (wh0 can never leave its platform) to bait the loneliest among us into more engagement. "The average person wants more connectivity, connection, than they have," Zuckerberg said, hyping AI friends. For the Facebook founder, it must be hard to envision a future where his platforms aren't the answer to providing that basic social need. All this comes more than a decade after he sought $5 billion in Facebook's 2012 initial public offering so that he could keep building tools that he told investors would expand "people's capacity to build and maintain relationships." At the trial, Zuckerberg testified that AI and augmented reality will be key fixtures of Meta's platforms in the future, predicting that "several years from now, you are going to be scrolling through your feed, and not only is it going to be sort of animated, but it will be interactive." Meta declined to comment further on the company's vision for social media's future. In a statement, a Meta spokesperson told Ars that "the FTC’s lawsuit against Meta defies reality," claiming that it threatens US leadership in AI and insisting that evidence at trial would establish that platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and X are Meta's true rivals. "More than 10 years after the FTC reviewed and cleared our acquisitions, the Commission’s action in this case sends the message that no deal is ever truly final," Meta's spokesperson said. "Regulators should be supporting American innovation rather than seeking to break up a great American company and further advantaging China on critical issues like AI.” Meta faces calls to open up its platforms Weinstein, the MeWe founder, told Ars that back in the 1990s when the original social media founders were planning the first community portals, "it was so beautiful because we didn't think about bots and trolls. We didn't think about data mining and surveillance capitalism. We thought about making the world a more connected and holistic place." But those who became social media overlords found more money in walled gardens and increasingly cut off attempts by outside developers to improve the biggest platforms' functionality or leverage their platforms to compete for their users' attention. Born of this era, Weinstein expects that Zuckerberg, and therefore Meta, will always cling to its friends-and-family roots, no matter which way Zuckerberg says the wind is blowing. Meta "is still entirely based on personal social networking," Weinstein told Ars. In a Newsweek op-ed, Weinstein explained that he left MeWe in 2021 after "competition became impossible" with Meta. It was a time when MeWe faced backlash over lax content moderation, drawing comparisons between its service and right-wing apps like Gab or Parler. Weinstein rejected those comparisons, seeing his platform as an ideal Facebook rival and remaining a board member through the app's more recent shift to decentralization. Still defending MeWe's failed efforts to beat Facebook, he submitted hundreds of documents and was deposed in the monopoly trial, alleging that Meta retaliated against MeWe as a privacy-focused rival that sought to woo users away by branding itself the "anti-Facebook." Among his complaints, Weinstein accused Meta of thwarting MeWe's attempts to introduce interoperability between the two platforms, which he thinks stems from a fear that users might leave Facebook if they discover a more appealing platform. That’s why he's urged the FTC—if it wins its monopoly case—to go beyond simply ordering a potential breakup of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp to also require interoperability between Meta's platforms and all rivals. That may be the only way to force Meta to release its clutch on personal data collection, Weinstein suggested, and allow for more competition broadly in the social media industry. "The glue that holds it all together is Facebook’s monopoly over data," Weinstein wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, recalling the moment he realized that Meta seemed to have an unbeatable monopoly. "Its ownership and control of the personal information of Facebook users and non-users alike is unmatched." Cory Doctorow, a special advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Ars that his vision of a better social media future goes even further than requiring interoperability between all platforms. Social networks like Meta's should also be made to allow reverse engineering so that outside developers can modify their apps with third-party tools without risking legal attacks, he said. Doctorow said that solution would create "an equilibrium where companies are more incentivized to behave themselves than they are to cheat" by, say, retaliating against, killing off, or buying out rivals. And "if they fail to respond to that incentive and they cheat anyways, then the rest of the world still has a remedy," Doctorow said, by having the choice to modify or ditch any platform deemed toxic, invasive, manipulative, or otherwise offensive. Doctorow summed up the frustration that some users have faced through the ongoing "enshittification" of platforms (a term he coined) ever since platforms took over the Internet. "I'm 55 now, and I've gotten a lot less interested in how things work because I've had too many experiences with how things fail," Doctorow told Ars. "And I just want to make sure that if I'm on a service and it goes horribly wrong, I can leave." Social media haters wish OG platforms were doomed Weinstein pointed out that Meta's alleged monopoly impacts a group often left out of social media debates: non-users. And if you ask someone who hates social media what the future of social media should look like, they will not mince words: They want a way to opt out of all of it. As Meta's monopoly trial got underway, a personal blog post titled "No Instagram, no privacy" rose to the front page of Hacker News, prompting a discussion about social media norms and reasonable expectations for privacy in 2025. In the post, Wouter-Jan Leys, a privacy advocate, explained that he felt "blessed" to have "somehow escaped having an Instagram account," feeling no pressure to "update the abstract audience of everyone I ever connected with online on where I am, what I am doing, or who I am hanging out with." But despite never having an account, he's found that "you don’t have to be on Instagram to be on Instagram," complaining that "it bugs me" when friends seem to know "more about my life than I tell them" because of various friends' posts that mention or show images of him. In his blog, he defined privacy as "being in control of what other people know about you" and suggested that because of platforms like Instagram, he currently lacked this control. There should be some way to "fix or regulate this," Leys suggested, or maybe some universal "etiquette where it’s frowned upon to post about social gatherings to any audience beyond who already was at that gathering." On Hacker News, his post spurred a debate over one of the longest-running privacy questions swirling on social media: Is it OK to post about someone who abstains from social media? Some seeming social media fans scolded Leys for being so old-fashioned about social media, suggesting, "just live your life without being so bothered about offending other people" or saying that "the entire world doesn't have to be sanitized to meet individual people's preferences." Others seemed to better understand Leys' point of view, with one agreeing that "the problem is that our modern norms (and tech) lead to everyone sharing everything with a large social network." Surveying the lively thread, another social media hater joked, "I feel vindicated for my decision to entirely stay off of this drama machine." Leys told Ars that he would "absolutely" be in favor of personal social networks like Meta's platforms dying off or losing steam, as Zuckerberg suggested they already are. He thinks that the decline in personal post engagement that Meta is seeing is likely due to a combination of factors, where some users may prefer more privacy now after years of broadcasting their lives, and others may be tired of the pressure of building a personal brand or experiencing other "odd social dynamics." Setting user sentiments aside, Meta is also responsible for people engaging with fewer of their friends' posts. Meta announced that it would double the amount of force-fed filler in people's feeds on Instagram and Facebook starting in 2023. That's when the two-year span begins that Zuckerberg measured in testifying about the sudden drop-off in friends' content engagement. So while it's easy to say the market changed, Meta may be obscuring how much it shaped that shift. Degrading the newsfeed and changing Instagram's default post shape from square to rectangle seemingly significantly shifted Instagram social norms, for example, creating an environment where Gen Z users felt less comfortable posting as prolifically as millennials did when Instagram debuted, The New Yorker explained last year. Where once millennials painstakingly designed immaculate grids of individual eye-catching photos to seem cool online, Gen Z users told The New Yorker that posting a single photo now feels "humiliating" and like a "social risk." But rather than eliminate the impulse to post, this cultural shift has popularized a different form of personal posting: staggered photo dumps, where users wait to post a variety of photos together to sum up a month of events or curate a vibe, the trend piece explained. And Meta is clearly intent on fueling that momentum, doubling the maximum number of photos that users can feature in a single post to encourage even more social posting, The New Yorker noted. Brendan Benedict, an attorney for Benedict Law Group PLLC who has helped litigate big tech antitrust cases, is monitoring the FTC monopoly trial on a Substack called Big Tech on Trial. He told Ars that the evidence at the trial has shown that "consumers want more friends and family content, and Meta is belatedly trying to address this" with features like the "friends" tab, while claiming there's less interest in this content. Leys doesn't think social media—at least the way that Facebook defined it in the mid-2000s—will ever die, because people will never stop wanting social networks like Facebook or Instagram to stay connected with all their friends and family. But he could see a world where, if people ever started truly caring about privacy or "indeed [got] tired of the social dynamics and personal brand-building... the kind of social media like Facebook and Instagram will have been a generational phenomenon, and they may not immediately bounce back," especially if it's easy to switch to other platforms that respond better to user preferences. He also agreed that requiring interoperability would likely lead to better social media products, but he maintained that "it would still not get me on Instagram." Interoperability shakes up social media Meta thought it may have already beaten the FTC's monopoly case, filing for a motion for summary judgment after the FTC rested its case in a bid to end the trial early. That dream was quickly dashed when the judge denied the motion days later. But no matter the outcome of the trial, Meta's influence over the social media world may be waning just as it's facing increasing pressure to open up its platforms more than ever. The FTC has alleged that Meta weaponized platform access early on, only allowing certain companies to interoperate and denying access to anyone perceived as a threat to its alleged monopoly power. That includes limiting promotions of Instagram to keep users engaged with Facebook Blue. A primary concern for Meta (then Facebook), the FTC claimed, was avoiding "training users to check multiple feeds," which might allow other apps to "cannibalize" its users. "Facebook has used this power to deter and suppress competitive threats to its personal social networking monopoly. In order to protect its monopoly, Facebook adopted and required developers to agree to conditional dealing policies that limited third-party apps’ ability to engage with Facebook rivals or to develop into rivals themselves," the FTC alleged. By 2011, the FTC alleged, then-Facebook had begun terminating API access to any developers that made it easier to export user data into a competing social network without Facebook's permission. That practice only ended when the UK parliament started calling out Facebook’s anticompetitive conduct toward app developers in 2018, the FTC alleged. According to the FTC, Meta continues "to this day" to "screen developers and can weaponize API access in ways that cement its dominance," and if scrutiny ever subsides, Meta is expected to return to such anticompetitive practices as the AI race heats up. One potential hurdle for Meta could be that the push for interoperability is not just coming from the FTC or lawmakers who recently reintroduced bipartisan legislation to end walled gardens. Doctorow told Ars that "huge public groundswells of mistrust and anger about excessive corporate power" that "cross political lines" are prompting global antitrust probes into big tech companies and are perhaps finally forcing a reckoning after years of degrading popular products to chase higher and higher revenues. For social media companies, mounting concerns about privacy and suspicions about content manipulation or censorship are driving public distrust, Doctorow said, as well as fears of surveillance capitalism. The latter includes theories that Doctorow is skeptical of. Weinstein embraced them, though, warning that platforms seem to be profiting off data without consent while brainwashing users. Allowing users to leave the platform without losing access to their friends, their social posts, and their messages might be the best way to incentivize Meta to either genuinely compete for billions of users or lose them forever as better options pop up that can plug into their networks. In his Newsweek op-ed, Weinstein suggested that web inventor Tim Berners-Lee has already invented a working protocol "to enable people to own, upload, download, and relocate their social graphs," which maps users' connections across platforms. That could be used to mitigate "the network effect" that locks users into platforms like Meta's "while interrupting unwanted data collection." At the same time, Doctorow told Ars that increasingly popular decentralized platforms like Bluesky and Mastodon already provide interoperability and are next looking into "building interoperable gateways" between their services. Doctorow said that communicating with other users across platforms may feel "awkward" at first, but ultimately, it may be like "having to find the diesel pump at the gas station" instead of the unleaded gas pump. "You'll still be going to the same gas station," Doctorow suggested. Opening up gateways into all platforms could be useful in the future, Doctorow suggested. Imagine if one platform goes down—it would no longer disrupt communications as drastically, as users could just pivot to communicate on another platform and reach the same audience. The same goes for platforms that users grow to distrust. The EFF supports regulators' attempts to pass well-crafted interoperability mandates, Doctorow said, noting that "if you have to worry about your users leaving, you generally have to treat them better." But would interoperability fix social media? The FTC has alleged that "Facebook’s dominant position in the US personal social networking market is durable due to significant entry barriers, including direct network effects and high switching costs." Meta disputes the FTC's complaint as outdated, arguing that its platform could be substituted by pretty much any social network. However, Guy Aridor, a co-author of a recent article called "The Economics of Social Media" in the Journal of Economic Literature, told Ars that dominant platforms are probably threatened by shifting social media trends and are likely to remain "resistant to interoperability" because "it’s in the interest of the platform to make switching and coordination costs high so that users are less likely to migrate away." For Meta, research shows its platforms' network effects have appeared to weaken somewhat but "clearly still exist" despite social media users increasingly seeking content on platforms rather than just socialization, Aridor said. Interoperability advocates believe it will make it easier for startups to compete with giants like Meta, which fight hard and sometimes seemingly dirty to keep users on their apps. Reintroducing the ACCESS Act, which requires platform compatibility to enable service switching, Senator Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) said that "interoperability and portability are powerful tools to promote innovative new companies and limit anti-competitive behaviors." He's hoping that passing these "long-overdue requirements" will "boost competition and give consumers more power." Aridor told Ars it's obvious that "interoperability would clearly increase competition," but he still has questions about whether users would benefit from that competition "since one consistent theme is that these platforms are optimized to maximize engagement, and there’s numerous empirical evidence we have by now that engagement isn’t necessarily correlated with utility." Consider, Aridor suggested, how toxic content often leads to high engagement but lower user satisfaction, as MeWe experienced during its 2021 backlash. Aridor said there is currently "very little empirical evidence on the effects of interoperability," but theoretically, if it increased competition in the current climate, it would likely "push the market more toward supplying engaging entertainment-related content as opposed to friends and family type of content." Benedict told Ars that a remedy like interoperability would likely only be useful to combat Meta's alleged monopoly following a breakup, which he views as the "natural remedy" following a potential win in the FTC's lawsuit. Without the breakup and other meaningful reforms, a Meta win could preserve the status quo and see the company never open up its platforms, perhaps perpetuating Meta's influence over social media well into the future. And if Zuckerberg's vision comes to pass, instead of seeing what your friends are posting on interoperating platforms across the Internet, you may have a dozen AI friends trained on your real friends' behaviors sending you regular dopamine hits to keep you scrolling on Facebook or Instagram. Aridor's team's article suggested that, regardless of user preferences, social media remains a permanent fixture of society. If that's true, users could get stuck forever using whichever platforms connect them with the widest range of contacts. "While social media has continued to evolve, one thing that has not changed is that social media remains a central part of people’s lives," his team's article concluded. Ashley Belanger Senior Policy Reporter Ashley Belanger Senior Policy Reporter Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience. 1 Comments