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Alphabet may have hoped that Donald Trump winning the White House would quell talk of a Google breakup, but that doesnt seem likely. In a filing late last week, the Justice Department reiterated its suggestion that Google be forced to sell the Chrome web browser following a verdict last August that determined the company to be an illegal monopoly. Thats a setback for Google, and it could signal trouble ahead for other companies, as the government continues to take an aggressive stance on Big Tech. In some cases, that could be financial trouble. Google pays handsomely to be the default search engine for Safari, Apples Web browser. In 2022, Googles revenue share payment to Apple was estimated at $20 billion. That worked out to 17.5% of the companys operating profit that year. With that sort of money at risk, Apple asked to intervene as a defendant in the governments case against Google last year, saying it didnt want to lose the ability to defend its right to reach other arrangements with Google that could benefit millions of users and Apples entitlement to compensation for distributing Google search to its users. (Last month a judge denied that request.) Last week, however, the DOJ did agree to let Google pay Apple for services that were unrelated to search. The ripple effect could go well beyond finances. While Google was the only Big Tech company with a judgment against it, the Federal Trade Commission had expressed grievances against several other companies during the Biden administration. And the fact that the DOJ is not standing down on Google has executives worrying they might be next. Meta, for instance, is set to go on trial next month in a case that could see it forced to sell Instagram and WhatsApp. That case, originally filed by the FTC in 2020, alleges Meta overpaid for the two apps in an attempt to maintain a monopoly on personal social networks. Another judge set October 2026 as the start date for the FTCs antitrust suit against Amazon. Apple is not immune from legal action either. The DOJ, along with 16 state and district attorneys general, sued the company last March for monopolizing the smartphone market. This is . . . the first signal of the Trump Justice Department’s approach to antitrust litigation, said Damian Rollison, director of market insights at AI-powered marketing solutions company SOCi. The willingness of the Trump Justice Department to reinforce and continue prior actions against Big Tech has dangerous implications for Meta and Apple as well, given the cases they face in the next several months. Federal officials are targeting each of these companies for something different, but there are some similar threads in the prosecutions. While Google, Apple, Amazon, and Meta all operate in different parts of the technology world today, they share a common focus: artificial intelligence. These are not firms anymore; theyre platforms, says Ram Chellappa, professor of information systems and operations management at Emory Universitys Goizueta Business School. As these platforms become bigger and their knowledge of the user increases and ownership of user data increases, they all . . . want to be the platform from which you do things. . . . Meta didnt buy Instagram for the tech. They bought it [in 2012] for the user base, [and] their data. The future will boil down to who has the best training data for AI. With the looming threat from the DOJ (as well as other threats made during the presidential campaign), the CEOs of major tech firms have been cozying up to Trump since he was elected. Google and Microsoft both donated $1 million to Trumps inauguration fund. Meta did as well, and agreed to pay the president $25 million to settle a lawsuit for suspending his social accounts in 2021. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos also contributed to the inauguration fund and has radically overhauled the opinion page of The Washington Post to reflect libertarian viewpoints and exclude opposing points of view (as well as killing a planned endorsement of Kamala Harris during the campaign). It’s unclear so far how effective those actions have been in shielding their companies from further scrutiny from the DOJ or FTC.
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Were only in the third month of the year and already there have been a number of bizarre food trends go viral on TikTokfrom a $19 strawberry to feeding babies spoonfuls of butter. The latest is a yogurt, called Coconut Cult, that costs $39 for a 16 ounce jar. On many a for-you-page, you can find influencers incorporating a scoop of the super-live probiotic yogurt into their morning routine and instructing viewers how to properly eat it. Ive never looked hotter, one user posted, adding her stomach has never been flatter. (Not everyone on the platform was impressed with the results, however, and some weren’t fans of the reportedly sour taste.) @clararpeirce why is it spicy #coconutcult son original – Reverse.Soundeffects – Reverse.story Available in three standard flavors (Original, Chocolate Mousse, and Harvest Strawberry) and limited, seasonal releases, Coconut Cult is not a regular yogurt you snack on. According to the California-based brand, it is meant to be consumed more like a daily probiotic supplement. The website claims that two tablespoons a day is enough to experience less bloating, more regularity, improved mood and mental health, better digestion and skin, and boosted immunity,. (The brand warns against double dipping into the same jar with a dirty spoon to avoid interfering with the live bacteria.) This is the most probiotic-rich coconut yogurt you will find on the market in the grocery store, one nutritionist weighed in on TikTok. The certified nutritionist, NTP, BFA, who goes by Claire The Nutritionist, did disclaim that people with certain conditions, such as small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, might be best avoiding the product as it can worsen the symptoms. For the everyday yogurt enthusiast, however, the difference between this yogurt and other options, according to founder Noah Simon-Waddell, is that many yogurts are pasteurized after fermentation to be shelf-stable, despite the fact this process can reduce or eliminate live cultures. (Some manufacturers may add them back in after the process as probiotics need to be alive and active in order to do their job in creating a healthy environment in the gut.) Packaged with roughly 50 billion colony-forming units (CFUs) per ounce (plain yogurt typically contains at least 1,000,000), Coconut Cult is certainly not lacking in that department. “Fifty billion CFU per ounce is extremely high for food-based probiotics, health creator Brooke Harter, who is currently pursuing her Masters in nutrition, told Delish. While high doses may be beneficial for some, excessive amounts could lead to digestive distress like bloating, gas, and diarrhea.” She added that research also says a lower-dose of well researched and specific probiotics is better than a higher-dose of mixed dose of strains, like those found in Coconut Cult. However, thanks to the glowing endorsements, jars of the stuff are flying off the shelves at Whole Foods and the website is experiencing shipping delays up to three weeks due to demand. Coconut Cult is reportedly producing five times as many jars as they were in 2024 to keep up with demand. I created this yogurt as part of my healing journey, as a way to heal myself and my gut, which was really sick, founder Simon-Waddell posted on TikTok in 2022. I didnt create this yogurt as some kind of genius startup business plan to sell incredibly expensive yogurt. And at approximately $10 per 8-ounce jar (the brands website, thecoconutcult.com, sells 16-ounce jars for $39 with a two-jar minimum purchase), it certainly costs more than your standard Chobani.
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Last September, as Hurricane Helene barreled toward the coast of Florida, Andrew Hazelton was in a plane flying into the eye of the storm. The plane was collecting crucial data to help understand the path and intensity of the hurricaneand Hazelton was simultaneously watching to see how the real-time data matched what scientific models predicted. At the time, he was working at a NOAA lab at the University of Miami; in October, he was promoted to another NOAA job focused on helping the governments computer models of hurricanes continue to get even better. (NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is in charge of tracking, predicting, and responding to hurricanes, among many other things, from deep sea exploration to climate research.) At the end of February, Hazelton became one of hundreds of NOAA employees to lose his job through cuts pushed by DOGE, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. The team was already short-staffed, Hazelton says. Now it will be even harder to do the work. Theyre going to do their best to try to continue the missionNOAA is very mission-focused on protecting laws and property. That’s what we want to do. But when you lose expertise, you lose people. Any one person can only do so much during the day. So fewer tests will get run, and there will be less expertise to make improvements. And itll degrade the forecast over time. Andrew Hazelton As hurricane forecasts improve, that translates directly into saving lives. When Hurricane Andrew hit Florida in 1992, causing around $27 billion in damage, most forecasts could happen only a day or two in advance of a hurricane. Now, forecasts five days in advance can be as accurate. “That has a lot of implications,” Hazelton says. “That means that the forecast ‘cone’ that people see is smaller. People who are under harm’s way can get out sooner and prepare better. But it also means that people who aren’t going to be as directly affected don’t have to close their business or close their school.” The modeling is on track to eventually provide accurate forecasts seven days in advance. That’s because of the work of scientists like Hazelton, who has a PhD in meteorology, and was part of the team helping the models continually improve. Though he was fired because he was a probationary employeemeaning that hed been in his current role for less than a yearhe had already been working in NOAA labs at universities for nearly a decade. Most probationary employees were in a similar position, he says, and had been working with NOAA at universities or as contractors for years, even if they were relatively early in their careers. Youre losing people who are motivated to improve themselves and build their career, build your organization, hungry, all of those thingsbut also have that experience, he says. Youre not getting rid of people who havent really done anything. NOAA is expected to potentially fire more than 1,000 additional employees. In total, that would mean losing around 15% of its staff. As a result, the U.S. will have less information about the weather at a time when climate change is making it more extreme. Hurricanes, for example, come with stronger winds, higher storm surges, and more rainfall as the planet heats up. The lack of data is going to degrade the forecastfor all sorts of weather, Hazelton says. “So these improvements that we’ve become accustomed to are going to be harder and harder to come by. It’s possible we could even see the forecast get worse again. That would result in more deaths and loss of property and loss of life.” The forecast improvements that we’ve come to take for granted, he says, have been the result of investments over decades. And those investments were already efficient: NOAAs improvements in hurricane forecasting have saved an estimated $7 billion since 2009, or 20 times as much as the agency spent on its forecasting system Though the current administration has a vision of privatizing weather data, its worth noting that private weather companies rely heavily on sources from NOAAa system that cant easily be replaced. This basic forecast and lifesaving datawatches and warningsis something I don’t think the private sector can really replicate, Hazelton says. At least not easily.
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