Ask Paul: November 22 (Premium)

Happy Friday! We're back in the US and exhausted, but here's a particularly lengthy installment of Ask Paul to kick off the weekend a bit early.
Pretty no bueno
j5 asks:

Hi Paul! Any updates on when your Paulism "pretty bueno" is going to be on your coffee mugs? That's what I'm waiting for to buy one. Thanks!

Sorry, this hasn't really been top of mind lately. I did update the swag store with several more items at some point a few weeks or maybe a month back, but that wasn't among them. I'll do that over the weekend.

Speaking of which.

This reminds me of something that happens each year on Windows Weekly, mostly because it just came up Wednesday, when Leo asks me if I have any favorite moments from the year and I never do. To me, this is a blur of 2-3 hours every Wednesday and I don't actually hang on whatever stupid phrases come out of my mouth, though some are memorialized as episode titles. In this case, I know there are likely some other phrases that might be fun to have on t-shirts or mugs or whatever. But I don't remember a single one of them. If anyone has thoughts on this, let me know.

(OK, I can think of one, but maybe it's only funny/relevant to me: "But you said...")
Chicken Little
wright_is asks:

I hear a lot of people calling out the sanctions being suggested by the FTC against Google (and other bodies against Google, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon etc.), complaining that it might cause the company to "fail" or to have considerably reduced income etc. Surely that is the point? The sanctions are there to punish the companies and to ensure, going forward, that they comply with the law.

This is correct. Google was found to have an illegal monopoly, meaning it behaved illegally to create or maintain that monopoly, and the remedy must be designed to not just curb that behavior, but to prevent future abuses and to deny Google of its illegal revenues and other benefits. We can absolutely debate the merits of whatever proposed remedies the DOJ/states come up. But it's fascinating to me that this could have--maybe should have--been much worse. For example, why not just cut off the head of the snake and force Google to divest itself of what used to be DoubleClick, i.e. its ad business? That's the simplest way to achieve the goals. But that's also a lot more radical than the proposals the DOJ suggested. Why isn't the DOJ being praised for a measured set of proposals?

For me, it is simple, if a business can't survive on its merits, it isn't a viable business. If the business only survived due to illegal practices and can't survive without them, surely that is the natural order of things, that those businesses cease to be?

Also correct. This is what we can now call the Mozilla Paradox, I guess. Because in addition to Google, which I think most would agree is this overly powerful and abusive Big Tech monopoly, we have collateral damage in the form of Apple, Mozilla, and Samsung, each of which will see its...