The Path of Enshittification: Apple Ads, Google's Toll Booth, and Meta's $18B Escape Hatch

Send us Fan MailGreg Sterling and Mike Blumenthal go guest-free this week to connect three stories that are really one story. Apple has launched ads in Apple Maps — contextual, largely on-device, and with no way to turn them off — which quietly undercuts the "you're not the product" brand Apple spent years building. Google is expanding what it charges for: starting October 1, some missed Local Services Ads calls become billable leads, and LSAs have moved into Google's main ad organization as ad real estate keeps eating the results page.Then there's Meta's roughly $18 billion youth-safety settlement with state attorneys general — a number the hosts argue is far smaller than it looks once you read the contingencies and spread it over ten years. Along the way: why the traffic "stolen by AI" is really going to ads, why even ad-skeptics now click rich local ad units, and why the settlement's shared discovery pool may matter more than the dollar figure.Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/