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  • Amazon launches Pill Subscription💊, US Gov sues Google

Amazon launches Pill Subscription💊, US Gov sues Google

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Good Morning. In the favor of working from home debate, Waymo's self-driving car was stranded in the middle of a busy intersection in San Francisco during morning rush hour, stalling traffic in all directions.

In today's edition:

  1. Amazon's new unlimited meds subscription

  2. Antitrust lawsuit filed against Google

Today's reading time is 2 minutes.

Tech

Amazon launches unlimited meds subscription services

Generic medications for a flat $5/month subscription.

*for illustration only

What: Amazon launched RxPass, a new subscription service that delivers generic version of your prescriptions for just $5/month. 

Key details:

  • The service offers medications 80 common health conditions including Diabetes, High Cholesterol, blood pressure. Even with multiple medications, the cost is flat $5/month.

  • The subscription is available to Prime members, but they can't use insurance or FSA/HSA to pay.

Amazon's Healthcare Focus: Amazon is trying to make its way into the $500 billion retail pharmacy business. It has made major acquisitions too, buying - Pillback for almost $1B in 2018 (relaunched as Amazon Pharmacy), and health care provider One Medical in July 2022 for $3.9 billion.

What's next: The competition is heating up - Walmart offers a prescription service, CVS and Walgreens are trying to deliver prescriptions as well. More than 150 million people in the US take one or more of the medications offered by Amazon, and with Amazon's next day reliable delivery coupled with unlimited meds at low cost, it could soon grab a major chunk of the space.

US Government files anti-trust lawsuit against Google

The first anti-trust lawsuit against Big-Tech by Biden Administration

What: US Government and eight states including California, New York and Colorado filed a civil antitrust suit against Google for monopolizing Digital-Ad market worth $250B

Key details:

  1. The complaint alleges Google 'monopolized' the digital-ad tech to force publishers and advertisers to use it products and suppress competition

  2. The lawsuit could end up breaking Google to separate the online advertising business.

Why it matters: The online ad market has 3 key actors - an Ad-buyer, an Ad-Seller and an Ad-Exchange that determines the price of Ad. The suit alleges Google owns all sides of the market and could simply exploit its monopoly to earn more profit.

If successful, it could break up Google's most profitable online-advertising business and the effects would ripple across entire tech industry.

Big Picture

Twitter 'GodMode' allows engineers to tweet as any account, claims a whistleblower. What's more concerning is that Twitter doesn't have the capability to log which or if engineers used the GodMode! 

NASA will build and test Nuclear powered engines in space by 2027 in effort to reduce travel time to Moon and Mars. The nuclear engines are 3x more efficient than conventional chemical propulsion in space. 

Quick Bites

1. New Product: Turn books into chatbots with GPT-3.

2. New Research: It might be possible to rewind heart's age by up to a decade.

3. SpaceX completes first stacked test of new Starship orbital vehicle.

4. Pay Raise: Walmart raises minimum pay to $14/hour, a 17% increase.