The city of San Francisco is coming for e-cigarettes. And, for Juul, it’s personal.

Officials in San Francisco have introduced a four-pronged policy proposal to curb the use, manufacture, and sale of e-cigarettes. That includes a moratorium on selling e-cigarettes to customers within city limits, as well as prohibiting the business-side of manufacturing and distribution of vape products in San Francisco. The proposal hits leading vape-brand Juul hard, as its headquarters are in rented space in San Francisco’s Pier 70.

“E-cigarettes have wiped out the hard-fought gains we have made in curbing youth tobacco use,” City Attorney Dennis Herrera said in a statement. “Today we are taking action to protect our kids.”

The action is predicated on a national policy that says the FDA must study the public health of any new tobacco products before they go to market. The SF city attorneys claim that the FDA “has simply failed to do its job in unprecedented fashion” by not reviewing e-cig products before they hit shelves.

On March 13, the FDA released its proposed guidelines for e-cigarettes. It gives e-cigarette companies until 2021 to complete public health reviews of their products. San Francisco city attorneys, along with their counterparts in Chicago and New York City, say this is not enough. They’ve sent a jointly signed letter to the FDA urging it to “do its job and immediately conduct the required public health review of e-cigarettes that, by law, was supposed to happen before these products were on the market.” 

SF city attorneys claim the FDA “has simply failed to do its job in unprecedented fashion”

San Francisco has also asked the FDA to turn over its e-cigarette records so the city can determine whether it will take legal action against the FDA for what the city describes as abdicating its legal duties.

The FDA rule is also at the center of the proposed ban on selling and manufacturing e-cigarettes: The law would prohibit e-cigarette transactions of products that haven’t undergone public health review. Which, it turns out, is all of them.

“This is not an outright ban on e-cigarettes,” the statement reads. “It’s a prohibition against any e-cigarettes that haven’t been reviewed by the FDA to confirm that they are appropriate for the protection of public health.”

The temporary ban would include selling e-cigarettes within San Francisco, as well as delivering e-cigarette products to San Francisco addresses.

The next part of the proposal includes a separate piece of legislation that serves as a punch in the gut to leading e-cigarette manufacturer, Juul, specifically. It includes prohibiting the “sale, manufacture and distribution of all tobacco products, including e-cigarettes, on City property in San Francisco.” 

While the proposed law wouldn’t kick Juul out of its Bay Area home, it would prevent it from expanding in any way to more directly manufacture Juul products in SF.

The final prong of the proposed policy directly concerns Juul’s office space. The city attorney has sent a letter to Juul’s landlord for an explanation as to “why Juul holds a tobacco distributor license at that property when it has maintained that it ‘does not engage in the sale of cigarettes or tobacco products’ on the premises.”

Juul takes a direct hit in the proposed policy because it is such a popular product among teenage users, and the city attorney’s effort is directly aimed at curbing youth vaping. Juul maintains that it supports (and is currently undertaking) efforts to stop teens from Juuling, but thinks that the city attorney’s action goes too far, especially since San Francisco still sells traditional cigarettes within city limits. 

Juul declined to comment on whether it had any plans to stay or leave its SF office space. Here is the statement that Juul provided to Mashable in full:

We share the City of San Francisco’s concerns with youth usage of tobacco and vapor products, including our own. That is why we have taken aggressive action nationwide, including stopping the sale of flavored products to retailers and supporting strong, restrictive category wide regulation to keep e-cigarettes out of the hands of youth. But this proposed legislation’s primary impact will be to limit adult smokers’ access to products that can help them switch away from combustible cigarettes. We encourage the City of San Francisco to severely restrict youth access but do so in a way that preserves the opportunity to eliminate combustible cigarettes. This proposed legislation begs the question – why would the City be comfortable with combustible cigarettes being on shelves when we know they kill more than 480,000 Americans per year?

The FDA has taken action to limit the sale of flavored e-cigarettes, which experts say contribute to the popularity of e-cigs among teens. Juul itself also has stringent age regulations, and is undertaking its own campaign to reduce teen use of its product. But it’s not clear whether any policy on flavored cartridges or age restrictions will be enough to combat the Juuling craze and cool-kid aesthetic the products inspire. 

With tobacco use up among teens who might never have picked up a cigarette in the first place, there’s a strong case for the idea that more drastic action is necessary. Then again, Juuling and vaping more broadly has successfully converted smokers into vapers. The problem — which comes back to the city’s original point about the need for FDA oversight — is that the health effects of vaping are still unknown. 

“San Francisco has never been afraid to lead,” Herrera said in the statement. “We’re certainly not afraid to do so when the health and lives of our children are at stake.”

Can Google Stadia — Google’s first entry into the world of mainstream gaming — hope to make a dent in a market that’s been dominated for more than two decades by three major platforms? Or is it just another OnLive in the making?

Even at this early stage, we can pretty definitively answer that second question: Not a chance. Between the leaps in high-speed internet capabilities over the past decade, not to mention Google’s own cloud infrastructure and overall reach, Stadia has advantages that earlier would-be competitors couldn’t have even imagined.

SEE ALSO: Stadia will make YouTube livestreamers a lot more valuable

As for challenging the likes of Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony … well that’s a much more up-in-the-air scenario. The odds are obviously stacked against Google. These are long-established players with the communities to match.

Just consider the history for a moment. The original Xbox launched almost two decades ago, in 2001. That was really the last major market disruption for the audience Google appears to be chasing with Stadia. 

It’s true that the lines between console/PC gaming and mobile gaming have blurred in recent years. But no one who’s observed the industry for any significant period of time is under any illusions: Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony are the clear market leaders for a certain kind of gaming audience, and Stadia is another hopeful new kid on the block.

Of course, an effort spearheaded by Google is more than just “hopeful.” This is a company with the resources and reach to force its way into the conversation. So let’s consider what Stadia’s big promise actually looks like, and the various elements the work in the service’s favor, or against it.

Why is Stadia so exciting?

For those who don’t remember OnLive: Stadia is a gaming platform that moves all the expensive hardware you’d normally need for console/PC games into a data center. That data center delivers gameplay to the screen of your choice via high-speed internet while also receiving commands from whatever controller you’re using.

“Netflix, but for games” is accurate from a technical standpoint; same principle here (though the technology powering it all is much more complex). That comparison fails, however, at the content level: We know Google wants the latest mainstream games to be playable on Stadia, but whether you’ll pay for them individually or as a packaged subscription deal remains to be seen.

That comparison also fails because Stadia is so much more than Netflix. Remember, this is Google. In terms of what we know, that means integrations with YouTube and Google Assistant. But it’s not hard to see the possibilities with other popular Google services, like Hangouts or even Gmail (what if, say, your contacts list suddenly doubled as your friends list?).

“Netflix, but for games” is accurate from a technical standpoint.

Don’t forget, too: The delivery platform here is Chrome, the most-used web browser on the planet by a wide margin. It runs on pretty much everything, just like Stadia will. It’s hard to say at this point how Chrome extensions might factor in (if they do at all), but the idea of using them to customize your experience creates some exciting possibilities.

Google’s reveal also pointed to a number of service-specific features that will help differentiate Stadia. State Sharing, for example, could give players the ability to create a shareable link mid-game that would allow other users with access to the same game to click that link and pick up right in the same spot.

There’s also a Crowd Play feature that makes jumping into a game with someone who’s streaming a one-click process. That kind of access will of course be limited by the game in question’s lobby size (or online play support at all), as well as the streamer’s personal preference.

Those two features, the way they were revealed, feel like work-in-progress examples aimed at making a larger point. Google wants everyone to understand just how vertically integrated Stadia is as a platform. It’s your console, but it’s also your streaming platform, your community board, and your content sharing portal. 

On top of all that, it’s also completely portable. If you have a screen with high-speed internet access and Bluetooth or USB support, you’re good to go.

What’s working against Stadia?

For all the excitement and noise around Google’s Stadia reveal, it’s not a guaranteed winner by any stretch. Let’s set aside the industry competition that we’ve already acknowledged. It’s unquestionably a factor, but it’s a factor that depends in large part on how the service assuages these other, more platform-specific concerns.

For now, the biggest thing working against Stadia is the range of questions Google hasn’t answered yet. The games lineup is largely a mystery. Stadia’s beta program, better known as Project Stream, proved that even a hot, new game like Assassin’s Creed Odyssey can run well when it’s delivered from the cloud. And Google made it clear during the reveal that Odyssey represents the kinds of games the service will hope to deliver.

But in terms of specific titles that will actually be available at or close to launch? The list is very short. Marty Stratton, a creative lead at id Software, showed up to confirm that Doom Eternal will be available on Stadia. But that was notably the only high-profile title Google let slip. Ubisoft, Odyssey‘s publisher, pledged to support Stadia as well, but stopped short of listing specific games.

Google is assuming that more people have access to a stable high-speed connection than not.

Google did make it clear that there are plans to create first-party games that will be exclusive to Stadia. But the reveal suggested that the in-house studio effort is just getting started. Jade Raymond, a veteran of Ubisoft and Electronic Arts, is heading up the new team, but she only joined Google in March. Most modern games take 3 to 5 years to complete, from pre-production to release.

Cost is another major factor, and an unanswered question. We don’t know if games will be sold individually or as part of a subscription plan. Google confirmed that Stadia will allow for cross-platform play, but is there a cross-buy scenario as well where games you own on one platform or another are also accessible via Stadia?

Maybe that’s part of the business model here: You pay for a subscription that unlocks all the games you already own elsewhere. It’s a far-fetched (and very unlikely!) scenario, but that’s my point. It’s impossible to speculate about Stadia’s impact on the market until we know how Google intends to make money off of it.

There’s also the bandwidth concern. Yes, high-speed internet has improved immeasurably since the last push toward cloud gaming ended in around 2012. But Google is making a basic assumption with this service, that more people have access to a stable high-speed connection than not.

A 2018 report from the UK broadband company Cable (via BBC) found that the global average download speed at the time was 9.10 Mbps. Stadia is launching first in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and “most of Europe,” according to Google. The averages for all of those countries hover in the 20-25 Mbps range, according to the report.

Of course, download speeds are only part of the equation here because of the way Stadia (and streaming in general) works. But a Google rep told Kotaku on Monday what the performance expectations are for a 25 Mbps download speed.

A Google PR rep tells Kotaku that Google’s Project Stream was able to provide 1080p, 60fps gameplay for users with 25 megabits per second connections. “When Stadia launches later this year, we expect to be able to deliver 4k 60 fps at approximately the same bandwidth requirements,” they said. 

“Approximately” is a key word there. The actual speed target for 4K resolution at 60 frames per second could come in higher or lower than 25 Mbps (but not by much, if Google’s estimate turns out to be accurate). It’s also worth noting: Not everyone will be playing on a 4K display. For a good chunk of people, 1080p will be all they need — and that should lower the bandwidth demands even further.

Even with manageable bandwidth demands, it’s not yet clear how much data you’ll actually be using for the games you play. Some service providers impose data caps, and game streaming could easily test those limits. There’s about to be a reckoning in the way data is valued, in terms of dollars, with the looming launch of 5G networks. But any major shifts resulting from that are likely more than a year away — and Stadia is launching in 2019.

People still matter too. Someone who’s fully invested in a console ecosystem already isn’t necessarily going to be enthusiastic about jumping over to a new platform. Especially one like Stadia, where there’s no physical product you can hold in your hands or have access to even when there’s no internet.

There are even more obstacles for social gamers. Stadia may support cross-platform play, but that doesn’t mean you’ll be able to hop into voice chat with friends on Xbox Live or PlayStation Network. Online games have increasingly transformed into virtual hangout spaces (I’m thinking of examples like Fortnite and Destiny 2 here); where your friends are playing matters just as much as where you yourself play. For some friend groups, switching over to a new platform might feel like an all or nothing proposition.

The close integration of Stadia with YouTube could convince popular streamers to leap over and bring their communities along for the ride. But content moderation is already a tricky proposition on the more popular Twitch, and YouTube has struggled again and again (and again) to create a safe environment for all users. Google also hasn’t yet laid out the moneymaking advantages of being on Stadia, an important factor since this is a job for them.

Stadia’s closer integration of play with streaming and community features is all the more concerning when you remember that this is the video game scene we’re talking about. It’s been almost five years since the GamerGate hate group brought the most toxic elements of the gaming community to the forefront. Yet we continue to have front-and-center conversations about how to mitigate the still-rampant misogyny, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and all manner of other shitty, anti-society views that the worst offenders from the gaming scene tend to espouse.

Stadia still brims with potential

As much as it might seem on paper like there’s more working against Stadia than for it, I’m not here to be a killjoy. Personally, as someone who’s been working in this industry for the better part of 15 years (and who’s been gaming for more than twice that), I’m bowled over with excitement after this announcement.

The potential here to disrupt a market that often seems to run like clockwork — which isn’t necessarily a great thing! — is huge. Fresh competition breeds fresh ideas, and Google’s efforts with Stadia will inevitably push everyone to innovate and be bolder when trying out new things. 

That should be true even if the service itself ultimately fails. Google doesn’t always put out winners, but the company’s sheer size and influence as a global business all but guarantees that the industry’s existing big players will sit up and get to work on what their response looks like.

Also, don’t forget: Some of the heaviest concerns here could be wiped away once Google answers more of the still-unaddressed Stadia questions, price and catalog being the big ones.

Stadia won’t be the next OnLive, we can assume that much. But can it hope to disrupt an entrenched market where the most established players have carried the reins for almost two full decades? The ideas are there, the potential is evident. We’ll just have to wait and see what — and how — Google delivers.

The EU is making Google pay for its anti-competitive practices.

On Wednesday, the European Commission ordered Google to pay a huge €1.49 billion antitrust fine (roughly $1.7 billion USD) for “abusive practices in online advertising.”

The Commission determined that Google had engaged in illegal conduct to “cement its dominant market position” with its Adsense program, which had a market share of more than 70 percent from 2006 to 2016 in Europe.

Hundreds of Google’s advertising agreements with major websites were reviewed by the commission, which discovered numerous restrictive clauses that blocked the company’s advertising rivals from competing in the market.

“Today the Commission has fined Google €1.49 billion for illegal misuse of its dominant position in the market for the brokering of online search adverts,” said Commissioner Margrethe Vestager in the statement. “Google has cemented its dominance in online search adverts and shielded itself from competitive pressure by imposing anti-competitive contractual restrictions on third-party websites.” 

Among the Europe Commission’s findings were exclusivity clauses in Google’s contracts which forbade publishers from placing search ads from competitors on search results pages.

Around three years later, Google would adopt what the Commission refers to as a “relaxed exclusivity strategy.” The search giant would replace the exclusivity clauses with “Premium Placement” clauses that required its publishing partners to save its most profitable ad space on search result pages for Google.

SEE ALSO: Google’s grand entry into gaming turns Chrome into your console

The Commission also discovered clauses that required publishers to obtain approval from Google if they wished to change how ads from the search company’s competitors were displayed on their website.

“This is illegal under EU antitrust rules,” stated Vestager. “The misconduct lasted over 10 years and denied other companies the possibility to compete on the merits and to innovate and consumers the benefits of competition.”

Google stopped its illegal advertising practices in July 2016 after the Commission issued a decision which required that the search giant do so.

This is Google’s third antitrust fine levied by the European Commission. In 2017, the company was fined $2.72 billion for using its search engine to promote its own shopping comparison tool above competitors. In 2018, Google was fined more than $5 billion for using Android’s mobile dominance to force its search engine on smartphone manufacturers.

All three fines were determined using the revenue Google generated from the illegal practice and the company’s overall revenue, as well as other factors such as “the length of the violation.”

The previous $5 billion fine was record-setting for Google. However, it barely affected the company when its quarterly earnings came around.

Google has now been fined around €8.2 billion ($9.3 billion USD) by Europe in total since 2017.

For the past week, I’ve asked people who spend their lives focused on the practice of mindfulness to do the one thing they’re not supposed to do: meditate like they’re in competition with each other. 

That’s the idea behind March Mindfulness, Mashable’s annual meditation tournament — the world’s first-ever, word to the latecomers at Meditation Battle League — now in its second year. Using brain-sensing headbands called Muses, we’re able to place the world’s chillest people in head-to-head combat, comparing scores that literally measure the calmness of their brains. 

SEE ALSO: Competitive Meditation 101: What you need to know about the world’s weirdest sport

The 2018 version of the contest focused entirely on the videogame fans at our sister website IGN. For 2019, I wanted to expand the circle a little wider. We’ll still feature gamers in later rounds — this time, it’s IGN versus the games developers of GDC. 

But I also wanted to see if people who took meditation as their vocation would be more adept under the pressure of competition than the people who love competition. It’s a simple knockout tournament. Each match lasts for just 5 minutes. You get one point for every five seconds of calm mind, as measured by the Muse. (Every time the brain is quiet for 5 seconds, the sound of a bird chirping is played; the app records the total number of birds heard.) The player that hears the most birds in 5 minutes — from 1 to a maximum of 60 — is the winner. 

Welcome to March Mindfulness Year 2: Gamers v. Meditators. 

Two groups of meditators agreed to participate. Both call San Francisco home, but they could not have been more diverse. One group consisted of the employees of Calm, the world’s most popular meditation app, which claims nearly 30 million downloads. Calm just received an $88 million round of funding from Silicon Valley investors. 

The other group was the local chapter of Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual University, a predominantly female global movement with ties to the UN. Based in India, founded in 1930, it now claims more than a million full-time, live-in members. Millions more have dropped in to Brahma Kumaris centers, where they are taught to focus on the soul over the body, and to “enjoy the everlasting effects of meditation.”

The for-profit vs. the nonprofit. The material-world mavens vs. the spiritual cyphers. New school vs. old school, tech vs tradition. 

Who is the most serene?  

Round 1: Brahma Kumaris

The Victorian spires of the Brahma Kumaris meditation center are glinting and golden in San Francisco’s first Sunday sunshine of the year. I am welcomed into a stained-glass interior filled with people wearing white robes, each forehead decorated with a brightly painted bindi, and invited to join a group breakfast of vegetables and rice followed by delicious fried sweet jalebi. 

Everyone calls each other “brother” and “sister.” A couple of girls aged 7 and 8 run around. Their elder sisters and brothers suggest the kids try the Muse first. After I explain the concept, the girls close their eyes and count the number of bird chirps they hear on the Muse app on tiny fingers. It’s too adorable. “Do we get to take bets?” asks an older man with a broad grin. 

You can’t not love this place. I had feared that meditation technology would be viewed with suspicion here. Now I’m almost ready to cast aside my worldly concerns and sign up for my white robe and bindi. Almost.

On with the experiment!

All these good vibes mean that Brahma Kumaris folks aren’t much for competition. In a nail-biting 5 minutes, the first two competitors score the two highest bird totals in this particular bracket, 22 and 23 — which they would have known had they not both immediately left for the day, blissfully unaware that there was any such thing as a winner and a next round.  

The next highest scores go to Olga McKenna (above, right), who settles into her lotus pose and begins happily meditating before I even set her up with the headband, and Sukanya Belsare, the cool-as-a-cucumber meditation teacher who’d been amused by the concept and invited me to Brahma in the first place. 

But both Olga and Sukanya see their bird numbers drop precipitously in the round after they score above 20. It’s an outcome I’d noted often in the first year of running meditation tournaments: Victory in one round brings a flurry of expectations, a.k.a. thoughts picked up by the brain-sensing headband, in the next. 

Even career meditators are not immune. 

Normal folk protest when their bird score is zero. As does accountant Vaishali Jogi, insisting that she had not noticed any thoughts that might have disrupted her peace of mind. Her sisters smile and wag gentle fingers. “She is very analytical,” one says.   

Joao Bridi, a quiet veteran of the center, had no such expectations. He squeaked through early rounds with low bird totals, then found his time to shine in the final. His unbreakable smile throughout, no matter his score, reminded me a lot of Alexio Quaglierini, who won the first March Mindfulness.

Would Silicon Valley tech types display that level of chill, even at an app built around meditation?  

Round 2: Calm

Don’t let the soothing forest murals and cozy furniture fool you. Calm HQ, on the fourth floor of a nondescript building in San Francisco’s glass-and-steel SOMA district, is a high-pressure environment of constant meetings, movement, and Slack chatter. The company is growing fast, it’s on the move, and the meditators here are all business, in more ways than one. 

With ruthless efficiency, Team Calm pulls off a number of Competitive Meditation records. It’s the highest-scoring bracket I’ve ever run. It’s the first with an audience for every match. It’s also the fastest, clocking in at just under two hours. A designated coordinator ushers them into the designated meditation room. They’re all wearing matching Calm sweatshirts. 

They engage in some quick pre-match banter — “You’re going down,” says one, who promptly loses — and five minutes later, they’re off to another meeting. 

In those five minutes the Calm folks display what can best be described as a furious focus, silencing their brains by sheer force of will. No one exemplifies this look better than Ben Chandler, operations manager and the red-bearded Viking of Competitive Meditation. 

Ben trounces talent acquisition head Rosalind Rattan in round 1. Rather than adopt the posture of furious focus, Rosalind boldly goes for the build-a-pillow-fort-and-crash plan of total comfort. But it is thwarted when she realizes she’s forgotten to turn her phone off all the way. The vibrating Slack notifications are so distracting, she scores a birdless zero.

Ben goes immediately on to face Nick Candler, an early favorite who scored a formidable 53 birds in round one. But we know by now what happens to meditators who peak too soon. Nick scores a still-impressive 36, but Ben hits 59. It’s a new Competitive Meditation record (beating Alexio’s 54) and just one short of the elusive perfect game. 

It also isn’t enough to give him the title. 

In a high-drama finale, Ben is up against Aleena Abrahamian, head of strategic partnerships. Aleena has a cold and has been chugging DayQuil. This turns out to be a performance-enhancing substance, as she coasts to the final in croaky-voiced, blanket-wrapped glory. 

Before the final, a dispute emerges over the neutrality of the tournament equipment. In every prior game, the wearer of the black headband won and the wearer of the white headband lost. To ensure maximum fairness, I offer to run the final in two heats. Ben and Aleena will swap headbands for the second. The total number of birds in both heats will determine the winner. 

As it turns out, Aleena wins both heats, the first in a squeaker, 24-23. Ben himself has fallen victim to the curse of high expectations, and can’t improve on his 23 in the second heat. Aleena becomes the first female champion in Competitive Meditation’s (admittedly rather short) history. 

Coming soon: the gamer bracket. Then, next week, the two winning gamers will go head to head against the two coolest meditators. Will the drive to win at all costs beat the serenity of furious focus? Keep it right here to find out.