9781911709657

Fortnite, Musk, Spotify, and the Siege of Apple

iWar

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Tim Higgins iWar

Fortnite, Musk, Spotify, and the Siege of Apple

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For Karin

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This book was made possible by people involved with these companies and government agencies that talked to me—often on the condition that those conversations not be attributed to them directly. Some of the people mentioned by name agreed to be interviewed, some declined. To protect my sources, who risked professional reprisal, I don’t generally disclose who I interviewed. This book also relies heavily on reams of internal documents from these companies made public through litigation and hours and hours of legal testimony. In a few instances, direct quotes were recreated from my sources’ memories to the best of their recollection. These quotes were heard firsthand by at least one source. Most of the time, though, direct quotes came from documents, such as emails, reviewed by me, or audio and video recordings. I conducted reporting in Austin, Cupertino, Brussels, New York City, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. The main characters in this book were offered a chance to comment on details in this narrative.

PROLOGUE

2021

Tim Cook sat between two worlds. And his power over both was being tested. Seated in the back of an Oakland courtroom waiting to face a judge, the sixty-year-old man from Alabama who rose to chief executive of Apple did what we all tend to do in such tedious moments: looked at his iPhone. Unlike the rest of us, in that digital world Cook was the king, ruling over an iPhone empire with a billion users, all connected by the software that his company had developed, shipped, policed, and taxed.

The real world wasn’t the same since the iPhone was revealed fourteen years earlier in 2007. Communities were reimagined. Commerce evolved. Giants rose on the success of a new computing paradigm. And now, in the spring of 2021, Cook was in the real world of a federal court, having to answer for the power he held in his digital realm. He came prepared to defend against those who wanted to strip away the rules and order, who wanted to tear down the Walled Garden that, he and his team insisted, kept their world special and that users wanted.

As Cook took the stand, wearing a dark gray suit, white shirt, and gray tie, a clear face shield protected him from germs, part of the unusual safeguards of the pandemic era, precautions that included limiting who could be in Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers’s courtroom

that Friday in May. Because of that limited access, she took the rare step of allowing audio of the proceedings to be broadcast to an army of lawyers, regulators, and rivals listening around the world. They wanted to hear Cook defend Apple’s reign over the App Economy.

With his polite southern drawl, Cook could, at times, sound both awestruck and personally offended at any suggestion his company would—could do wrong. The digital world that Apple created with its App Store was special. Apple was making the world better. “I think it’s been an economic miracle,” Cook told the judge from the witness stand.

That miracle had made Cook a billionaire and Apple the world’s most valuable company. With annual sales approaching $400 billion, Apple’s output exceeded most nations’ GDPs. In 2021, it printed more than $3,000 in profit every second of every day. Yet this pinnacle had made Apple vulnerable, both to corporate rivals and to governments that increasingly questioned the power the company wielded over its digital empire—and them.

A rebellion against the empire had been brewing for a long time— almost from day one when it became clear how powerful the mobile computing world was going to be. But now things had escalated. Here, Cook was on the witness stand to defend Apple over claims that it was a monopolist. He was joined in the courtroom by a top deputy named Phil Schiller, a longtime Apple executive whose lifework amounted to the stewardship of the App Store and Apple’s reputation.

Across the courtroom from Cook and Schiller sat the man who brought the lawsuit that was attracting the world’s attention and had put Cook in the crosshairs: Tim Sweeney.

The iPhone was a gateway for his company, Epic Games and its wildly popular video game Fortnite, to wealthy consumers. One billion users depended on Apple’s grace. And Cook’s patience had run thin the previous summer, when Epic sprang a trap designed to draw his wrath and end up in this courtroom on this day to air out what Sweeney felt was Apple’s dirty laundry. In the years since Apple had created its digital empire, with the advent of the iPhone, in order for other businesses to gain access to its marketplace, Apple had set up a drawbridge for all of the companies that wanted to make money through it. Unlike users of a computer that can download programs

at will, iPhone users had to get third-party programs from one spot, Apple’s App Store. To be offered in the App Store, Epic and other software makers agreed to certain rules around content and to use Apple’s payment system, which conveniently collected as much as 30 percent of the revenue generated through each app. Cook and his team were essentially taking 30 cents of every dollar spent on digital goods in their empire, akin to a tax for breathing their air. He would argue it was only fair. That most apps were free and didn’t have to pay for the opportunity to be part of the iPhone empire. Those who were making money selling digital goods and services, such as video games and streaming music, should pay their fair share. Apple, after all, was connecting those third-parties with its massive audience. Its rules were there to protect Apple’s users from tricksters, hackers, and scammers. By its own calculations, Apple had stopped more than $1.5 billion in potentially fraudulent transactions in the previous year alone while rejecting hundreds of thousands of proposed apps for privacy violations or for being spam, copycats, or misleading. For Schiller, the attacks on Apple could feel personal. He had worked with the late Steve Jobs to build the App Store and was a true believer in the idea that they were offering a better experience for users—those customers of the iPhone and the small developers who could benefit from their economic miracle. He held tight to the lessons learned from his friend. “I know it sounds like bullshit . . . these philosophies—about small developers and about trying to do the right thing and not caring about money,” Schiller told me. “To me, it’s always honoring the things he taught us. I really want to hang on to as much of that as I can.”

Those selling digital goods couldn’t just go someplace else if they didn’t like Apple’s rules. Apple and its rival Google controlled the mobile world. Their rules were very similar, though Apple was often the lead dog, taking positions that Google followed. Some have long seen Apple’s toll taking as a violation of U.S. monopoly laws that dated back to the era of robber barons. But few had the guts or the gold to challenge Apple. Sweeney would later estimate that his battle, which saw Fortnite booted from both Apple and Google app stores, cost his company more than $1 billion in both lawyer fees and lost sales. Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, of all people, had warned of

Apple’s power, but had failed to diminish it. Daniel Ek, the founder of Spotify, had antagonized Apple for years as he sought to sell his streaming-music beyond Apple’s reach, to moderate effect.

Months before Cook appeared in court, Apple’s control of the App Economy took on a new political dimension after it booted a social media platform called Parler that had grown popular with conservatives who felt like Silicon Valley was trying to limit their speech. Apple, along with Google, ejected Parler over content moderation concerns following the January 6 Capitol insurrection. Soon, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, would face the limits of his own power when it came to Apple after acquiring Twitter amid worries liberals were hampering its role as a town square. According to Musk, Apple would quietly deliver a message that his social media platform could soon find itself withheld from the App Store—an existential threat for the little blue bird.

What was so jarring in 2021 was that the forces against Apple appeared to be closing in—a dramatic change from just years earlier when it was Apple’s rivals, Google and Facebook, that were commonly seen as the Big Tech companies having gone too far. Now Apple, to its dismay, was being lumped in with something of a rogues’ gallery.

The pressures mounting against Apple were not without historical precedent in American business history. With the rise of a new technology, power players have emerged that benefit from their scale and ecosystem’s rules that seemingly locked in customers. That’s been followed by decay as rivals and regulators tried to chip away at the power—sometimes successfully or other times not. But the fight tends to provide a distraction, allowing a new player armed with a newer technology to emerge. IBM spent much of the 1970s fighting the Justice Department’s claims it maintained an illegal monopoly over computers only to see the Reagan administration drop that in the early 1980s. By then, Microsoft was on the rise, launching in 1985 its first version of the Windows operating system that would rise to such power as to attract its own antitrust claims a generation later. Apple’s iPhone kingdom began to grow as Microsoft fought its monopoly battles in the U.S. and Europe.

By 2021, the list of Apple enemies was long. Together they formed

a ragtag group of rebels fighting Apple for control of the internet—all of them engaged in an increasingly political fight. On this day, as Cook sat before a judge who would decide Apple’s fate, it was Sweeney’s turn to do damage, a gamble he could use the popularity of his game Fortnite to crack open Apple’s Walled Garden.

The rebellion had been dragging on for years and would only grow—in part—because of the attention Sweeney brought. The Justice Department and Europe’s top antitrust official were paying attention, as were Congress and the European Union. Apple’s power had even inspired apparent aggressive maneuverings in China. It was a global story of conflicting interests, the entanglement of corporate powers, and geopolitics. It was a battle royal among some of the biggest names in tech. The motives of the rebels? Hardly pure. Billion-dollar fortunes were at stake. That, in part, helped Apple dismiss assaults upon it as sour grapes and vulgar greed. Apple has, it argues, simply built a better mousetrap. It has ushered into the world a product that rules the day, and has won consumer pocketbooks. Why shouldn’t it benefit—in perpetuity?

Yet the tapestry of the rebellion’s complaints has woven a new picture of a generational fight: Apple as a monopolistic power, an empire dictating to everyone commercial terms and, more crucially, cultural terms. Terms of expression. To them, in many ways, Apple set the limits of expression and thought. And as much as anyone might dislike those aligned against Apple, these people weren’t exactly wrong.

Part I New Worlds

1AN UNREAL HERO

2006

The rare peek into Tim Sweeney’s private life began at the front driveway of his mansion in the Raleigh, North Carolina, area. His orange Lamborghini roared toward the brick home. Pale, balding, and wearing an ill-fitting sweatshirt, Sweeney began by telling the MTV documentary, “I never really expected to be this successful when I went into game development.”

Deeply private, Sweeney had been persuaded to appear on camera as part of a marketing push by Microsoft, which was betting his company’s upcoming game—a gory military-meets-horror shooter— could help put its new gaming console, Xbox 360, on the map. Sweeney, who talks with a soft, almost tinny, high-pitched voice, proceeded to show the camera crew his bachelor pad’s large dining room, which he confessed he never used, favoring to eat at fast-food restaurants such as Burger King. In his kitchen, he pointed to his collection of garnets, gathered during hikes; then he went out into the backyard, where the almost six-foot-tall, nearing forty-year-old man proceeded to climb a tree. “I have a really big house,” he said. “I don’t know why I have a big house. I really don’t need it . . . but I figured, you know, I have the money, why not?”

It has been said that the video game industry is Hollywood for nerds. If so, in 2006, Sweeney was something of a Walt Disney in this world. His company, Epic Games, founded in 1991, debuted one of the hottest franchises in recent memory: Gears of War.

The MTV documentary was part of a marketing launch to build excitement for the game.

The 3D, over-the-shoulder-view shooter debuted on the Xbox 360 game system in late 2006. Within a few weeks, two million copies had been sold for the all-important holiday season. It was lauded with industry best-of awards and remained an Xbox 360 bestseller for almost a year. (A sequel to the game, Gears of War 2, would follow in 2008 and sell two million copies in the first weekend.)1

Attention followed. Glowing reviews. Stories in Entertainment Weekly and The New Yorker talked about his weird, private company based in suburban Raleigh—far from Silicon Valley. Sweeney wasn’t an attention-getting personality like his star video game designer/ wunderkind Cliff “CliffyB” Bleszinski with bleached blond hair and knack for publicity. Sweeney was sincere, perhaps, at times, naive, and very determined. What you’d imagine if a teenager won the lottery—he had all the toys but was mostly just interested in his one passion. In fifteen years, Sweeney had managed to guide Epic through industry-upending technology shifts. The Gears franchise represented a culmination of a long bet that Epic could pivot from selling its software directly to customers through online bulletin boards to making its own sophisticated games for the big distributors like Microsoft. It had moved from a world of simple pixel graphics to immersive 3D wonders. If anything, Sweeney had shown a canny ability to see how technology was shifting and to position Epic to be ready.

Behind the Gears franchise was a software tool that Sweeney had led the creation of called Unreal Engine, which helped Bleszinski efficiently build his digital worlds. The first Gears game had a budget of around $12 million and a team of fewer than thirty people. Unreal allowed them— including nonprogrammers such as Bleszinski—to focus on the art and gameplay and not worry about the time-consuming process of building the pieces of their world, such as adding the landscapes or the physics of how characters might move. “It was as if Einstein had

created a tool kit for the average person to understand space and time, capture it, and mold it into cool shapes that would appear on their computer screen,” Bleszinski would later recall.2

Sweeney’s passion seemed to lay in developing the tools of game making, in building a new world for others to play. He left the work of game development to artists such as Bleszinski, who had joined Sweeney as a teenager still in high school when Epic was operating out of his parents’ basement. As the two young men worked on games, Bleszinski, would later write in his autobiography, he came to realize Sweeney “was more interested in making games than playing them.”3

The success of the Gears franchise changed the trajectory of Epic and, in the process, made Sweeney, who was the largest shareholder in the private company, wildly rich—a far cry from his middle-class upbringing in suburban Maryland where the shy kid first learned to code.

At twenty years old, Sweeney had begun his video game company from his parents’ home, initially calling it Potomac Computer Systems after his hometown in Maryland. The first game, ZZT, wasn’t very good compared with the lifelike graphics of his games to follow years later. But it was a start. Players navigated a white smile-like character through mazes, interacted with clues, and shot enemies that looked like characters found on the keyboard. More important, perhaps, ZZT held the ingredients of what would ultimately make Sweeney successful in the years to come.

ZZT wasn’t simply a dungeon-puzzle-style game; it also included a feature—an editor—that allowed users to make changes to the actual game, such as adding their own characters, or even make up a new game of their own within the digital world that Sweeney had created. That editor helped make the game popular among computer users during the days ahead of the modern internet.

At the time, Sweeney didn’t realize it, but his desire to create tools that allowed others to easily create their own digital worlds would become a formula he would build upon again and again—one that would eventually put him at odds with Apple.

In 1991, however, Sweeney, still a student at the University of Maryland, wasn’t thinking about changing the world. He was more

interested in earning a buck, and until his experiment with ZZT he hadn’t thought that possible. He was wrong, of course. He was on the path to great riches.

His interest in computers had begun at an early age, around eleven, after visiting one of his older brothers in San Diego. His brother Steve was more than fifteen years older and had moved across the country for a job developing hardware and software.

It was all pretty cool to the younger Sweeney, who idolized his brother and his new life that now included living in a small house near the beach, driving a nice car, and, perhaps best of all, spending his days working on computers. Beyond opening his littler brother’s eyes to a world beyond suburban Washington, D.C., Steve gave Tim a lifechanging gift: an Apple II Plus computer.

In the early 1980s, Apple was aiming to change the thinking around what a computer could be. Its co-founder Steve Jobs was selling the idea of a home computer, a personal gadget, not some big box used only by giant corporations. The Apple II was an early part of that revolution. It would be followed by the company’s Super Bowl commercial in 1984 that launched Apple into popular culture. The sixty-second ad, inspired by George Orwell’s novel 1984, presented a repressed sci-fi future that declared—without naming names—war against IBM’s drab vision for the future. “Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh,” a voice intoned. “And you will see why 1984 won’t be like 1984.”

By the time Tim Sweeney arrived at college to study mechanical engineering, he figured he knew all there was to know about computers. The thought of studying computer programming properly in school didn’t interest him. Part of the issue was that he didn’t see how to make money from programming free games shared through online bulletin board systems. And money was on his mind. His first job was at a hardware store making around $4 an hour, and he despised it. Then he turned to mowing lawns, a gig that ignited his entrepreneurial side. Soon, he was making $20 an hour but trying to figure out a way to make more.

He was toying with an idea involving computers, maybe a consulting business making customized databases. His preconceived notions about computer games changed, however, when he noticed a new business model emerging by the likes of Apogee, which became known for the PC hits Duke Nukem and Wolfenstein 3D. The shareware company began releasing a free taste of its games on the BBS, then charging for the full offering mailed to customers directly.

That inspired Sweeney to release ZZT, which he had been working on for several months at night. Orders came in as soon as he released it, and he began feeling flush as he raked in about $100 a day in sales. For a while, he continued living at his dorm while operating the business out of his parents’ home, where he would copy the software on disks and package them up for mailing. Soon, he was working around the clock between school and coding his next game, Jill of the Jungle, which he launched a year later. Along with the new game, he changed the company’s name to Epic MegaGames to sound like a legitimate competitor to Apogee, a fact he’d joke about later, calling the name “kind of a scam to make it look like we were a big company” and not just a guy working out of his parents’ house.

His entrepreneurial side was excited. Sweeney was reading business magazines and studying accounting. Epic MegaGames was going to be a real company. And he was all in—dropping out of college one credit short of graduating and moving back in with his parents to run his nascent business. He had ambitions of being more than just a coder; he wanted to be a distributor for other game creators, promising to help market and deliver their offerings in exchange for a cut of sales.

One of the first people to reach out to him was a California high school student known on chat groups as CliffyB. Bleszinski, who would go on to success with Gears of War, began his career with a letter to Sweeney, including a game he had designed called Dare to Dream.

By happenstance, the package arrived at the same time an industry gaming executive named Mark Rein had come to visit Sweeney to talk him into hiring him as his first full-time employee. Together, Rein and Sweeney would make a formidable team in the cliché way: Rein had a gift for gab, while Sweeney was the technical guy. They both immediately saw potential in Bleszinski, and Rein phoned him with

an over-the-top sales pitch. “You should publish this through Epic— you’ll be a millionaire!”

Sweeney’s business model was simple: Developers, guys like Bleszinski, would get 40 percent of revenue from the game sold, while Epic would keep 60 percent. To Sweeney, it was a good deal for developers because publishers such as himself tended to keep 70 to 85 percent. Sweeney was giving up potential revenue for the little guy. For Bleszinski, the initial royalty checks felt like a windfall. Though his first game didn’t do so well, it did bring him into a growing fold of developers collected by Sweeney from around the world. For years, they worked remotely: Sweeney in Potomac, Rein in Toronto, Bleszinski in California, and so on. Sweeney kept an 800 number so they—mostly young people with little money—could call him for free. Others would just send him lengthy, long-distance phone bills they racked up talking with each other.

Bleszinski’s next game, Jazz Jackrabbit, inspired by Sonic the Hedgehog–like games, would become Epic’s biggest-selling game at the time. Another developer, James Schmalz, was so convinced he could have a career in gaming after making $50,000 in royalties with a game called Solar Winds that he began working on what would become another hit, called Epic Pinball.

“I went from earning $1,000 a month to earning, at times, almost a hundred times that,” Schmalz told a gamer publication. The proceeds helped fund Epic’s pivot from a successful shareware company to a major force in the video game industry.

In the late 1990s, video games were changing from two-dimensional characters, often bitmaps that sort of floated on the background, into almost lifelike, three-dimensional graphics. As the team was working on a new game that called for a dragon flying over a terrain, Sweeney was creating an editor tool and had a realization that like with ZZT he was really creating something bigger: a video game programming system called an engine. That engine would help make creating games easier, allowing the creatives, like Bleszinski, the freedom to build where their imaginations took them rather than being hampered by trying to figure out the right code as he did years earlier. That realization would put Epic on a dual path: Sweeney would be working

to create a video game engine that would be dubbed Unreal, while his team would be working to use the tool to create bigger and better games.

The strategic change also marked a shift in business models for Epic: Instead of publishing others’ games, Epic would make its own and license out its tools to developers. It was moving from shareware to bona fide game developer. Bleszinski and his cohorts would become employees in an ever-growing company. Instead of being spread around the world, they picked Cary, North Carolina, for a headquarters—not exactly central to the tech industry. But an appealing spot because of a lower cost of living than Silicon Valley while still being close to hiking and beaches.

There was little time for those perks, however. For Sweeney and many others, life was Epic. The young men worked long, late hours. And Sweeney, at times, never seemed to stop, going days at a time.4 There were exterior signs of their success, to be sure. Epic’s parking lot would be filled with Lamborghinis and Ferraris with license plates that read “EPICBOY” and “GRSOFWAR.”5 Sweeney’s own car collection would grow impressively to include two Lambos, three Porsches, some Hummers, and a Corvette. “It turns out having fast cars is an excellent hobby when you’re a workaholic because even if you don’t have any free time, you can always drive the car to work,” he told the documentary crew.

Except a flashy car collection wasn’t enough for Sweeney. In time, he would mature, expressing regret for wasting his money. His ambitions would turn to building something more meaningful. He would be consumed with the idea of fairness. He would see the world of video games was in for another revolutionary change. New worlds to be explored and controlled.

“WITNESSING HISTORY”

2008

2

It was unlike most Apple events. Subdued. Boring. Business. Phil Schiller stood onstage to welcome an auditorium of roughly three hundred people—journalists, Apple employees, and Silicon Valley dignitaries. They all had come to the company’s sprawling headquarters at 1 Infinite Loop in Cupertino, California, for the next development in the iPhone. They were gathered for arguably one of the company’s most important announcements, though at the time most probably didn’t realize just how world changing an event this would be. The somewhat unexciting venue suggested as much. A little more than a year earlier, Apple had rented out the Moscone Center, located about forty-five miles north in San Francisco, to reveal the iPhone to an audience of four thousand.

On this day in March, forty-seven-year-old Schiller’s baby was being revealed: the App Store. It would serve as the digital marketplace for the iPhone, allowing third-party developers to offer their software for download onto Apple’s smartphones through a Wi-Fi or cellular connection. It promised a world of change. No need for a software maker to find a distributor to get their goods to market. No need for a customer to take a trip to the mall to buy the software. No need

“Witnessing

for a disk to download that software onto a computer. It was a world not originally envisioned by Schiller’s boss, Apple’s chief executive, Steve Jobs. The very idea of an App Store was a big change from how the iPhone was introduced, but one, in hindsight, that would seem so obvious. Worried about security, Jobs had been against the idea of allowing third-party software on the iPhone. That’s what the web was for, and the iPhone’s three-and-a-half-inch touch screen offered a then-unheard-of web surfing experience. But if anyone could persuade Jobs to change his mind, it was Schiller.

After Jobs, no one, perhaps, was more familiar to the Apple faithful than Schiller at that point. He was seen as a possible successor for the company’s iconic co-founder, whose failing health was of constant concern. Schiller was the company’s top marketer, speaking publicly at product reveals and helping shape how Apple projected itself to the world. He was also behind the scenes helping get those products out, working closely with designers and engineers. Schiller was credited with coming up with the idea of a scroll wheel on the iPod.1

Physically and stylistically, Jobs and Schiller were opposites. Jobs was slim and stylish, Schiller heavier and fond of ill-fitting buttondown shirts. Jobs was uninterested in sports; Schiller, a Boston native, was a rabid hockey fan. But when it came to product, they were so in sync that insiders dubbed Schiller Jobs’s Mini-Me, a nod to the Austin Powers movie. He embraced the nickname, keeping a cutout of the character in his office.2

Schiller had grown up in Massachusetts, dreaming of becoming a marine biologist. He learned to scuba dive before learning to drive. One summer, as a teenager, he worked at the New England Aquarium and was asked if he wanted to volunteer for a special event with Jacques Cousteau, the famed oceanographer and filmmaker. He would remember that event as his single greatest workday. No. 2 was when Jobs, who had been ousted from Apple, returned in 1997.

Apple had been near bankruptcy when Jobs returned to run the show after being gone for a dozen years. At Jobs’s request, Schiller, who had spent six years at Apple before leaving, rejoined, too. Together, they quickly narrowed the company’s sprawling lineup and, by 2001, had a new product that would put Apple on a new course, the iPod.

The success of the digital music player helped Apple move beyond the computer market into personal electronics and also opened entirely new business models, the music industry. The iPod had been conceived in an era when digital music piracy was rampant. Apple’s iPod allowed users to download songs from compact discs onto their Macs, then transfer the files to the portable player. More important, though, Apple figured out how to create a digital music store for downloading those songs onto the iPod.

Jobs convinced the record companies, which were seeing CD sales plummet from online piracy, that they should sell their songs digitally for download through Apple’s desktop music store, iTunes. His store would offer piracy protections—he promised—while making buying new music easy. Under the deals that Jobs cut, the record companies would keep 70 percent of sales while Apple would pocket a 30 percent commission. While it might have seemed like just pennies at the beginning for Apple, the significance of the revenue split—70-30—would become foundational for Apple, living on in its ethos like the Ten Commandments. At the time, however, it was easily dismissed.

Some outside observers believed music would be a money loser for Apple, simply a ploy by the company to juice hardware sales. In truth, however, offering the bundling of a physical device (the iPod) and digital good (music) created a powerful marriage for Apple. It was a combo made even more power when Apple made the unusual decision—unusual for Apple, that is—to create Windows-compatible iPods after its first generation of devices. That allowed the iPod to operate within the entire world of PCs, opening Apple up to a much larger customer base than just those using the Mac. It was a feat probably made easier because Microsoft was under pressure to play nice as it defended itself against antitrust claims brought by the U.S. government and European Commission.

By early 2008, Apple was estimated to be the second-largest music retailer in the United States, and Billboard magazine calculated that iTunes sold more than 1.7 billion downloaded songs in the previous year. Using that volume estimate, Billboard ’s back-of-the-envelope math suggested iTunes revenue totaled $1.9 billion in 2007, which, if