A snowmobile sits on a pile of trucked-in snow in the middle of an Austrian shopping street. It is not going anywhere. A rider poses on it, a rope line keeps the public back, and behind that rope a dozen photographers and two video crews work the same three angles for twenty minutes. Nobody is selling a snowmobile to anybody standing there. The machine is a prop, the snow is set dressing, and the actual product being manufactured is a photograph.

X has settled its long-running legal battle with the World Federation of Advertisers, ending a case that accused brands including Mars and Shell of illegally coordinating a boycott of the platform. The suit was the most aggressive test yet of a theory that has been circulating in advertising for several years: that when brands act collectively through an industry body to withhold spending from a platform over content standards, the coordination itself can constitute an antitrust problem rather than a series of independent commercial decisions.