Fosstodon

Miguel Afonso Caetano💯 💯 💯 💯 💯 💯 👉 "Here's why you're getting enshittified: we deliberately decided to stop enforcing competition laws. As a result, companies formed monopolies and cartels. This means that they don't have to worry about losing your business or labor to a competitor, because they don't compete. It also means that they can handily capture their regulators, because they can easily agree on a set of policy priorities and use the billions they've amassed by not competing to capture their regulators. They can hold a whip hand over their formerly powerful tech workers, mass-firing them and terrorizing them out of any Tron-inspired conceits about "fighting for the user." Finally, they can use IP law to shut down anyone who makes technology that disenshittifies their offerings.You can take care to avoid enshittification, you can even make a fetish out of it, but without addressing these systemic failings, your individual actions will only get you so far. Sure, use privacy-enhancing tools like Signal to communicate with other people, but if the only way to get your kid to their little league game is to join the carpool group on Facebook, you're going to hemorrhage data about everything you do to Meta.Likewise, you can use privacy-preserving adblockers in your browser, but the instant you've got to do business with a monopoly that requires you to use their app, you will be totally helpless before them, because anti-circumvention law felonizes modifying an app so it preserves your privacy. (...) If you turn your personal campaign to live an enshittification-free life into a set of rigid practices that isolate you from your community, you will be miserable – and you will undermine your ability to address the systemic roots of enshittification.That's because systemic problems have systemic solutions. They are addressed through mass movements..."<a href="https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/31/unsatisfying-answers/#systemic-problems" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank">https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/31/unsatisfying-answers/#systemic-problems</a><a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Enshittification" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Enshittification</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Monopolies" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Monopolies</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Oligopolies" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Oligopolies</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/BigTech" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#BigTech</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Competition" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Competition</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Antitrust" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Antitrust</a>

Miguel Afonso Caetano"If they succeed in their current efforts, companies like Google will have done so mainly because they already control the most crucial nodes of digital exchange. When it comes to news, research, and plenty of other important things, their “innovation” will essentially consist of having devised a means of aggregating arguments and information that have already been gathered, organized, and accumulated by others without having to offer any compensation in return.The effects of that might be profound, but nothing about the underlying process would be creative in any meaningful sense of the word, and big monopolies have been pursuing some version of it since the inception of capitalism itself: seeking ownership and control over vital infrastructure, co-opting or subordinating smaller actors in the marketplace, reducing business costs to increase their profits, and—most crucially of all—reducing the cost of labour to do the very same.Here, we find not the constructive pattern envisioned by Schumpeter but the visceral instincts of capitalist predation taken yet again to their inevitable and logical conclusion. If the rapacious vanguardists of the AI revolution succeed in their designs, the impact will doubtless be significant and far reaching. The revolution itself, however, will have been anything but creative."<a href="https://thewalrus.ca/the-ai-revolution-is-a-heist" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank">https://thewalrus.ca/the-ai-revolution-is-a-heist</a><a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/AI" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#AI</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/GenerativeAI" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#GenerativeAI</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Google" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Google</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/BigTech" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#BigTech</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/SiliconValley" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#SiliconValley</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Monopolies" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Monopolies</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Capitalism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Capitalism</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Oligopolies" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Oligopolies</a>

Miguel Afonso CaetanoIt's Technology AND Policy decisions AND Market behavior:"The answer isn’t an AI-specific response, it’s to promote competition, expand labor rights, including intellectual property protections for artists and engineers, protect consumers, provide financing for farming and small business, while taxing and otherwise creating friction for the movement of financial capital. That’s not just good policy because of AI, it’s good policy if you want any form of democracy!Yet, today, American policy is organized around juicing higher returns on capital, which means policymakers focus on cutting wages, squeezing consumers, and reducing taxes on finance. This choice isn’t hidden, most of our leaders really believe that experts and financiers know how to organize America better, and much of our economic model is now based on higher asset prices. But these choices have been in place for decades, which is why we are afraid of job losses, instead of seeing the possibility of new industries and prosperity. It’s also why Americans are scared of AI; we rightly assume technology will conform to the larger politics of our society. When American policy was organized to benefit most of us, technology meant The Jetsons. Since it’s now organized to consolidate power, it’s become Black Mirror.All of which is to say that we really should pay careful attention to generative AI. If it can cure cancer or automate driving, awesome. At the same time, companies like Meta and Anthropic, who steal en masse, should be held accountable for doing so. But in terms of policy, we have to distinguish between “AI as a technology” and generalized Wall Street-friendly choices causing the problems ascribed to AI, aka lower wages, less job stability, and people without power getting screwed."<a href="https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/why-are-we-pretending-ai-is-going" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank">https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/why-are-we-pretending-ai-is-going</a><a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/AI" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#AI</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/GenerativeAI" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#GenerativeAI</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Monopolies" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Monopolies</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Oligopolies" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Oligopolies</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Competition" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Competition</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/PoliticalEconomy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#PoliticalEconomy</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Automation" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Automation</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Unemployment" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Unemployment</a>

Miguel Afonso Caetano"In Europe, discussions are coalescing around an ambitious idea called EuroStack, an EU-led “digital supply chain” that would give Europe technological sovereignty independent from the US and other countries.The idea gathered steam a couple of months before Trump’s reelection, when a group of business leaders, European politicians, and technologists—including Meredith Whittaker, the president of Signal, and Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s former minister of digital affairs—met at the European Parliament to discuss “European Digital Independence.” According to Cristina Caffarra, an economist who helped organize the meeting, the takeaway was stark: “US tech giants own not only the services we engage with but also everything below, from chips to connectivity to cables under the sea to compute to cloud. If that infrastructure turns off, we have nowhere to go.”The feeling of urgency has only grown since Trump retook office. The German and French governments have embraced EuroStack, while major EU aircraft manufacturers and military suppliers like Airbus and Dassault have signed on to a public letter advocating its approach to “sovereign digital infrastructure.” In all the European capitals, the Danish government adviser says, teams of people are calculating what elements should be folded into the effort and what it would cost.And EuroStack is just one part of the response to enshittification. The European Union is also putting together a joint defense fund to help EU countries buy weapons—but not from the US. The EU’s executive agency, the European Commission, is patching together a network of satellites that could eventually provide Ukraine and Europe with their own home-baked alternative to Starlink."<a href="https://www.wired.com/story/enshittification-of-american-power/" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank">https://www.wired.com/story/enshittification-of-american-power/</a><a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/USA" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#USA</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Trump" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Trump</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/BigTech" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#BigTech</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Enshittification" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Enshittification</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Monopolies" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Monopolies</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Oligopolies" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Oligopolies</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/DigitalSovereignty" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#DigitalSovereignty</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/EU" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#EU</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Eurostack" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Eurostack</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/PoliticalEconomy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#PoliticalEconomy</a>

Miguel Afonso Caetano"[Google] has been gradually eroding Android’s open-source capacity in the last decade.For example, it recently released the source code for Android 16 without the device trees and drivers for its Pixel phones. Device trees tell the operating system what hardware is present in the device: camera, display, speakers, Bluetooth, and so on. Drivers provide instructions for how to use these components. Without them, your phone is just an expensive paperweight.In March, Google said that it would develop Android behind closed doors. Previously everyone could see the code as it was being written. Developers working on alternative versions could grab this prerelease code, make their changes, and test them on actual devices. They could release their versions just days after Google. Now they must wait for months until Google dumps the code alongside the stable release. This greatly delays the development cycle for competitors.In 2023, Google deprecated the open-source Dialer and Messaging features and made future versions proprietary. This means that others must build their own software to make phone calls or send text messages from scratch. Over the years, Google has moved many crucial features, such as the camera, keyboard, and push notifications, from the open-source project to its closed-source black box. Competitors must now spend their scarce resources on reinventing the wheel rather than implementing new features.Being open source helped Android compete against the iPhone and swiftly dominate the global smartphone market. Manufacturers could quickly adapt it to their devices and sell at lower prices than they could if they had to make their own operating systems from scratch. But now that it has captured the market, Google is rolling up the ladder behind it to keep competition at bay."<a href="https://jacobin.com/2025/07/google-android-smartphones-open-source" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank">https://jacobin.com/2025/07/google-android-smartphones-open-source</a><a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/OpenSource" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#OpenSource</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Android" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Android</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Google" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Google</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Smartphones" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Smartphones</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Oligopolies" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Oligopolies</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Monopolies" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Monopolies</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/IP" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#IP</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/BigTech" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#BigTech</a>

Miguel Afonso Caetano"In recent years, we have also seen a rapid expansion of hyperscale data centres, with significant energy, water, and climate consequences. In part, this is to power generative AI technologies whose benefits remain dubious, but it also ensures the cloud businesses of those companies continue to grow at a rapid pace.The government should not be subjecting itself to the corporate pressures to increase the amount of computation it requires and the number of AI tools it uses beyond what is necessary, all to serve the bottom lines of cloud companies. Developing its own infrastructure means the Canadian government can build what it needs and ensure it does appropriate assessment of new technologies to see if they will actually help the public service and benefit Canadians more broadly.Over time, that infrastructure could serve as the foundation of a new set of digital services and platforms developed to serve the public good over private profit — without the need for extensive data collection to serve ad-targeting systems or the pressures to serve up extreme and misleading content to keep people engaged on exploitative platforms.Handing the digital sphere to US companies that don’t have our interests at heart was always a mistake. The time when they claimed to “do no evil,” as Google’s motto once led us to believe, is long gone."<a href="https://www.disconnect.blog/p/why-canada-needs-to-build-a-public" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank">https://www.disconnect.blog/p/why-canada-needs-to-build-a-public</a><a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Canada" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Canada</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/DigitalSovereignty" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#DigitalSovereignty</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/DataCenters" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#DataCenters</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/PublicCloud" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#PublicCloud</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/USA" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#USA</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/BigTech" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#BigTech</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Oligopolies" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Oligopolies</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/PoliticalEconomy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#PoliticalEconomy</a>

Richard W. Woodley ELBOWS UP 🇨🇦🌹🚴‍♂️📷 🗺️If the success of <a href="https://mstdn.ca/tags/capitalism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#capitalism</a> is supposedly based on <a href="https://mstdn.ca/tags/competition" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#competition</a> why are most successful capitalist enterprises <a href="https://mstdn.ca/tags/monopolies" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#monopolies</a> or <a href="https://mstdn.ca/tags/oligopolies" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#oligopolies</a> ?

Miguel Afonso Caetano"TL;DR: Apple’s rules and technical restrictions are blocking other browser vendors from successfully offering their own engines to users in the EU. At the recent Digital Markets Act (DMA) workshop, Apple claimed it didn’t know why no browser vendor has ported their engine to iOS over the past 15 months. But the reality is Apple knows exactly what the barriers are, and has chosen not to remove them.Safari is the highest margin product Apple has ever made, accounts for 14-16% of Apple’s annual operating profit and brings in $20 billion per year in search engine revenue from Google. For each 1% browser market share that Apple loses for Safari, Apple is set to lose $200 million in revenue per year.Ensuring other browsers are not able to compete fairly is critical to Apple’s best and easiest revenue stream, and allows Apple to retain full control over the maximum capabilities of web apps, limiting their performance and utility to prevent them from meaningfully competing with native apps distributed through their app store. Consumers and developers (native or web) then suffer due to a lack of competition.This browser engine ban is unique to Apple and no other gatekeeper imposes such a restriction. Until Apple lifts these barriers they are not in effective compliance with the DMA."<a href="https://open-web-advocacy.org/blog/apples-browser-engine-ban-persists-even-under-the-dma/" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank">https://open-web-advocacy.org/blog/apples-browser-engine-ban-persists-even-under-the-dma/</a><a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/EU" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#EU</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Apple" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Apple</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/iOS" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#iOS</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/DMA" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#DMA</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Oligopolies" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Oligopolies</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Antitrust" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Antitrust</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/OpenWeb" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#OpenWeb</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/WebApps" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#WebApps</a>

Miguel Afonso CaetanoBillionaires are the enemies of truth-seeking and rational thinking. They actually hate critical thinking. I don't see any reason why shouldn't their wealth be taxed accordingly."Google co-founder Sergey Brin called the United Nations “transparently antisemitic” on Saturday in an internal forum for employees, according to screenshots reviewed by The Washington Post and verified with a current member of the forum.His comments came in response to a U.N. report released last month that alleged technology firms including Google and its parent company Alphabet had profited from “the genocide carried out by Israel” in Gaza by providing cloud and AI technologies to the Israeli government and military.“With all due respect, throwing around the term genocide in relation to Gaza is deeply offensive to many Jewish people who have suffered actual genocides. I would also be careful citing transparently antisemitic organizations like the UN in relation to these issues,” Brin wrote in a forum for staff at Google DeepMind, the company’s artificial intelligence division, where workers were debating the report, according to the screenshots.The U.N. report was authored by its special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, Italian legal scholar Francesca Albanese. The U.S. representative to the U.N. has asked for her removal, accusing her of antisemitism and bias against Israel."<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/07/08/sergey-brin-united-nations-gaza-israel/" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank">https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/07/08/sergey-brin-united-nations-gaza-israel/</a><a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Google" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Google</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/BigTech" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#BigTech</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Oligopolies" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Oligopolies</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Israel" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Israel</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Palestine" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Palestine</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Gaza" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Gaza</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Genocide" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Genocide</a>

Miguel Afonso Caetano"While projects like Te Hiku are no doubt valuable, by definition they cannot be scaled-up alternatives to the collective power of American AI capital, which commands resources far greater than many of the world’s states. If it becomes normal for AI tools like ChatGPT to be governed by and for Silicon Valley, we risk seeing the primary means of content production concentrated in the hands of a tiny number of tech barons.We therefore need to put big solutions on the table. Firstly, regulation: there must be a set of rules that place strict limits on where AI companies get their data from, how their models are trained, and how their algorithms are managed. In addition, all AI systems should be forced to operate within tightly regulated environmental limits: energy usage for generative AI cannot be a free-for-all on a planet under immense ecological stress. AI-powered automated weapons systems should be prohibited. All of this should be subject to stringent, independent audits to ensure compliance.Secondly, although the concentration of market power in the AI industry took a blow from DeepSeek’s arrival, there remain strong tendencies within AI — and indeed in digital tech as a whole — towards monopolization. Breaking up the tech oligarchy would mean eliminating gatekeepers that concentrate power and control data flows.Finally, the question of ownership should be a serious part of the debate. Te Hiku shows that when AI tools are built by organizations with entirely different incentive structures in place, they can produce wildly different results. As long as artificial intelligence is designed for the purposes of the competitive accumulation of capital, firms will continue to find ways to exploit labor, degrade the environment, take short cuts in data extraction, and compromise on safety, because if they don’t, one of their competitors will."<a href="https://jacobin.com/2025/07/altman-openai-artificial-intelligence-labor-environment-deepseek" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank">https://jacobin.com/2025/07/altman-openai-artificial-intelligence-labor-environment-deepseek</a><a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/AI" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#AI</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/GenerativeAI" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#GenerativeAI</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/OpenAI" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#OpenAI</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/BigTech" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#BigTech</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/USA" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#USA</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/China" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#China</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/DeepSeek" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#DeepSeek</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Monopolies" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Monopolies</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Oligopolies" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Oligopolies</a>

Miguel Afonso Caetano"Regulators around the world are working to address competition issues in digital markets, particularly on mobile devices. Several new laws have already been passed, including the UK’s Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act (DMCC), Japan’s Smartphone Act, and the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA). Australia and the United States are also considering similar legislation with the U.S. Department of Justice pursuing an antitrust case against Apple. Across all of these efforts, common questions arise: How should competition, user choice, and utility be balanced against security concerns? What is proportionate and necessary in relation to security? And how effective is app store review in practice?The DMA is a helpful act to look at as it has been in force the longest and many of these other acts are loosely based on it. The DMA aims to restore contestability, interoperability, choice and fairness back to digital markets in the EU. These fundamental properties of an effectively functioning digital market have been eroded by the extreme power gatekeepers wield via their control of “core platform services”.Under the DMA gatekeepers are only allowed to have strictly necessary, proportionate and justified security measures to protect the integrity of the operating system."<a href="https://open-web-advocacy.org/blog/balancing-security-and-fair-competition/" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank">https://open-web-advocacy.org/blog/balancing-security-and-fair-competition/</a><a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/EU" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#EU</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/DMA" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#DMA</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Monopolies" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Monopolies</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Oligopolies" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Oligopolies</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Antitrust" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Antitrust</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Competition" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Competition</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Interoperability" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Interoperability</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/CyberSecurity" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#CyberSecurity</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/WebSecurity" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#WebSecurity</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/OpenWeb" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#OpenWeb</a>

SPQRThe airfare from Toronto to Vancouver can often cost around the same as a ticket to Mexico or Europe, enough to nudge many would-be domestic tourists toward international travel. That was among the responses 1,500 people shared with the Competition Bureau during a yearlong study of Canada’s airline market, the results of which were released on Thursday. <a href="https://mastodon.social/tags/Canada" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Canada</a> <a href="https://mastodon.social/tags/oligopolies" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#oligopolies</a> <a href="https://mastodon.social/tags/plutocracy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#plutocracy</a> <a href="https://mastodon.social/tags/RiggedMarkets" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#RiggedMarkets</a> <a href="https://mastodon.social/tags/corruption" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#corruption</a> <a href="https://mastodon.social/tags/competition" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#competition</a> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/21/world/canada/canada-airline-travel-fares.html" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank">https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/21/world/canada/canada-airline-travel-fares.html</a>

Miguel Afonso Caetano"These companies are at an inflection point. With Mr. Trump’s election, Silicon Valley’s power will reach new heights. The president named David Sacks, a billionaire venture capitalist and A.I. investor, as his A.I. czar and empowered another tech billionaire, Elon Musk, to slash through the government. Mr. Trump brought a cadre of tech executives with him on his recent trip to Saudi Arabia. If Senate Republicans now vote to prohibit states from regulating A.I. for 10 years, Silicon Valley’s impunity will be enshrined in law, cementing these companies’ empire status.Their influence now extends well beyond the realm of business. We are now closer than ever to a world in which tech companies can seize land, operate their own currencies, reorder the economy and remake our politics with little consequence. That comes at a cost — when companies rule supreme, people lose their ability to assert their voice in the political process and democracy cannot hold.Technological progress does not require businesses to operate like empires. Some of the most impactful A.I. advancements came not from tech behemoths racing to recreate human levels of intelligence, but from the development of relatively inexpensive, energy-efficient models to tackle specific tasks such as weather forecasting."<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/opinion/silicon-valley-ai-empire.html" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank">https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/opinion/silicon-valley-ai-empire.html</a><a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/AI" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#AI</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/BigTech" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#BigTech</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/SiliconValley" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#SiliconValley</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/GenerativeAI" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#GenerativeAI</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Oligarchy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Oligarchy</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Monopolies" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Monopolies</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Oligopolies" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Oligopolies</a>

Miguel Afonso Caetano"The nation's three largest airlines have begun charging some solo travelers higher fares than groups of two travelers or more.It's not a widespread phenomenon – currently, we're only seeing it on a handful of one-way domestic flights. And it's unclear whether whether this began just recently or weeks, even months ago. Maybe airlines are testing this new pricing tactic out on a smaller scale before expanding. We don't know. But we can say one thing for sure: Solo travelers – whether they're flying on a corporate account or not – will be the ones who pay the price."<a href="https://thriftytraveler.com/news/airlines/airlines-charging-solo-travelers-higher-fares/" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank">https://thriftytraveler.com/news/airlines/airlines-charging-solo-travelers-higher-fares/</a><a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/USA" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#USA</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/AirTravel" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#AirTravel</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/PriceDiscrimination" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#PriceDiscrimination</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Oligopolies" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Oligopolies</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Competition" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Competition</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Antitrust" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Antitrust</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Airlines" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Airlines</a>

Miguel Afonso Caetano"UnitedHealth Group, the nation’s largest healthcare conglomerate, has secretly paid nursing homes thousands in bonuses to help slash hospital transfers for ailing residents – part of a series of cost-cutting tactics that has saved the company millions, but at times risked residents’ health, a Guardian investigation has found.Those secret bonuses have been paid out as part of a UnitedHealth program that stations the company’s own medical teams in nursing homes and pushes them to cut care expenses for residents covered by the insurance giant.In several cases identified by the Guardian, nursing home residents who needed immediate hospital care under the program failed to receive it, after interventions from UnitedHealth staffers. At least one lived with permanent brain damage following his delayed transfer, according to a confidential nursing home incident log, recordings and photo evidence.“No one is truly investigating when a patient suffers harm. Absolutely no one,” said one current UnitedHealth nurse practitioner who recently filed a congressional complaint about the nursing home program. “These incidents are hidden, downplayed and minimized. The sense is: ‘Well, they’re medically frail, and no one lives for ever.’”"<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/21/unitedhealth-nursing-homes-payments-hospital-transfers" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank">https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/21/unitedhealth-nursing-homes-payments-hospital-transfers</a><a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/USA" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#USA</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Healthcare" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Healthcare</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/UnitedHealthcare" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#UnitedHealthcare</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/HealthInsurance" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#HealthInsurance</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Monopolies" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Monopolies</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Oligopolies" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Oligopolies</a>

Miguel Afonso Caetano"In the 1960s and 1970s, a group of Chicago School economists conceived of an absurd new way to interpret competition law, which they called "the consumer welfare standard." Under this standard, the job of competition policy was to encourage monopolies to form, on the grounds that monopolies were "efficient" and would lower prices for "consumers."The chief proponent of this standard was Robert Bork, a virulent racist whose most significant claim to fame was that he was the only government lawyer willing to help Richard Nixon illegally fire officials who wouldn't turn a blind eye to his crimes. Bork's long record of unethical behavior and scorching bigotry came back to bite him in the ass when Ronald Reagan tried to seat him on the Supreme Court, during a confirmation hearing that Bork screwed up so badly that even today, we use "borked" as a synonym for anything that is utterly fucked.But Bork's real legacy was as a pro-monopoly propagandist, whose work helped shift how judges, government enforcers, and economists viewed antitrust law. Bork approached the text of America's antitrust laws, like the Sherman Act and the Clayton Act, with the same techniques as a Qanon follower addressing a Q "drop," applying gnostic techniques to find in these laws mystical coded language that – he asserted – meant that Congress had intended for America's anti-monopoly laws to actually support monopolies.In episode three, we explore Bork's legacy, and how it led to what Tom Eastman calls the internet of "five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four." We got great interviews and old tape for this one, including Michael Wiesel, a Canadian soap-maker who created a bestselling line of nontoxic lip-balm kits for kids, only to have Amazon shaft him by underselling him with his own product."<a href="https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/19/khan-thought/#they-were-warned" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank">https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/19/khan-thought/#they-were-warned</a><a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Enshittification" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Enshittification</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/IP" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#IP</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Copyright" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Copyright</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/OpenWeb" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#OpenWeb</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Monopolies" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Monopolies</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Oligopolies" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Oligopolies</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Competition" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Competition</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Antitrust" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Antitrust</a>

Miguel Afonso Caetano"Meta did have more work to do on “child grooming,” as we saw in a June 2019 deck titled, “Inappropriate Interactions with Children on Instagram.” An early page called out that “IG recommended a minor through top suggested to an account engaged in groomer-esque behavior.” Grooming refers generally to the tactics a child predator might use to gain trust with potential victims to sexually abuse them. Subsequent pages gave some broader data: “27% of all follow recommendations to groomers were minors.” There’s a lot we don’t know about this statement: how did Meta track accounts that were “groomers” or “engaged in groomer-esque behavior”? And why were those accounts allowed at all? How did they generate that statistic? And it’s important to caveat as well that perhaps Meta didn’t know that any potential groomers were actual criminals. But by any measure, the headline is troubling.There was more data than that. 33% of Instagram comments reported to Meta as inappropriate were reported by minors, the deck said of a three-month period. Of the comments reported by minors, more than half were left by an adult. “Overall IG: 7% of all follow recommendations to adults were minors,” the deck concluded.The presentation also noted that during a “3-month period”—presumably in 2019—2 million minors were recommended by Instagram’s algorithm for groomers to follow. 22% of those recommendations resulted in a follow request from a groomer to a minor. Doing some back of the envelope math, that’s approximately 440,000 minors over just a three-month period who received a follow request from someone Meta labeled as a “groomer.” That number is shocking even before being annualized."<a href="https://www.bigtechontrial.com/p/instagrams-algorithm-recommended" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank">https://www.bigtechontrial.com/p/instagrams-algorithm-recommended</a><a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/SocialMedia" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#SocialMedia</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/USA" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#USA</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Meta" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Meta</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Facebook" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Facebook</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Instagram" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Instagram</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/CyberSecurity" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#CyberSecurity</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/WhatsApp" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#WhatsApp</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Antitrust" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Antitrust</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Monopolies" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Monopolies</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Oligopolies" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Oligopolies</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Competition" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Competition</a>

Miguel Afonso CaetanoNo conflict of interest at all... - Of course NOT!!! "One of Elon Musk’s employees is earning between $100,001 and $1 million annually as a political adviser to his billionaire boss while simultaneously helping to dismantle the federal agency that regulates two of Musk’s biggest companies, according to court records and a financial disclosure report obtained by ProPublica.Ethics experts said Christopher Young’s dual role — working for a Musk company as well as the Department of Government Efficiency — likely violates federal conflict-of-interest regulations. Musk has publicly called for the elimination of the agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, arguing that it is “duplicative.’’Government ethics rules bar employees from doing anything that “would cause a reasonable person to question their impartiality” and are designed to prevent even the appearance of using public office for private gain.Court records show Young, who works for a Musk company called Europa 100 LLC, was involved in the Trump administration’s efforts to unwind the consumer agency’s operations and fire most of its staff in early February.Young’s arrangement raises questions of where his loyalty lies, experts said. The dynamic is especially concerning, they said, given that the CFPB — which regulates companies that provide financial services — has jurisdiction over Musk’s electric car company, Tesla, which makes auto loans, and his social media site, X, which announced in January that it was partnering with Visa on mobile payments."<a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/doge-elon-musk-chris-young-cfpb-tesla-x" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank">https://www.propublica.org/article/doge-elon-musk-chris-young-cfpb-tesla-x</a><a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/USA" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#USA</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Trump" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Trump</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/CFBP" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#CFBP</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Musk" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Musk</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/ConflictOfInterest" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#ConflictOfInterest</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Kleptocracy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Kleptocracy</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Oligopolies" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Oligopolies</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/BigTech" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#BigTech</a>

Miguel Afonso Caetano""Who Broke the Internet?" is a new podcast from CBC Understood that I host and co-wrote – it's a four-part series that explains how the enshitternet came about, and, more importantly, what we can do about it. Episode one is out this week:<a href="https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/1353-the-naked-emperor/episode/16144078-dont-be-evil" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank">https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/1353-the-naked-emperor/episode/16144078-dont-be-evil</a>The thesis of the series – and indeed, of my life's work – is that the internet didn't turn to shit because of the "great forces of history," or "network effects," or "returns to scale." Rather, the Great Enshittening is the result of specific policy choices, made in living memory, by named individuals, who were warned at the time that this would happen, and they did it anyway. These wreckers are the largely forgotten authors of our misery, and they mingle with impunity in polite society, never fearing that someone might be sizing them up for a pitchfork."Who Broke the Internet?" aims to change that. But the series isn't just about holding these named people accountable for their enshittificatory deeds: it's about understanding the policies that created the enshittocene, so that we can dismantle them and build a new, good internet that is fit for purpose, namely, helping us overcome and survive environmental collapse, oligarchic control, fascism and genocide."<a href="https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/08/who-broke-the-internet/#bruce-lehman" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank">https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/08/who-broke-the-internet/#bruce-lehman</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Enshittification" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Enshittification</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/OpenWeb" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#OpenWeb</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Monopolies" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Monopolies</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Oligopolies" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Oligopolies</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Interoperability" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Interoperability</a>

Miguel Afonso Caetano"The most important story is that on Monday, in a D.C. district court, Judge Amit Mehta started hearings on how to restructure Google to thwart its unlawful monopoly. Two floors down, Judge James Boasberg continued the antitrust trial between the government and Meta. Never before have two trillion dollar plus companies been put on trial at the same time, in the same court house.And yet, on Thursday, Google had its quarterly investing call where it unveiled its gargantuan earnings of $34 billion in the past three months, and discussed its future prospects with Wall Street researchers. Not a single analyst even mentioned the risk of antitrust or asked a question about it. One of them noted a stat that came out of the trial, which is user pick-up of the search firm’s AI app, Gemini, so they are clearly paying attention to the trial. They just don’t seem to think it matters. That’s true for big investors in Meta as well.Why does antitrust seem irrelevant to Wall Street? It’s certainly not the substance of the trials."<a href="https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-google-generated" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank">https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-google-generated</a><a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/USA" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#USA</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Google" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Google</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Meta" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Meta</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Antitrust" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Antitrust</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Monopolies" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Monopolies</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Competition" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Competition</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Oligopolies" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Oligopolies</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/WallStreet" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#WallStreet</a>

Recent searches

Search options

Administered by:

Server stats:

#oligopolies