#EU#USA#Innovation#DigitalRights#TechPolicy#TechRegulation#DigitalEconomy : "This Article challenges the common view that more stringent regulation of the digital economy inevitably compromises innovation and undermines technological progress. This view, vigorously advocated by the tech industry, has shaped the public discourse in the United States, where the country’s thriving tech economy is often associated with a staunch commitment to free markets. US lawmakers have also traditionally embraced this perspective, which explains their hesitancy to regulate the tech industry to date. The European Union has chosen another path, regulating the digital economy with stringent data privacy, antitrust, content moderation, and other digital regulations designed to shape the evolution of the tech economy towards European values around digital rights and fairness. According to the EU’s critics, this far-reaching tech regulation has come at the cost of innovation, explaining the EU’s inability to nurture tech companies and compete with the US and China in the tech race. However, this Article argues that the association between digital regulation and technological progress is considerably more complex than what the public conversation, US lawmakers, tech companies, and several scholars have suggested to date. For this reason, the existing technological gap between the US and the EU should not be attributed to the laxity of American laws and the stringency of European digital regulation. Instead, this Article shows there are more foundational features of the American legal and technological ecosystem that have paved the way for US tech companies’ rise to global prominence—features that the EU has not been able to replicate to date."
@arstechnica Google is contemplating charging for AI-enhanced search results, a move away from its ad-supported model. This would mark Google's first charge for its core search services, adding a paid layer for advanced AI capabilities. The challenge lies in balancing increased operational costs with user demand for AI features, amidst ongoing efforts to maintain quality in search results against AI-generated content. #GoogleAI#DigitalEconomy
#DigitalEconomy#PlatformEconomy#Enshittification: ""Enshittification" isn't just a way of describing the symptoms of platform decay: it's also a theory of the mechanism of decay – the means by which platforms get shittier and shittier until they are a giant pile of shit.
I call that mechanism "twiddling": this is the ability of digital services to alter their business-logic – the prices they charge, the payouts they offer, the particulars of the deal – from instant to instant, for each user, continuously:
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Contrary to Big Tech's own boasting about its operations, the tricks that tech firms play to siphon value away from business customers and end-users aren't very sophisticated. They're crude gimmicks, like offering a higher per-hour wage to Uber drivers whom the algorithm judges to be picky about which rides they'll clock in for, and then lowering the wage by small increments as a way of lulling the driver into gradually accepting a permanent lower rate:
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This is a simple trick. The difference is that tech platforms like Uber can play it over and over, and very quickly." https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/26/glitchbread/#electronic-shelf-tags
#SuperApps#PoliticalEconomy#Conglomeration#DigitalEconomy: "‘Super apps’ are on the rise. This study explores the characteristics, origins, and manifestations of these apps worldwide, presenting the concept of ‘super-appification’ to describe processes of conglomeration in the global digital economy. Super apps aim to become deeply integrated into people’s everyday lives, capturing and monetising essential activities. By analysing 41 super apps, we identify four distinct types of ‘super-app constellations’, showcasing different patterns and dynamics of conglomeration: ‘Swiss-Army Knife’ apps that consolidate services in one app, ‘Family’ apps that expand through subsidiaries, and ‘Host’ and ‘Hub’-style apps that leverage external developers. This typology offers a comprehensive understanding of the conglomeration patterns underpinning the rise of super apps, involving corporate, development and international expansion strategies. Ultimately, super-appification represents an intensified form of ‘appification’, as these apps increasingly pervade and commodify various aspects of everyday life, such as payment, insurance, grocery delivery, mobility and travel, with significant sociopolitical implications."
PEDi is also supported by service providers such as Telekom #Malaysia, CelcomDigi, Maxis and Redtone, providing #elearning programmes for less privileged #students.
#DigitalEconomy#DigitalColonialism#VC#SiliconValley: "As countries in the Global South have long been plundered for labor and precious natural resources, today’s digital economy is extracting data from its citizens. And as the new dirty jobs of the digital economy are outsourced to the Global South—for instance, content moderators and data labelers in Kenya and the Philippines scouring the dregs of social media to protect the public from extreme and graphic material—we are witnessing the construction of a new age of digital sweatshops, where the most dangerous work is offshored to be performed by workers with the fewest protections.
The tech industry likes to present itself as presiding over a new industrial revolution that will change the world forever. It’s a more apt comparison than they might realize. As Dr. Onoho’Omhen Ebhohimhen of the Nigeria Labour Congress explained to us, noting that the effects of the digital economy, such as algorithmic management of workers, “is akin to reproducing the first Industrial Revolution, where workers were bonded and locked up, worked for 20 hours or more in a day, and had no right to a family life.”
Yet, it doesn’t have to be this way. Digital innovation can disrupt economies in favor of collaborative, solidarity-based forms of decent and quality work, where all can flourish. So, how might we democratize the digital economy so workers have agency and are able to shape the future alongside the technologists and venture capitalists of Silicon Valley?"