#AI#TESCREAL#SiliconValley#BigTech: "So there's this long tradition of consulting people who use technologies to find out what they need, and to find out why technology does or doesn't work for them. And the big message there was that technologists are probably more ill-equipped to understand that than average people, and to see the industry swing back towards tech authority and tech expertise as making decisions about everything, from how technology is built to what future is the best for all of us, is alarming in that sense.
So we can draw from things like user-centered research. This is how I concluded the paper, is just pointing to all the processes and practices we could start using. There's user-centered research, there's participatory processes, there's... Policy gets made often through consulting with groups that are affected by systems, by policies. There are ways of designing technology so that people can feed back straight into it, or we can just set in some regulations that say, in certain cases, it's not acceptable for technology to make a decision.
I think some of what we have to do is get outside of the United States, because some of the more human rights oriented or user-centered policymaking is happening elsewhere, especially in Europe."
#BigTech#SiliconValley#Antitrust#Competition#DigitalPlatforms: "Treating platform corporations as surrogate states leads to multiple interesting follow-up insights. Lehdonvirta criticizes competition policy-based solutions to the problem of platform power. If the digital platforms’ core source of value is the provision of governance services, how exactly would increasing competitive pressures or government-enforced deconcentration benefit societies? Among the most fascinating follow-up insights is Lehdonvirta’s take on the political power of platforms. The literature on platform power has—rightly—been focused on the extremely successful ways in which these businesses were able to enlist consumers and users into political-economic alliances against public regulators and incumbents (Culpepper and Thelen, 2020; Adler, 2021). Lehdonvirta’s take is not incompatible, but slightly different. In important ways platforms have become the institutional infrastructure of core swaths of the economy. While the book does not engage with the recent literature on financial systems, its account takes the recent debate about the infrastructural power of business to a new field. Even more striking than in financial markets, however, cloud empires are not just providing the ‘fuel’ to govern markets effectively but have themselves become essential components of the institutional fabric of commercial life today. It is this infrastructural role that helps to explain why there is very little public surprise when platforms feel entitled to maintain embassies in ‘foreign nations’."
#EU#DMA#BigTech#Regulation#Antitrust: "The DMA is a first, and a great deal of earnest effort is going into its implementation. But we don’t know what “success” will look like, even on its own terms. Of course, even a limited set of improvements would be better than the status quo. Godspeed, but let’s be realistic also. The more fundamental point is that the real interesting question is not if we can nibble the gatekeepers at the margin: but whether we can disintermediate them at least in part so that we do not need to rely entirely on a proprietary Web 2.0 that they comprehensively control. Antitrust complaints in the US have at least some prospect of involving divestments and break ups as the eventual remedy – though this will also be a long and inevitably hard fought road. This is not on the cards in Europe through digital markets regulation."
#AI#BigTech#Energy#GenerativeAI: "One problem is that data centres tend to consume power at a steady rate, including when the sun is not shining nor the wind blowing. So technology firms are also thinking of ways to make data-processing more flexible. In March Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners, an investment fund co-created by Alphabet, presented a detailed plan for how this could be achieved. It involves a combination of microgrids (which can run independently but also exchange energy with others nearby), batteries and advanced software in order to enable shifting less time-sensitive tasks, such as training ai models, to periods of fallow demand. Jonathan Winer, one of Sidewalk’s founders, expects such data centres to pop up first in energy-constrained places like Arizona, California and Massachusetts.
Renewables are not the only area of big tech’s power interest. In March aws paid $650m for a 960-megawatt (mw) data centre in Pennsylvania powered by a nuclear reactor located next door. Microsoft has struck a deal with Constellation Energy, America’s biggest nuclear operator, for supply of nuclear power for its data centre in Virginia, as a backstop when wind and solar are unavailable. Both firms have also been looking at “small modular reactors”, a promising though unproven nuclear technology."
I like how social media and news sites call it your "feed". Makes me feel like a farm animal getting fattened up for slaughter so I can be divided up and sold piecemeal to advertisers.
“A lot of times, it’s being asked to provide a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist with a tool that you don’t want to use,” independent software engineer Kolman told CNBC.
The Microsoft AI engineer said a lot of tasks are about “trying to create AI hype” with no practical use. He recalled instances when a software engineer on his team would come up with an algorithm to solve a particular problem that didn’t involve generative AI. That solution would be pushed aside in favor of one that used a large language model, even if it were less efficient, more expensive and slower, the person said. He described the irony of using an “inferior solution” just because it involved an AI model.
A software engineer at a major internet company, which the person asked to keep unnamed due to his group’s small size, said the new team he works on dedicated to AI advancement is doing large language model research “because that’s what’s hot right now.”"
#OpenWeb#BigTech#Interoperability#Splinternet: "If we’re make a serious case for a splinternet, the central plank should be the elimination of massive global platforms like we’ve gotten used to over the past couple decades. Governments will have to use regulatory and legal tools to erode the power and influence of those firms, squeezing their business models by restricting the ways they can use and collect data and enforcing much stronger rules on their operations. Higher taxes wouldn’t hurt either — something the US has been holding up globally for years. Regulation of global firms can be hard when undertaken by a single state on the national level, which is why it’s so important to start building an alliance of states that refuse the binary choice being offered by the United States — and rein in both US and Chinese tech giants with sectoral rules.
At the same time as regulatory pressures escalate, governments will need to think about what alternatives look like. This is where forced interoperability and open protocols come in, as long as they’re paired with regulatory measures and efforts to build public technology. Users will still want to communicate and share things with people they know from around the globe, and they should still be able to do that. But access to those federated services should instead happen through platforms conceived of and developed on the regional, national, or even local level. That will allow governments and communities to exert much more power over how they work and what they deem acceptable on them — instead of leaving it to a global monopoly or a tech-savvy group that has technical skill few other people hold — and given the different rules and cultural contexts of different countries, the choices they make may differ."
Featured speaker this time was Euro Member of Parliament @kimvsparrentak who passionately spoke on the need for a more free Internet detached from #bigTech and more focussed on #Democracy and real #Social interaction.
When confronted with her presence on X and Insta, and the lack of active presence here on the #Fediverse we promised to help her.
Please help us get a decent follower-base here and follow her account right now, before she even gets a chance to get more active. A follower base of more than a 1000 people will surely help her convince her party members to spend time and money on a real presence here.
Many politicians agree with us that #BigTech centralization is bad. Yet their primary presence is on Meta/X in most of the cases. When asked “then why are you not on the Fedi?”, many respond with “because there aren’t enough people for me to justify the jump/investment”.
And that in turn feeds the other feedback loop - “why do you still have an account on X?” - “because most of the politicians/public figures are there”.
Building presence in the social infrastructure one actually believes in, even if that requires extra effort, shouldn’t be something contingent to the probabilities of getting thousands or followers on that platform.
> Microsoft has the government locked in as a customer, so the government’s options for forcing change at Microsoft are limited, at least in the short term.
This applies to the states of the 🇪🇺 #EU and many other countries as well. But the bigger problem is: Nobody seems to care. Many times people just shrug and say that we can't change that anyway. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
To me it's the same situation as with the 🌡️ #ClimateCrisis. You can make the change. Switch to #FreeSoftware such as a :linux: #GNU / #Linux system, support #OpenSource projects through contribution and donation, and never trust the cloud (other people's computers).
No #AI or "genius" at #Microsoft or other #BigTech company will save the world or protect you from #Cybercrime. It's up to you and it's your responsibility to make the change. 🛡️ #ITSec is a process that begins with your #Commitment to it, and the #Internet is no sandpit (anymore).
The EU declares Apple's iPadOS as a 'gatekeeper' due to its vast app ecosystem, locking in businesses like yours or users like you.
The European Union's designation of Apple's iPadOS as a "gatekeeper" signals a significant win for small businesses and startup owners in fostering a fair digital marketplace.
This move further underscores the EU's commitment to regulating tech giants such as Apple and gives smaller businesses the opportunity to thrive and innovate.
Apple must now comply with the DMA within 6 months. Our CEO, @jon, welcomes this, noting that iPads and iPhones share the same ecosystem and that Apple controls both as the gatekeeper.
In light of the EU's DMA and Apple's implementation of their Browser Choice screens, our CEO and Co-Founder, Jon von Tetzchner @jon, talks to @WIRED.
"It starts from you clicking Safari. Which, I think all of us agree, that's the wrong spot." Jon said he prefers Google's implementation of its new browser choice screen that guides Android users to select a default while setting up their phone.
#SocialMedia#AdTech#Platforms#BigTech#SiliconValley: "This is the state of the modern internet — ultra-profitable platforms outright abdicating any responsibility toward the customer, offering not a "service" or a "portal," but cramming as many ways to interrupt the user and push them into doing things that make the company money. The greatest lie in tech is that Facebook and Instagram are for "catching up with your friends," because that's no longer what they do. These platforms are now pathways for the nebulous concept of "content discovery," a barely-personalized entertainment network that occasionally drizzles people or things you choose to see on top of sponsored content and groups that a relational database has decided are "good for you."
On some level, it's hard to even suggest we use these apps. The term "use" suggests a level of user control that Meta has spent over a decade destroying, turning Instagram and Facebook into tubes to funnel human beings in front of those who either pay for the privilege of visibility or have found ways to trick the algorithms into showing you their stuff.
It's the direct result of The Rot Economy, a growth-at-all-costs mindset built off the back of immovable monopolies where tech companies profitably punish users as a means of showing the markets eternal growth. In practice, this means twisting platforms from offering a service to driving engagement, which, in Facebook and Instagram's case, meant finding the maximum amount of interruptions that a user will tolerate before they close the app." https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-great-looting-of-the-internet/
#Amazon#BigTech#Antitrust#Competition: "The Everything War makes a compelling case that no company should be this powerful. For many sellers, Amazon is now their main route to market. Khan’s lawsuit argues that the company has leveraged this to force them to buy other services such as advertising and fulfilment (in 2022, Amazon surpassed UPS to become America’s biggest non-governmental delivery service). Swelled by this influx, its take of sellers’ revenues rose from 19 per cent in 2014 to 45 per cent in 2023, according to the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, an anti-monopoly group, which adds that prices had to go up to offset these fees. A Borkian might argue that Amazon’s success is the reward for being efficient and raising consumer welfare. But with less and less competition providing a benchmark, these notions of welfare become very hard to gauge."
Why enshittification of the internet is progressing so quickly - options are being destroyed one by one as monopoly power exerts itself.
"...So where have the missing companies gone? A 2023 paper by a trio of academics suggests a fairly straightforward answer: the Magnificent Seven ate them. Or at least a lot of them..."