#AI#BigTech#Oligopolies: "In the past year, political representatives have largely coasted on breezy associations between AI and innovation without feeling pressed to be concrete about what those innovations are and who they’ll serve. From what we’ve seen so far, it largely seems like business as usual—the same firms that brought us the surveillance business model and toxic social media platforms are driving the trajectory for artificial intelligence. If history is any guide, it’s at moments like these, when there are a few incumbents feeling increased pressure to turn a profit, that predatory business models tend to emerge.
This isn’t a vision of the public good that justifies investment at any scale. When evaluating whether to commit taxpayer dollars, we need a better litmus test than “diversity” or “democratization” of a sector. We need to know that these investments will meaningfully benefit society at large, broadening the horizon for innovation in ways that will accrue to the many and not just the few." https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/02/12/ai-public-private-partnerships-task-force-nairr/
#AI#BigTech#Antitrust#Competition#Oligopolies: "There has long been talk of considering access to the internet a public utility, because of how important it is for education, employment and acquiring information. Yet rules to that end were never adopted. But with the unlocking of compute as a shared good, the US and the EU are showing real willingness to make investments into public digital infrastructure.
Even if the latest measures are viewed as industrial policy in a new jacket, they are part of a long overdue step to shape the digital market and offset the outsized power of big tech companies in various corners of our societies.
These governments have made the right decision by expanding access to foundational compute resources, but such investments are only the first stage and must work hand in glove with legislative and regulatory interventions. Antitrust agencies must ensure that the largest AI companies do not grow impossibly large. Security agencies must prevent malign actors from accessing critical computational resources." https://www.ft.com/content/1fda45a2-43e0-4c10-b5fb-b6097e3f5c56
Yep. Totally true. Apple is only pro-users up to the extent this is good for its bottom-line
#EU#Apple#DMA#Oligopolies#Interoperability: "For one thing, Apple will only allow European customers to run alternative browser engines. That means that Firefox will have to "build and maintain two separate browser implementations — a burden Apple themselves will not have to bear."
(One wonders how Apple will treat Americans living in the EU, whose Apple accounts still have US billing addresses – these people will still be entitled to the browser choice that Apple is grudgingly extending to Europeans.)
All of this sends a strong signal that Apple is planning to run the same playbook with the DMA that Google and Facebook used on the GDPR: ignore the law, use lawyerly bullshit to chaff regulators, and hope that European federalism has sufficiently deep cracks that it can hide in them when the enforcers come to call.
But Apple is about to get a nasty shock. For one thing, the DMA allows wronged parties to start their search for justice in the European federal court system – bypassing the Irish regulators and courts. For another, there is a global movement to check corporate power, and because the tech companies do the same kinds of fuckery in every territory, regulators are able to collaborate across borders to take them down."
#AI#CloudComputing#Antitrust#Oligopolies#Competition#FTC: "In other words, more is not always better. For example, let’s consider the environmental impact of this approach. It’s akin to saying, we would be better off if there was more competition in the petrochemical and oil sector—when we know that would likely do nothing to reduce the overall sector’s production of fossil fuels, and its subsequent impact on climate change. Is 10,000 Shells better than one, if the business model of extraction and exploitation stays the same? I doubt it– and it might even be worse.
These same concerns hold for AI, cloud computing, and chips. Generative AI, for example, has a measurable impact on the environment, fueled by its need for computing power and reliance on the vast cloud computing power. Take Microsoft, for instance; the insatiable demand to cool its data centers, magnified by the increasingly ubiquitous application ChatGPT running on the Microsoft Azure platform, has led to a staggering surge in water consumption. It reached a whopping 6.4 million cubic meters in 2022. Again, there is no guarantee that if we open up the market and have 10,000 Microsoft Azures instead of one that the industry's environmental footprint will somehow magically reduce. Even if it were a better solution, again, creating 10,000 new cloud computing companies is hardly feasible, given the rising interest rates and the associated costs associated with building out cloud infrastructures, like data centers."
#EU#Apple#DMA#iOS#AppStore#Antitrust#Oligopolies: "Politicians in Brussels have for years debated how best to loosen Big Tech companies’ grip over their closely guarded marketplaces. But it was only this week that Apple announced sweeping and drastic changes for its European users. For the first time, new EU rules have forced the company to entertain the idea that you can shop for apps outside of Apple’s own App Store, as well as allow browsers other than Apple’s own Safari to run on iOS with their full suite of features.
Yet critics say those changes, although drastic, do not go far enough to comply with new EU rules, and a new fee system for developers reveals how Apple is not yet ready to release its grip on the App Store.
“The new fees and restrictions simply reinforce Apple’s hold over its ecosystem,” Andy Yen, founder and CEO of Swiss encrypted email and VPN provider, Proton, said in response to the changes."
#AI#BigTech#Oligopolies#Antitrust: "The cozy relationships among tech executives are reminiscent of the Gilded Age “money trust” of key banks and financial institutions that both supplied capital to the era’s industrial giants and colluded with them and one another. The money trust’s extraordinary power led to antitrust legislation (in 1890 and 1914), regulation (including the establishment of the US Federal Reserve in 1913), and eventually laws that broke up banks, restricted their involvement in owning companies, and limited their operations (in the 1930s). Unlike an oil company or a railroad, banks are uniquely positioned to drive consolidation across the economy, because they can use their financial leverage over virtually every company in diverse economic sectors to control their behavior, including by pushing for mergers.
Big Tech firms now resemble banks in their influence across the economy – but at a supercharged level. Through their access to data, they know more about consumer and business behavior, and exert more control over it, than banks ever did. They supply vital inputs to businesses across the economy, as well as products and services to almost all consumers. No bank has ever had such reach."
#Capitalism#Competition#Antitrust#Monopolies#Oligopolies#TechnoFeudalism#TechUnions: "The first and most important of these constraints is competition. Capitalists claim to love competition because it keeps firms sharp: they must constantly find ways to improve products and cut costs or be swept away by a superior alternative. There's a degree of truth here, but that's not the whole story.
For one thing, competition can "improve" things that we would rather see abolished. Critics of the GDPR, the EU's landmark privacy law, often point to the devastation that enforcing privacy law had on the European ad-tech industry, driving small firms out of business. But these firms were the most egregious privacy offenders, because they had the least to lose, lacking the dominant position of US-based Big Tech surveillance companies.
Having the least to lose, they were the most reckless with their privacy invasions – but they were also the least equipped to pay expensive enablers from giant corporate law firms to hold off European enforcers, and so they were obliterated. The resulting lack of competition is fine, as far as privacy goes: we don't want competition in the field of "who is most efficient at violating our human rights":"
#BigTech#Oligopolies#Antitrust#Privacy#DataProtection: "Last year, Big Tech companies (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft) received about $3.04 billion in fines for breaking laws on both sides of the Atlantic. As of seven days and three hours into 2024, they had already earned enough revenue to pay it all off.
A little over a week of operations is all it would take if the companies tackled their fines one after another. If they each paid their fines simultaneously, Meta would be the last to finish after five days and 13 hours.
This shows how insignificant these fines are for companies whose revenues are often larger than countries’ GDPs. In fact, 2023 was the second straight year these five companies were fined over $3 billion(new window), showing that they view fines as nothing more than the cost of doing business."
Prices Rise Again. We Must Dismantle Canada's Telecom Oligopoly.
You're paying more for less because the country's wireless providers are the ones in charge.
David Moscrop
Jan 9, 2024
#AI#LLMs#BigTech#Oligopolies: "Put simply, in the context of the current paradigm of building larger- and larger-scale AI systems, there is no AI without Big Tech. With vanishingly few exceptions, every startup, new entrant, and even AI research lab is dependent on these firms. All rely on the computing infrastructure of Microsoft, Amazon, and Google to train their systems, and on those same firms’ vast consumer market reach to deploy and sell their AI products.
Indeed, many startups simply license and rebrand AI models created and sold by these tech giants or their partner startups. This is because large tech firms have accrued significant advantages over the past decade."
Euractiv understands that France and Germany are pushing the European Commission to launch a market investigation following the qualitative criterion. Still, this process could take years and might take years of litigation to conclude.
Meanwhile, the AI market is moving at break-necking speed, with new generations of foundation models released every few months.
According to Jonathan Sage, a senior policy advisor at Portland, without the DMA’s cloud designation, there is little the EU can do to prevent them from creating dependencies between their cloud infrastructure and the foundation models."
"I came to office determined to change the economic direction of this country and to move from trickle-down economics to my middle out, bottom up vision: #Bidenomics."
@w7voa I still hope #Biden pushes for more price competition (for example, by promoting stronger #antitrust enforcement guidelines for breaking up #monopolies and cartels (#oligopolies ) ).
Bidens policies have recovered us from a recession (the #COVIDshutdowns ) but the fact is many people in the US are still doing worse than their parents were at the same age. We should not be excessively raising #InterestRates; it hurts the poor and vulnerable the most.
As someone whose finances were just rocked by yet another death in my family – and after a lifetime of worldwide financial crises and almost no public services – can I just post this and say “hahahahahahahaha” without anyone screaming in my mentions
From its first days, the consumer computing and networking sector was synonymous with explosive growth.
Companies would spring up out of nowhere and grow to impossible scale overnight. The source of this rapid corporate gigantism was no mystery: it came from network effects.
A business, product or service enjoys “network effects” when adding more customers increases in value. Every Apple ][+ sold increased the number of people you could exchange data on floppies with; it increased the number of dealers who’d sell you accessories for your new home computer; and it increased the number of software authors and hardware companies who’d fill those dealers’ showrooms with new applications and peripherals for you to use.
Network effects are how Amazon got so big. They’re why platforms with App Stores — from games to mobile OSes — are so exciting for investors. And, of course, they’re why social media platforms exploded onto the scene in the 2000s and took over the world."
#AI#GenerativeAI#LLMs#Chatbots#AIRegulation#BigTech#Oligopolies: "Fourth, will the regulation reinforce existing power dynamics and oligopolies? When Big Tech asks to be regulated, we must ask if those regulations might effectively cement Big Tech’s own power. For example, we’ve seen multiple proposals that would allow regulators to review and license AI models, programs, and services. Government licensing is the kind of burden that big players can easily meet; smaller competitors and nonprofits, not so much. Indeed, it could be prohibitive for independent open-source developers. We should not assume that the people who built us this world can fix the problems they helped create; if we want AI models that don’t replicate existing social and political biases, we need to make enough space for new players to build them." https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/07/generative-ai-policy-must-be-precise-careful-and-practical-how-cut-through-hype