#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
The European Commission have announced that Apple's iMessage, Microsoft's Bing browser, Edge search engine and advertising services will not fall under antitrust regulations, meaning they will not be required to open up to their competitors and adhere to new rules.
Editor-in-Chief of @theverge chats with Jonathan Kanter, assistant attorney general from the Department of Justice, about competition in the tech and media industry, how mergers including Big Tech buyers can distort the market and what the Antitrust Division looks into when it comes to preserving competition in business.
UnitedHealth's Optum has rather quietly assembled ~90,000 physicians into its provider empire
But its acquisition of a 100-provider clinic in Oregon is drawing outsized scrutiny due to Oregon's oversight and transparency laws, which may be the new norm
Cory Doctorow has an opinion piece in the Financial Times? The Financial Times is ready to consider the scourge of enshittification? 🤩 Well done, @pluralistic !
This brings me hope for a de-enshittified future. May we all come together to "disrupt" enshittification!
The opening sketch of Saturday Night Live this week did something that journalists have—for the most part—failed to do. That is pose vitally important questions about TFG’s refusal to debate Nikki Haley & his very OBVIOUS cognitive decline. These 2 issues raise alarming red flags about the Orange Imbecile that journalists should be raising--but instead it took a comedy show…https://open.substack.com/pub/deanobeidallah/p/snl-poses-tougher-questions-about?r=f0wq&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
Not just caved. I meant literally bought out. Charles Koch, from what I've heard, has been buying up news outlets left and right.
All the more reason to #TaxTheRich and enforce #antitrust. Private individuals should not have the power to singlehandedly buy entire industries like that, and especially not for the purpose of giving themselves government-like power.
#AI#EU#BigTech#Competition#Antitrust: "Johnny Ryan (Irish Council for Civil Liberties): the stakes here are incredibly high, so incremental change is not what is called for. Competition is not a “side dish” (a remark this morning by Olivier Guersent).
Gatekeepers should fear regulators, not be having “nice conversations”.
Francesca Bria (former president of Italian National Innovation Fund): I am more optimistic after today on EU and US cooperation on strategic economic reform to better serve people. Europe needs an industrial policy that’s forward-looking because we are too dependent on Big Tech firms. We don’t have a European tech stack which aligns with our values, our democratic principles — with chips, with cloud, with AI, with data… Is the EU requiring interoperability, open standards, ethics and privacy by design when it gives out subsidies?
We are trapped between the US private sector and Chinese big state models. We need public digital infrastructure and institutions. How about urban data to fight climate change, kept in a data trust owned by citizens? What about public participation? What about social media manipulation leading to polarisation? Public interest does not mean state control. We need infrastructures to mobilise people with public returns, allow political participation where the data is kept as a digital commons.
How can public investment funds ensure successful startups it funds aren’t just bought up by private equity and sovereign wealth funds?"
#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#AI#AIAct#DMA#Antitrust#Competition: "The good news is that Brussels doesn’t need to wait for the AI Act to start shaping the technology’s future for the better. It already possesses powerful tools that it could use right now to promote a fairer, safer, and more open AI ecosystem. These tools include its wide-ranging powers to police mergers, monopolistic conduct, anti-competitive agreements, and the recently introduced Digital Markets Act (DMA).
Take the lucrative partnerships and investments the tech giants use to neutralise or co-opt potential competitors. Microsoft’s $13 billion partnership with OpenAI is the most high-profile example of this tactic, but it is far from the only one. Amazon and Google have collectively invested around $6 billion into Anthropic, while Nvidia is funding the likes of Inflection and Cohere. Left unchallenged, these deals threaten to accelerate concentration in AI, weaken innovation, and leave businesses and consumers with less choice."
#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."
Rs brought #Greed first: America has devolved from being a relatively open market economy & a functioning democracy into a largely monopolistic one with a bought-off pol system. When Bork said the only thing that mattered was the price to the consumer & SHLDR’s profits he never considered: value of good food freshly made in a local restaurant as opposed to things arriving from across the country-.
#Journalism#Media#News#Newspapers#Antitrust#Competition: "So, what’s to be done? The Nieman Reports opinion piece advises journalists to adopt a four-part personal plan that includes developing more marketable skills, stepped-up networking, and staying abreast of industry trends like increasing reliance on charitable contributions and the use of artificial intelligence.
But while that’s no doubt practical advice for anyone trying to build or hold on to a career in journalism, it’s also obtuse to the real nature of the problem and needlessly fatalistic. The decline of journalism—and the concomitant rise of a poisoned, “post-truth” information environment that deeply threatens democracy—is not a development that journalists, or society at large, must accept as inevitable. Contrary to received ideas, it’s not an unavoidable consequence of digital technology, generational change, or immutable market forces.
Instead, it is a direct result of specific, boneheaded policy choices that politicians in both parties made over the past 40 years. By repealing or failing to enforce basic market rules that had long contained concentrated corporate power, policy makers enabled the emergence of a new kind of monopoly that engages in a broad range of deeply anticompetitive business practices. These include, most significantly, the cornering of advertising markets, which historically provided the primary means of financing journalism. This is the colossal policy failure that has effectively destroyed the economic foundations of a free press."
Hey neat. Just got a $90 check from the class action settlement against Apple throttling iPhones with software updates.
A phone I bought almost ten years ago.
The system works... Slowly...
Apparently #PharmaBro Martin Shkreli is back on his bullshit, and got pimp-slapped in Federal court for it. This is what he had to say after the latest trial at Elon's Nazi Bar:
Thanks to the @FTC, and now the 2nd Circuit, I am the first inividual [sic] person in the history of the USA to be sued under the Sherman Act Section 2 (130 year old law) as a monopolist. Not Gates, Zuckerberg, Rockefeller, but little old me. Even if you believe the monopolist allegations, which you should not–because they are bullshit–I did no different from what AbbVie and countless others do everyday in pharma. Anyway, with this ruling, every executive in America can be held jointly and severally liable for antitrust actions levied against their companies. Have fun out there!
I'm quoting the full post because I fucking wish that every executive in the US working in pharmaceuticals would get personally nailed under US #antitrust law. It would be a nice precedent with which to go after executives in every other industry.
"After quizzing these companies about data practices, I learned that most are sharing what’s happening in my home with Amazon, too. Our data is the price of entry for devices that want to integrate with Alexa. Amazon’s not only eavesdropping — it’s tracking everything happening in your home."
#GeoffreyAFowler, 'Alexa has been eavesdropping on you this whole time'
@strypey@phlogiston
Then people wonder why we skip to the chase and commit to only using the derogatory term, scam'azon to refer to the abusive #monopoly.
Add to that the irony of having #scamazon gauge interest in communities outrage by gloating about their abuse in the #corporateNews outlet they own, ie. #TheWashingtonPost and we come full circle — its jerks all the way up (and around).
Don't forget to buy that scam'azon #ringDoorbell, fools.
#BigTech#Antitrust: "The first difficulty is the market power question. It creates a collision course between the antitrust left, who are opposed to bigness, and the more centrist or right-leaning antitrust [theorists], who see antitrust as a problem of market power, without regard to whether a firm is small or big. One of the problems you’ve got with Amazon is that it is very, very big. However, it sells 12mn products and does not have market-dominating shares in very many of those products.
Remember a critical principle here, which is that market power attaches to products, not firms. We can speak of Microsoft as having market power in its Windows operating system. We are not speaking of Microsoft as having market power with its search engine. Why? Because Windows has a 60-70 per cent market share in desktop/laptop operating systems. Bing struggles at just above 3 per cent.
So with Amazon, you have to look product by product. And that means several things. Number one, it’s going to be a hell of an expensive antitrust case. Number two, you’re going to get very different outcomes depending on which product you’re looking at. It’s going to be very big unless the government narrows it down by identifying particular products."
#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."
OC Platform Tilt: Tracking issues which disadvantage Firefox relative to first-party browsers on major software platforms (mozilla.github.io)
Mozilla:...