Adversarial Interoperability
“Interoperability” is the act of making a new product or service work with an existing product or service: modern civilization depends on the standards and practices that allow you to put any dish into...
View ArticleAmerica's rotten ISPs object to encrypted DNS, argue that losing the ability...
I'm 100% in favor of pro-competitive regulation of Big Tech, and that is because I'm 100% in favor of pro-competitive regulation of all our hyper-concentrated, monopolistic industries. I say this even...
View ArticlePodcast: Why do people believe the Earth is flat?
In my latest podcast (MP3), I read my Globe and Mail column, Why do people believe the Earth is flat?, which connects the rise of conspiratorial thinking to the rise in actual conspiracies, in which...
View ArticleVerizon dumps another Oath property for peanuts: RIP, Mapquest
Mapquest was once the leading map site in the world; they were bought by AOL as part of AOL's decades' long spree of buying successful companies and running them into the ground -- finally, they were...
View ArticleNot only is Google's auto-delete good for privacy, it's also good news for...
Earlier this month, Google announced a new collection of auto-delete settings for your personal information that allows you balance some of the conveniences of data-collection (for example,...
View ArticleWhat it's like to have Apple rip off your successful Mac app
Companies that make successful Mac apps live in constant fear of being sherlocked -- having Apple release a feature-for-feature clone to compete with your product, bundling it in with Macos. In June...
View ArticleBipartisan legislation would force Big Tech to allow interoperability with...
The Augmenting Compatibility and Competition by Enabling Service Switching” (ACCESS) Act was introduced by Senator Mark Warner [D-VA] and co-sponsored by Senator Josh Hawley [R-MO] and Senator Richard...
View ArticleTalking science fiction, technological self-determination, inequality and...
Sean Carroll is a physicist at JPL and the author of many popular, smart books about physics for a lay audience; his weekly Mindscape podcast is a treasure-trove of incredibly smart, fascinating...
View ArticleLeaked internal docs show that Facebook shuts down access to user data to...
7,000 pages of leaked documents from the Six4Three lawsuit against Facebook reveal how the company provides or restricts access to user data as part of its overall strategy to crush potential...
View ArticleDebullshitifying the Right to Repair excuses Apple sent to Congress
Apple's response to the Congressional committee investigating monopolistic behavior by tech giants contains a chapter on Right to Repair, whose greatest enemy is Apple -- the company led successful...
View ArticleTalking Adversarial Interoperability with Y Combinator
Earlier this month while I was in San Francisco, I went over to the Y Combinator incubator to record a podcast (MP3); we talked for more than an hour about the history of Adversarial Interoperability...
View ArticlePrasad's Law: there's always enough health spending to concentrate wealth,...
In a recent installment of his Plenary Session podcast, hematologist-oncologist Vinay Prasad observed that "There are interventions that disperse wealth, … and they give people jobs, and they send...
View ArticleDistinguishing between "platforms" and "aggregators" in competition law
There's a lot of political will to regulate the Big Tech companies in both the US and the EU at the moment, which is a very welcome juncture to have arrived at after 40 years of antitrust inaction...
View ArticleInsulin prices doubled between 2012 and 2016
The historical excuse for pharma monopolists who conspired to rig prices on insulin was that hardly anyone paid full price -- everyone got their life-saving, non-optional medicine through health plans...
View ArticleAmericans should definitely be worried about the EU's new copyright rules
The passage -- through MEPs erroneously pushing the wrong buttons! -- of the new EU Copyright Directive last March means that online platforms operating in the EU will have to implement filters that...
View Article2019: EFF enters the competition fray
None of us signed up for an Internet composed of "a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four", but here we are, watching as hyper-concentrated industries rack...
View ArticlePermitting the growth of monopolies is a form of government censorship
In my latest Locus column, Inaction is a Form of Action, I discuss how the US government's unwillingness to enforce its own anti-monopoly laws has resulted in the dominance of a handful of giant tech...
View ArticleThe New Deal was partly motivated by a desire to kill the fake news epidemic...
100 years ago, wealthy people bought up newspapers as fast as they could, then used them to smear progressive reformers, inventing lies ("Congressmen don't pay taxes!") to discredit the entire project...
View ArticleThree years after the W3C approved a DRM standard, it's no longer possible to...
Back in 2017, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) approved the most controversial standard in its long history: Encrypted Media Extensions, or EME, which enabled Netflix and other big media companies...
View ArticlePodcast: Inaction is a form of action
In my latest podcast (MP3), I read my latest Locus column, Inaction is a Form of Action,, where I I discuss how the US government's unwillingness to enforce its own anti-monopoly laws has resulted in...
View ArticleIn serving big company interests, copyright is in crisis
Copyright rules are made with the needs of the entertainment industry in mind, designed to provide the legal framework for creators, investors, distributors, production houses, and other parts of the...
View ArticleBipartisan consensus is emerging on reining in Big Tech
House Antitrust chairman David Cicilline's interview with The Verge's Nilay Patel reveals the exciting shifts in how Congress thinks about Big Tech's monopolies. Cicilline doesn't think Congress can...
View ArticleThe answer to the Clearview AI scandal is better privacy laws, not...
Clearview AI (previously) is a grifty facial recognition company that sells untested, secretive tools to police departments, claiming that they can identify people from security camera footage by...
View ArticleBrexit means the UK will shelve the EU Copyright Directive (for now)
Last year, the EU adopted the incredibly controversial Copyright Directive (it passed by only five votes, and afterwards 10 MEPs said they'd got confused and pushed the wrong buttons!): now, EU member...
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Competitive double dutch has gone global
Fly Diggerz show what a modern Double Dutch competition routine looks like. Below is some more traditional competitive jumping at Lincoln Center in New York. Bonus video: Double Dutch crip walk:...
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Pilot takes off in 2.5 feet, lands in 16.5
The competitive world of STOL (short takeoff and landing) includes some impressive feats using specialized planes: Kevin Quinn has a global stole competition going on and a couple of weeks ago I had a...
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Competition is fierce in 'Sheep to Shawl,' where teams have 3 hours to weave...
The "Sheep to Shawl" competition at the Maryland Sheep & Wool Festival is an event where each team of five, with a designated shearer, three spinners, and a weaver, work together to shear a sheep,...
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This six-year-old now holds the women's world record for the speediest...
At the recent World Cube Association Rubik's Cube International Open in Singapore, Cao Quixian set the new women's world record of 5.97 seconds. She is six years old. Watch below. The 5.97 is an...
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The most 1970s moment in TV history: Gabe Kaplan vs. Robert Conrad in the...
Please allow me the honor of presenting to you one of the great moments in the history of television in the 1970s. Up there with the Watergate Hearings, Bobby Riggs vs. Billie Jean King, and Sammy...
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The great New York bus tour battle
New York has plenty of intracity rivalries — Yankees versus Mets, Ray's Pizza versus all the other Ray's Pizzas, and now tour buses are getting in on the action. According to Curbed, the hop-on-hop-off...
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