🇨🇦 Canadians were promised the Rogers-Shaw deal would benefit all of us. 3 years in, Rogers is falling short on jobs, 5G, prices, and service.

💥 Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED) has done nothing! Tell Minister Joly to act on what the government promised.

👉 https://openmedia.org/CallOutRogers

#CDNPoli #monopolies #Canada @OpenMediaOrg

"The world has moved on. Nothing works. Everything costs too much. No one can help. No one knows how to fix anything. The beams were broken by the Crimson King and his economism-crazed minions. The Dark Tower might fall.

So what consumer advice do I have for people who are angry about this? I don't have any consumer advice, I'm afraid. You can't shop your way out of a monopoly. Once again, shopping is not politics.

What I have for you is political advice. To restore the beams and beat back entropy again, we need a better system, not more virtuous individuals. If you feel – as I do – that "the world has moved on," then to wrench it back, you will have to join a polity. Support activist groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the digital rights group I've been at for the past 25 years:
(...)
Join a union. If there's no union at your jobsite, start a union. If you work in tech, you start this process by talking to techsolidarity.org and the techworkerscoalition.org.
(...)
Get involved in party politics. Find a political party whose local organization supports your values (even if the national version of that party sucks) and then work with your fellow grassroots activists to drag or replace the party leaders. Get involved in local politics: if there's one thing Moms For Liberty has taught us, it's that unregarded, seemingly unimportant local offices have enormous potential to change facts on the ground for the people where you live. Those changes don't have to be change for the worse.

Doing politics is hard. Hell, after all, is other people. It would be great if we could make change by changing ourselves, but that's not how any of this works. The world has moved on, and you can't save it. But together, we can restore the beams and beat back entropy. Hell is other people, but only because other people are so great but it's so hard to figure out how to work together. We can do it, though."

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/11/lapsarianism/
#Politics #Oligopolies #Monopolies #Capitalism

the audacity of selling #privacy as a feature yet not allowing regulators audit their technology to verify their claims.

this is a toot about #Apple #iOS

#NBAFinals2026 #ABCtv #Disney #monopolies

Demand Is Booming for New #NoTech, #Repairable #Tractor

"There is consumer pressure to back away from technology that is unnecessary to perform everyday tasks."

by Jason Koebler
Jun 3, 2026

"The secondary market for decades old, low-tech #JohnDeereTractors has been booming for years as farmers have sought reliable tractors that they can actually fix without having to deal with John Deere’s repair monopoly. A Canadian company has seen that demand and came up with a radical thought: What if they made a new, repairable, 'no-tech' tractor to solve what has become a gigantic pain point for farmers?

"Alberta’s #UrsaAg says that it has been inundated with demand after announcing its tractor, which costs roughly half as much as a Deere and has the benefit of not being a repair nightmare. We have for years covered the frustration that farmers have felt as they have been locked out of their Deere tractors with digital rights management systems that prevent them from fixing their machinery, tractors that won’t run because of minor sensor failures, and crops that literally die on the vine as they wait for an 'authorized' repair person to fix tractors during critical harvesting periods.

"Ursa Ag markets its tractors as '#NoFrills' and 'built to last.' Ursa Ag’s Doug Wilson told me that the company designed the tractor because of a need in the marketplace for a new machine that isn’t loaded with tech and is easy to maintain. The company follows in the footsteps of consumer electronics companies like #Fairphone, which makes a repairable smartphone and #Framework, which makes modular, repairable #laptops. The demand Ursa Ag has seen is part of the backlash to manufacturer repair #monopolies and the injection of #technology and #InternetConnectedSensors and terms of use into even the most basic of gadgets.

" 'I talk to farmers every day and I hear from farmers every day about how they went out and bought machinery from 1987 so that it wouldn’t have a computer on it,' Wilson said. 'All of this came from a simple discussion with a customer who wanted to be able to turn [the tractor] on at the start of the day, to use it, and shut it off at the end of the day. It needed to work, so that’s what we built.'

"Ursa Ag’s tractor has been hyped in agriculture circles after Wilson showed the tractor off at a Canadian farm show and it was featured by Farms.com. Wilson said more than a thousand farmers have contacted him after that show, from roughly 30 countries. 'I got a handwritten letter from a farmer in France who doesn’t own a computer and wanted us to mail him information about the tractors,' he said."

Read more:
https://www.404media.co/demand-is-booming-for-ursa-ag-new-no-tech-repairable-tractor/

#SolarPunkSunday #LowTech #LoTech #RightToRepair #Farmers

Canada Needs to Rebuild Public Telecoms

By Edgardo Sepulveda

#Canada #cdnpli #telecom #monopolies #oligopolies

https://jacobin.com/2026/06/canada-telecoms-infrastructure-public-ownership

“…No one is able to access the unencrypted data without our authorisation.” https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jun/01/fcas-palantir-deal-could-expose-uk-financial-data-to-trumps-us-critics-fear

Why should any believe that authorisation won’t be given? Farage, is not the only one who is keen to collaborate with Trump. Many in the other parties would do so as well. #authorisation #surveillance #PoliceState #GDPR #weakLinks #Antitrust #monopolies

“We can’t count on the US to help us tame Big Tech. The US is Big Tech. The roof isn’t leaking anymore. The roof has fallen in, and it’s time to move.

This isn’t all bad. All things being equal, it would be better if Putin had stayed out of Ukraine and if Trump had lost the 2024 election. But when life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla. Trump’s incontinent belligerence creates the conditions for the replacement of our old enshittified internet with a new, good internet. A post-American internet. That’s the internet that activists like me and EFF have been trying to build for decades ever since it became apparent that the old, good internet was gone. Swallowed by enshittifying monopolists.

We tried hard. We eked out some victories. But we were overmatched by the largest, most rapacious corporations to curse the Earth since the Hudson’s Bay Company. Today, we have new allies. Members of a coalition who have different motives and access to different levels of power but have a shared goal.

In all, Trump has summoned up three armies to fight for the post-American internet. The first army: digital civil society groups battling for privacy, consumer rights, and labour rights; for an end to the systematic program of worker misclassification and wage theft we call the gig economy; for the right to use the internet anonymously rather than having your data harvested in the name of age verification only to have it mobilized later by the next Viktor Orbán or Trump; for an end to Big Tech monopolies and their corrosive power over our democracies and lives.“

https://thewalrus.ca/the-internet-has-become-too-american-to-trust

#USA #BigTech #Trump #SocialMedia #DigitalRights #PoliticalEconomy #Monopolies #Oligopolies