And here I come again with another post. Maybe you can sympathise with me, when I use the internet without proper protections, it feels like walking in the streets of Brazil, one step away from a murder attempt or someone trying to scam you on some bullshit, got interested?

https://jeferson.me/blog/2025/11/15/a-bill-for-us-to-pay/

#Accountability #AdBlocker #Algorithmic #AlgorithmicAbuse #DarkPatterns #Ethics #Fake #Ads #Fraud #Missinformation #Monopolies #Privacy #Protection #Regulation #Sponsor #SponsorBlock

🏷️ #JonStewart #LisaKhan #Markets #US #Politics #Economy #Monopolies #Government #TheWeeklyShow #MustListen

🔗 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRJWM_3OW2Y

"In my view, Wu is a national treasure. He coined the term net neutrality. (The concept—which assures nondiscriminatory access to platforms—has been momentarily beaten down by the courts.) During the Biden days, he, along with FTC chair Lina Khan and assistant attorney general for antitrust Jonathan Kanter, helped thaw out what he calls Antitrust Winter, a free-for-all era of corporate consolidation and anticompetitive practices that empowered Big Tech.

He’s also a good writer. One felicitous trick in his bag is the invocation of obscure, even ancient precedents that provide illuminating insights into contemporary conundrums. To explain the value of net neutrality, Wu tells the tale of a 14th century Englishwoman who was refused lodging at a rural inn for unspecified reasons, and found herself abandoned in the dark; her successful court challenge established the principle that a “public house” must be open to the public.

The Age of Extraction is the third in a trilogy consisting of The Master Switch (about the importance of open platforms) and The Attention Merchants (which focused on how social media and online ads infected the media ecosystem).

I read this latest effort, though, with a bit of wistfulness. It was written before the 2024 election. Donald Trump is mentioned only once, and not in the context of his return to the White House. To be sure, a number of times Wu refers to scenarios where a generic autocratic strongman takes power—guess who comes to mind? But Wu didn’t want to write another Trump book. “I just felt it’s duplicative to say Trump is a crazy madman who is corrupted,” he says. Instead, he wanted to write on issues and ideas, in hopes that his work would retain relevance long after our current leader leaves the scene.

But right now, Trump is in the White House, presiding over the age Wu refers to in his book title."

https://www.wired.com/story/tim-wu-age-of-extraction/

#USA #Monopolies #Oligopolies #Antitrust #Competition #BigTech

Pluralistic: The 40-year economic mistake that let Google conquer (and enshittify) the world (06 Nov 2025)

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/06/vertical-blinds/

Trump FCC Makes It Easier For Prison Phone Monopolies To Rip Off Inmate Families

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://www.techdirt.com/2025/11/03/trump-fcc-makes-it-easier-for-prison-phone-monopolies-to-rip-off-inmate-families/

Hier heeft Doctorow al eerder over geschreven: de wetgeving tegen het omzeilen van technische beschermingsmaatregelen afschaffen. En vervolgens kiezen voor open source aanpassingen of alternatieven. Dat zou een eerste stap kunnen zijn voor ieder land om de monopolies van Big Tech te bevechten.

#bigtech #pluralistic #monopolies

Pluralistic: There’s one thing EVERY government can do to shrink Big Tech (01 Nov 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/01/redistribution-vs-predistribution/anticircumvention law

"Economic optimism is in short supply these days, but Tim Wu is optimistic — to a point. In “The Age of Extraction,” he rejects zero-sum doom-saying and declares that “enlightened self-interest” is real. “Prosperity, fairness and growth are not incompatible,” he writes.

But at a time when Big Tech platforms dominate our economic lives, we will have to work hard to re-establish a balance. In fact, Wu suggests, too much optimism is what got us into this predicament in the first place. He resurfaces all the sunny predictions of the decentralized, democratic world that the internet was to bring, and which allowed optimism to slide into complacency.

Information was supposed to flow, a healthy pluralism was supposed to flourish. Lumbering Goliaths were supposed to be felled by scrappy Davids. “Only rarely,” he writes, “have so confident a set of predictions been so wrong.”

Wu has been writing critically about information technologies and monopolies for some time now. “The Age of Extraction” can be read as part of a trilogy that began with “The Master Switch” (2010) and “The Attention Merchants” (2016). His little book “The Curse of Bigness” (2018) warned about the dangers of ballooning corporate power. (Wu helped the Biden administration craft its antitrust policies.) Reality has since caught up to a future he has long warned about. Where Wu’s previous books were once dazzlingly prescient, “The Age of Extraction” reads more like an intelligent and useful guide to a dispiriting present."

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/29/books/review/the-age-of-extraction-tim-wu.html?unlocked_article_code=1.xk8.xjyN.s8FPfwO9r9Ms&smid=url-share

#USA #BigTech #Antitrust #Monopolies #Oligopolies #Competition

"In a week when Nvidia became the world’s first $5tn company, the dominance of a handful of big tech companies is becoming even more pronounced.

Eight of the 10 biggest stocks in the S&P 500 are tech stocks. Those eight companies account for 36 per cent of the entire US market’s value, 60 per cent of the gains in the index since the market bottomed in April and almost 80 per cent of the S&P 500’s net income growth in the last year.

According to Nomura analysts, the S&P 500’s roughly 2.4 per cent rally in the five sessions up to and including Wednesday was almost entirely driven by just three stocks — Alphabet, Broadcom and Nvidia.

“In the US we’re clearly in a momentum-driven market being led by a handful of technology companies trading at transparently dubious valuations,” says Steven Grey, chief investment officer at Grey Value Management.

With the S&P 500 up about 16 per cent this year, “investors who simply closed their eyes and went along for the ride have done well”, he adds.

A retail investor might think that putting funds into the MSCI All World index would give them a diverse portfolio. But that index, which comprises over 2,000 companies from more than 40 markets, currently has almost a quarter of its capitalisation in just eight US tech groups."

https://www.ft.com/content/ae4d7961-cf59-4369-8e64-8a9c9da956d1

#USA #BigTech #AI #GenerativeAI #Monopolies #Competition #Antitrust #StockMarket