Mastodawn

jwz Jun 20, 2024

Mozilla is an advertising company now.

This seems completely normal and cool and not troublesome in any way.

Mozilla has acquired Anonym, a [blah blah blah] raise the bar for the advertising industry [blah blah blah] while delivering effective...
https://jwz.org/b/ykVg

Mozilla is an advertising company now

This seems completely normal and cool and not troublesome in any way. Mozilla has acquired Anonym, a [blah blah blah] raise the bar for the advertising industry [blah blah blah] while delivering effective advertising solutions. [...] Anonym was founded with two core beliefs: [blah blah blah] and second, that digital advertising is critical for the sustainability of free content, services and ...

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jwz Jun 20, 2024

Preemptive subtwit.

Let's say you run a nonprofit animal shelter. And for some reason, some people feel you should be seeing hockey-stick growth, but the donations aren't covering it.

So you decide to start up a side-line of selling kittens for meat.

Then you will inevitably have someone stroking their chin and saying, 'Yes, yes, but how could they afford to stay open if they weren't selling kitten deli slices?"

Some might say -- maybe you aren't an animal shelter any more. Some might say.

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Merc

@jwz It's weirder than that though.

There's a public library, and 90% of its funding is from the book store that would otherwise dominate the entire book market. The monopolist book store gives the library vast piles of cash, that are theoretically so that any library patron who wants to buy a book is directed to the monopolist book store. But, most people agree it's mainly so that the book store can keep regulators away and say "look, if people want books, they can always go to the library"

Now, for some reason, this library has so much money to burn, it decides it's going to start acquiring for-profit businesses. Some acquired businesses were arguably providing services that would be useful for library patrons, others not so much. But, now, their latest acquisition is a small indie book store.

What does their main funder think about this? Will it think the library is now competing with it on its core business? Did it secretly suggest the acquisition?