Pluralistic: The enshittification of garage-door openers reveals a vast and deadly rot (09 Nov 2023)


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Pluralistic: Amazon is a ripoff (06 Nov 2023)


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Pluralistic: Big Tech's "attention rents" (03 Nov 2023)


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Pluralistic: Zuck's gravity-defying metaverse money-pit (30 Oct 2023)


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Pluralistic: Amazon Alexa is a graduate of the Darth Vader MBA (26 Oct 2023)


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Pluralistic: Podcasting "Microincentives and Enshittification" (24 Oct 2023)


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Pluralistic: Leaving Twitter had no effect on NPR's traffic (14 Oct 2023)


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Pluralistic: Google's enshittification memos (03 Oct 2023)


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Pluralistic: Saturday linkdump, part the sixth (09 Sept 2023)


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Big Tech Can’t Stop Telling On Itself

PREMEDITATED_MURDER_FINAL_FINAL_1.docx

An old Mac System 6 folder, titled Mens Rea. It contains a file called PREMEDIATED_MURDER_FINAL.DOC as well as UNTITLED-1.DOC, UNTITLED-1.DOC copy, UNTITLED-1.DOC FINAL and UNTITLED-1.DOC FINAL-1.

In July, the Federal Trade Commission announced a complaint against Amazon over the ways the company has tricked customers into subscribing to its paid Prime service. The Commission argues that Amazon discovered that its customers were accidentally signing up for Prime and were unhappy about it, and that the company nevertheless decided not to fix this confusion because it was making too much money from these accidental signups. To make things worse, Amazon deliberately made it harder to cancel Prime, and celebrated that the new, more complex process resulted in fewer cancellations.

This is historic. Prior to the current administration, the FTC had been in a 40 year decline: underfunded and timid. But the new chair, Lina M. Khan, has brought a muscular, take-no-prisoners approach, working in close coordination with her peers at the DoJ antitrust division and with other agencies to reawaken their long-dormant regulatory powers.

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