Pluralistic: We should ban TikTok('s surveillance) (30 Mar 2023)


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The EU, Tech Trustbusting, and Trade Wars

There’s a difference between protectionism and political will

The EU flag superimposed over a Matrix “code waterfall” effect; in the center of the ring of stars is a vintage newspaper caricature of Roosevelt as a trustbuster, swinging his “big stick.”

Competition regulators in the EU, the UK and the US are all looking hard at concentration in the tech sector, and well they should: an industry that was once hailed for its dynamism — for being a sector where yesterday’s world-spanning titans are sold for parts to companies that were mere napkin doodles a year or two before — has calcified into “a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four.”

The reasons for tech concentration are pretty straightforward. Despite a lot of fatalistic tech exceptionalism about “network effects” leading to inevitable monopolization, the actual means by which tech companies consolidated is actually easy to see in the historical record.

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Pluralistic: 12 Apr 2020

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