#monopolies — Public Fediverse posts

"If Kagi (a startup with a handful of engineers) can extract useful search results from Google's databases, then Google – a thrice-convicted monopolist that's had its pick of thousands of the top computer scientists from the world's most prestigious universities for a generation – could also do so.

They just choose not to.

They're too big to fail. They're too big to jail. They're too big to care.

Google's AI search isn't a way to fix its broken core product: it's a way to partially remediate the damage Google itself inflicted on the open internet, while imprisoning the web in a walled garden that would make Steve Jobs drool:
(...)
It's a deadly combination: Google has committed hundreds of billions to stock buybacks and its AI money-furnace, financed by mass layoffs targeting the people who keep the core services useful. The too-big-to-care company is still the internet's gatekeeper, but half the guards at the gate have been fired and the other half have pulled so much overtime that they keep falling asleep on the job.

Google has become a scammer's paradise.

Take Google's "answer box." This is the part of the search results page that tries to answer your query directly, without sending you elsewhere for that info. Back in 2023, Google's Answer Box was taken over by scammers who impersonated airline help desks. When Google's users searched for airlines' toll-free phone numbers, Google directed them to phones that rang in the scammers' boiler room, where they were tricked into giving up their passport info and credit card numbers to boiler-room thieves:"

https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/05/absentee-landlord/

#Google #Search #SearchEngines #AI #AISearch #Scams #AIOverview #BigTech #Monopolies #Antitrust

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHkN8DUpn9E

A deep dive into 'the financials' & concerns about the pending merger of Paramount and Warner. Global Implications for #media, #movies, #monopolies, #politics & #CNN

> A judge just froze Paramount’s proposed $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery for 14 days. California and 11 other states argue the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger would reduce competition in theatrical films, major blockbusters, and basic cable programming.

#Ellison #Paramount #Warner #merger

"WeLib describes itself as an “endless library” founded on the principle that “education and literature belong to everyone.” The publishers, however, clearly don’t agree with the library framing, noting libraries can be trusted; pirate sites not.

“Libraries are trusted institutions that serve the communities that fund them by lending books and other publications they have lawfully acquired. Using this label for WeLib explicitly misleads the public and allows WeLib to hijack the goodwill that libraries enjoy and have legitimately earned.”

“WeLib is no more than a pirate website that reproduces and distributes works of authorship owned by others to users for a profit, without authorization from or compensation to the copyright owners,” the complaint adds.

The complaint notes that WeLib’s operators made efforts to keep their identities hidden. However, the site itself quickly became a go-to portal for many book pirates.

The complaint notes that, by WeLib’s own account, its collection includes 43 million books and 98 million articles. The site reportedly has over 80,000 active monthly users who accessed more than 51.7 million books and downloaded 14.5 million files last month."

https://torrentfreak.com/major-publishers-sue-welib-a-pirate-site-built-on-annas-archive-code/

#AnnasArchive #Copyright #IP #Piracy #Monopolies #Rentism #Feudalism

I've never hated #capitalism as described in my #Economics classes or by its proponents. I hate #CronyCapitalism, #monopolies & #monopsonies & their "oli-" kin ( #oligopoly for example). I want actual #FreeMarket capitalism with strong #rules, enforced equally. I want true #AdamSmith capitalism.

Why The Rich Hate Capitalism -...

Pluralistic: Google steers Americans looking for health care into "junk insurance" (25 Nov 2025)

https://web.brid.gy/r/https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/25/open-season/

Elon Musk’s xAI sues Apple and OpenAI over AI competition, App Store rankings https://www.byteseu.com/1319124/ #AI #AppStore #Apple #ArtificialIntelligence #ChatGPT #Competition #DeepSeek #ElonMusk #EpicGames #ForProfit #Fortnite #GrokApp #lawsuit #MicrosoftBacked #monopolies #nonprofit #OpenAI #shnd #Tesla #XAI

#Thai #Government #policies favour #bigbusiness
"Corporations #takeadvantage of #connections w key government figures to seek benefits.. #Monopolies are #bad for overall #economy, leading to low production efficiency & lack of new products.. #Thailand’s #SMEs are dying, & cannot compete in terms of production cc w oth countries.. Witoon criticised government’s #alcohol #policy & casino-entert'ment complex proposal, as these initiatives wld primarily benefit big investors"
https://www.bangkokpost.com/thailand/general/2860161/government-policies-favour-big-business-say-critics

#CyberSecurity #Monopolies #Microsoft #Windows #CrowdStrike #Monocultures: "CrowdStrike will likely face a wave of lawsuits seeking to hold it responsible for shutting down the world’s computers. It’s easy to blame the company. But there’s a bigger culprit: monoculture. Roughly 73 per cent of desktop computers worldwide run a Microsoft Windows operating system. Because Windows systems are so common, they are a popular target for hackers, who can exploit more computers with a single attack than if they targeted MacOS or Linux systems. As a result, there’s a massive market for software like CrowdStrike’s. Almost 60 per cent of Fortune 500 companies use CrowdStrike, which helps explain why impacts on commercial systems were so profound, even though 8.5m machines is a tiny fraction of the number of computers used worldwide. The reliance on a single operating system and a single threat checker for critical commercial IT systems makes global outages possible. Consequently, computing is profoundly more vulnerable than it needs to be.

To understand how we got here, it helps to look at an apparently unrelated industry: agriculture."

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/technology/67625/when-monoculture-leads-to-monofailure

Soul Boom Podcast

Do we need Jobs? No, here's a small explanation.

You can start at 20:00 ↓↓↓

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFbJy-Iw7b8

#rainnwilson #douglasrushkoff #Freeeconomy #resourcebasedeconomy #rbe #ubi #gifteconomy #monopoly #gafam #eattherich #tradelesssociety #moneylesssociety #monopolies #conglomerates
#spirituality #theoffice #SoulBoomPodcast #CommunityBuilding #SharingEconomy #CollectiveAction #HumanConnection #SystemicChange #CompassionateLiving #DigitalDetox

I need to follow more interesting people. Any recommendations?

I'm interested in #Tech, #monopolies, #UKPolitics, #socialism, #Sociology, #SocialJustice, #restorativejustive, #pacifism, #geopolitics, #HumanRights, #migrantRights, #Palestine, #economics, #MMT, #Philosophy, #Realism, #leftism, #nonviolence, #psychology, #management, #systemsdesign, #unions, #WorkerRights, #solidarity, #intersectionality, #history, #heterodox views, anti-#techhype etc. and probably a fair few other things.

🙏