#monopolies — Public Fediverse posts

@sabrinkmann
#monopolies like the one you mentioned tend to zuck up everything while the #fedi, as I understand it, prefers to #federate and link instead. So, can't an actor provide a clickable, say matrix, handle? Has it to be mandatory? Has it to be a certain protocol? #AP? Or can there be #choice?

P.S.: auto-discovery via #webfinger / #RFC7033?

@sabrinkmann
#monopolies like the one you mentioned tend to zuck up everything while the #fedi, as I understand it, prefers to #federate and link instead. So, can't an actor provide a clickable, say matrix, handle? Has it to be mandatory? Has it to be a certain protocol? #AP? Or can there be #choice?

P.S.: auto-discovery via #webfinger / #RFC7033?

@sabrinkmann
#monopolies like the one you mentioned tend to zuck up everything while the #fedi, as I understand it, prefers to #federate and link instead. So, can't an actor provide a clickable, say matrix, handle? Has it to be mandatory? Has it to be a certain protocol? #AP? Or can there be #choice?

P.S.: auto-discovery via #webfinger / #RFC7033?

@sabrinkmann
#monopolies like the one you mentioned tend to zuck up everything while the #fedi, as I understand it, prefers to #federate and link instead. So, can't an actor provide a clickable, say matrix, handle? Has it to be mandatory? Has it to be a certain protocol? #AP? Or can there be #choice?

P.S.: auto-discovery via #webfinger / #RFC7033?

@sabrinkmann
#monopolies like the one you mentioned tend to zuck up everything while the #fedi, as I understand it, prefers to #federate and link instead. So, can't an actor provide a clickable, say matrix, handle? Has it to be mandatory? Has it to be a certain protocol? #AP? Or can there be #choice?

P.S.: auto-discovery via #webfinger / #RFC7033?

"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

Sourdough #6 Drafting Hope, Creating Counter-Narratives with migrazine and maiz / magazine presentation

Raumschiff, Friday, April 24 at 05:00 PM GMT+2

Sourdough #6 (magazine presentation) 
Drafting Hope, Creating Counter-Narratives                                                                                                                                                                                                                               with migrazine and maiz

When: Friday, 24th April, 17:00–19:30
Where: Raumschiff, Pfarrplatz 18, 4020 Linz

In this gathering we present the last issue of the online-magazine migrazine "Drafting Hope, Creating Counter-Narratives” in which we took part in search for models of life, community and values that promote the emancipation from technology monopolies as well as our capacity for a political digital engagement. Intervening with counter-narratives, creating alternative uses and spaces for technologies, as well as building relationships that inspire empathy and generosity were some of the forms of (re)existence in a hyper-digitalized life that we gathered to tackle this issue.

Together with the authors Aimilia Liountou and Mary Maggic we will go through two of the published texts: respectively, the sociopolitical development of emojis in the global cultural sphere, and “Workshopology” as practice and research methodology for artists and interdisciplinary collaborations.

We invite activists, authors, artists, editors and general public to an evening full of playful, creative exchange on hegemonic digital infrastructure and possible ways to overcome them - acknowledging our contradictions at hand. 

This event will be held in English.

About
Verein maiz: Autonomous Centre by and for migrant women founded in Linz in 1994. Our goal is to better the living and working situation of migrant women in Austria and to promote their political and cultural participation, as well as to transform the existing, unjust social conditions. https://maiz.at/de 

migrazine - Online Magazine by Migrant Women* for Everyone is a multilingual magazine and alternative media platform that deals with migration-related phenomena as well as socio-political issues. migrazine went online for the first time in 2009, published by maiz (Autonomous Centre by & for Migrant Women), born out of a desire to make critical migrant voices more audible in the media and to stand up against the clichéd portrayal of migrants. http://www.migrazine.at/ 

Verein maiz and migrazine will be represented by Lia Kastiyo-Spinósa and Rosi Grillmair.

Aimilia Liontou (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist, interested in the use of technology and its impact on the near future. In her artistic practice, she uses speculative scenarios as a means of investigating current realities and potential futures. By blending real facts with fantasy, she create projects that aim to question specific situations and encourage viewers to think for themselves, rather than suggesting specific solutions. Since May 2023 she is part of servus.at team. https://www.aimilialiontou.com

Mary Maggic (1991, Los Angeles) is an artist and researcher based in Vienna since 2017 whose practice revolves around workshopology as a shared process of amateurism and care that can collectively move us beyond pollution, planetary wounds, and grief. These workshopologies center ecological crisis as the starting point for embodying our permeability and vulnerability, informed by what our collectives and lands already know and feel. With this participatory practice, Maggic constantly searches for new embodied strategies for dissolving the boundaries between the personal and the planetary, and entering into new modalities of collective world-making. 

https://core.servus.at/en/projekt/sourdough/sourdough-6-drafting-hope-creating-counter-narratives

*Sourdough is funded by LINZimPULS.
poster: © Elizaveta Belkevich

https://kulturkarte.servus.at/event/sourdough-6-magazine-presentation-drafting-hope-creating-counter-narratives-with-migrazine-and-maiz

"The adtech problems drew a monopolization case, and Google lost that one too. And though the remedy is still to come, few think Google will be fundamentally restructured.

And that’s a tragedy, because the shift to AI is perhaps more significant than the shift to mobile. As with the early search market, there are several companies offering foundational AI services, like OpenAI, Microsoft, Perplexity, Anthropic, DeepSeek, and so forth. The two key resources determining which model wins are, same as search before, data and distribution.

Google, as you’d expect, is repeating its search monopolization playbook with Gemini. It is self-preferencing Gemini across its lines of business, which is what it did with Android and search. It is cutting deals to insert Gemini into every major retail channel, which is analogous to its payments to phone makers to thwart rival search engines. Then there’s its deal with Apple, which is virtually identical to what Judge Mehta found to be the original Apple-Google arrangement enabling the illegal monopolization of the search market.

Mehta’s failure to impose a remedy was permission for Google to repeat this scheme with generative AI. And now it has. This deal will ensure that Google’s artificial intelligence chatbot product will become dominant in the most important mobile ecosystem in the world. And its experience structuring adtech markets suggest that if it mediates the entire economy, many tradition businesses will wind up like newspapers, eliminated as Google appropriates profit margins for itself and destroys the ability of consumers to differentiate products based on quality, innovation or other values. It could be an extinction level event for many commercial areas, like the death of the open web, and a dramatic narrowing of consumer choice."

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/will-google-organize-the-worlds-prices

#Google #AI #LLMs #AISearch #PriceFixing #Monopolies #Oligopolies #Competition #Antitrust

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 -...

"Then, back lit, filling the saloon doors, amid swirling dust, staring down the debauch...comes Lina Khan."

https://3m.fyi/posts/the-redemption-of-lawyers/

#LinaKhan #CoryDoctorrow #Monopolies #lawyers #PowellMemo #PowellMemorandum #Bork #Nixon #Reagan #AntiTrust #Oligarchs #Oligarchy #Plutocrats #Plutocracy #Trump #Law #BreakEmUp #Litigate #democracy #FTC #Mamdani #Zoran #NYC

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/

...#thepeople have become so addicted to aggressive #consumption and so dependent on the mega monster #monopolies supplying their #addictions that they have forgotten how little they actually need and how much power they already possess within themselves to create what they need for themselves!

#wakeup now please. these "#machines" keep us embryonic to make us feel weak while feeding off our strenths to #empower only themselves.

#anticapitalism #anitconsumerism #thematrixisalie

Boot KP out of ALL their #monopolies!

#KingPower cites economic doldrums while #closing storefronts in 3 #Thai #airports
"Among te 7 issues was an apparent deviation from te terms of reference in the #contract btw King Power & #AOT due to a #government #policy shift in 2024, #duty reductions for wine, a lack of proactive state measures to bolster confidence for #Chinese #tourists, & a general #downturn in overall #tourism. Admitting to a lack of confidence in persisting"
https://www.bangkokpost.com/business/general/3049031/king-power-cites-economic-doldrums-while-closing-storefronts-in-3-thai-airports

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.

🙏

Lots of #BannedBooks and #OutOfPrintBooks on the #InternetArchive. This isn't about #copyright -- this is about #censorship! There are only FIVE major publishers in the US -- and they keep trying to merge to create even bigger #monopolies! Often, big publishing companies buy out #IndependentPublishers and #SmallPublishers, so they can stop printing their books!

#Books #Corporations #Monopoly #Censorship #Copyright #History #Culture #Libraries #DigitalLibraries #ProgressivePublishers #IA