#monopolies — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #monopolies, aggregated by home.social.
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@Powerfromspace1 it's called "#Competition instead of #Monopolies", but #Europe has been a little slow to wake up 💤
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"Last year, Jenkins published Music Copyright, Creativity, and Culture, an Oxford University Press title that fuses her scholarly and popular work in a generalist textbook on the legal framework for music that will forever change how you think about music. Now, a second edition, with a lengthy section on new music litigation, AI copyright fights, and the issue of uncompensated labor is available as an open access download:
https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/musiccopyright/
Music Copyright weaves together the economic, cultural, political and artistic history of music, pulling on historic threads ranging from antiquity to medieval Europe to the age of mechanical reproduction to describe changing views of musicians, their audiences, and religious and political leaders on what constituted music, who was allowed to make music, and what music was for. In so doing, she firmly establishes the extremely contingent nature of our present-day norms around music, showing that the "natural" present-day assumptions about who gets paid, who pays, and when payment (or permission) is required are anything but, and are always in flux.
For obvious reasons, much of Jenkins' text describes these changes in the context of the record, the radio, satellite transmission, P2P file-sharing, and digital sampling (along with a chapter on AI). These examples are liberally illustrated with links to musical excerpts that bring the subject to life (these are presented as hotlinks in the ebook; if you're reading the print edition, you can use the book's companion website:)"
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How hospital monopolies are driving up the cost of your health care - The Washington Post
https://archive.ph/BX72C -
"If I want to make myself really angry about the enshittified state of the internet, I don’t fume over pages of slop-drenched, spam-drowned Google results; nor about the fake-review garlanded sub-Temu garbage on Amazon. I don’t even rage against Elon Musk’s child porn–choked, bot-infested Twitter.
No, when I want to get good and apoplectic about the internet, I think about policymakers. Specifically, I think about all the policymakers I’ve met and corresponded with and begged with and pleaded with and raged against in my twenty-five years with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
These policymakers are the true authors of our misery. It was they who made decisions that had the foreseeable and foreseen outcome of ushering in the enshittocene, this era in which all of our technology is turning into shit. The thing is, we told them exactly what would happen if they made those policy blunders, and they made them anyway, and now they walk among us, disclaiming any responsibility for systematically rigging the game so that the worst people with the worst ideas make the most money.
It’s as though we used to put down rat poison, and we didn’t have a rat problem, and then these guys told us that we had it all wrong and we didn’t need the rat poison after all. Now, rats are eating our faces off, and these guys refused to accept that their pro-rat policies had anything to do with it. They say we’re living through the Time of the Rat, in which the great forces of history and the iron laws of economics have combined to create rats of unheard-of fecundity. When we point out the rats have bought and shuttered the rat poison factories, they get defiant
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For decades, we allowed companies like Google and Facebook and Amazon to violate competition law. We let them buy their major competitors...https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/what-was-the-internet/
#Capitalism #OpenWeb #BigTech #PublicInfrastructures #Antitrust #Monopolies #Oligopolies
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Grocery prices are up 33% in the past seven years.
#monopolies -
Digital sovereignty and the AI narrative
Cory Doctorow thinks tech executives' story about AI is not an inevitability
"Bubbles are really evil. They transfer money from everyday savers to insiders who lie about market opportunities. And those everyday savers are just trying to avoid like, being homeless and starving to death in their old age."
"We have to really be focused on that fine distinction because it is in that distinction that the narrative that drives the investment, that drives the bubble, it's in that, that's where it lives."
"We live in an environment that is the end stage of 40 years of lax competition enforcement in which cartels, monopolies, and duopolies dominate most sectors of our economy. And they believe correctly that when there are fewer options to shop for, you can lower quality without losing sales because you're the only game in town. And so, in a world of statistical inference tools and monopolies, firing workers and replacing them with software to produce lower quality outputs, is not an unreasonable bet that you could make it work, but there's nothing inevitable about it."
"If Donald Trump turned off all of our chatbots tomorrow, what would change? Which government ministry would be unable to do his job? Which important firm would go out of business?" >>
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-08/cory-doctorow-on-the-ai-bubble-and-inevitability/106982988
#technology #AI #DigitalSovereignty #finance #markets #ToxicAssets #bubble #narrative #DeepSeek #Mastodon #Sovereignty #InternetCultures #monopolies #governance -
"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:
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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
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Radio workers hope to resurrect stations axed by Big Media
Co-op ownership might prove a more sustainable model than corporate rapaciousness#Canada #cdnpoli #canadianmedia #radio #monopolies #oligopolies
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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.
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https://www.youtube.com/shorts/bb-5Kw30yaQ?is=8lTsmc-ucwPdBfnv
#LizOyer #OyerLawyer #ToddBlanche #DOJ #ConsumerProtection #Law #Justice #Politics #USA #tRump #Republicans #GOP #Congress #Activism #Protest #Election #Vote #Corruption #Grift #Lobbyists #Corporatocracy #Oligarchy #EatTheRich #Senate #Cronyism #Mergers #Maga #Affordability #AntiTrust #Monopolies #Enforcement #MikeDavis #RealEstate #Investigations #Tax #Corporate #Prices
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#BigTech #AI #TechBro companies crying to mommy to get the bad companies to stop (maybe) using their models' output for training is now a standard play from the #monopolies and wannabe monopolies.
If a (Chinese) company gets too good at doing what American companies do, then force an embargo or force a sell. It was the #Meta/#Facebook with #Tiktok play, and now it's the #LLM play.
If #scraping copyrighted works for training is legal, so is #distillation.
#Capitalists sure do hate #Capitalism.
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"37-39. Please stop seeing every precious and beautiful aspect of life on earth as a commodity to be controlled and exploited for wealth. Now, see, this is a tough one. It’s so tough that I’m giving it three entries. It’s tough because I know you know you fucked up. You’re aware that much of the world has soured on you. You’ve seen a fleet of headlines like “AI Companies Know They Have an Image Problem” and “AI Has a Message Problem.” You’re aware that the loathing people feel for AI is making them look again at the other products you’ve inserted into every corner of their lives and realize with fresh disgust the many, many ways in which those products represent broken promises. They don’t work as they’re supposed to. They make life more frustrating, stressful, competitive, and alienating rather than easier and more connected. You’re using them to spy on your customers, whom you view as vessels of monetizable data more than as people, and whom you hold in increasingly palpable contempt. You see that we see this, and you’re surely hard at work on ways to fix the problem.
But this is where things get tricky, because I don’t think you want to fix the problem, not really. I think that, to you, “fixing the problem” means fixing the image that conceals the problem. I think you want to keep doing all the same stuff while selling us a better story so that we’ll let you get away with it. And that doesn’t fix anything at all.
Because the truth is, tech doesn’t have an image problem. It doesn’t have a message problem. It has an intention problem."
https://www.theringer.com/2026/05/28/tech/pope-leo-xiv-ai-encyclical-tech-industry-problems
#BigTech #TechIndustry #Capitalism #Monopolies #Oligopolies #PopeLeon
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"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
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@karlbode.com This is straight up doublespeak. It will just be more media consolidation into the hands of billionaires resulting in high prices, more #monopolies, and far less competition.
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RE: https://masto.deoan.org/@jsonstein/116754340590435892
50+ years of deregulation means there is no entity or government agency that can protect us from price gouging. Remember how prices soared during COVID because of supply chain issues? I do.
And then when the supply chain issues smoothed over and returned to somewhat normal, did the prices coming back down? Nope. Companies now kept prices high because they could.
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🇨🇦 Canadians were promised the Rogers-Shaw deal would benefit all of us. 3 years in, Rogers is falling short on jobs, 5G, prices, and service.
💥 Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED) has done nothing! Tell Minister Joly to act on what the government promised.
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"The world has moved on. Nothing works. Everything costs too much. No one can help. No one knows how to fix anything. The beams were broken by the Crimson King and his economism-crazed minions. The Dark Tower might fall.
So what consumer advice do I have for people who are angry about this? I don't have any consumer advice, I'm afraid. You can't shop your way out of a monopoly. Once again, shopping is not politics.
What I have for you is political advice. To restore the beams and beat back entropy again, we need a better system, not more virtuous individuals. If you feel – as I do – that "the world has moved on," then to wrench it back, you will have to join a polity. Support activist groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the digital rights group I've been at for the past 25 years:
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Join a union. If there's no union at your jobsite, start a union. If you work in tech, you start this process by talking to techsolidarity.org and the techworkerscoalition.org.
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Get involved in party politics. Find a political party whose local organization supports your values (even if the national version of that party sucks) and then work with your fellow grassroots activists to drag or replace the party leaders. Get involved in local politics: if there's one thing Moms For Liberty has taught us, it's that unregarded, seemingly unimportant local offices have enormous potential to change facts on the ground for the people where you live. Those changes don't have to be change for the worse.Doing politics is hard. Hell, after all, is other people. It would be great if we could make change by changing ourselves, but that's not how any of this works. The world has moved on, and you can't save it. But together, we can restore the beams and beat back entropy. Hell is other people, but only because other people are so great but it's so hard to figure out how to work together. We can do it, though."
https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/11/lapsarianism/
#Politics #Oligopolies #Monopolies #Capitalism -
Demand Is Booming for New #NoTech, #Repairable #Tractor
"There is consumer pressure to back away from technology that is unnecessary to perform everyday tasks."
by Jason Koebler
Jun 3, 2026"The secondary market for decades old, low-tech #JohnDeereTractors has been booming for years as farmers have sought reliable tractors that they can actually fix without having to deal with John Deere’s repair monopoly. A Canadian company has seen that demand and came up with a radical thought: What if they made a new, repairable, 'no-tech' tractor to solve what has become a gigantic pain point for farmers?
"Alberta’s #UrsaAg says that it has been inundated with demand after announcing its tractor, which costs roughly half as much as a Deere and has the benefit of not being a repair nightmare. We have for years covered the frustration that farmers have felt as they have been locked out of their Deere tractors with digital rights management systems that prevent them from fixing their machinery, tractors that won’t run because of minor sensor failures, and crops that literally die on the vine as they wait for an 'authorized' repair person to fix tractors during critical harvesting periods.
"Ursa Ag markets its tractors as '#NoFrills' and 'built to last.' Ursa Ag’s Doug Wilson told me that the company designed the tractor because of a need in the marketplace for a new machine that isn’t loaded with tech and is easy to maintain. The company follows in the footsteps of consumer electronics companies like #Fairphone, which makes a repairable smartphone and #Framework, which makes modular, repairable #laptops. The demand Ursa Ag has seen is part of the backlash to manufacturer repair #monopolies and the injection of #technology and #InternetConnectedSensors and terms of use into even the most basic of gadgets.
" 'I talk to farmers every day and I hear from farmers every day about how they went out and bought machinery from 1987 so that it wouldn’t have a computer on it,' Wilson said. 'All of this came from a simple discussion with a customer who wanted to be able to turn [the tractor] on at the start of the day, to use it, and shut it off at the end of the day. It needed to work, so that’s what we built.'
"Ursa Ag’s tractor has been hyped in agriculture circles after Wilson showed the tractor off at a Canadian farm show and it was featured by Farms.com. Wilson said more than a thousand farmers have contacted him after that show, from roughly 30 countries. 'I got a handwritten letter from a farmer in France who doesn’t own a computer and wanted us to mail him information about the tractors,' he said."
Read more:
https://www.404media.co/demand-is-booming-for-ursa-ag-new-no-tech-repairable-tractor/ -
Canada Needs to Rebuild Public Telecoms
By Edgardo Sepulveda
#Canada #cdnpli #telecom #monopolies #oligopolies
https://jacobin.com/2026/06/canada-telecoms-infrastructure-public-ownership
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“…No one is able to access the unencrypted data without our authorisation.” https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jun/01/fcas-palantir-deal-could-expose-uk-financial-data-to-trumps-us-critics-fear
Why should any believe that authorisation won’t be given? Farage, is not the only one who is keen to collaborate with Trump. Many in the other parties would do so as well. #authorisation #surveillance #PoliceState #GDPR #weakLinks #Antitrust #monopolies
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“We can’t count on the US to help us tame Big Tech. The US is Big Tech. The roof isn’t leaking anymore. The roof has fallen in, and it’s time to move.
This isn’t all bad. All things being equal, it would be better if Putin had stayed out of Ukraine and if Trump had lost the 2024 election. But when life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla. Trump’s incontinent belligerence creates the conditions for the replacement of our old enshittified internet with a new, good internet. A post-American internet. That’s the internet that activists like me and EFF have been trying to build for decades ever since it became apparent that the old, good internet was gone. Swallowed by enshittifying monopolists.
We tried hard. We eked out some victories. But we were overmatched by the largest, most rapacious corporations to curse the Earth since the Hudson’s Bay Company. Today, we have new allies. Members of a coalition who have different motives and access to different levels of power but have a shared goal.
In all, Trump has summoned up three armies to fight for the post-American internet. The first army: digital civil society groups battling for privacy, consumer rights, and labour rights; for an end to the systematic program of worker misclassification and wage theft we call the gig economy; for the right to use the internet anonymously rather than having your data harvested in the name of age verification only to have it mobilized later by the next Viktor Orbán or Trump; for an end to Big Tech monopolies and their corrosive power over our democracies and lives.“
https://thewalrus.ca/the-internet-has-become-too-american-to-trust
#USA #BigTech #Trump #SocialMedia #DigitalRights #PoliticalEconomy #Monopolies #Oligopolies
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Barry C. Lynn, the mono-causal view of -monopolies as the root of all of the U.S.A.'s ills, and their prospects for driving the agenda of the Democratic party:
