#monopolies — Public Fediverse posts on home.social

Ramesh Gupta @[email protected] · 2026-09-09 · 10:06 UTC

#Democracy is incompatible with unrestrained #capitalism. #Monopolies powered the #Nazi war machine 85 years ago.

General public knows that #CorporatePower is a big, rising, and terrifying problem. But regulators don't seem to know what corporate power is.

On #antitrust, the #EU buckled to #US under both #GeorgeBush (#Microsoft breakup) and #GeorgeWBush (#GE #Honeywell merger).

Now a new revolt against monopolization is brewing in #Europe.

#NewCompetitionSchool

https://www.brusselstimes.com/eu-scream-podcast/2308831/ep-133-how-the-eu-learned-to-love-the-chicago-school

#democracy #capitalism #monopolies #nazi #corporatepower #antitrust

Ramesh Gupta @[email protected] · 2026-09-09 · 10:06 UTC

#Democracy is incompatible with unrestrained #capitalism. #Monopolies powered the #Nazi war machine 85 years ago.

General public knows that #CorporatePower is a big, rising, and terrifying problem. But regulators don't seem to know what corporate power is.

On #antitrust, the #EU buckled to #US under both #GeorgeBush (#Microsoft breakup) and #GeorgeWBush (#GE #Honeywell merger).

Now a new revolt against monopolization is brewing in #Europe.

#NewCompetitionSchool

https://www.brusselstimes.com/eu-scream-podcast/2308831/ep-133-how-the-eu-learned-to-love-the-chicago-school

#newcompetitionschool #europe #honeywell #georgewbush #georgebush #us

Ramesh Gupta @[email protected] · 2026-09-09 · 10:06 UTC

#Democracy is incompatible with unrestrained #capitalism. #Monopolies powered the #Nazi war machine 85 years ago.

General public knows that #CorporatePower is a big, rising, and terrifying problem. But regulators don't seem to know what corporate power is.

On #antitrust, the #EU buckled to #US under both #GeorgeBush (#Microsoft breakup) and #GeorgeWBush (#GE #Honeywell merger).

Now a new revolt against monopolization is brewing in #Europe.

#NewCompetitionSchool

https://www.brusselstimes.com/eu-scream-podcast/2308831/ep-133-how-the-eu-learned-to-love-the-chicago-school

#democracy #capitalism #monopolies #nazi #corporatepower #antitrust

Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹 @[email protected] · 2026-08-08 · 22:38 UTC

"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
(...)
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

#capitalism #openweb #bigtech #publicinfrastructures #antitrust #monopolies

Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹 @[email protected] · 2026-06-19 · 23:04 UTC

"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

#annasarchive #copyright #ip #piracy #monopolies #rentism

Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹 @[email protected] · 2026-04-17 · 22:37 UTC

"In recent weeks, Amazon has changed how it pays out seller earnings and collects payments for its advertising services. The company then announced it would start charging merchants a 3.5% fuel surcharge to offset surging oil prices from the Iran war.

To some sellers, the moves represent another example of Amazon putting the squeeze on them.

“We’re running out of f---ing margin,” said Michael Patrón, who runs an eight-figure Amazon business and frequently criticizes the company’s policies on his X account. “I think that’s why it keeps getting more and more frustrating.”

Patrón and hundreds of large Amazon sellers are boycotting its advertising platform on Wednesday to protest the recent policy changes that are strangling their already stretched bottom lines.

The 24-hour advertising boycott is being organized by Million Dollar Sellers, a community of more than 700 members that collectively generate about $14 billion in revenue.

“Sellers have complained for years, but this feels different,” MDS co-founder Eugene Khayman said in a post on X about the boycott. “The reason is simple: this is no longer just about irritation. It is about cash extraction.”"

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/15/amazon-sellers-boycott-ads-payment-changes.html

#Amazon #USA #BigTech #Monopolies #Rentism

#amazon #usa #bigtech #monopolies #rentism

Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹 @[email protected] · 2026-04-12 · 14:41 UTC

"In 2023, the city of Evanston, Illinois raised its ambulance fee from $1500 to $2000, with a $15 mileage charge tacked on. Like many municipalities, city officials and taxpayers have gotten used to ever-increasing prices for basic services, all bucketed under the “cost of living” crisis we’re dealing with. In fact, yesterday the Michigan University consumer sentiment indicator hit the worst reading it has ever recorded, going all the way back to 1961. The endless increases in prices for all sorts of random necessities is a key reason.

But these cost hikes don’t just ‘happen,’ as if it’s some sort of natural event. Markets are a function of law. There are companies and dealers and financiers behind every industry, so we can actually try to understand why they are happening. In this case, Evanston chalked up the hike to, among other things, the increasing of “cost of equipment and vehicles used for emergency responses.” The ambulance market, once a decentralized set of family owned firms, has been rolled up into a consolidated industry run by private equity. And the price hikes followed.

This story isn’t unusual. In early 2025, BIG traced a roll-up of fire trucks and fire apparatus, leading to a crisis in that sector. It turns out that something similar seems to have happened here, with some of the same players."

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/code-red-why-your-city-cant-affordor?r=3pbdu&utm_medium=ios&shareImageVariant=split&triedRedirect=true

#USA #Emergency #Ambluances #Monopolies #Rentism #PrivateEquities

#usa #emergency #ambluances #monopolies #rentism #privateequities

KulturKarte @[email protected] · 2026-04-07 · 09:45 UTC

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

#servus #maiz #technology #sourdough #migrazine #presentation

Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹 @[email protected] · 2026-03-15 · 12:42 UTC

So-called "artists" in favor of monopoly rights and endless rent extraction. What else is new?

"Every invention has brought predictions of copyright’s demise: the daguerreotype, the phonograph, radio, cassettes, home video and the internet. All those predictions were premature, and Britain’s soft power flourished as a result.

A belief has taken hold that progress can’t happen without the abolition of some of our oldest rights. That it’s only theft when individuals steal. That corporations don’t steal, they innovate. If you believe all this, you might as well stock your bookshelves with fantasy."

https://www.ft.com/content/48532284-9244-4ee6-be46-f3bde22b7232

#AI #GenerativeAI #AITraining #Copyrght #Monopolies #Rentism #RentExtraction

#ai #generativeai #aitraining #copyrght #monopolies #rentism

Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹 @[email protected] · 2025-12-02 · 11:47 UTC

"Prices have been rising across the economy in ways that are both visible and opaque. There are short-term drivers of inflation due to President Trump’s mismanagement of the economy. But the deeper drivers result from the degradation of capitalism.

For example, the lethal combination of digital technology and tech monopolies picks your pocket in countless ways. Instead of technical advances leading to greater convenience and lower cost, as they logically should, they create strategies for opportunistic price hikes.

When Amazon uses its deep knowledge of consumer preferences to rig markets and undermine competitors, higher prices are passed along. When HP makes it illegal or impossible for consumers to use cheaper non-HP cartridges in their printers, it can charge exorbitant prices. If you are prohibited from repairing your own car or your own iPhone, or as a farmer, prohibited from saving seed for next year’s planting, that invites monopoly profits built on higher prices. Costs rise because the rules are rigged.

It isn’t just the increasing cost of health insurance, but the tax on your time when a health system of byzantine complexity requires you to waste hours to get a simple referral or get a claim paid. Middlemen and algorithms, both in the business of denying claims, are a direct cost to the system and a source of rising out-of-pocket prices to patients. If insurance doesn’t pay, you do. These middlemen also function as a drain on doctor time and thus a tax on doctors’ incomes, as well as a debasement of medical services

In this special issue of the Prospect, we take stock of several hidden drivers of rising costs. David Dayen explores all the ways that technology allows sellers of any product that uses the internet to take advantage of surveillance capitalism to personalize prices and charge more than the market price..."

https://prospect.org/2025/12/01/sources-of-americas-hidden-inflation/

#USA #Rentism #Inflation #Economy #PoliticalEconomy #Monopolies #Antitrust #Oligopolies #IP #Competition

#usa #rentism #inflation #economy #politicaleconomy #monopolies

Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹 @[email protected] · 2025-11-25 · 21:50 UTC

"To address this problem, Amin called for a process of delinking, which for him contains two key elements:

1) Delink from exploitation by the imperial core. Southern states should end dependence on imports from the core, and end dependence on imperial capital and core currencies, in order to build economic sovereignty and mitigate unequal exchange. Note that Amin was not calling for autarky or isolation; on the contrary, he actively encouraged South-South cooperation and trade as a tactic for overcoming imperial dependencies.

2) Delink from the capitalist law of value. Under capitalism, production is organised around whatever is most profitable to capital (largely, foreign capital). In the South, capital prefers to exploit cheap labour in global supply chains than to invest in technological innovation and industrial upgrading. This inhibits development. Southern governments must overcome this and align production to a new law of value: human needs and national development.

How can delinking be achieved in the 21st century? Some basic principles include the following:

A first step is to reduce imports from the core. This can be achieved by reducing unnecessary imports (luxury goods, etc), while substituting necessary imports where possible with domestic production, or through South-South trade, ideally using swap lines to trade goods outside the US dollar or Euro. Taking this step reduces pressure for exports to the core (and reduces the need for core currencies), and therefore reduces exposure to unequal exchange.

These options are increasingly available to Southern countries now because of China."

https://jasonhickel.substack.com/p/what-is-delinking

#Delinking #PoliticalEconomy #Imperialism #Capitalism #LawOfValue #EconomicSovereignty #Monopolies

#delinking #politicaleconomy #imperialism #capitalism #lawofvalue #economicsovereignty

Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹 @[email protected] · 2025-11-16 · 13:48 UTC

"Why do these solutions fall so short? Because many of these copyright lawsuits, licensing solutions and digital replica rights are Trojan horses, inside of which sits big content. The Copyright Alliance, an influential non-profit advocating for the interests of the “copyright community”, argues for strong copyright solutions to generative AI. While it claims to “advocate for individual creators”, its board of directors is stacked with industry executives from media giants such as Paramount, NBC Universal, Disney and Warner Bros.

But why all the fanfare of coalition-building when the entertainment industry could just quietly pocket billions in deals with tech companies? Because big content needs artists. Its media empires need artists’ labour to profit, its lobbying needs artist support to seem legitimate and its new AI business partners need artists’ art.

This fact points to a strategy that entertainment executives fear far more than AI, one that would empower artists to challenge the status quo across big content and big tech: organised labour. Unionised creative workers, such as those in the Writers Guild and Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, have secured meaningful protections against AI through strikes and collective bargaining. Copyright is a tool too antiquated, too static and too indelicate to bear the task of deciding the future of an already precarious creative labour force. If big content truly cared about protecting artists from AI, it would stop trying to sell their voices as training data and start listening to them."

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/nov/15/big-content-ai-entertainment-media-conglomerates-tech

#AI #GenerativeAI #BigContent #BigTech #Monopolies #Copyright #IP #IntellectualMonopolies #Rentism

#ai #generativeai #bigcontent #bigtech #monopolies #copyright

Strypey @[email protected] · 2025-11-06 · 22:03 UTC

"Such poor performance leads MacCulloch to ask a provocative and essential question: how is it possible that these executives are 'so incompetently useless they can’t make a buck even when they have no competition?'. He notes that it is difficult to find another developed country where multiple virtual monopolies are effectively 'run at a loss' in terms of shareholder value ..."

#BryceEdwards, 2025

https://theintegrityinstitute.substack.com/p/integrity-briefing-are-business-leaders

(1/2)

#monopolies #MarketFailure

#bryceedwards #monopolies #marketfailure

Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow – No trackers, no ads. Black type, white background. Privacy policy: we don't collect or retain any data at all ever period. [Unofficial] @[email protected] · 2025-11-06 · 12:57 UTC

Pluralistic: The 40-year economic mistake that let Google conquer (and enshittify) the world (06 Nov 2025)

https://web.brid.gy/r/https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/06/vertical-blinds/

#uncategorized #adtech #alineblankertz #antitrust #briannarock #chicagoschooleconomics

Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow – No trackers, no ads. Black type, white background. Privacy policy: we don't collect or retain any data at all ever period. [Unofficial] @[email protected] · 2025-11-06 · 12:57 UTC

Pluralistic: The 40-year economic mistake that let Google conquer (and enshittify) the world (06 Nov 2025)

https://web.brid.gy/r/https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/06/vertical-blinds/

#uncategorized #adtech #alineblankertz #antitrust #briannarock #chicagoschooleconomics

Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow – No trackers, no ads. Black type, white background. Privacy policy: we don't collect or retain any data at all ever period. [Unofficial] @[email protected] · 2025-11-06 · 12:57 UTC

Pluralistic: The 40-year economic mistake that let Google conquer (and enshittify) the world (06 Nov 2025)

https://web.brid.gy/r/https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/06/vertical-blinds/

#uncategorized #adtech #alineblankertz #antitrust #briannarock #chicagoschooleconomics

Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow – No trackers, no ads. Black type, white background. Privacy policy: we don't collect or retain any data at all ever period. [Unofficial] @[email protected] · 2025-11-06 · 12:57 UTC

Pluralistic: The 40-year economic mistake that let Google conquer (and enshittify) the world (06 Nov 2025)

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/06/vertical-blinds/

#verticalmergers #scholarship #predatoryacquisitions #nicholasshaxson #neoliberalism #monopolies

Techdirt [Unofficial] @[email protected] · 2025-11-03 · 13:28 UTC

Trump FCC Makes It Easier For Prison Phone Monopolies To Rip Off Inmate Families

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://www.techdirt.com/2025/11/03/trump-fcc-makes-it-easier-for-prison-phone-monopolies-to-rip-off-inmate-families/

#securus #brendancarr #families #fcc #monopolies #pricecaps