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"The combination of software and IP in every device is a sea-change for the organization of our society. As firms have become increasingly concentrated - as monopolies have emerged in every sector - they have also figured out how to infuse their products with just enough software that they can invoke IP to control their competitors, critics, and customers. These are market power monopolies backstopped by creators' monopolies, which create IP rights that supercharge their market power."

"What the apps have done, instead of competing to serve customers and restaurants, is use Wall Street money to accumulate market power, raise barriers to entry, and then merge with each other and set up regional monopolies.The people who have invested tens of billions of dollars in the four dominant delivery apps tolerate huge short-term losses purely because they see the likelihood of monopoly power"

"Although you'd never guess it from mainstream media, the most significant antitrust case in more than 20 years is under way in Washington. In it, the US justice department, alongside the attorneys general of eight states, is suing Google for abusively monopolising digital advertising technologies, thereby subverting competition through "serial acquisitions" and anti-competitive auction manipulation. Or, to put it more prosaically, arguing that Google - which has between 90% and 95% of the search market - has maintained its monopoly not by making a better product, but by locking down almost every avenue through which consumers might find a different search engine and making sure they only see Google wherever they look."

"Goodreads stagnates even as its near-monopoly persists, a wedding of the worst excesses of online commenting, fiction fandom and tech-biz social engineering. The lies, the insecure hatereaders, the impassive tolerance of toxic behavior-all are brought to bear, without mercy, on authors at the precarious margins of career security. And after all that, it's all but useless as a discovery service. At The New Stateman, Sarah Manavis hopes that its "reign of terror" will soon come to an end."

"On the other hand, users (as distinct from developers) are about to see an upside of Apple's monopoly power. The next update of its mobile operating system, iOS14, includes a change that should have a dire impact on many online advertisers. The industry assigns a unique code to each device called an IDFA. Knowing your IDFA can help advertisers tell whether their ads are effective, particularly when they've shown you the same ad in multiple places. Facebook uses the IDFA as part of Audience Network, its ad network for developers."

"One of the problems with The Social Dilemma is that it supposes that tech did what it claims it did - that these are actually such incredible geniuses that they figured out how to use machine learning to control minds. And that's the problem - the mind control thing they designed to sell you fidget spinners got hijacked to make your uncle racist. But there's another possibility, which is that their claims are rubbish. They just overpromised in their sales material, and that what actually happened with that growth of monopolies and corruption in the public sphere made people cynical, angry, bitter and violent. In which case the problem isn't that their tools were misused. The problem is that the structures in which those tools were developed are intrinsically corrupt and corrupting."

"A new regime of interoperability can revitalize competition in the space, encourage innovation, and give users more agency over their data; it may also create new risks to user privacy and data security. This paper considers those risks and argues that they are outweighed by the benefits. New interoperability, done correctly, will not just foster competition, it can be a net benefit for user privacy rights."