I have been blogging very little, as I have been swamped with a big and exciting work project. As the peak effort on that is now past, I look forward to writing more on Continuations again, as well as taking another turn revising my book The World After Capital. In the meantime, here are some observations on the most recent iteration of the debate around regulating large tech companies generally, the role of Section 230 specifically and how these relate to speech on the Internet. Topics that ...

Twitter is banning political ads. This is Jack sticking it to Mark while the latter is on the ropes in a one-two punch including a jab against Libra. This mast feel like sweet revenge for the many ways Facebook has messed with Twitter over the years including snatching Instagram. But is it the right thing to do? Not running paid political adds is a self-imposed behavioral remedy, the way traditional antitrust regulators would impose on monopolies. A behavioral remedy requires or forbids some ...

Here we are again in 2019 debating speech online and specifically the case of Facebook. Zuckerberg speaks at Georgetown trying to invoke the civil rights movement and to draw a sharp distinction to China. Warren quickly fires back on Twitter. Pundits everywhere weigh in. And yet hardly anyone gets to the heart of the matter: power. And those who are mostly stuck in industrial age thinking recommending a traditional antitrust approach to limiting power. Here are the two big traps people appear...

Today we announced that we have joined the Libra Association, the governance for a global stable coin. Nick has written a post on the USV blog explaining our decision. I have argued before that we don’t really know what path will take us to a decentralized future and therefore have to try many things. Some of these paths involve centralized corporations exposing their endusers to crypto. Nobody has more users than Facebook! There is a historic analogy here to when Microsoft released Internet ...

One thing I have learned in over 2 decades of working with startups is that you can learn the most about a leader from the organization that they build. Over time, especially if not checked by a capable board, the organization will come to reflect the strengths and weaknesses of the leader(s). There is a great German saying “Der Fisch stinkt vom Kopf” – “The fish stinks from the head.” The origin of this saying is that a fish’s brain is the most fragile part of the body and when a fish has be...

Facebook is in the unique position today to face both the problems of centralization and decentralization. On its centralized core platform it is confronted with making content decisions, while on WhatsApp it struggles with slowing down the spread of rumors and calls for violence. Just to be clear, I have no sympathy for Facebook which has been arrogant about these issues and has put growth above anything else. Nonetheless everyone who is building new decentralized platforms would do well to ...

The Zuckerberg hearings were predictably pretty weak. First, the format does not lend itself to a deeper inquiry on a complex topic. Whenever someone seemed close to getting somewhere, the next questioner would take it somewhere else (or weirdly start over). Second, the politicians asking the questions appeared for the most part not to have a super deep understanding themselves which means they stick to the questions prepared by their staff even when an answer provides a small opening that th...

When #DeleteUber was a trending hashtag it was relatively easy for people to take action in those cities where Lyft, MyTaxi or some other service was available. Even if you didn’t delete the Uber app outright, you could move it a screen back or so and default to another provider. Such is the power of competition. The brief #DeleteFacebook run was a different story. There is no obvious other place to go (and please don’t say WhatsApp, as that’s Facebook also). The network effect in social is m...

At the end of last week Facebook announced that it would stop having humans write summaries of trending news stories. This follows previous allegations that the selection of trending stories had been changed to remove conservative ones. This is a good time to revisit some foundational questions about the spread of information in a digital world. First, it is too easy for information cascades to occur. It takes much less effort to like, share, retweet than it does to read, think and possibly e...

A couple of days have passed since the news of the monster acquisition of WhatsApp by Facebook broke. More people have written about it already than I can possibly link to so I won’t even try. My immediate reaction just based on financial metrics was that Facebook massively overpaid but I wasn’t sure about the strategic side. Having had some time to think about that I am now convinced that this deal makes no sense. Why? Because phone number based messenger apps can bootstrap very rapidly off ...