Continuations

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 ...

The dominant position of companies such as Google, Facebook, Amazon is sure receiving a lot more attention these days. There is critical media coverage, including in traditionally pro business publications such as the Wall Street Journal “Can the Tech Giants Be Stopped?” and Bloomberg “Should America’s Tech Giants Be Broken Up?” There is also the Democratic Party’s “Better Deal” memo which focuses more broadly on the negative effects of corporate power. And then of course there is the Europea...

Yesterday, Google announced something stunning: free turn-by-turn directions for Android 2.0 to be first available shortly on the Droid phones. It is stunning because the previously cheapest software only alternatives were apps such as Navigon ($89.99) and TomTom ($99.99) for the iPhone (as an aside, stand alone GPS devices with turn-by-turn directions can now be found on Amazon for as little as $139 for a Garmin nuvi 260 and that’s after 2 seconds of looking). So here we have a case of Googl...

Yesterday the Republican-controlled Senate voted to allow ISPs to sell customer data including browsing history without prior customer consent. I tweeted that in response it is “Time to tunnel all home traffic through a proxy.” First let me explain for a less technical reader what that means. At the moment your ISP can see every web request you make. They can’t see inside encrypted requests and much of the web is encrypted these days (https versus http). But they can see whether you are going...