Digital sovereignty can’t be bargained away

The European Commission has tools, public support and a mandate to act on Big Tech. Trading that away for short-term calm would be a costly mistake.

Davos 2026: Special address by Mark Carney, PM of Canada

Canadian PM Mark Carney stressed the end of the rules-based international order and urged middle powers to act together to counter the great power rivalry.

Google’s Chrome Antitrust Paradox

This Article examines Google’s dominance of the browser market, highlighting how Google’s Chrome browser plays a critical role in reinforcing Google’s dominance in other markets. While Google portrays Chrome as a neutral platform built on open-source technologies, this Article shows that Chrome is, in fact, instrumental in Google’s strategy to reinforce its dominance in the online advertising, publishing, and browser markets. The examination of Google’s strategic acquisitions, anticompetitive practices, and the implementation of so-called “privacy controls” underlines that Chrome is far from a neutral gateway to the web. Rather, it serves as a key tool for Google to maintain and extend its market power, often to the detriment of competition and innovation in the digital economy.This Article illustrates how Chrome not only bolsters Google’s position in online advertising and publishing through practices such as coercion and self-preferencing, but also leverages its advertising clout to engage in a “pay-to-play” paradigm—the cornerstone of Google’s larger strategy of market control. It also outlines potential regulatory interventions and remedies by drawing on historical antitrust precedents. Lastly, this Article proposes a triad of solutions motivated by an analysis of Google’s abuse of Chrome, including behavioral remedies targeting specific anticompetitive practices, structural remedies involving an internal separation of Google’s divisions, and divestiture of Chrome from Google into an independent organization.Despite Chrome’s dominance and its critical role in Google’s ecosystem, as well as its recent legal troubles with the Department of Justice, it so far has avoided significant antitrust action. A key reason for this inaction lies in the long-standing precedent supporting the hegemony of technology firms and the uncertainty surrounding Chrome’s viability as a standalone entity. This Article attempts to address these issues to enable antitrust actions that are essential in remedying current market imbalances. Such actions are also critical to mitigate future threats to competition from an increasingly monopolistic technology landscape, thereby fostering a competitive digital environment that promotes innovation and protects consumer interests.

News: WHAT open mailing list announcement — WHATWG

The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT): Cooperative governance for network innovation, standards, and community

A PDF version of this book is available for free in open access via www.tandfebooks.com as well as the OAPEN Library platform, www.oapen.org. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license and is part of the OAPEN-UK research project. This book traces the history and development of a mutual organization in the financial sector called SWIFT, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication. Over the last forty years, SWIFT has served the financial services sector as proprietary communications platform, provider of products and services, standards developer, and conference organizer ("Sibos"). Founded to create efficiencies by replacing telegram and telex (or ‘wires’) for international payments, SWIFT now forms a core part of the financial services infrastructure. It is widely regarded as the most secure trusted third party network in the world serving 212 countries and over 10,000 banking organizations, securities institutions and corporate customers. Through every phase of its development, SWIFT has maintained the status of industry cooperative thus presenting an opportunity to study broader themes of globalization and governance in the financial services sector. In this book the authors focus on how the design and current state of SWIFT was influenced by its historical origins, presenting a comprehensive account in a succinct form which provides an informative guide to the history, structure, activities and future challenges of this key international organization. This work will be of great interest to students and scholars in a wide range of fields including IPE, comparative political economy, international economics, business studies and business history.

Position Paper for the W3C Workshop on Web Applications and Compound Documents

This document represents the consensus opinion of the Mozilla Foundation and Opera Software in the context of standards for Web Applications and Compound Documents.

There Are No Standards Police

No one requires tech companies or open source projects to use most Internet standards, and no one requires people to use them either. This post explains why the voluntary nature of its standards are critical to the Internet's health.

The Routledge Handbook of Cooperative Economics and Management

Cooperatives have spread across virtually all continents. Today, the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA) recognises over 3 million cooperatives with 1 billion cooperative members or about 12% of the human population and serving many more members of the public, collectively owning trillions in assets. This handbook provides a comprehensive introduction to the subject and the current state of affairs with regard to the study of cooperation in the economy generally and of the cooperative and related sectors particularly. It highlights the essential issues and debates; provides a future research agenda, outlining the distinctions and similarities between individual and (inter)organisational cooperation; and explores the connections of cooperative economics and management to fundamental ethical principles. This book examines coopetition and the similarities and differences between competitive economics and cooperative economics, identifying to what extent and how cooperative economics and management are more capable of addressing the problems of global neoliberalism, such as ecological collapse, wealth inequity, value capture, and distribution, including via online platforms and social/relational problems. This book offers a variety of new research and theory‑building from various disciplines, particularly focusing on the fields of economics and management but extending beyond these disciplines to domains such as sociology, psychology, anthropology, and political science. It will become the standard reference work for not only a broad and large audience of scholars, researchers, and students but also interested professionals, policymakers, regulators, and cooperators in the field wishing to orient themselves in a global, rapidly developing movement and field of study with reference to issues of producing and allocating resources and focusing on the impact of cooperation on issues like risk, trust, the development of preferences, institutional governance, networks, and inequity. The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license. The handbook has received an Honorable Mention for the Joyce Rothschild book prize.

Mistral CEO: AI companies should pay a content levy in Europe

A revenue-based charge would protect the livelihoods of copyright holders and bring legal certainty

How Wikipedia Can Save the Internet With Advertising

Robin Berjon explores how principled advertising on Wikipedia could fund a democratic digital future.

The Dispersion of Power: A Critical Realist Theory of Democracy

Abstract The Dispersion of Power is an urgent call to rethink centuries of conventional wisdom about what democracy is, why it matters, and how to make it better. Drawing from history, social science, psychology, and critical theory, it explains why elections do not and cannot realize the classic ideal of popular rule, and why prevailing strategies of democratic reform often make things worse. Instead, Bagg argues, we should see democracy as a way of protecting public power from capture—an alternative vision that is at once more realistic and more inspiring. Despite their many shortcomings, real-world elections do prevent the most extreme forms of tyranny, and are therefore indispensable. In dealing with the vast inequalities that remain, however, we cannot rely on standard solutions such as electoral reform, direct democracy, deliberation, and participatory governance. Instead, Bagg shows, protecting and enriching democracy requires addressing underlying inequalities of power directly. In part, this entails substantive policies attacking the advantages of wealthy elites. Even more crucially, deepening democracy requires the organization of oppositional, countervailing power among ordinary people. Neither task is easy, but historical precedents exist in both cases—and if democracy is to survive contemporary crises, leaders and citizens alike must find ways to revive and reinvent these essential democratic practices for the twenty-first century.

“We need to reinvent the co-op” – Writings and rehearsals by Nathan Schneider

Originally published by Vanderbilt Divinity School’s Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice in a series on “Cooperatives and Religious Communities.”

Analysis | Google’s AI pointed him to a customer service number. It was a scam.

There’s a new AI twist on a travel scam that has fooled people for years. Here’s what you need to know.

Google’s AI Overviews Can Scam You. Here’s How to Stay Safe

Beyond mistakes or nonsense, deliberately bad information being injected into AI search summaries is leading people down potentially harmful paths.

Google Search is now using AI to replace headlines

Let us know if you see more.

Transmutations

We know from experience and empirical analysis that open source and open standards projects drift into oligarchies that struggle to reform themselves and become ossified. Often, we can simply let them die and replace them with fresher alternatives, but when that's a costly option we can learn from theoretical models of institutional change to understand how to compost the oligarchy and regrow the project from within.