There’s an article in the NY Times Sunday Business Section today that lays out a very important question we have all been dancing around but will increasingly be dealing with. The article is nominally about Amazon’s fight with Hachette but it is really about internet platforms and monopolies. The author of the NY Times piece […]
The politics of ‘platforms’ - Tarleton Gillespie, 2010
Online content providers such as YouTube are carefully positioning themselves to users, clients, advertisers and policymakers, making strategic claims for what ...
Opinion | The Monopolization of America (Published 2018)
In one industry after another, big companies have become more dominant over the past 15 years, new data show.
How One 1990s Browser Decision Created Big Tech’s Data Monopolies (And How We Might Finally Fix It) - Above the Law
From the take-back-control dept
Google, Facebook, and Amazon benefit from an outdated definition of “monopoly”
A few weeks ago, Italy fined Apple and Samsung €15 million for the “planned obsolescence” of their smartphones. The antitrust regulators allege that both companies pushed users to download software that slowed phone performance, forcing customers to buy replacement phones sooner.
Parting Clouds: Creating a Competitive Marketplace for Compute | Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project
The Canadian market for cloud computing is monopolized. In a new report, CAMP argues that the most effective response is to unleash competition through procurement, regulation, and competition law enforcement.
The Internet Economy
We are living in an era of bundling. The big five consumer tech companies — Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft — have moved far…
Leave big tech behind! How to replace Amazon, Google, X, Meta, Apple – and more
A handful of companies monopolise the web, with unprecedented access to our data. But there are many more ethical – and often distinctively European – alternatives
Stuck in the middleware with you: the challenges of capitalizing a market-oriented approach to platform governance
T1 - Stuck in the middleware with you: the challenges of capitalizing a market-oriented approach to platform governance
Facebook and the Cost of Monopoly
Facebook gave one of the worst keynotes in a long time: there was no vision, just the adoption of Snap’s. It’s the inevitable outcome of a monopoly.
Why Amazon Has No Profits (And Why It Works) | Andreessen Horowitz
Amazon has a tendency to polarize people. On one hand, there is the ruthless, relentless, ferociously efficient company that’s building the Sears Roebuck of the 21st Century. But on the other, there is the fact that almost 20 years after it was launched, it has yet to report a meaningful profit. This chart captures the...
Paywall violation ‘eviscerates’ fair use defense: What OpenAI-NYT twist means for publishers
The unsealed material could set a precedent that fuels more lawsuits against AI firms and strengthens publishers hand in licensing talks.
The politics of ‘platforms’
Online content providers such as YouTube are carefully positioning themselves to users, clients, advertisers and policymakers, making strategic claims for what they do and do not do, and how their place in the information landscape should be understood. One term in particular, ‘platform’, reveals the contours of this discursive work. The term has been deployed in both their populist appeals and their marketing pitches, sometimes as technical ‘platforms’, sometimes as ‘platforms’ from which to speak, sometimes as ‘platforms’ of opportunity. Whatever tensions exist in serving all of these constituencies are carefully elided. The term also fits their efforts to shape information policy, where they seek protection for facilitating user expression, yet also seek limited liability for what those users say. As these providers become the curators of public discourse, we must examine the roles they aim to play, and the terms by which they hope to be judged.
The strength of a monopoly can be guessed at by calling customer support
If you were an alien hovering above planet earth on a quick visit and trying to find out quickly which were its most dominant companies, you could probably do worse than try to reach their customer…
Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech
So I finally finished reading this and while I agree with the recommendation, I’m a little wary of some of the context it’s rooted in ideologically and I’m wondering if others have thoughts on these things. Equality in the marketplace I think the main problem with the text is that it relies heavily on the idea of “marketplace of ideas,” leaning heavily on the idea that protocols are actually good for markets specifically because they make competition more perfect (because there’s better knowled...
When (not if) the Tech Monopolies come for the Atmosphere, can we create the institutional structures to protect what we have? Right now we're nowhere near ready. No company harmed the web more than Google, not even close, while claiming to help which many believed. What can we learn and how fast?
kottke.org
“The Metric Is Not the Mission is a ten-part examination of how Big Tech moved from building and expanding the open internet to increasingly shaping it around its own metrics, incentives and assumptions.” techdirt.com/2026/09/21/the-metric-is-not-…
