Private monopolies are rightly criticized for being inefficient and unaccountable. But public monopolies are a different story — we should loudly and proudly say that democratically controlled public monopolies are a positive good.
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.
Private-sector Trumpism
Monopoly, facial recognition and property rights all add up to a private system of government.
The Game of Oligarchy | Brewster Kahle's Blog
I just invented and played a game today with my family, and it worked great– it was fun and we learned an important lesson. Similar to the game “Monopoly” which shows that one person ends up monopolizing even though you think the rules are “fair,” the game of Oligarchy shows that the “free market” leads inexorably to one person getting all the money and everyone else going broke. And fast.
Private Schools Are Bad for Society
The starting point for any honest discussion.
interfluidity » The great game of global public goods provision
War is bad. Excuses should not be made for it. All sides should work to end this and every war as quickly as possible and shift to modes of bargaining and competition that are not profoundly destructive.
The Myth of Capitalism Exposed
We need a revolution to cast off monopolies and restore entrepreneurial freedom. First of two excerpts from “The Myth of Capitalism.”
Platform Monopolies - AVC
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 New Utilities: Private Power, Social Infrastructure, and the Revival of the Public Utility Concept
From the renewed controversies over financial regulation and the problem of too-big-to-fail (TBTF) financial firms, to the clash over the FCC’s ‘net neutrality’
Net neutrality
When there is a structural reason consumers don’t have freedom of choice, and the free market can’t work, consumers need minimal protection from the government so that they don’t get abused. We...
The 'Digital Town Square' Problem
Privately owned public spaces like Twitter are often viewed as “public town squares.” But it's unclear exactly how private companies' influence on the so-called public spaces they control affects actual civic outcomes.
The Myth of Authoritarian Efficiency
When it comes to getting stuff done, democracies win every time.
Too much of a good thing
Profits are too high. America needs a giant dose of competition
Proprietary Software Giants Telling Us That “Open Source Has Won” Means That “Open Source” is Just Proprietary Software Giants
Don't fall for the deceitful illusion that monopolies hijacking what they've dubbed the
This misunderstands the role of private vs. public R&D. Private R&D is great but is connected to R&D tax exemptions, & often doesn't spill out into the public domain. There's a notion we can ramp federal R&D spending down & be competitive. We can’t & we shouldn’t. whitehouse.gov/releases/2026/07/45470/
OSTP Director Releases Landmark Report and Recommendations for Renewing American Scientific Discovery
www.whitehouse.govDo you mean “can the arts business model survive monopolies?” Half of the story here is of concentration of power in a quasi-monopsony (eg Spotify) and a de facto monopoly (LiveNation). That’s what’s actually killing the arts.
Joey Politano🏳️🌈
Can the arts business model survive AI? Perhaps the best guide is to look at how the arts survived past tech revolutions Take music—internet piracy and then streaming killed the lucrative CD market, but musicians mostly saved their jobs by focusing much more on live concerts
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-…
