Dan Shipper 📧 on Twitter / X

The web can be weaponised – and we can't count on big tech to stop it | Tim Berners-Lee

It’s dangerous having a handful of companies control how ideas and opinions are shared. A regulator may be needed

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

The Internet Has Become Too American to Trust | The Walrus

Trump and Big Tech have fused into a new kind of threat

GDPR, China and data sovereignty are ultimately wins for Amazon and Google | TechCrunch

The Great Privacy Policy Email Deluge of 2018 may have finally petered out, but we are just starting to build an understanding of who the winners and

Facebook Data Privacy Scandal: A Cheat Sheet - TechRepublic

Read about the saga of Facebook's failures in ensuring privacy for user data, including how it relates to Cambridge Analytica, the GDPR, the Brexit campaign, and the 2016 US presidential election.

Custodians of the Internet

A revealing and gripping investigation into how social media platforms police what we post online—and the large societal impact of these decisions Most use...

Facebook-Cambridge Analytica: A timeline of the data hijacking scandal

Facebook is desperately trying to mend its damaged reputation following the continued fallout of a massive data scandal.

Who Even Cares About Data Ownership Anyway? - What The Function!?

Taking a look at a concept that's been talked a lot over the last few years, especially in the context of social media

Who Even Cares About Data Ownership Anyway? - What The Function!?

Taking a look at a concept that's been talked a lot over the last few years, especially in the context of social media

Tim Berners Lee: Thoughts On The Internet Evolution

"I’ve always believed the web is for everyone. That's why I and others fight fiercely to protect it."

Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future

"For all the informational convenience the internet offers, it is deeply flawed. How can it be improved? Writer Ben Tarnoff proposes one possibility in this intriguing book, which urges the development of 'a public lane on the information superhighway.' It's worth checking out for yourself." – Seth MacFarlane Why is the internet so broken, and what could ever possibly fix it? In Internet for the People, leading tech writer Ben Tarnoff offers an answer. The internet is broken, he argues, because it is owned by private firms and run for profit. Google annihilates your privacy and Facebook amplifies right-wing propaganda because it is profitable to do so. But the internet wasn't always like this—it had to be remade for the purposes of profit maximization, through a years-long process of privatization that turned a small research network into a powerhouse of global capitalism. Tarnoff tells the story of the privatization that made the modern internet, and which set in motion the crises that consume it today. The solution to those crises is straightforward: deprivatize the internet. Deprivatization aims at creating an internet where people, and not profit, rule. It calls for shrinking the space of the market and diminishing the power of the profit motive. It calls for abolishing the walled gardens of Google, Facebook, and the other giants that dominate our digital lives and developing publicly and cooperatively owned alternatives that encode real democratic control. To build a better internet, we need to change how it is owned and organized. Not with an eye towards making markets work better, but towards making them less dominant. Not in order to create a more competitive or more rule-bound version of privatization, but to overturn it. Otherwise, a small number of executives and investors will continue to make choices on everyone’s behalf, and these choices will remain tightly bound by the demands of the market. It's time to demand an internet by, and for, the people now.

Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future

"For all the informational convenience the internet offers, it is deeply flawed. How can it be improved? Writer Ben Tarnoff proposes one possibility in this intriguing book, which urges the development of 'a public lane on the information superhighway.' It's worth checking out for yourself." – Seth MacFarlane Why is the internet so broken, and what could ever possibly fix it? In Internet for the People, leading tech writer Ben Tarnoff offers an answer. The internet is broken, he argues, because it is owned by private firms and run for profit. Google annihilates your privacy and Facebook amplifies right-wing propaganda because it is profitable to do so. But the internet wasn't always like this—it had to be remade for the purposes of profit maximization, through a years-long process of privatization that turned a small research network into a powerhouse of global capitalism. Tarnoff tells the story of the privatization that made the modern internet, and which set in motion the crises that consume it today. The solution to those crises is straightforward: deprivatize the internet. Deprivatization aims at creating an internet where people, and not profit, rule. It calls for shrinking the space of the market and diminishing the power of the profit motive. It calls for abolishing the walled gardens of Google, Facebook, and the other giants that dominate our digital lives and developing publicly and cooperatively owned alternatives that encode real democratic control. To build a better internet, we need to change how it is owned and organized. Not with an eye towards making markets work better, but towards making them less dominant. Not in order to create a more competitive or more rule-bound version of privatization, but to overturn it. Otherwise, a small number of executives and investors will continue to make choices on everyone’s behalf, and these choices will remain tightly bound by the demands of the market. It's time to demand an internet by, and for, the people now.

A Former Google Engineer Built a Search Engine for Finding Every Privacy Violation You Face Online

Former Google engineer Tim Libert is releasing a search engine, webXray, that aims to find illicit online data collection and tracking—with the goal of becoming “the Henry Ford of tech lawsuits.”

Big Tech tried to get young people addicted. Now we’re fighting back

Two seismic court decisions in the US have intervened where legislators have failed to defend social media users from exploitation, writes campaigner Zamaan Qureshi

Competitive Compatibility: Let's Fix the Internet, Not the Tech Giants

Tech's market concentration—summed up brilliantly by Tom Eastman, a New Zealand software developer, as the transformation of the Internet into "a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four"—has aroused concern from regulators around the world.