“Europe, through regulations like GDPR and the Copyright Directive, along with last week’s court decision striking down the Privacy Shield framework negotiated by the European Commission and the U.S. International Trade Administration (and a previous decision striking down the Safe Harbor Privacy Principles framework), is splintering off into an Internet of its own.

This Internet, though, feels like the worst of all possible outcomes. On one hand, large U.S. tech companies are winners, at least relative to everyone else: yes, all of the regulatory red tape increases costs (and, for targeted advertising, may reduce revenue), but the impact is far greater on would-be competitors. To put it in allegorical terms, the E.U. is restricting the size of the castle even as it dramatically increases the moat” (Ben Thompson).

“Facebook is a criminal enterprise fully and knowingly complicit in all of this — from the spread of bigotry to the spread of pseudoscience.

Conversely, legitimate advertisers are abandoning Facebook because they want nothing to do with any of this. To remain on Facebook is to be complicit by association” (John Gruber).

“The rising popularity of plastic surgery is more than a little horrifying” (Paul Kafasis).

Kill the algorithm

Finally some good news from Twitter.

“I’m all for making Big Tech small again and fixing the internet so that it’s not just five giant websites filled with screenshots from the other four, not to mention doing something about market dominance, corporate bullying, rampant privacy invasions and so on” (Cory Doctorow).

“To summarize:

• Open gardens have curators instead of gatekeepers.
• Open gardens use standards so that the same formats exist inside and outside the platform.

This is only possible by embracing the open web. I believe it’s an important part of the way forward for all great platforms” (Manton Reece).

“Crank calls and robocalls were spam of the phone era. The[n] email had its spam. Text messages also became spam. Why are we surprised that social media posts became spam — in most cases as fake news. Tomorrow it will be video and virtual reality spam.

At the end of the day, we have to remember: spam is an unsolicited or undesired electronic message. The network and the tools of delivery don’t matter” (Om Malik).

You can find me on micro.blog/carrington.

“However, if I bought individual stocks [ … ], I would be out: this S-1 is so devoid of meaningful information (despite its length) that it makes me wonder what, if anything, Uber is trying to hide. If I am going to be taken for a ride I want at least some idea of where I am going — isn’t that the point of Uber in the first place” (Ben Thompson)?

Another link to Daring Fireball, a site which obviously share my animosity towards Facebook.

“Again I say, Facebook is to privacy and civil discourse what Enron was to accounting” (John Gruber).

“Facebook’s standard playbook is to admit that they made a mistake by being slow to react, remind us of their good intentions, then promise to do better. It’s the aw geez who woulda thought in the dorm room that we would have to deal with all these tricky issues defense.

This has been very effective for a company that still gets the benefit of the doubt. No one would ever suggest that Facebook *wanted* to bring about the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya or lynchings in rural Indian villages. They just were in a little over their heads.

But this Soros thing is different. This is no passive failure. It’s a malevolent action taken against groups who criticize Facebook for things that Facebook admits it has failed at. It takes advantage of and contributes to the most poisonous aspects of our public discourse” (The New York Times).

“The New York Times has been a pointy edge of the coverage on Facebook, Google and Big Tech domination of our daily lives. […]

However, the Times is hypocritical, to put it mildly. While it talks about a surveillance advertising technology ecosystem, the company itself is a willing participant — its web pages and apps are jam-packed with advertising and tracking scripts. It complains about Facebook ads in the news stream, and yet it blasts large ads in your face on its website and in the applications. The reading experience is deprecated by really big ads, which honestly has lead to the use of ad-blockers and a deep dislike for their product” (Om Malik).

“Mike Isaac and Sheera Frenkel, reporting for The New York Times:

Who wants to bet that a week or two from now they “discover” it was 100 million accounts, and then eventually admit it was 200 million?” (John Gruber)

“…even though the virus doesn’t understand what it’s doing or how it’s doing it, it’s able to use feedback to refine its strategies, gaining control over more resources with which to try more strategies.

It’s a powerful metaphor for the kind of cold reading we see Trump engaging in at his rallies, and for the presidency itself. I think it also explains why getting Trump of Twitter is impossible: it’s his primary feedback tool, and without it, he wouldn’t know what kinds of rhetoric to double down on and what to quietly sideline.“

“Microsoft is once again redesigning Skype — in order to make Skype great again. Or as a Microsoft executive puts it too “focus on simplicity* to provide an overall better experience for you by making Skype faster to learn and easier to use.” What he is not saying — Microsoft messed up Skype so bad that what was a market leading product is now an afterthought in modern daily communication flow.“

Let’s just quit, shall we?

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