Antimonopoly law, I learned, dates to the founding of our nation. It is, in essence, an extension of the concept of checks and balances into the political economy. One goal of antimonopoly law is to ensure that every American has liberty, to change jobs when they want, to create a small business or small farm if they want, to get access to the information they want. Another goal of antimonopoly is to ensure that our democratic institutions are not overwhelmed by wealth and power concentrated in the hands of the few.
.. since the early days of the Reagan Administration, power over almost all forms of economic activity in America has been steadily concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.
.. As hospitals continue to merge into giant chains, for example, they are able to pass along ever higher prices without having to worry about losing business to competitors. And anyone who flies these days can attest to what happens when just four airlines control 80 percent of the market.
..It means that fewer and fewer companies are competing for our labor, allowing employers to gain more and more power not only over how we do business, but also how over we speak, think and act.
.. his last June 27, my group published a statement praising the European Union for fining Google for violating antitrust law. Later that day I was told that Google — which provides substantial support to other programs at New America — said they wanted to sever all ties with the organization. Two days later I was told that the entire team of my Open Markets Program had to leave New America by September 1.
.. No think tank wants to appear beholden to the demands of its corporate donors. But in this instance, that’s exactly the case. I — and my entire team of journalists and researchers at Open Markets — were let go because the leaders of my think tank chose not to stand up to Google’s threats.
.. But today we are failing. Not only are we not preventing concentration of power over our economy and our media. We are not protecting the groups that are working to prevent and reverse that concentration of power.
Insurrectionist Civics in the Age of Mistrust
Ghanaians are so frustrated with politics that within his generation of young, internet-savvy guys, no one wanted to be associated with either of Ghana’s major political parties. In fact, the easiest way to lose credibility in the Ghanaian internet community was for someone to declare you a member of the NPP or the NDC, the two major political parties, because at that point, anything you say is assumed to be said purely to score political points.
.. Efo can’t even be seen being too friendly with politicians or prominent members of either party – he avoids even being in the same photographs with people who are closely associated with either major party.
.. Activists in Pakistan and India who collect information on corruption, reporting police or customs officials who ask for bribes, or taxi drivers who cheat passengers, using crowdmapping to document these patterns. Friends in Russia who use the internet to collect resources for people affected by natural disasters and provide relief that the government should be, but isn’t providing.
What these movements have in common is
- the youth of their organizers,
- their use of digital media to organize and promote, and
- an insistence by their organizers that these efforts are not political.
.. the front runners – at least in terms of pundit attention – are people who aren’t politicians – Donald Trump, Dr. Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina – or who are at least very unusual politicians, like socialist Vermont representative Bernie Sanders
.. think we’re at a moment of very high mistrust, not just in government, but in large, powerful institutions as a whole. And I think if we want to revive our civic life, we need to think about a vision of civics that’s appropriate for an age of widespread mistrust.
.. Where trust remains high is in a set of nations that includes successful autocracies like UAE, Singapore and China, countries that have made an implicit deal with their citizens that economic advancement will come at the expense of constraints on democratic participation.
.. Hayes suggests that the most significant divide in US politics today is not between left and right but between “institutionalist” and “insurrectionist” approaches to civic life. Institutionalists believe we need to strengthen and rebuild the institutions that have brought us this far, while insurrectionists want to overthrow the power of those institutions and either build new ones in their place, or see whether we’re able to exist without these sorts of institutions.
.. At MIT, we’re in the midst of an entrepreneurship craze – you may be experiencing this at Syracuse as well. The coolest thing you can do as a college student is graduate – or leave before you graduate – and found a startup. The lamest thing you can do is join a large, established company – and large, established companies no longer mean IBM or Bank of America, they include Google.
.. There’s a strong sense that the way in which you can leave your mark on the universe is not through existing, powerful institutions but through small, nimble structures that haven’t yet had time to become calcified and bureaucratic.
.. Reverend King and the rest of the movement had to influence a government that was capable of passing these powerful and sweeping laws. I don’t have confidence that a march on Washington could have this effect today, that our Congress could pass reforms on this scale. And if we can’t march on Washington, where do we march?
.. The model pursued by the civil rights movement is one we still use today: elect the right people to office, and influence them so that they take action on the issues you care about. In other words, our power as citizens comes from influencing the institutions that govern our country. The NRA are institutionalists when they work to influence legislators to oppose any gun control, and the Human Rights Campaign are institutionalists when they work to bring equal marriage to the Supreme Court. Despite radically different points of view, their core methods are similar, and they both depend on confidence in these core civic institutions.
.. But change is lots harder for insurrectionists. If we decide that Congress no longer represents the will of the people – because members are so beholden to donors, because representatives now have to speak for 700,000 people rather than the 30,000 they spoke for when we founded the nation, because partisanship is so high that very little legislation gets passed, then any strategy that involves Congress – whether it’s elections, lobbying, letter-writing campaigns, sit-ins, or even marches – can’t accomplish major change.
.. And so, often, insurgents are revolutionaries. They have lost confidence in the possibility of making change through any existing institutions, so they wanted to smash them all and start again. That’s what we saw in Tunisia, in Egypt, in Libya, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain and Sudan, countries where cartoonish dictators had ruled for years and where every institution of the public and private sector was part of an unjust system. And when people rose up against those governments, we tended to root for the revolutionaries, because it seemed absurd and impossible that these corrupt institutions could be reformed or changed.
.. But it hasn’t gone so well for the countries of the Arab Spring.
.. In Egypt, we discovered an uncomfortable truth of revolutions – if you topple a powerful authority, the likely outcome is that whoever was next most powerful and organized will take power: in Egypt, it was first the Muslim Brotherhood, then the army, an institution that has demonstrated that it’s capable of the indignities and cruelties of the Mubarak regime.
.. Revolutions where we replace existing flawed institutions with new, different institutions are exceedingly rare.
.. many people involved with Occupy would argue that the movement had difficulty governing itself within encampments, never mind scaling the model of General Assembly to govern a city or a nation.
.. I’m seeing lots of examples of a third way, a form of civics that starts with a simple question: “What’s the most effective way I can be a civic actor?”
.. I’m deeply frustrated – ashamed, really – by US government surveillance of domestic and international users of the internet by the NSA, as revealed by Edward Snowden and the journalists who worked with him. But I don’t have a lot of confidence that either President Obama or this Congress will make more than cursory changes to our surveillance apparatus… and I’m not sure how I’d even verify that these changes took place, given the NSA’s track record of lying to Congress.
.. friends who work developing open source security software tell me that they have a very hard time flying in the United States due to frequent supplemental screenings.
.. So maybe surveillance doesn’t have you worried. Climate change should. But it’s been fascinating to watch entrepreneurs look for ways to make money and make change around alternative energy
.. We need to change the norms of our society so that black men and boys aren’t automatically viewed as potential threats.
.. There’s a tendency to dismiss online activism as slacktivism or clicktivism – and no doubt some is. But online activism can be very powerful as well, particularly when it comes to shaping norms.
.. iftheygunnedmedown was a campaign to call attention to the images used to portray Michael Brown after his death. Media outlets found Brown’s Facebook account and chose a picture where Brown was photographed from below, giving prominence to his height. Media
.. The Root found another Facebook photo in which Brown looks much less intimidating, and juxtaposed the two, asking “If they gunned me down, what picture would they use”,
.. how news media portrays a victim has influence on whether we see that victim as innocent or culpable. The campaign quickly became participatory with African Americans selecting pictures from their Facebook accounts that portrayed them at their most and least “acceptable”.
.. Many newspapers changed the image they used to depict Brown
.. iftheygunnedmedown is evidence that online campaigns can shape media more broadly, and perhaps shape norms.
.. Some of the most ambitious experiments in insurrectionism are trying to build a world without institutions at all
.. promoters of bitcoin hope that these distributed architectures could provide a powerful new way to govern legal contracts, eliminating the need for branches of government and judiciary
.. This month, Alabama announced they were closing 31 DMV offices across the state, including every one in counties where the population is 75% black. Black and white people have an equal right to vote in Alabama, but voting in Alabama is likely to be deeply inequitable.
.. “Monitoring” sounds passive, but it’s not – it’s a model for channeling mistrust to hold institutions responsible
.. They would follow police patrol cars and when officers got out to make an arrest, the Panthers – armed, openly carrying weapons they were licensed to own – would observe the arrest from a distance, making it clear to officers that they would intervene if they felt the person arresting was being harassed or abused, a practice they called “Policing the Police”.
The New Copycats: How Facebook Squashes Competition From Startups
Mr. Zuckerberg is sensitive to anything that might disrupt Facebook, even the teeniest startup, say current and former executives and employees.
Facebook uses an internal database to track rivals, including young startups performing unusually well, people familiar with the system say. The database stems from Facebook’s 2013 acquisition of a Tel Aviv-based startup, Onavo, which had built an app that secures users’ privacy by routing their traffic through private servers. The app gives Facebook an unusually detailed look at what users collectively do on their phones, these people say.
The tool shaped Facebook’s decision to buy WhatsApp and informed its live-video strategy, they say. Facebook used Onavo to build its early-bird tool that tips it off to promising services and that helped Facebook home in on Houseparty.
.. Mr. Rubin didn’t want to sell but was under pressure from his board to keep Houseparty’s options open, Mr. Elman says. “If a company like Facebook or Snapchat needs your team’s expertise, that might be a better return for shareholders than the risk of going big,” Mr. Elman says he told Mr. Rubin.
.. In December, Facebook began its group-video-chat offensive. Its Messenger app introduced the feature with the ability to see up to six people in a conversation, compared with the eight-person rooms on Houseparty.
In February, Facebook invited Houseparty users between the ages of 13 and 17 to come to its offices in Menlo Park, Calif., to participate in a study and keep a diary for a week afterward that they would share with Facebook, offering as an inducement $275 Amazon gift cards.
.. Last month, it recruited a vice president of engineering, Kinshuk Mishra, who had helped Spotify AB, the music-streaming service, fend off Apple Music. It introduced a new chat feature called “passing notes” to attract more users.
The New Copycats: How Facebook Squashes Startup Competition (wsj.com)
> Facebook uses an internal database to track rivals… The database stems from Facebook’s 2013 acquisition of a Tel Aviv-based startup, Onavo, which had built an app that secures users’ privacy by routing their traffic through private servers. The app gives Facebook an unusually detailed look at what users collectively do on their phones…
WTF is this shady-ass sh*t. Way to “secure users’ privacy,” Facebook.
From the sound of Onavo’s App Store reviews they are using deceptive marketing of the “Your phone is infected, install this now!!” variety. Yet they have a lot of positive but suspiciously brief reviews balancing them out. So Facebook bought a company that MITMs unsuspecting users for profit, using scammer marketing techniques and fake reviews to drive installs, then leverages that to knife babies. “Don’t be too proud,” indeed.
I hope there is cause for Apple to remove this app from the App Store (like deceptive marketing or exploitive practices). Or for a bunch of us good folks to leave negative reviews. These guys depend on informed people avoiding these apps and not leaving reviews.
.. You have to intercept to gather metadata… but semantics aside, they are deceiving users.First there is the marketing scam reported in the app store reviews, people who installed it because some web site told them they have a virus and they need this thing to fix it.
Second, the only mention of their logging practices is buried below the fold in the last line of their description: “Onavo receives and analyzes information about your mobile data and app use.” This is just vague enough to deceive a user that believes it is merely to support their user-facing features, i.e. giving you a report on what you use… not Facebook for spying purposes. Of course, most users never even get that far in the description. They’re installing this to “secure their phone” because of a scary ad they saw.
These guys know exactly what they’re doing. Most of their users, not so much. That’s where we come in. The App Store exists to help protect users from this kind of exploitation and I hope Apple and our community takes action.
.. What struck me from the article was how facebook knew what social networks are competitive threats. They’re tracking what apps you use on your phone.”Facebook uses an internal database to track rivals, including young startups performing unusually well, people familiar with the system say. The database stems from Facebook’s 2013 acquisition of a Tel Aviv-based startup, Onavo, which had built an app that secures users’ privacy by routing their traffic through private servers. The app gives Facebook an unusually detailed look at what users collectively do on their phones, these people say.
The tool shaped Facebook’s decision to buy WhatsApp and informed its live-video strategy, they say. Facebook used Onavo to build its early-bird tool that tips it off to promising services and that helped Facebook home in on Houseparty”
.. Facebook is what Microsoft was in the 1990s. Using its existing market dominance to crush potential competitors by offering their distinctive offerings as mere features of its existing popular products.This did lead to a lot of momentum to the anti-trust proceedings against Microsoft.
I wonder if that encourages Facebook to not do this so obviously in the future? Or maybe it isn’t at all worried about anti-trust for the near term.
I am sure Google, Amazon and Microsoft continue to do doing this as well, but it seems that Facebook is doing this most successfully or at least most prominently with its total destruction of Snap.
.. This is just killer:
> In December, Facebook began its group-video-chat offensive. Its Messenger app introduced the feature with the ability to see up to six people in a conversation, compared with the eight-person rooms on Houseparty.
> In February, Facebook invited Houseparty users between the ages of 13 and 17 to come to its offices in Menlo Park, Calif., to participate in a study and keep a diary for a week afterward that they would share with Facebook, offering as an inducement $275 Amazon gift cards.