Recently, I’ve added another child to the stack: an RSS reader called #Newsblur (other RSS readers are available). Except this child is a little bit older, and knows how to trick the other ones into getting along so long as they’re kept on the hook with a steady supply of sweets. It’s a strategy I got from @pluralistic :

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/13/two-decades/#hfbd

If my thoughts on blog posts and newsletters should go anywhere, it should first be the journal; then, later, they go into the Zettel for a second pass in literature notes, and perhaps some permanent notes linking back to past notes I think are relevant; sooner or later, you get one Brologue.

Today’s the first day I try this. Rather than spend days on a longform essay, I decided this next post would be a linkblogging lightning round, to get a feel on how this method might work for me. It turns out this post ended up long, regardless…

Since I brought him up, I revisited Doctorow’s takes on the recent antitrust ruling against #Google. It is now, undeniably, a #monopoly:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/07/revealed-preferences/

This is a *seismic* legal rumbling, on the scale of the rulings that led to the break-ups of Standard Oil and Ma Bell. Across the world, antitrust has been reinvigorated, and lawmakers have enforced competition laws more times in the past four years than the last *forty.*

Now, were this a work of fiction, this might be where the story ends and we all live happily ever after. But this is real life, and in real life, those with the authority now have to decide what happens to Google’s ad-tech #monopoly. I share the view that it would be better if #Google – all of Big Tech – were broken up into smaller companies, incentivised by competition, and unable to gain the footholds that allowed their current forms from becoming too big to fail, jail, and care.

How? Well, the argument they put forward, as I understood it, was that a smaller, more competitive ad-tech market, where Google is not the only marketplace, where Google is not the only buyer and seller, would give site owners less of a cut of the ad-revenue made. Therefore, there would be more ads on websites to make up for this. Never mind the fact that Big Tech already skims 51% off of every ad dollar. Somehow, a small-fry ad-tech company is going to withhold even more than that.

Now, don’t get them wrong, they are not one to blindly defend Big Tech. But their argument, no matter how deep the hypotheticals go, is based on a lie that monopolists have always told: that services like Google Search and YouTube cannot function efficiently, cheaply, and at scale with the government getting in the way. You can’t have YouTube without Big Tech, therefore, we should just let them get on with it.

It’s not just that we wouldn’t have #YouTube – they argued that YouTube’s breakup would cause a #LostMedia *avalanche.* Despite the archival tools at our disposal to save YouTube videos, many of us just… wouldn’t? “Wouldn’t,” in this context, I assume to be the same “wouldn’t” that assumes most people won’t donate to #Wikipedia, and gives no explanation as to why the site remains adless to this day.

To believe this, and thus believe that #Google is exceptional and shouldn’t be broken up (at least not right away) is to misunderstand the lessons that the history of antitrust law can teach us. Doctorow’s latest nonfiction book, The Internet Con, gives us a masterclass on these lessons in its first chapter:

https://brologue.net/2023/12/31/users-arent-free-until-big-tech-is-wee/

A panel on the histories of IBM and AT&T doesn’t come amiss, either:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VNivXjrU3A

When you can fit all the leaders of industry around a table, what you have is a cartel that can move swiftly and with little friction. *That’s* #monopoly. But when your industry leaders are a hundred smaller companies, you’ve got a cacophony. They will be too busy disciplining each other with competition to agree on what they should be lobbying for.