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.

Next – most Pluralistic posts end with a trio of ‘hey look at this’ links. One recent link is a retrospective on griefing culture in MMO spaces:

https://www.raphkoster.com/2024/08/07/the-neverending-griefing-discussion/

These old games were some of the first online 3D games to try and address a fundamental content moderation dilemma – “How do we allow users to express themselves freely and disincentivise behaviour that sours the experience for other users?” We can learn from their post-mortems.

@raphkoster, a game designer known for his work on MMORPGs Ultima Online and EverQuest, makes a salient point about “player governance.” Although Reddit and Discord are centralised platforms, they do offer their users a lot more freedom over how communities are constructed. Everyone is not clumped in with everyone else on Discord – this lets users create their own private spaces, or “dark corners” as Doctorow describes them:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/15/normalize-dark-corners/

Content moderation has no silver bullets nor golden hammers, and where platforms claim it is a continuing process, we find that their idea of progress is glacial. The early days of UO saw players moderate each other using reputation systems. Think of the seeding/leeching numbers on magnet links, to wit: if you torrent something, and don’t continue after you’ve fully downloaded it, you’re a literal leech – you’ve slurped up your download, and gave nothing back*:

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/a-brief-history-of-murder-in-ultima-online

#Twitter and MMOs share common ground in the fact that everyone gets clumped in with everyone else. Koster’s articles invite juxtaposition to Elon Musk’s laissez-faire approach to moderation on Twitter. His idea of free speech is being able to non-consensually thrust shitty opinions into the faces of folks who *didn’t fucking ask;* regular users are deprived of power, because “that’s the admin’s job,” and, well, the admin *didn’t fucking care.*

Ironically, if the rumours are true, Musk’s Twitter buyout has a sliver of provenance in his being kicked out of the Bay Area babyfur community. Yes, read that again: A group of furries who do a little ageplay (regardless of what you think of that) formed a cohesive enough commons to keep fuckwits like Elon Musk out of their community. Fur-curious!

https://social.coop/@katanova/112885524200418276

(And, like a tree bearing fruit, if you seed your torrents, then every time that Ratio field in your torrent tracker increments a whole integer, someone else gets a seed to plant their own tree; you've made one whole copy of that torrent and passed it onto someone else.)