#google docs have also been scraping content btw

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Tech trustbusting's moment has arrived

When it's railroading time, you get railroads.

When the railroads turn into the personal satrapies of rail-barons, you get trustbusters.

A couple decades ago, it was online service time. We had the users, the telcoms systems, the computers, the modems, so we got platforms.

We had that, but we lacked something important: effective antimonopoly enforcement. Lax merger laws allowed companies with access to capital markets to buy out or neutralize all their competitors, so we got monopolies.

Right on schedule, we're getting digital trustbusters.

Now, some people aren't technically sophisticated, but they do understand a lot about competition law. That's how you get meat-and-taters antitrust proposals like Amy Klobuchar's CALERA, which address the structural problems with antitrust law.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/06/calera/#fuck-bork

Klobuchar's bill is hugely important. The reason we have monopolies is that we stopped enforcing anti-monopoly law 40 years ago. Monopoly isn't a tech problem, it's everywhere from sneakers to glass bottles to pro wrestling to candy to aerospace.

https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers

Klobuchar's CALERA doesn't just seek to apply antitrust law to tech – it also explicitly restores the pre-Reagan basis for fighting monopolies: we fight monopolies because they concentrate power and corrupt our politics. All monopolies are guilty unless proven otherwise.

But though industries all attained their monopolies through similar tactics – predatory acquisitions and mergers, vertical integration – they also each have their own technical characteristics that must inform our demonopolization tactics.

Take emergency care: monopolists love ERs because we don't choose which ER to use, nor when. You can't shop for an ER from the back of an ambulance. You don't know going in whether you're going to spend $1m or $1k. And you'll buy whatever services the ER tells you to buy.

Or power-grids: demand for electricity is both inelastic (you need power when you need power) and price-insensitive, and that inelasticity increases with demand: that is, when it's freezing or boiling out, everyone wants electricity.

Tech, of course, has its own technical characteristics. Chief among these is its flexibility. At a deep, theoretical level our digital tools and networks are capable of interoperating with one another in ways that no physical technologies can match.

Think of the Australian rail-system. In the mid-19th century, would-be rail-barons laid differing gauges in hopes of conquering the nation's logistics and transport. For 150+ years, engineers have tried to solve the "multi-gauge muddle" by designing multi-system railcars.

Hundreds of designs for cars that retract and extrude different wheelbases have been tried, and none ever caught on. Instead, Australia is tearing up and re-laying thousands of kilometers' worth of track. With physical tech, "compatibility" often means starting from scratch.

Not so with digital tech. If you are an OS company whose rival has locked up all office docs in a proprietary format, you don't have to convince all its customers to abandon their documents and start over. You just make a compatible program:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interoperability-reviving-elegant-weapon-more-civilized-age-slay

With digital and physical tech, network effects drive high switching costs, but when it comes to digital, network effects are a double-edged sword.

With interoperability, a walled garden can easily become a feed-lot, where customers for a new service are neatly arrayed for competitors to come and harvest.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/01/twitter-and-interoperability-some-thoughts-peanut-gallery

Good tech policy emphasizes interoperability when it comes to demonopolizing the digital world. Long before the US ACCESS Act and the EU Digital Markets Act, Mike Masnick published his seminal "Protocols, Not Platforms" paper.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/01/twitter-and-interoperability-some-thoughts-peanut-gallery

And Daphne Keller's work on "Magic APIs" presaged the ACCESS Act's idea of forcing tech companies to expose the APIs they use internally so that competitors can plug into their services:

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200901/13524045226/if-lawmakers-dont-like-platforms-speech-rules-heres-what-they-can-do-about-it-spoiler-options-arent-great.shtml

(that paper is outstanding, BTW, with clear-eyed assessments of alternatives, like a digital fairness doctrine, "common carriage" rules, an "indecency" standard for content moderation – basically a checklist for "So you've got a plan to fix tech – did you think of ____?")

Masnick's "protocols" are a vision for a decentralized, better internet. Keller's Magic APIs describe a legal path to getting there. My own work on Competitive Compatibility (nee Adversarial Interoperability) describes how we'll STAY there.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

Because monopolies are good at subverting regulation, so any Magic API rule would be brittle – dependent on the tech companies not sabotaging those APIs by moving the important data-flows away from the mandatory APIs.

That's why we have to strip monopolists of the power to ask a court to block interoperators: take away the wildly distorted copyright, patent, terms of service and other legal doctrines that Big Tech ignored during its ascent, but now enforces against would-be competitors.

With both interop mandates and a legal right for new entrants to force interoperability through technical means, tech giants will face consequences if they subvert antimonopoly rules.

The choice becomes: either respect the intent of a mandate and preserve interop; or be plunged into a chaotic arms-race with competitors who switch to scraping, bots, and reverse-engineering.

All of this is incredibly wonkish, a highly specialized debate that involves highly technical propositions about how digital technology works today, how it used to work and how it might work – layered atop a similar, highly technical understanding of antitrust law.

The Venn overlap of "deep understanding of digital tech" and "deep understanding of antitrust debates" isn't so much a slice as it is a sphincter, and the debate has been equally narrow, but when it's railbaron time, you get trustbusters.

The tech monopoly/interop debate is going mainstream. Francis Fukuyama and his colleagues at the Stanford Working Group on Platform Scale have proposed an intervention similar to the ACCESS Act, where trusted third parties mediate between monopolists, new entrants and users.

The Stanford proposal calls them "middleware companies," but they're conceptually interchangeable with the idea of a "data fiduciary": companies that act as referees when a new co-op, startup or nonprofit wants to plug into a monopolist's service.

https://pairagraph.com/dialogue/4124f75013da40038c4cbff5ebdaaa51/3

This is clearly an idea whose time has come – it's present in the EU's DMA and the US Access Act, and latent in the UK CMA report:

https://www.gov.uk/cma-cases/online-platforms-and-digital-advertising-market-study#final-report

Importantly, it's an approach that recognizes the distinctive character of tech – taking account of the power of interop to break open walled gardens and unravel network effects.

What's especially interesting about this work is that it appears to have been developed in parallel to pre-existing work from Masnick and Keller (and me) – it's a case of convergence between the tech-policy world and the broader world of policy.

After all, while Masnick and Keller's work is well known inside of tech policy, that's just our obscure, nerdy corner of the policy world – now they're escaping that corner, becoming self-evident to people from traditional policy backgrounds.

https://review.chicagobooth.edu/economics/2020/article/capitalisn-t-francis-fukuyama-s-proposal-rein-big-tech

My hope is that the trend continues – that we see ideas about Competitive Compatibility/Adversarial Interop join the idea of API mandates, so that we produce durable anti-monopoly systems, not just anti-monopoly rules.

Most important, though, is restoring an appreciation for the importance of interoperability in preventing monopolies and promoting technological self-determination for communities and individuals.

Because such a sensibility can escape the legislative world and be enacted via fast-moving, easier-to-use policy  tools. For example, we could (should!) make interop a feature of all government procurement rules.

No school district should buy devices for students without securing the right to sideload the apps they need on them – imagine buying 50,000 Ipads at public expense and then having Apple boot the app you rely on out of the App Store!

Likewise, no district should buy Google Classroom without securing a legally binding guarantee not to block interoperators who want to integrate other ed-tech services into the curriculum, with or without Google's cooperation.

Procurement and interop are as old as the Civil War, when the Union Army demanded firearms and ammo that had multiple manufacturers. As the state-level Net Neutrality rules (which bar governments from using non-neutral ISPs) showed us, procurement can shape markets.

Procurement is just for starters. Right now, tech companies caught breaking the law are handed down fines that are less than the profits their lawbreaking generated – instead, we could demand interop as part of any settlement.

One major barrier to interop is contract law: terms of service, EULAs, noncompetes, arbitration, etc. States wield enormous power over contracting terms: states can declare certain contractual language against public policy and thus unenforceable.

If, say, California were to pass a rule nullifying the mountain of abusive garbage that has become standard in digital "contracts," it would be in a position to export fair usage terms to the country in just the same way it exports robust emissions standards.

Antittrust is primarily a federal manner (that's why 40 years of federal antitrust malpractice has been such a disaster). But every level of government, down to your local school board, can make a meaningful difference in tech antitrust.

Digital technology's inescapable, marvellous, terrifying flexibility can be translated into so many unique, powerful weapons for transforming the industry and empowering communities to control their digital lives and seize the means of computation.

[topicprinter]

Hey guys, I've built a Hackernews-inspired newsletter containing the top 10 articles relevant to founders that were on the HN front-page last week.Why HackerNews? Because it's one of the last places on the internet with meaningful discussion & quality topics. See for yourself below if you don't believe me. Btw, if you want to get this via email every week, go here.1. Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think (1022 votes)There’s a thrill in finding quiet companies, operating in the background, cashing checks. Software has exploded the number of these businesses. Ten people working remotely can make millions of dollars a year.Austen Allred shared how, when matching Lambda graduates to jobs, he’ll discover software companies he’s never heard of in Oklahoma pocketing $10m/year in profit. Doing things like “making actuarial software for funeral homes.”3It’s not surprising. Of the 3,000+ software companies acquired over the last three years, only 7% got TechCrunch, Recode, HN, or other mainstream tech coverage.4Also, markets like SAP, worth $163B. There is a term for these companies, they're called Hidden Champioons, and you can see a few of them on Wikipedia.Some other useful quotes:I’ve had four jobs in my life and have always been stunned by what is still done by hand. Every company had a task which could be heavily automated but was instead consuming 4-30 people. So if you think the software market is large, consider all the stuff software never reached.I applied for a job at a company in my city, and they told me their product was entirely API connectors for the local banks. In fact all of the companies I've worked for here have been making software for local industries! From solar installers, energy efficient lighting manufacturers, local commerce and POS systems, mechanics software, creative market places, local lead generation.Oh yes, there are tons of giants creating software for health applications you never heard of, defense purposes you cannot hear about, logistic you would never consider (managing competitions, port services, private jet traffic, truck fleets...) and so on. I should know, I make half of my income going from company to company to train their team. They are everywhere. They make billions.Don’t require a user to be interested twice: lessons on reducing signup friction (390 votes)Long story short: A guy made a SaaS prototype and he got a few users by posting on forums. Thing is, his "flow" was to get them to "sign up" to the waitlist and then he manually sent them an invite hours or days later.His success increased when he changed the flow so people get an automatic email to register immediately after they sign up.Kind of obvious, but there's an important principle here:Don't require a user to be motivated twice. Instead, make use and ride of the motivation wide when they sign up. This is pretty obvious if you read BJ Fogg material.Some useful notes from HN comments on users:Treat signups as a leading indicator of success, not the ultimate goal.Asking for an email up front is already too much. Let the user use your service, they'll create some "content" or "configuration" in it. Once they do that, they'll want to preserve / persist it, and then you can ask for an email address. They're much more likely to give you a real email address and validate it, because they're already invested.I'm convinced one of the reasons Zoom is so successful (besides being a great product) is that there is no sign up required at all. Someone invites you to a conference and you just click the link, enter your name and go.Ask HN: What is the best way to target restaurants and small businesses? (28 votes)I really like these threads where you have very bright minds giving advice for a common pain point. Here are some amazing answers:Almost every brick and mortar company’s website includes a phone number. Call 5 of them and order a meal, when you pick it up ask to talk to the manager for a minute. Elevator pitch: you’ve got 5-10 seconds to get them to ask for more time. “When I was ordering food I noticed that I couldn’t prepay online, I almost thought of going somewhere else, how come you don’t have a way to pay before coming in?” “Don’t know how to do that”. “I built a plugin that takes 5-10 mins to set up and people can pay while they order so I don’t have to come inside, can we do a Skype call when you’re not busy to walk through this?”. Once you’ve gotten a handful of trials like this you can start calling but your options with restaurants(especially mom and pop) are to walk in the door or get to them directly on the phone.or this:You can also try to target other companies thay already have large restaurant customer bases, but then you become a SKU in their offerings. It may be more about lead genertion than anything else.​OnlyFans, influencers, and the politics of selling nudes during a pandemic (133 votes)While sites like AirBnb have huge loses, OnlyFans grew 75% during last month. It was launched as a result of platforms like Instagram shutting out adult entertainment workers.I wonder if there is any way to integrate into this platform as a developer and "ride" on its growth :D​The coming disruption of colleges and universities (82 votes)Scott Galloway is a man who predicted a lot of things. He predicted Amazon’s $13.7 billion purchase of Whole Foods a month before it was announced. Last year, he called WeWork on its “seriously loco” $47 billion valuation a month before the company’s IPO imploded.Now, he predicts something happening with universities. . The post-pandemic future, he says, will entail partnerships between the largest tech companies in the world and elite universities. [MIT@Google](mailto:MIT@Google). iStanford. HarvardxFacebook. According to Galloway, these partnerships will allow universities to expand enrollment dramatically by offering hybrid online-offline degrees.How will this disrupt education? Well thousands of brick-and-mortar universties will go out of business.At the same time, more people than ever will have access to a solid education, albeit one that is delivered mostly over the internet.If this is true, it may open a lot of opportunities for makers in the edu space.​Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?Here are some recommendation for "brain expanding" books:"Rework", "Getting Real", the other books by the old 37signals crew, and of course "The Lean Startup" really changed the way I thought about software development and business. I credit them for much of my startup/programming success.Taleb's Incerto series changed how I thought about investing, risk, and life in general. "Fooled by Randomness" and "Antifragile" are especially good."Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy" by Thomas Sowell. I read this as a teenager with only limited exposure to economics and it cleared up many misconceptions I held."Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life" by Rory Sutherland. Explains why we choose brands over cheaper alternatives, why we're willing to pay a lot more to lock in a deal, why we hate registering before buying the thing (but are more than happy to do so right after), why Sony removed the record button from the first Walkman, and much more.Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. This book makes every bit of life advice you receive afterwards feel shallow. It feels like a reference to western thought.​Scraping Recipe Websites (461 votes)Do you do scraping as part of your job? Then you may want to read this how this site scrapes 99% of recipe website using a logical template.An interesting thing they mention is the concept of LCA (lowest common ancestor) and how they use it to identify part of the HTML most likely to contain all of the ingredients/instructions​My blog is now generated by Google Docs (398 votes)Over and over and over again, I see businesses succeeding just because they tap into people existing habits.Most people are familiar with typing in Google Docs. If you can make a tool where they just press a button and 'voila', it turns it itno a blog post, they're way more likely to use you vs. someone who creates a separate interface (see BJ Fogg and his behavioral design theory).US video game sales have record quarter as consumers stay at home (376 votes)Video game sales are at historic hights. Traffic on gaming-related services like Discord, Twitch, Mixer, and others have hit historic highsThe current crisis probably accelerated video games adoption by 10 years.Ask HN: How to stop anxiety from too many choices? (286 votes)The best advice I've seen here is:Stop shopping start doing. All these decisions I call shopping, where you do a lot of research but never commit. At some point you have to start working on something.Have an ideas journal. Write new ideas down there, and don't start with any of them in less than two weeks. This lets you get over the initial enthusiasm - and perhaps new better ideas will push less useful ones out of the way in that time. If something stays at the top of your list for weeks, then perhaps it is useful.My advice is to lower the value of ideas. A lot of time people think, "If only I had a good idea I would be successful". You will see other people saying things like, "Buy my good idea!". But really, good ideas are a dime a dozen. Good ideas, bad ideas... it actually doesn't make much difference. What makes the difference is execution and timing.To be successful, really what you need is execution and to have the patience to wait until what you are doing is relevant. Of course there is the fear that it will never be relevant. However, if you accept the thesis that the good idea is not valuable in itself, then you realise that it is not really valuable to pivot without a really good reason. A good idea that is never relevant is just as worthless as a bad idea that is never relevant. However, even a bad idea that is executed very well and ready when the opportunity arises can be successful.see the first step, the very next step, and that's it. You don't need to know what step 2,748 is about let alone how to solve it to take the next door. (formally: no premature optimization).Make a decision, and stick to it. In other words, be quick to decide but slow to change. The trick in life is not to "do what you love" (or make the decisions you think are right: spoiler, you'll be wrong 50% of the time). The trick is to "love what you do"I have similar problems sometimes- and remind myself the power of "good enough". Striving for "the best" will often leave you unsatisfied. So instead of thinking "which is better?" think "is this one good enough?"If you want to get this via email every week, see http://founderweeklys.com/