#anti-monopoly

[rhube]

OMG, watch this.

See also this article from Apple Insider, on Jon Stewart saying one of the reasons he parted ways with Applw TV+ was because they would not let him do interviews like this:

"I wanted to have you on a podcast and Apple asked us not to do it," he told her. "They literally said, 'Please don't talk to her.'"

... "They wouldn't let us do even that dumb thing we just did in the first act on AI," he continued. "Like, what is that sensitivity? Why are they so afraid to even have these conversations out in the public sphere?"

[amtrak-official]

Guys, guys guys, oh my god, It's finally here!!!

Google is getting sued in an Anti Trust Suit!!!!

Let's goooooo!!

[canon-transgender-virgil]

Janus normally: Fuck capitalism. It's a rigged system that keeps the underprivileged poor and isn't fair. You shouldn't have to work three jobs to afford basic necessities.

Janus, playing monopoly: Sorry, if you wanted to win you should have tried not being poor.

[nando161mando]

Why are things expensive?

4 companies control 55% to 85% of the meat market.

4 airlines control 80% of air travel.

3 companies control 92% of the soda market.

3 companies control 73% of the cereal market.

Why don't I hear about it?

6 companies control 90% of the news.

[mirrorofliterature]

there's something very amatonormative about the way booker sees the world

he tells nicky and joe that they had always had each other, whilst andy and booker only had themselves and their grief and that's uncharitable and an amatonormative way of looking at the world.

yes, nicky and joe are in a long-term romantic and sexual relationship that is very solid, but that doesn't negate like... their platonic relationships?

when booker says that, it is so damn self-absorbed and naive and amatonormative

does he not realise that nicky and joe have always been with him too? that nicky and joe lost quynh too? sure, andy lost her lover but look at nicky and joe when they tell nile about quynh - they loved her and her loss deeply fucked them up.

booker's betrayal is so, so selfish and amatonormative. and sure he had his reasons - grief, alcoholism, depression - but those are not excuses, but explanations. I'm on the side of 'booker is a character and what he did was understandable and he clearly needs therapy' but 'holy SHIT let nicky and joe feel BETRAYED because they were and shouldn't have to moderate their reaction to protect ickle booker' - like the amount of work booker needs to put in for a proper reconciliation is astronomical.

anyway I digress. by saying 'you always had each other', booker is being an amatonormative little shit who downplays both nicky and joe's platonic relationships, I love and care for the other immortals, including him, but also that they have suffered loss too - their families, and how their first meeting wasn't exactly serendipitous.

anyway! booker's framing of nicky and joe is deeply fucked up, stemming from amatonormativity and booker's worldview of competing grief. like booker.... grief sucks but it's not a competition, y'know?

anyway! this is a Reading TM of booker's worldview vis a via nicky and joe that I've felt strongly about because booker just like. is so self-absorbed in his grief that he cannot recognise and appreciate what he has, nor can he recognise that nicky and joe's lives haven't been sunshine and rainbows because they're in a romantic relationship.

like bro. they love you. go to therapy.

[crumblinggothicarchitecture]

Taylor Swift is the music industry.... and that's not a good thing

why is no one else worried or weirded out about Taylor Swift occupying all top 15 spots on the Billboard chart? Even songs that aren't singles are getting radio time...

is no one concerned?

People know that having a monopoly on an industry is a bad thing, right? like we have anti-trust laws and laws against forming monopolies in industries... for a reason.

[ecrivainsolitaire]

We need to open more conversations about software, intellectual property and tech literacy because every time something new happens on the internet everyone enters into crisis mode without actually knowing what to do about it. A lot of the moral panic over AI is this: nitpicking about names and scaremongering about art theft without really understanding any of the technology or legal frameworks they're discussing. (This is not to say AI is without its criticisms but people have been dropping the ball on this because they're focused on the wrong part of the equation.) A lot of the talk about NFTs and Twitter has been the same: dunking on technological changes without really understanding the root of the problem, mostly for clout and virtue signalling. We need to bring back the discussions of the early internet: freedom of information, privacy rights, right to repair, open source and public domain sustainability. Tumblr is mostly worried about moral righteousness and support, and those are all good things, but in this cyberpunk dystopia it's more important than ever to have a handle on the way technology influences our lives and how we can control it. Freedom of information is mutual aid. Digital autonomy is fighting the tech monopolies. Data gathering is the first step of capitalist propaganda. We can only crush our oppressors if we learn how to stop depending on them.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Big Telco’s fury over FCC plan to infuse telecoms policy with facts

I'll be at the Studio City branch of the LA Public Library on Monday, November 13 at 1830hPT to launch my new novel, The Lost Cause. There'll be a reading, a talk, a surprise guest (!!) and a signing, with books on sale. Tell your friends! Come on down!

Reality has a distinct anti-conservative bias, but conservatives have an answer: when the facts don't support your policies, just get different facts. Who needs evidence-based policy when you can have policy-based evidence?

Take gun violence. Conservatives tell us that "an armed society is a polite society," which means that the more guns you have, the less gun violence you'll experience. To prevent reality from unfairly staining this pristine ideological mind-palace with facts, conservatives passed the Dickey Amendment, which had the effect of banning the CDC from gathering stats on American gun-violence. No stats, no violence!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dickey_Amendment

Policy-based evidence is at the core of so many cherished conservative beliefs, like the idea that queer people (and not youth pastors) are responsible for the sexual abuse of children, or the idea that minimum wages (and not monopolies) decrease jobs, or the idea that socialized medicine (and not private equity) leads to death panels:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/26/death-panels/#what-the-heck-is-going-on-with-CMS

The Biden administration features a sizable cohort of effective regulators, whose job is to gather evidence and then make policy from it:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/23/getting-stuff-done/#praxis

Fortunately for conservatives, not every Biden agency is led by competent, honest brokers – the finance wing of the Dems got to foist some of their most ghoulish members upon the American people, including a no-fooling cheerleader for mass foreclosure:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/06/personnel-are-policy/#janice-eberly

And these same DINOs reached across the aisle to work with Republicans to keep some of the most competent, principled agency leaders from being seated, like the remarkable Gigi Sohn, targeted by a homophobic smear campaign funded by the telco industry, who feared her presence on the FCC:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/19/culture-war-bullshit-stole-your-broadband/

The telcos are old hands at this stuff. Long before the gun control debates, Ma Bell had figured out that a monopoly over Americans' telecoms was a license to print money, and they set to corrupting agencies from the FCC to the DoJ:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/14/jam-to-day/

Reality has a vicious anti-telco bias. Think of Net Neutrality, the idea that if you pay an ISP for internet service, they should make a best effort to deliver the data you request, rather than deliberately slowing down your connection in the hopes that you'll seek out data from the company's preferred partners, who've paid a bribe for "premium delivery."

This shouldn't even be up for debate. The idea that your ISP should prioritize its preferred data over your preferred data is as absurd as the idea that a taxi-driver should slow down your rides to any pizzeria except Domino's, which has paid it for "premium service." If your cabbie circled the block twice every time you asked for a ride to Massimo's Pizza, you'd be rightly pissed – and the cab company would be fined.

Back when Ajit Pai was Trump's FCC chairman, he made killing Net Neutrality his top priority. But regulators aren't allowed to act without evidence, so Pai had to seek out as much policy-based evidence as he could. To that end, Pai allowed millions of obviously fake comments to be entered into the docket (comments from dead people, one million comments from @pornhub.com address, comments from sitting Senators who disavowed them, etc). Then Pai actively – and illegally – obstructed the NY Attorney General's investigation into the fraud:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/06/boogeration/#pais-lies

The pursuit of policy-based evidence is greatly aided by the absence of real evidence. If you're gonna fill the docket with made-up nonsense, it helps if there's no truthful stuff in there to get in the way. To that end, the FCC has systematically avoided collecting data on American broadband delivery, collecting as little objective data as possible:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/26/pandemic-profiteers/#flying-blind

This willful ignorance was a huge boon to the telcos, who demanded billions in fed subsidies for "underserved areas" and then just blew it on anything they felt like – like the $45 billion of public money they wasted on obsolete copper wiring for rural "broadband" expansion under Trump:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/27/all-broadband-politics-are-local/

Like other cherished conservative delusions, the unsupportable fantasy that private industry is better at rolling out broadband is hugely consequential. Before the pandemic, this meant that America – the birthplace of the internet – had the slowest, most expensive internet service of any G8 country. During the lockdown, broadband deserts meant that millions of poor and rural Americans were cut off from employment, education, health care and family:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/12/ajit-pai/#pai

Pai's response was to commit another $8 billion in public funds to broadband expansion, but without any idea of where the broadband deserts were – just handing more money over to monopoly telcos to spend as they see fit, with zero accountability:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/26/pandemic-profiteers/#flying-blind

All that changed after the 2020 election. Pai was removed from office (and immediately blocked me on Twitter) (oh, diddums), and his successor, Biden FCC chair Jessic Rosenworcel, started gathering evidence, soliciting your broadband complaints:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/23/parliament-of-landlords/#fcc

And even better, your broadband speed measurements:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/14/for-sale-green-indulgences/#fly-my-pretties

All that evidence spurred Congress to act. In 2021, Congress ordered the FCC to investigate and punish discrimination in internet service provision, "based on income level, race, ethnicity, color, religion, or national origin":

https://www.congress.gov/117/plaws/publ58/PLAW-117publ58.pdf

In other words, Congress ordered the FCC to crack down on "digital redlining." That's when historic patterns of underinvestment in majority Black neighborhoods and other underserved communities create broadband deserts, where internet service is slower and more expensive than service literally across the street:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/10/flicc/#digital-divide

FCC Chair Rosenworcel has published the agency's plan for fulfilling this obligation. It's pretty straightforward: they're going to collect data on pricing, speed and other key service factors, and punish companies that practice discrimination:

https://www.fcc.gov/document/preventing-digital-discrimination-broadband-internet-access

This has provoked howls of protests from the ISP cartel, their lobbying org, and their Republican pals on the FCC. Writing for Ars Technica, Jon Brodkin rounds up a selection of these objections:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/11/internet-providers-say-the-fcc-should-not-investigate-broadband-prices/

There's GOP FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, with a Steve Bannon-seque condemnation of "the administrative state [taking] effective control of all Internet services and infrastructure in the US. He's especially pissed that the FCC is going to regulate big landlords who force all their tenants to get slow, expensive from ISPs who offer kickbacks to landlords:

https://www.fcc.gov/document/carr-opposes-bidens-internet-plan

The response from telco lobbyists NCTA is particularly, nakedly absurd: they demand that the FCC exempt price from consideration of whether an ISP is practicing discrimination, calling prices a "non-technical aspect of broadband service":

https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/110897268295/1

I mean, sure – it's easy to prove that an ISP doesn't discriminate against customers if you don't ask how much they charge! "Sure, you live in a historically underserved neighborhood, but technically we'll give you a 100mb fiber connection, provided you give us $20m to install it."

This is a profoundly stupid demand, but that didn't stop the wireless lobbying org CTIA from chiming in with the same talking points, demanding that the FCC drop plans to collect data on "pricing, deposits, discounts, and data caps," evaluation of price is unnecessary in the competitive wireless marketplace":

https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/1107735021925/1

Individual cartel members weighed in as well, with AT&T and Verizon threatening to sue over the rules, joined by yet another lobbying group, USTelecom:

https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/1103655327582/1

The next step in this playbook is whipping up the low-information base by calling this "socialism" and mobilizing some of the worst-served, most-gouged people in America to shoot themselves in the face (again), to own the libs:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/15/useful-idiotsuseful-idiots/#unrequited-love

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/10/digital-redlining/#stop-confusing-the-issue-with-relevant-facts

Image: Japanexperterna.se (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/japanexperterna/15251188384/

CC BY-SA 2.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

--

Mike Mozart (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/jeepersmedia/14325839070/

https://www.flickr.com/photos/jeepersmedia/14325905568/

https://www.flickr.com/photos/jeepersmedia/14489390566/

www.ccPixs.com https://www.flickr.com/photos/86530412@N02/8210762750/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[rhaenin-time]

[twilight-deviant]

Telling content creators it's wrong to explore artistic freedom and be independently funded by fans, and they should instead continue taking advertisement revenue from google* is

NOT

the anti-capitalism stance actually.

*(Yes, google owns youtube.)

[degeneratedworker]

“Tax The Rich“ William Gropper New Masses Magazine United States of America July 9, 1935

[kyotocop]

You can tell Monopoly is an old game because there's a luxury tax and rich people can go to jail.

In early versions there even were chance cards for paying poor tax or school tax. However, these were adapted to today's times and thus abolished.

[cynthiadasorceress]

"I LEFT FOR FIVE MINUTES!" - Cloudi Kitty

Characters shown

Purple and teal wolf-dragon: Juniper, she/her

Tan and brown cat: Cloudi, he/him

Green and black raptor: Glitch, he/they

Red and white protogen: Peppermint, she/her

[erelavent]

Do I think F1 was being an elitist little shit by rejecting Andretti's bid? Yes.

Do I think that Andretti writing to congress to investigate F1 under anti-trust laws is a little bitch move? Also yes.

[glasshomewrecker]

So, Pinterest decided to "crack down on p*d*philia" last month... while I certainly hope they were able to eliminate child abuse, the general effects were about what you'd expect. Here are some of my favorite "violations:"

The first one is a manifesto all on its own.

Another affirmation that "action against p*d*philia" will always be used as a cover story for homophobia and censorship of queer love. On top of the misogyny, the censorship of art depicting the human form, and the censorship of anti-nazi. Disappointing.

Meanwhile, they're perfectly happy with promoting Terfs. Here are some Pins they've reviewed as just fine:

Nothing says "feminism" like shitting on everyone who isn't a cis white woman, amirite?