#monopoly case Google

[deep-definition]

Yelp vs. Google Antitrust Case: Core Claims Head to Trial

Yelp vs. Google Antitrust Case: Yelp’s antitrust lawsuit against Google survives dismissal, as key claims on local search monopoly move to trial. Discover what this means for Big Tech and local SEO. Yelp vs. Google Antitrust Case Survives First Major Legal Hurdle Yelp vs. Google Antitrust Case: Core Claims Head to Trial Yelp’s Lawsuit Moves Toward Trial, Spotlighting Google’s Local Search…

[transannabeth]

nothing like listening to the radio and knowing they’re gonna get pissed off calls about it

[latestnews-now]

The US Department of Justice has proposed groundbreaking remedies in its antitrust case against Google, including selling Chrome and barring browser market re-entry. Could this end Google’s search monopoly? Learn more in this video! 🔴 Key Topics Covered: -Google’s antitrust ruling explained -DOJ’s proposed remedies -Google’s response and what’s next

[batboyblog]

Things the Biden-Harris Administration Did This Week #30

August 2-9 2024

The Department of Interior announced the largest investment since 1979 in outdoor recreation and conservation projects. The $325 million will go to support State, territorial, DC, and tribal governments in buying new land for parks and outdoor recreation sites. It also supports expansion and refurbishment of existing sites.

The EPA announced that Birmingham Alabama will get $171 million to update and replace its water system. The city of Birmingham is 70% black and like many black majority cities as struggled with aging water systems and lead pipes causing dangerous drinking water conditions. This investment is part of the Biden-Harris administrations plan to replace all of the nation's lead pipes.

The Department of Energy announced $2.2 billion in investments in the national power grid to help boost resiliency in the face of extreme weather. The projects will add 13 gigawatts of capacity, support 5,000 new jobs and upgrade 1,000 miles of transmission. Major projects will cut power outages in the west, drive down energy prices in New England, add off shore wind, and enable the development of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s wind resources.

The Justice Department won its massive anti-trust case against Google. A federal judge ruled that Google was an illegal monopoly. The DOJ has an ongoing antitrust suit against Apple, while the Federal Trade Commission is suing Facebook and Amazon for their monopolist practices

The US Government announced $3.9 billion in direct aid to Ukraine. The money will help the Government of Ukraine make up for massive budget short falls caused by the war with Russia. It'll help pay the salaries of teachers, emergency workers, and other public employees, as well helping displaced persons, low-income families and people with disabilities.

The Department of Energy announced $190 million to improve air quality and energy upgrades in K-12 schools. The grants to 320 schools across 25 states will impact 123,000 students, 94% of these schools service student bodies where over half the students qualify for free and reduced lunch. In the face of climate change more schools have been forced to close for extreme heat. These grants will help schools with everything from air filtration, to AC, to more robust energy systems, to replacing lighting.

USAID announced $424 million in additional humanitarian aid to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Due to ongoing conflict and food insecurity, 25 million Congolese are in need of humanitarian aid. This year alone the US has sent close to a billion dollars in aid to the DRC, making it the single largest donor to the crisis.

The Senate approved President Biden's appointment of Stacey Neumann of Maine, Meredith Vacca of New York, and Joseph Saporito Jr. of Pennsylvania to life time federal Judgeships. This brings the total of judges appointed by President Biden to 205. President Biden is the first President who's judicial nominations have not been majority white men, Judge Vacca is the first Asian American to serve in her district court. President Biden has also focused on former public defenders, like Judge Saporito, and former labor lawyers like Judge Neumann, as well as civil rights lawyers.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The Google antitrust remedy should extinguish surveillance, not democratize it

I'm coming to DEFCON! On FRIDAY (Aug 9), I'm emceeing the EFF POKER TOURNAMENT (noon at the Horseshoe Poker Room), and appearing on the BRICKED AND ABANDONED panel (5PM, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01). On SATURDAY (Aug 10), I'm giving a keynote called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification" (noon, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01).

If you are even slightly plugged into the doings and goings on in this tired old world of ours, then you have heard that Google has lost its antitrust case against the DOJ Antitrust Division, and is now an official, no-foolin', convicted monopolist.

This is huge. Epochal. The DOJ, under the leadership of the fire-breathing trustbuster Jonathan Kanter, has done something that was inconceivable four years ago when he was appointed. On Kanter's first day on the job as head of the Antitrust Division, he addressed his gathered prosecutors and asked them to raise their hands if they'd never lost a case.

It was a canny trap. As the proud, victorious DOJ lawyers thrust their arms into the air, Kanter quoted James Comey, who did the same thing on his first day on the job as DA for the Southern District of New York: "You people are the chickenshit club." A federal prosecutor who never loses a case is a prosecutor who only goes after easy targets, and leave the worst offenders (who can mount a serious defense) unscathed.

Under Kanter, the Antitrust Division has been anything but a Chickenshit Club. They've gone after the biggest game, the hardest targets, and with Google, they bagged the hardest target of all.

Again: this is huge:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/boom-judge-rules-google-is-a-monopolist

But also: this is just the start.

Now that Google is convicted, the court needs to decide what to do about it. Courts have lots of leeway when it comes to addressing a finding of lawbreaking. They can impose "conduct remedies" ("don't do that anymore"). These are generally considered weaksauce, because they're hard to administer. When you tell a company like Google to stop doing something, you need to expend a lot of energy to make sure they're following orders. Conduct remedies are as much a punishment for the government (which has to spend millions closely observing the company to ensure compliance) as they are for the firms involved.

But the court could also order Google to stop doing certain things. For example, since the ruling finds that Google illegally maintained its monopoly by paying other entities – Apple, Mozilla, Samsung, AT&T, etc – to be the default search, the court could order them to stop doing that. At the very least, that's a lot easier to monitor.

The big guns, though are the structural remedies. The court could order Google to sell off parts of its business, like its ad-tech stack, through which it represents both buyers and sellers in a marketplace it owns, and with whom it competes as a buyer and a seller. There's already proposed, bipartisan legislation to do this (how bipartisan? Its two main co-sponsors are Ted Cruz and Elizabeth Warren!):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/25/structural-separation/#america-act

All of these things, and more, are on the table:

https://www.wired.com/story/google-search-monopoly-judge-amit-mehta-options/

We'll get a better sense of what the judge is likely to order in the fall, but the case could drag out for quite some time, as Google appeals the verdict, then tries for the Supreme Court, then appeals the remedy, and so on and so on. Dragging things out in the hopes of running out the clock is a time-honored tradition in tech antitrust. IBM dragged out its antitrust appeals for 12 years, from 1970 to 1982 (they called it "Antitrust's Vietnam"). This is an expensive gambit: IBM outspent the entire DOJ Antitrust Division for 12 consecutive years, hiring more lawyers to fight the DOJ than the DOJ employed to run all of its antitrust enforcement, nationwide. But it worked. IBM hung in there until Reagan got elected and ordered his AG to drop the case.

This is the same trick Microsoft pulled in the nineties. The case went to trial in 1998, and Microsoft lost in 1999. They appealed, and dragged out the proceedings until GW Bush stole the presidency in 2000 and dropped the case in 2001.

I am 100% certain that there are lawyers at Google thinking about this: "OK, say we put a few hundred million behind Trump-affiliated PACs, wait until he's president, have a little meeting with Attorney General Andrew Tate, and convince him to drop the case. Worked for IBM, worked for Microsoft, it'll work for us. And it'll be a bargain."

That's one way things could go wrong, but it's hardly the only way. In his ruling, Judge Mehta rejected the DOJ's argument that in illegally creating and maintaining its monopoly, Google harmed its users' privacy by foreclosing on the possibility of a rival that didn't rely on commercial surveillance.

The judge repeats some of the most cherished and absurd canards of the marketing industry, like the idea that people actually like advertisements, provided that they're relevant, so spying on people is actually doing them a favor by making it easier to target the right ads to them.

First of all, this is just obvious self-serving rubbish that the advertising industry has been repeating since the days when it was waging a massive campaign against the TV remote on the grounds that people would "steal" TV by changing the channel when the ads came on. If "relevant" advertising was so great, then no one would reach for the remote – or better still, they'd change the channel when the show came back on, looking for more ads. People don't like advertising. And they hate "relevant" advertising that targets their private behaviors and views. They find it creepy.

Remember when Apple offered users a one-click opt-out from Facebook spying, the most sophisticated commercial surveillance system in human history, whose entire purpose was to deliver "relevant" advertising? More than 96% of Apple's customers opted out of surveillance. Even the most Hayek-pilled economist has to admit that this is a a hell of a "revealed preference." People don't want "relevant" advertising. Period.

The judge's credulous repetition of this obvious nonsense is doubly disturbing in light of the nature of the monopoly charge against Google – that the company had monopolized the advertising market.

Don't get me wrong: Google has monopolized the advertising market. They operate a "full stack" ad-tech shop. By controlling the tools that sellers and buyers use, and the marketplace where they use them, Google steals billions from advertisers and publishers. And that's before you factor in Jedi Blue, the illegal collusive arrangement the company has with Facebook, by which they carved up the market to increase their profits, gouge advertisers, starve publishers, and keep out smaller rivals:

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

One effect of Google's monopoly power is a global privacy crisis. In regions with strong privacy laws (like the EU), Google uses flags of convenience (looking at you, Ireland) to break the law with impunity:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/finnegans-snooze/#dirty-old-town

In the rest of the world, Google works with other members of the surveillance cartel to prevent the passage of privacy laws. That's why the USA hasn't had a new federal privacy law since 1988, when Congress acted to ban video-store clerks from telling newspaper reporters about the VHS cassettes you took home:

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

The lack of privacy law and privacy enforcement means that Google can inflict untold privacy harms on billions of people around the world. Everything we do, everywhere we go online and offline, every relationship we have, everything we buy and say and do – it's all collected and stored and mined and used against us. The immediate harm here is the haunting sense that you are always under observation, a violation of your fundamental human rights that prevents you from ever being your authentic self:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2013/jun/14/nsa-prism

The harms of surveillance aren't merely spiritual and psychological – they're material and immediate. The commercial surveillance industry provides the raw feedstock for a parade of horribles, from stalkers and bounty hunters turning up on their targets' front doors to cops rounding up demonstrators with location data from their phones to identity thieves tricking their marks by using leaked or purchased private information as convincers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy

The problem with Google's monopolization of the surveillance business model is that they're spying on us. But for a certain kind of competition wonk, the problem is that Google is monopolizing the violation of our human rights, and we need to use competition law to "democratize" commercial surveillance.

This is deeply perverse, but it represents a central split in competition theory. Some trustbusters fetishize competition for its own sake, on the theory that it makes companies better and more efficient. But there are some things we don't want companies to be better at, like violating our human rights. We want to ban human rights violations, not improve them.

For other trustbusters – like me – the point of competition enforcement isn't merely to make companies offer better products, it's to make companies small enough to hold account through the enforcement of democratic laws. I want to break – and break up – Google because I want to end its ability to bigfoot privacy law so that we can finally root out the cancer of commercial surveillance. I don't want to make Google smaller so that other surveillance companies can get in on the game.

There is a real danger that this could emerge from this decision, and that's a danger we need to guard against. Last month, Google shocked the technical world by announcing that it would not follow through on its years-long promise to kill third-party cookies, one of the most pernicious and dangerous tools of commercial surveillance. The reason for this volte-face appears to be concern that the EU would view killing third-party cookies as anticompetitive, since Google intended to maintain commercial surveillance using its Orwellian "Privacy Sandbox" technology in Chrome, with the effect that everyone except Google would find it harder to spy on us as we used the internet:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/googles-trail-of-crumbs

It's true! This is anticompetitive. But the answer isn't to preserve the universal power of tech companies large and small to violate our human rights – it's to ban everyone, especially Google, from spying on us!

This current in competition law is still on the fringe, but the Google case – which finds the company illegally dominating surveillance advertising, but rejects the idea that surveillance is itself a harm – offers an opportunity for this bad idea to go from the fringe to the center.

If that happens, look out.

Take "attribution," an obscure bit of ad-tech jargon disguising a jaw-droppingly terrible practice. "Attribution" is when an ad-tech company shows you an ad, and then follows you everywhere you go, monitoring everything you do, to determine whether the ad convinced you to buy something. I mean that literally: they're combining location data generated by your phone and captured by Bluetooth and wifi receivers with data from your credit card to follow you everywhere and log everything, so that they can prove to a merchant that you bought something.

This is unspeakably grotesque. It should be illegal. In many parts of the world, it is illegal, but it is so lucrative that monopolists like Google can buy off the enforcers and get away with it. What's more, only the very largest corporations have the resources to surveil you so closely and invasively that they can perform this "service."

But again, some competition wonks look at this situation and say, "Well, that's not right, we need to make sure that everyone can do attribution." This was a (completely mad) premise in the (otherwise very good) 2020 Competition and Markets Authority market-study on "Online platforms and digital advertising":

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5fa557668fa8f5788db46efc/Final_report_Digital_ALT_TEXT.pdf

This (again, otherwise sensible) document veers completely off the rails whenever the subject of attribution comes up. At one point, the authors propose that the law should allow corporations to spy on people who opt out of commercial surveillance, provided that this spying is undertaken for the sole purpose of attribution.

But it gets even worse: by the end of the document, the authors propose a "user ID intervention" to give every Briton a permanent, government-issued advertising identifier to make it easier for smaller companies to do attribution.

Look, I understand why advertisers like attribution and are willing to preferentially take their business to companies that can perform it. But the fact that merchants want to be able to peer into every corner of our lives to figure out how well their ads are performing is no basis for permitting them to do so – much less intervening in the market to make it even easier so more commercial snoops can get their noses in our business!

This is an idea that keeps popping up, like in this editorial by a UK lawyer, where he proposes fixing "Google's dominance of online advertising" by making it possible for everyone to track us using the commercial surveillance identifiers created and monopolized by the ad-tech duopoly and the mobile tech duopoly:

https://www.thesling.org/what-to-do-about-googles-dominance-of-online-advertising/

Those companies are doing something rotten. In dominating ads, they have stolen billions from publishers and advertisers. Then they used those billions to capture our democratic process and ensure that our human rights weren't being defended as they plundered our private data and put us in harm's way.

Advertising will adapt. The marketing bros know this is coming. They're already discussing how to live in a world where you can't measure clicks and you can't attribute actions (e.g. the world from the first advertisements up until the early 2000s):

https://sparktoro.com/blog/attribution-is-dying-clicks-are-dying-marketing-is-going-back-to-the-20th-century/

An equitable solution to Google's monopoly will not run though our right to privacy. We don't solve the Google monopoly by creating competition in surveillance. The reason to get rid of Google's monopoly is to make it easier to end surveillance.

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/2024/08/07/revealed-preferences/#extinguish-v-improve

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[devilish-cherry]

nanami relationship headcanons ♡

ᨳ♡₊➳ nanami x reader

ᨳ♡₊➳ crack, fluff

ᨳ♡₊➳ my other works

ᨳ♡₊➳ a/n: this post is just me projecting my need for someone emotionally mature and capable through nanami. please clap. 🙂‍↕️

₊⊹. nanami unironically has reminders set for relationship milestones. not because he's forgetful, but because he's practical. he'll deadpan tell you, "it's our anniversary tomorrow. expect a dinner that's slightly nicer than usual, but please keep your expectations reasonable."

₊⊹. you bought him novelty socks once. he said they were "childish." he now wears them every friday. they have little croissants on them. he doesn't talk about it. but when you pointed it out, he just said, "i was low on clean socks. coincidence." lies.

₊⊹. you once complained about him texting like a customer service chatbot. now, you'll get messages like "Dinner at 7. 👍" and after questioning him, he'll calmly explain, "i thought the thumbs up would indicate enthusiasm."

₊⊹. he respects your weird little hobbies like it's a full-time religion. you told him you liked collecting novelty erasers and now he's like, "i found this one shaped like a sushi roll. seemed appropriate. it's from a limited set." you don't even know where he finds these.

₊⊹. you once texted nanami "u up?" at 10:42 p.m. he responded at 6:00 a.m. the next day with, "I was asleep. As all sane adults should be." you then received a forwarded link to a sleep hygiene article and a reminder to hydrate. the man loves you, but sleep comes first. always.

₊⊹. on a particularly rough day, you find him staring dramatically out the window, murmuring, "this world continues to test my patience." when you ask what's wrong, he answers solemnly, "they discontinued my preferred rye bread."

₊⊹. he might complain about meaningless small talk, yet he listens patiently and intently whenever you excitedly ramble about your latest hyperfixation. later, you catch him quietly googling random obscure facts just so he can casually drop information into future conversations. "did you know," he'll begin flatly at dinner, "the specific species of salamander you adore has regenerative capabilities?" this is peak romance for him.

₊⊹. nanami keeps a grocery list in his notes app. it is secretly 80% just things you casually mentioned once.

₊⊹. if you have long hair, you notice he starts wearing your hair ties on his wrist. he vehemently denies sentimentality, claiming instead that it's practical, in case of "unexpected wind conditions."

₊⊹. he never says he misses you outright but texts random things like, "The house seems unnecessarily spacious today." you translate these awkwardly formal messages as "i miss you." and tease him relentlessly for it.

₊⊹. nanami looks so intimidatingly polished at all times, people assume he's naturally graceful. in reality, you've seen him bang his shin on the coffee table at least twice a week. each time he just quietly, painfully mutters, "fantastic."

₊⊹. the first time you suggest watching a cheesy romantic drama together, he provided dry commentary on unrealistic plot developments, muttering things like, "yes, because sprinting in heels through an airport is totally practical." with such seriousness you almost choke on your popcorn laughing.

₊⊹. despite being cool and collected, he's hilariously competitive at random things. he's calm until someone mentions board games. monopoly nights at home become overly serious. he mutters under his breath about property taxes, income inequality, and irresponsible fiscal policies as you nervously remind him, "nanami, it's fake money." he glares softly, "principles aren't fictional."

₊⊹. if you oversleep and panic, he watches calmly as you sprint around. when you complain, he sips his coffee and deadpans, "it’s simple: wake up earlier, or master teleportation."

₊⊹. nanami calls you by your name 95% of the time. once he called you "dear" and gojo materialized from the drywall like a poltergeist to scream about it. nanami now refuses to say anything remotely affectionate within a five-mile radius of gojo.

₊⊹. he is 100% the boyfriend who texts "Can you talk?" and immediately stresses you out, only to call and calmly ask, "which type of cereal did you want again?"

₊⊹. despite being generally indifferent towards animals, nanami somehow attracts stray cats. you regularly catch him sternly lecturing a cat, saying flatly, "i’m not feeding you again," while simultaneously sliding food toward it discreetly.

₊⊹. he openly claims he doesn’t nap. he merely "rests his eyes aggressively" on weekends, fully clothed on the couch, for precisely forty five minutes exactly.

₊⊹. he secretly enjoys watching documentaries about marine life but insists he's doing "important retirement research."

₊⊹. even though he seems eternally composed, when you get sick, nanami panics silently. he googles symptoms discreetly, sighs, then calmly states, "according to the internet, you either have a mild cold or twenty four hours left to live. please let me know which one so i can adjust my schedule accordingly."

₊⊹. he hates pda in theory, claiming it’s "inappropriate and disruptive," yet has zero hesitation holding your hand tightly when crossing busy streets, rationalizing it as "accident prevention."

₊⊹. nanami tries his absolute hardest to hate all forms of modern slang and phrases. until one day he overhears you calling gojo "a walking red flag" and suddenly he's very supportive.

₊⊹. you catch him watching cooking competition shows with intense seriousness, critiquing plating skills and muttering, "no self-respecting chef serves food smeared randomly like abstract art. are we dining or painting?"

₊⊹. despite his stoic demeanor, you catch glimpses of softness: like the slightly awkward way he offers his coat when you're cold, muttering, "don’t make a fuss, just wear it." or how he carefully holds the umbrella slightly more over you in the rain, grumbling about your poor planning yet never failing to protect you from a single raindrop.

₊⊹. he walks on the side of the sidewalk closest to traffic. holds doors for you even if it means awkwardly power-walking to get ahead. refills your water without being asked. the kind of love that’s low-volume but high-resolution.

[anim-ttrpgs]

Help Save the World of TTRPGs and Their Creators.

Okay I’m being a little dramatic, but at the same time I’m pretty serious. This is a call to action, and the livelihoods of myself and lots of other people, many of them (like myself) disabled, are depending on it. This is a post about why, what you can do about it, and (perhaps least often answered) how.

This post is actually an accompaniment to another discussion by someone else. If you don’t want to listen to a 90-minute in-depth discussion of much of what I’m about to tell you, you can just keep reading. Otherwise, click here or here and listen to this either before or after you read this post. (They’re the same thing, just different sources.)

If you have ever made or reblogged posts urging people to switch from Google Chrome to Firefox, you should be willing to at least give a try to other TTRPGs besides D&D5e for much the same principle reasons. I’m not telling you you have to hate D&D5e, and I’m not telling you you have to quit D&D5e, I’m just asking you to try some other games. If you don’t like them, and you really want to go back to D&D5e, then go back to D&D5e. But how can you really know you won’t like other games if you have literally never tried them? This post is a post about why and how to try them. If you’re thinking right now that you don’t want to try them, I urge you to look below to see if any of your reasons for not wanting to try them are covered there. Because the monopoly that WotC’s D&D5e has on TTRPGs as a whole is bad for me as a game designer, and it’s bad for you as a game player. It’s even bad for you if you like D&D5e. A fuller discussion of the why and how this is the case can be found in the links above, but it isn’t fully necessary for understanding this post, it’ll just give you a better perspective on it.

If you’re a D&D5e player, I’m sure at some point or another, you’ve been told “play a different game”, and it must get frustrating without the context of why and how. This post is here to give you the why and how.

[The following paragraph has been edited because the original wording made it sound like we think all weird TTRPGs suck.]

Before that though, one more thing to get out of the way. I'm going to level with you. There’s a lot of weird games out there.

You are gonna see a lot of weird TTRPGs when you take the plunge. Many of them try to completely reinvent what a TTRPG even is, and some fail spectacularly, others really do even up doing something very interesting even if they don't end up being what a core TTRPG player wants. But not every indie RPG is a Bladefish, lots and lots of them are more 'traditional' and will feel very familiar to you, I promise. (And you might even find that you like the weird experimental bladefish type ones, these are usually ideal for one-session plays when your usual group can't play your usual game for any reason.)

You're also going to probably see a lot of very bad games, and man have I got some stories of very bad games, but for now I'm just saying to make sure you read the reviews, or go through curators (several of which will be listed below), before you buy.

Now that that is out of the way, I’m going to go down a list of concerns you may have for why not, and then explain the how.

“I don’t want to learn a whole new set of rules after I already spent so much time learning D&D5e.”

Learning a new set of rules is not going to be as hard as you think. Most other TTRPGs aren’t like that. D&D5e is far on the high end of the scale for TTRPGs being hard and time-consuming to learn and play. If you’ve only played D&D5e, it might trick you into thinking that learning any TTRPG is an overwhelmingly time-consuming task, but this is really mostly a D&D5e problem, not a TTRPG problem as a whole.

“D&D5e has all of these extra online tools to help you play it.”

So what? People have been playing TTRPGs without the help of computers for 50 years. To play a well-designed TTRPG you won’t need a computer. Yes, even if you're bad at math. There are some TTRPGs out there that barely even use math.

“I’m too invested in the narrative and characters of my group’s current ongoing D&D5e campaign to switch to something else.”

There are other games, with better design made by better people for less money, that are the same kind of game as D&D5e, that your current characters, lore, and plot will fit right into and do it better. And no, it's not just Pathfinder, there's others.

“I can’t afford to play another TTRPG.”

You probably can. If you’ve only played D&D5e, you might have been made to think that TTRPGs are a very expensive hobby. They aren’t. D&D5e is actually uniquely expensive, costing more than 3x more than the next most expensive TTRPG I can think of right now. Even on the more expensive end, other TTRPG books will cost you no more than $60, most will cost you less than $20, and a whole lot of them are just free. If you somehow still can’t afford another TTRPG, come to the A.N.I.M. TTRPG Book club mentioned below, nominate the game, and if it wins the vote we will straight up buy it for you.

(By the way, if you had any of the above concerns about trying other games besides D&D5e, that really makes it sound like you are in a textbook abusive relationship with D&D5e. This is how abusers control their partners, and how empires control their citizens, by teaching you to think that nothing could ever get any better, and even though they treat you bad, the Other will treat you even worse.)

“If I don’t play D&D5e, which TTRPG should I play?”

That’s a pretty limited question to be asking, because there will be no one TTRPG for everything. And no, D&D5e is not the one TTRPG for everything, Hasbro’s marketing team is just lying to you. (Pathfinder and PbtA are not the one system for everything either!) Do you only play one video game or only watch one movie or only read one book? When you finish watching an action movie like Mad Max, and then you want to watch a horror movie, do you just rewind Mad Max and watch it over again but this time you act scared the whole time? No, you watch a different movie. I’m asking you to give the artistic medium of TTRPGs the same respect you would give movies.

“I want to play something besides D&D5e, but my friends won’t play anything else!”

I have several answers to this.

Try showing them this post.

If that doesn’t work: Make them. Put your foot down. This works especially well if you are the DM. Tell them you won’t run another session of D&D5e until they agree to give what you want to do at least one try instead of always doing only what they want to do. This is, like, playing 101. We learned this in kindergarten. If your friend really wants to play something else, you should give their game a try, or you’re not really being a very good friend.

If that doesn’t work, find another group. This doesn’t even mean that you have to leave your existing group. A good place to start would be the A.N.I.M. TTRPG Book Club which will be mentioned and linked below. You can also go to the subreddit of any game you’re interested in and probably meet people there who have the same problem you do and want to put together a group to play something other than D&D5e. You might get along great with these people, you might not, but you won’t know until you try. Just make sure to have a robust “session zero” so everyone is on the same page. This is a good practice for any group but it is especially important for a group made of players you’ve just met.

“I only watch actual plays.”

Then watch actual plays of games that aren’t D&D5e. These podcasts struggle for the same reasons that indie RPGs struggle, because of the brand recognition and brand loyalty D&D5e has, despite their merit. I don’t watch actual plays, or else I would be able to list more of them. So, anyone who does watch actual plays, please help me out by commenting on this post with some non-D&D5e actual plays you like. And please do me a favor and don’t list actual plays that only play one non-D&D5e system, list ones that go through a variety of systems. The first one I can think of is Tiny Table.

“I can just homebrew away all the problems with D&D5e.”

Even though I want to, I’m not going to try and argue that you can’t actually homebrew away all the problems with D&D5e. Instead, I’m going to ask you why you’re buying two $50 rulebooks just to throw away half the pages. In most other good RPGs, you don’t need to change the rules to make them fun, they’re fun right out the box.

“But homebrewing D&D5e into any kind of game is fun! You can homebrew anything out of D&D5e!”

Firstly, I promise that this is not unique to D&D5e. Secondly, then you would probably have more fun homebrewing a system that gives you a better starting point for reaching your goal. Also, what if I told you that there are entire RPG systems out there that are made just for this? There are RPG systems that were designed for the purpose of being a toolbox and set of materials for you to work with to make exactly the game you want to make. Some examples are GURPS, Savage Worlds, Basic RolePlaying, Caltrop Core, and (as much as I loathe it) PbtA.

“I’m not supporting WotC’s monopoly because I pirate all the D&D5e books.”

Then you’re still not supporting the smaller developers that this monopoly is crushing, either.

Now, here’s the how. Because I promise you, there’s not just one, but probably a dozen other RPGs out there that will scratch your exact itch.

Here’s how to find them. This won’t be a comprehensive list because I’ve already been typing this for like 3 hours already. Those reading this, please go ahead and comment more to help fill out the list.

First, I’m gonna plug one of my own major projects, because it’s my post. The A.N.I.M. TTRPG Book Club. It’s a discord server that treats playing TTRPGs like a book club, with the goal of introducing members to a wide variety of games other than D&D5e. RPGs are nominated by members, then we hold a vote to decide what to read and play for a short campaign, then we repeat. There is no financial, time, or schedule investment required to join this book club, I promise it is very schedule-friendly, because we assign people to different groups based of schedule compatibility. You don’t have to play each campaign, or any campaign, you can just read along and participate in discussion that way. And if you can’t afford to buy the rulebook we’re going to be reading, we will make sure you get a PDF of it for free. That is how committed we are to getting non-D&D5e RPGs into people’s hands. Here is an invite link.

Next, there are quite a few tumblr blogs you can follow to get recommendations shown to you frequently.

@indierpgnewsletter

@indie-ttrpg-of-the-day

@theresattrpgforthat

@haveyouplayedthisttrpg

@indiepressrevolution

Plenty of podcasts, journalists, and youtubers out there do in-depth discussions of different systems regularly, a couple I can think of off the top of my head are:

Storyteller Conclave (I’m actually going to be interviewed live on this show on April 10th!)

Seth Skorkowsky

Questing Beast

The Gaming Table

Rascal News

Lastly, you can just go looking. Browse r/rpg, drivethrurpg.com, indie press revolution, and itch.io.

Now, if you really want to support me and my team specifically Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy, our debut TTRPG, is going to launch on Kickstarter on April 10th and we need all the help we can get. Set a reminder from the Kickstarter page through this link.

If you’re interested in a more updated and improved version of Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy than the free demo you got from our website, there’s plenty of ways to get one!

Subscribe to our Patreon where we frequently roll our new updates for the prerelease version!

Donate to our ko-fi and send us an email with proof that you did, and we’ll email you back with the full Eureka prerelease package with the most updated version at the time of responding! (The email address can be found if you scroll down to the bottom of our website.)

We also have merchanise.

[datamined]

UH OH Google just lost an antitrust case!

“A federal U.S. judge ruled Monday that Google has illegally held a monopoly in two market areas: search and text advertising.

The landmark case from the government, filed in 2020, alleged that Google has kept its share of the general search market by creating strong barriers to entry and a feedback loop that sustained its dominance. The court found that Google violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act, which outlaws monopolies.

The ruling marks the first anti-monopoly decision against a tech company in decades.”

Article by Rohan Goswami and Jennifer Elias

[daemonhxckergrrl]

i missed out on the decades of hype and sci-fi thirsting over One Device to Rule Them All but grew up during the transition from Wow ! Gadgets ! to turbomaxxing smartphones. the phone/ipod/internet communications device congealment. bought into it.

who remembers igoogle ? wave ? there's an app for that ? early attempts at "os in a browser", thin client replacements ? docs before it became drive ? text to tweet ? cloud. integrations. smartphone. integrations. integrated integrations.

the ultimate Gadget and it's in your pocket, and on the cloud. you are the cloud. your whole life the cloud.

and we got it, complete with malware. spyware. ads. ads for spyware. spyware for ads tracking. locked in. not like that ! walled gardens, monopolies, too big to fail !!

baby synthia, kid synthia, teen synthia, even young adult synthia, all got hyped got hyper over it. not the spyware. i grew up using linux in the fuckign 00s did schoolwork on it. but like. bluetooth peripherals, wow !! 2.4ghz wireless peripherals, wow !!! webmail webapps cloud storage i had blogger/blogspot on my first smartphone i was amazed at sync via google account i dreamed of smarthomes and alexas. like a fool.

but, doing that shit early ? i got out early too. too many wires are a pain and there are cases for wireless things (K400 plus controlling jellyfin/plex), but wires are reliable. dependable. don't need batteries. i want Gadgets and Gizmos. sometimes this trades convenience for reliability, but well-designed gadgets are only inconvenient for task-switching. and maybe that friction would stop us being so chronically online.

this lacks the funny interaction or initial oneliner into reblog chain to gain any traction but idc. read a classic blog post once in a while.

gadgets, much like the part where i live mostly in the terminal, represent bringing whimsy back into tech my relationship with it. but they also represent an attempt to balance things and enforce a boundary with myself. i spend a lot of time on my desktop and i miss spending time sat in other places, or outside for fun, or tinkering with projects, a million other things. reading an ebook on the sofa, laying in bed with just an mp3 player, treating internet use on my thinkpad as transactional from time to time, that's an attempt to find balancce. that's renegotiating things. and telling corporate tech to fuck off especially.

[autolenaphilia]

Why enshittification happens and how to stop it.

The enshittification of the internet and increasingly the software we use to access it is driven by profit. It happens because corporations are machines for making profits from end users, the users and customers are only seen as sources of profits. Their interests are only considered if it can help the bottom line. It's capitalism.

For social media it's users are mainly seen by the companies that run the sites as a way for getting advertisers to pay money that can profit the shareholders. And social media is in a bit of death spiral right now, since they have seldom or never been profitable and investor money is drying up as they realize this.

So the social media companies. are getting more and more desperate for money. That's why they are getting more aggressive with getting you to watch ads or pay for the privilege of not watching ads. It won't work and tumblr and all the other sites will die eventually.

But it's not just social media companies, it's everything tech-related. It gets worse the more monopolistic a tech giant is. Google is abusing its chrome-based near monopoly over the web, nerfing adblockers, trying to drm the web, you name it. And Microsoft is famously a terrible company, spying on Windows users and selling their data. Again, there is so much money being poured into advertising, at least 493 billion globally, the tech giants want a slice of that massive pie. It's all about making profits for shareholders, people be damned.

And the only insurance against this death spiral is not being run by a corporation. If the software is being developed by a non-profit entity, and it's open source, there is no incentive for the developers to fuck over the users for the sake of profits for shareholders, because there aren't any profits, and no shareholders.

Free and Open source software is an important part of why such software development can stay non-corporate. It allows for volunteers to contribute to the code and makes it harder for users to be secretly be fucked over by hidden code.

Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird are good examples of this. There is a Mozilla corporation, but it exists only for legal reasons and is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the non-profit Mozilla foundation. There are no shareholders. That means the Mozilla corporation is not really a corporation in the sense that Google is, and as an organization has entirely different incentives. If someone tells you that Mozilla is just another corporation, (which people have said in the notes of posts about firefox on this very site) they are spreading misinformation.

That's why Firefox has resisted the enshittification of the internet so well, it's not profit driven. And people who develop useful plugins that deshitify the web like Ublock origin and Xkit are as a rule not profit-driven corporations.

And you can go on with other examples of non-profit software like Libreoffice and VLC media player, both of which you should use.

And you can go further, use Linux as your computer's operating system.. It's the only way to resist the enshitification that the corporate duopoly of Microsoft and Apple has brought to their operating system. The plethora of community-run non-profit Linux distributions like Debian, Mint and Arch are the way to counteract that, and they will stay resistant to the same forces (creating profit for shareholders) that drove Microsoft to create Windows 11.

Of course not all Linux distributions are non-profits. There are corporate created distros like Red Hat's various distros, Canonical's Ubuntu and Suse's Opensuse, and they prove the point I'm making. There has some degree of enshittification going on with those, red hat going closed source and Canonical with the snap store for example. Mint is by now a succesful community-driven response to deshitify Ubuntu by removing snaps for example, and even they have a back-up plan to use Debian as a base in case Canonical makes Ubuntu unuseable.

As for social media, which I started with, I'm going to stay on tumblr for now, but it will definitely die. The closest thing to a community run non-profit replacement I can see is Mastodon, which I'm on as @autolenaphilia@chaosfem.tw.

You don't have to keep using corporate software, and have it inevitably decline because the corporations that develop it cares more about its profits than you as an end user.

The process of enshittification proves that corporations being profit-driven don't mean they will create a better product, and in fact may cause them to do the opposite. And the existence of great free and open source software, created entirely without the motivation of corporate profits, proves that people don't need to profit in order to help their fellow human beings. It kinda makes you question capitalism.

[butteronabun]

11/14

a diluc ragnvindr x female reader college au.

overview: he’s worried. they’re all worried.

wc: 2.6k

disclaimer: arguments & confrontations, mentions of losing sleep & skipping meals, anxiety, hurt/comfort, hints of plot if you squint but they’re just fillers anyway

( if that is not to your liking, feel free to skip! it’s angsty! )

You stare blankly at the screen in front of you. Hands fidgeting, eyes drying, you put yourself at a standstill — even just for a bit.

Though a rational part of you screams to keep on moving, to keep on going—because there’s a fucking deadline that you have to chase—the tight grip on the rope has loosened.

Aggressive yet motivational speeches linger. From “stop fucking around” to “suck it up” and to “no pain, no gain,” you don’t have the drive to resume your duties anymore. Even if you have backlogs to wrap up, even if you to–do lists to fulfill, even if you have obligations to commit, you just can’t.

You close your slightly parted lips - you, yourself, know that you’re in danger. Not by the means of losing sleep, or even skipping meals, no. But the way that you’re going to get up at early hours of dawn because you have a seven o’clock class and you have a paper to pass. (Your body is screaming for help.)

A paper that is yet to be revised, for it is filled with comments from group mates who have no self-awareness. Messages ranging from is this already enough, to does the paragraph make any sense? Can you check? Thanks!

Said paper is but a lowly Google doc tab beside other twenty–somethings that contain case studies and design pegs for the first and third chapter of your thesis.

There’s a gentle knock on your door. It snaps you out of your reverie, and you swallow. You need water, and so you reach out to your messy bedside table to retrieve the flask. Close to the flask is nothing but your angry clock that reminds you it’s almost close to midnight.

You pull the flask’s lid, and make yourself drink. It’s not cold anymore.

You need to refill this.

There’s another knock. Oh. You haven’t answered. It must've been your roommate. “What now, Noelle?” You take another swig of your flask before gulping it all down. You really need to refill it. “I already told you, I can’t join for today’s game night because I still have some requirements to complete. Tell Amber and the others that I’ll make it up to them next time.”

You turn to your screen again. To your unfinished project—to your work in progress.

You’ve rejected her offers countless times - but can she really blame you, when it’s the peak of midterms season? Everyone’s suffering as it is, and despite your desire to mingle with the others through board games ( such as monopoly or game of the generals ) in the lobby or partake in the nerf gun wars in the second floor’s hall, you just can’t indulge yourself today.

(Though you’re not even sure if you’ll be able to push through until 12 with this task. But she doesn’t need to know that, right?)

“It’s me,” A familiar voice says, and you freeze in your sitting position on your bed. You immediately glance at the door, imagining the shape of a grumpy, beefy, and attractive man with red hair tied up, clad in his stupid, dark, and hot turtleneck. “Noelle’s not here as of the moment. May I come in?”

Diluc wants to come in, your mind supplies, before it hits you all at once. Oh.

Diluc. Wants. To. Come. In.

Diluc.

And suddenly, memories come flashing. The way you’ve ignored the notifications flooding your phone for weeks now. The way you’ve shut the people out who approach you when they manage to find you in the cafeteria. The way you’ve ceased your tendency to come visit their dorm every night, just to yap about a cheesy romcom movie you’ve binged last Saturday (and rate them in your letterboxd).

Oh fuck.

Fuck!

“No,” you answer hastily, and just like that, you push your laptop away. You rush around your room to fix some things that have scattered on your desk and on the ground.

You pick up some of the uniforms and statement shirts your friend Yanfei has given you, and throw them on the laundry basket near your door. You push aside some of the sticky notes, yellow papers, sketches of storyboards on your study table to make room for your other workload. You kick some of the printed documents and files you’ve accumulated this week that are covered with red marks from strict professors under the bed, and even though you’ve made yourself clear that no, Diluc can’t go in, the doorknob fucking twists anyway, and every fiber of your being launches into a fight or flight mode.

”Diluc, you can’t—“

The golden light pours in when the door slowly opens. You cover your eyes with your arm, hissing at the brightness. Gods. As your sight adjusts, Diluc’s figure looms over you.

Damn it, you forgot to lock the door. You make a mental reminder to yourself that Noelle’s not everyone.

Diluc calls out your name, and your heart stirs. It stirs because it has been so long since you’ve heard from him, it’s been so long since you’ve heard his gentle voice call your name. By lowering your arm, you hesitantly meet his gaze—his oh–so tender gaze ( that is still unbelievably surprising to witness, when he’s always unimpressed ). Your stomach churns, and you feel all other things that bring you to the edge, all because of one scapegoat: him.

He scans you up and down, and you can’t help but feel conscious. You can’t help but feel vulnerable. You nervously blurt out a what? before he comments with a frown that is deepening by the second. “You look as if someone has put you through the wringer.”

Ah.

The first that comes to your mind is — “you think?” and the second is, “obviously.” Irritation floods your veins, but you suppress yourself from lashing out. Diluc’s an innocent person and he doesn’t deserve to be the receiving end of your growing bad mood.

But he’s not wrong. Out of all the efforts you’ve done just to at least make him believe that you’re keeping it all together, you’ve forgotten to fix yourself.

But then again. It’s Diluc. Nothing ever passes him.

“Thanks,” you send him a small smile that doesn’t reach your eyes. You return the scrutiny back to him. As usual, Diluc’s prim and proper. And it’s unfair. You’re aware that he also has his own big and heavy thing to tackle. A feasibility study, right? But compared to other business students, Diluc doesn’t look bothered at all. He doesn’t look very much affected by the stress.

But then again, it’s Diluc. He’s stupidly amazing. It’s also crazy stupid how he even wants to be a college student in the first place when he already has enough or ample knowledge to run a business, considering he’s taken the role of being Dawn Winery’s CEO. Considering he’s also eligible for being Forbes 30 under 30.

“What brings you here?” You turn your back to him, not wanting to meet his eyes any longer. You make yourself busy by sorting through some of the printed pages that have caused your heart so much dread these past few days. The simple touching of it makes you want to pull away, yet you refrain yourself. Not now. Not when Diluc is just right there. “Sorry to be a killjoy, but if you’re inviting me for a sponty road trip, I’ll have to decline.”

( You ignore once more the assortment of polaroid shots hanging from your cork board below your study desk. There’s one film in particular that shows a picture of you and Diluc together inside his Aston Martin that one night during freshman year. This was when you told him about that shawarma place that served burrito-sized shawarmas. You were smiling brightly while holding your half–bitten order, and if one would squint, they would be able to notice the minuscule grin that Diluc was displaying. )

“You haven’t returned my calls,” Diluc points out, and you’re not surprised. Always straight to the point. Not cryptic, like Venti, and definitely not disingenuous, like Kaeya. “And you haven’t replied to some of my messages. It's been hard to catch you recently.”

You remember Venti and Childe repeating the same words. And as your usual response, you assume he’s going to say more, so you let him. You grab your flask, shaking it a bit even though you know you’ve emptied it. “It’s midterms season, Diluc. I’m sure you understand and can relate to my constant absence. Unfortunately, I can’t control it.” Though a part of you desperately wishes you can.

Then, as you slowly spin to the direction of the exit, you wonder how you’ll ever cross the distance without Diluc intruding your goal. You really need to drink more water because your lips are chapped, and your throat feels rough.

Eh, here goes nothing. You try to avoid his observant gaze. “Um. If that’s everything, feel free to leave now because I still have some paperwork to write.” And be miserable again, you say in your mind. You begin to saunter towards the doorway, passing him ultimately. A mission success? “I’ll see you, maybe in the next few—“

“Are you alright?”

That stops you.

Diluc moves, and you can feel him staring at your form, even if you have your back turned to him. The stirring in your heart increases a greater amount as the silence envelops both of you when you don’t eventually respond.

The clock plastered on the wall ticks. And ticks. And ticks.

Students, maybe juniors, outside your dorm room that you share with Noelle, bicker and guffaw. Troublemakers on the other side bump their fists on the wooden walls.

Diluc waits for you in anticipation.

And you ponder—you attempt to form the words that will at least drop this conversation. That will not further cause any more questions.

( But nothing ever comes out. )

“This isn’t like you.” Diluc then says, after your prolonged silence. You fear for the worst. Diluc knows you. Diluc knows you too much, and perhaps the younger you, the happier you—from back then on those stupid polaroid shots that carried on the memories of the previous two school years—would’ve been delighted by this fact, but the you in the present is apprehensive.

She wants to cower. She wants to hide. ( She wants to stay away from Diluc because she knows that deep inside, with Diluc’s arrival finally during the lowest points of your life, will be the immediate climax. It will be the immediate breakthrough. )

“Compared to previous ‘midterm seasons’, you haven’t acted like this before. Not until now.” He spurs on.

“T–Things. . .have changed.” You mentally beat yourself up for stammering, though you can’t deny that Diluc’s correct for the second time. “I can’t just hang around in your dorm room with Venti and eat instant ramen anymore. I know that you two are occupied with your own respective majors.”

“And you know that we don’t mind your visits. What even brought this on?” Diluc questions, and you clench your fists. “I’ve heard from Noelle that you’ve been skipping your breakfast. She also told me how you would go home immediately and pass out on your bed for the rest of the day.”

You feel like a deer caught in the headlights. Gosh, you underestimate Noelle and Diluc’s closeness. She’s like a sister to him, so of course she’ll be sharing what she has seen with him.

But you just can’t let him put you on the spot like this. You had your reasons. “Again, I was tired because of midterms, Diluc. Completely unavoidable and reasonable for college students like us—“ Yet he’s not having any of it, when he interrupts you.

“And from your friends. Navia and Nilou.”

Your eyes grow wide. No.

“They’ve informed me that you—“

You turn to him by the shoulder in disapproval, “Diluc—“

“—had an altercation with them, and they’re all—“

“Diluc, that’s enough,” You chide, glowering at him with an intensity. Because you don’t understand—how? “What does this - how did you even know that?Why did they even tell you that? That doesn’t concern you.”

Diluc glares back at you tenfold. “It does concern me when it involves you.”

( At another time you would’ve asked what he meant by that. )

“It’s a sensitive topic, you know that,” You seethe at him. “If you’re here to push my buttons, you know better not to do it today. Not when—“

“Not when a lot of people have been deeply affected in the process?” He interferes again, and takes a step forward. “If I have to force you from confessing what you truly feel instead of bottling it up, then this is the option that I’ll have to resort to. Your stubborn nature isn’t helping with the matter.”

You feel something crack. Wow. “I don’t have to explain everything to you.”

”You’re not alright.”

“I am alright!”

“You’re not.” Another crack.

“I am!”

Diluc calls out your name in a warning.

And the dam breaks. You just can’t take it anymore. “For archon’s sake, Diluc, I am! I fucking am!” You scream. “Can you, please, PLEASE fucking believe in me before I cannot to myself anymore? Please?”

You and Diluc have gotten into fights before. Petty squabbles or stupid quarrels, actually, but never this heated. You have triggered his pet peeves when he has forgotten to fulfill his small promises, and he gives you the silent treatment whenever you have annoyed him far too much. All in all, they’re just normal disagreements between you two.

But this? This is different. For all the three years you’ve spent with each other, not once did it reach to this degree, until now.

You and Diluc are aware that both of you are equally obstinate—both with prideful personalities and never the one to back down from an argument because of the stances they want to stand for.

But of course, there’s only one denominator that not only triumphs all, but the two of you share.

The reason why you both are fighting as of the moment is because it’s all coming from the heart.

( The rage from Diluc’s expression immediately disappears when he catches sight of your tears cascading down your cheeks. He registers the words that have spilled from your lips, and the organ in his chest shatters one by one as you bawl.

He knows you’re hurting, and you’ve done a great job of hiding it. He doesn’t like the fact that it took him this long to realize, yet he doesn’t dwell on it and moves forward. He focuses on the present. On what matters. You hurting— he knows that with you keeping it a secret will only damage you further. )

You cover your face with your hands as you break down. You’re ashamed. Embarrassed. But most of all: in pain. “I know that I haven’t been on my best behavior lately, but I’m trying, okay? I’m fucking trying, damn it!” You breathe out heavily. “You don’t have to— you don’t have to mention my shortcomings, or what I’ve missed, because I’m aware. I’m fucking aware, but I promise you, Diluc, after all this, I swear, I’ll—“

Diluc calls your name again. You peek from your fingers, because his voice has softened, and your heart quivers, and Diluc is much much closer.

Your eyes glaze when Diluc opens his arms. An open invitation—his protection. Your broken, broken soul aches for it, and every fiber of your being wants nothing more but to be encased by his arms. “Come.”

And you bury yourself on Diluc’s chest, crying your heart out. You wail as Diluc wraps you in a warm and gentle embrace, finally giving you the comfort that you need, after the hell you’ve been through. He strokes your back comfortingly, and more tears fall from your eyes.

The stress, frustrations, and anxieties that you’ve accumulated this past few weeks have taken a great toll on you. It has ruined and devastated you to the point that you can’t even track your academic standing and relationships. And in result, this has affected you physically, emotionally, and mentally.

“Diluc,” You whine, and he releases a soft hum. You lift your head up to him, with your cheeks flushed and eyes red. He looks back at you. “I - I don’t know what to do— I. . . I have been so lost, and I feel like giving up, because—“

He caresses your cheekbone, and wipes a stray tear with his thumb. “You don’t have to tell me.” ( He doesn’t want to stress you out any longer. )

“But — but I want to. You’re,” You weep, “the only one who listens.”

Diluc cups both of your cheeks. “Then, share your burdens with me. Confide with me. One at a time.”

You nod quietly. Diluc mutters for you to go on and kisses your forehead, whispering sweet and comforting words and guilty apologies.

( this is so personal omg but yeah so this was written last year, around Nov 14 - i was at my lowest frfr. anw this is like, the same au with this one but it’s also like an au??? yes it’s an au of an au LOLOL )

[scienceandshitpostsdaily]

“In August, a federal judge ruled that Google holds a monopoly in the search market. The ruling came after the government in 2020 filed its landmark case, alleging that Google controlled the general search market by creating strong barriers to entry and a feedback loop that sustained its dominance. The court found that Google violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act, which outlaws monopolies.”

[consolecadet]

HA

[follow-up-news]

Google has illegally built “monopoly power” with its web advertising business, a federal judge in Virginia has ruled, siding with the Justice Department in a landmark case against the tech giant that could reshape the basic economics of running a modern website. The ruling that Google violated antitrust law marks the US government’s second major court victory over Google in less than a year amid claims the company has illegally monopolized key parts of the internet ecosystem, including online search. And it is the third such decision since a federal jury in December 2023 found that Google’s proprietary app store is also an illegal monopoly. Taken together, the trio of decisions highlights the breadth of trouble Google faces, raising the prospect of sweeping penalties that could reshape multiple aspects of its business, though ongoing and expected appeals will likely take years to play out. Thursday’s decision by District Judge Leonie Brinkema, of the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, addresses the $31 billion portion of Google’s ad business that matches website publishers with advertisers. This “stack” of technologies determines what banner ads appear on countless sites across the web. The Justice Department’s lawsuit followed years of criticism that Google’s extensive role in the digital ecosystem that enables advertisers to place ads, and for publishers to offer up digital ad space, represented a conflict of interest that Google exploited anticompetitively.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Lina Khan’s future is the future of the Democratic Party — and America

On OCTOBER 23 at 7PM, I'll be in DECATUR, presenting my novel THE BEZZLE at EAGLE EYE BOOKS.

On the one hand, the anti-monopoly movement has a future no matter who wins the 2024 election – that's true even if Kamala Harris wins but heeds the calls from billionaire donors to fire Lina Khan and her fellow trustbusters.

In part, that's because US antitrust laws have broad "private rights of action" that allow individuals and companies to sue one another for monopolistic conduct, even if top government officials are turning a blind eye. It's true that from the Reagan era to the Biden era, these private suits were few and far between, and the cases that were brought often died in a federal courtroom. But the past four years has seen a resurgence of antitrust rage that runs from left to right, and from individuals to the C-suites of big companies, driving a wave of private cases that are prevailing in the courts, upending the pro-monopoly precedents that billionaires procured by offering free "continuing education" antitrust training to 40% of the Federal judiciary:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/post-bork-era/#manne-down

It's amazing to see the DoJ racking up huge wins against Google's monopolistic conduct, sure, but first blood went to Epic, who won a historic victory over Google in federal court six months before the DoJ's win, which led to the court ordering Google to open up its app store:

https://www.theverge.com/policy/2024/10/7/24243316/epic-google-permanent-injunction-ruling-third-party-stores

Google's 30% App Tax is a giant drag on all kinds of sectors, as is its veto over which software Android users get to see, so Epic's win is going to dramatically alter the situation for all kinds of activities, from beleaguered indie game devs:

https://antiidlereborn.com/news/

To the entire news sector:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/save-news-we-must-open-app-stores

Private antitrust cases have attracted some very surprising plaintiffs, like Michael Jordan, whose long policy of apoliticism crumbled once he bought a NASCAR team and lived through the monopoly abuses of sports leagues as an owner, not a player:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/michael-jordan-anti-monopolist

A much weirder and more unlikely antitrust plaintiff than Michael Jordan is Google, the perennial antitrust defendant. Google has brought a complaint against Microsoft in the EU, based on Microsoft's extremely ugly monopolistic cloud business:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-files-complaint-eu-over-microsoft-cloud-practices-2024-09-25/

Google's choice of venue here highlights another reason to think that the antitrust surge will continue irrespective of US politics: antitrust is global. Antitrust fervor has seized governments from the UK to the EU to South Korea to Japan. All of those countries have extremely similar antitrust laws, because they all had their statute books overhauled by US technocrats as part of the Marshall Plan, so they have the same statutory tools as the American trustbusters who dismantled Standard Oil and AT&T, and who are making ready to shatter Google into several competing businesses:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/8/24265832/google-search-antitrust-remedies-framework-android-chrome-play

Antitrust fever has spread to Canada, Australia, and even China, where the Cyberspace Directive bans Chinese tech giants from breaking interoperability to freeze out Chinese startups. Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops, and the cost of 40 years of pro-monopoly can't be ignored. Monopolies make the whole world more brittle, even as the cost of that brittleness mounts. It's hard to pretend monopolies are fine when a single hurricane can wipe out the entire country's supply of IV fluid – again:

https://prospect.org/health/2024-10-11-cant-believe-im-writing-about-iv-fluid-again/

What's more, the conduct of global monopolists is the same in every country where they have taken hold, which means that trustbusters in the EU can use the UK Digital Markets Unit's report on the mobile app market as a roadmap for their enforcement actions against Apple:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/63f61bc0d3bf7f62e8c34a02/Mobile_Ecosystems_Final_Report_amended_2.pdf

And then the South Korean and Japanese trustbusters can translate the court documents from the EU's enforcement action and use them to score victories over Apple in their own courts:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/10/an-injury-to-one/#is-an-injury-to-all

So on the one hand, the trustbusting wave will continue erode the foundations of global monopolies, no matter what happens after this election. But on the other hand, if Harris wins and then fires Biden's top trustbusters to appease her billionaire donors, things are going to get ugly.

A new, excellent long-form Bloomberg article by Josh Eidelson and Max Chafkin gives a sense of the battle raging just below the surface of the Democratic Power, built around a superb interview with Khan herself:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-10-09/lina-khan-on-a-second-ftc-term-ai-price-gouging-data-privacy

The article begins with a litany of tech billionaires who've gone an all-out, public assault on Khan's leadership – billionaires who stand to personally lose hundreds of millions of dollars from her agency's principled, vital antitrust work, but who cloak their objection to Khan in rhetoric about defending the American economy. In public, some of these billionaires are icily polite, but many of them degenerate into frothing, toddler-grade name-calling, like IAB's Barry Diller, who called her a "dope" and Musk lickspittle Jason Calacanis, who called her an all-caps COMMUNIST and a LUNATIC.

The overall vibe from these wreckers? "How dare the FTC do things?!"

And you know, they have a point. For decades, the FTC was – in the quoted words of Tim Wu – "a very hardworking agency that did nothing." This was the period when the FTC targeted low-level scammers while turning a blind eye to the monsters that were devouring the US economy. In part, that was because the FTC had been starved of budget, trapping them in a cycle of racking up easy, largely pointless "wins" against penny-ante grifters to justify their existence, but never to the extent that Congress would apportion them the funds to tackle the really serious cases (if this sounds familiar, it's also the what happened during the long period when the IRS chased middle class taxpayers over minor filing errors, while ignoring the billionaires and giant corporations that engaged in 7- and 8-figure tax scams).

But the FTC wasn't merely underfunded: it was timid. The FTC has extremely broad enforcement and rulemaking powers, which most sat dormant during the neoliberal era:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

The Biden administration didn't merely increase the FTC's funding: in choosing Khan to helm the organization, they brought onboard a skilled technician, who was both well-versed in the extensive but unused powers of the agency and determined to use them:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff

But Khan's didn't just rely on technical chops and resources to begin the de-olicharchification of the US economy: she built a three-legged stool, whose third leg is narrative. Khan's signature is her in-person and remote "listening tours," where workers who've been harmed by corporate power get to tell their stories. Bloomberg recounts the story of Deborah Brantley, who was sexually harassed and threatened by her bosses at Kavasutra North Palm Beach. Brantley's bosses touched her inappropriately and "joked" about drugging her and raping her so she "won’t be such a bitch and then maybe people would like you more."

When Brantley finally quit and took a job bartending at a different business, Kavasutra sued her over her noncompete clause, alleging an "irreparable injury" sustained by having one of their former employees working at another business, seeking damages and fees.

The vast majority of the 30 million American workers who labor under noncompetes are like Brantley, low-waged service workers, especially at fast-food restaurants (so Wendy's franchisees can stop minimum wage cashiers from earning $0.25/hour more flipping burgers at a nearby McDonald's). The donor-class indenturers who defend noncompetes claim that noncompetes are necessary to protect "innovative" businesses from losing their "IP." But of course, the one state where no workers are subject to noncompetes is California, which bans them outright – the state that is also home to Silicon Valley, an IP-heave industry that the same billionaires laud for its innovations.

After that listening tour, Khan's FTC banned noncompetes nationwide:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/25/capri-v-tapestry/#aiming-at-dollars-not-men

Only to have a federal judge in Texas throw out their ban, a move that will see $300b/year transfered from workers to shareholders, and block the formation of 8,500 new US businesses every year:

https://www.npr.org/2024/08/21/g-s1-18376/federal-judge-tosses-ftc-noncompetes-ban

Notwithstanding court victories like Epic v Google and DoJ v Google, America's oligarchs have the courts on their side, thanks to decades of court-packing planned by the Federalist Society and executed by Senate Republicans and Reagan, Bush I, Bush II, and Trump. Khan understands this; she told Bloomberg that she's a "close student" of the tactics Reagan used to transform American society, admiring his effectiveness while hating his results. Like other transformative presidents, good and bad, Reagan had to fight the judiciary and entrenched institutions (as did FDR and Lincoln). Erasing Reagan's legacy is a long-term project, a battle of inches that will involve mustering broad political support for the cause of a freer, more equal America.

Neither Biden nor Khan are responsible for the groundswell of US – and global – movement to euthanize our rentier overlords. This is a moment whose time has come; a fact demonstrated by the tens of thousands of working Americans who filled the FTC's noncompete docket with outraged comments. People understand that corporate looters – not "the economy" or "the forces of history" – are the reason that the businesses where they worked and shopped were destroyed by private equity goons who amassed intergenerational, dynastic fortunes by strip-mining the real economy and leaving behind rubble.

Like the billionaires publicly demanding that Harris fire Khan, private equity bosses can't stop making tone-deaf, guillotine-conjuring pronouncements about their own virtue and the righteousness of their businesses. They don't just want to destroy the world - they want to be praised for it:/p>

"Private equity’s been a great thing for America" -Stephen Pagliuca, co-chairman of Bain Capital;

"We are taught to judge the success of a society by how it deals with the least able, most vulnerable members of that society. Shouldn’t we judge a society by how they treat the most successful? Do we vilify, tax, expropriate and condemn those who have succeeded, or do we celebrate economic success as the engine that propels our society toward greater collective well-being?" -Marc Rowan, CEO of Apollo

"Achieve life-changing money and power," -Sachin Khajuria, former partner at Apollo

Meanwhile, the "buy, strip and flip" model continues to chew its way through America. When PE buys up all the treatment centers for kids with behavioral problems, they hack away at staffing and oversight, turning them into nightmares where kids are routinely abused, raped and murdered:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/they-told-me-it-was-going-be-good-place-allega-tions-n987176

When PE buys up nursing homes, the same thing happens, with elderly residents left to sit in their own excrement and then die:

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/12/24/nursing-homes-private-equity-fraud-00132001

Writing in The Guardian, Alex Blasdel lays out the case for private equity as a kind of virus that infects economies, parasitically draining them of not just the capacity to provide goods and services, but also of the ability to govern themselves, as politicians and regulators are captured by the unfathomable sums that PE flushes into the political process:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/oct/10/slash-and-burn-is-private-equity-out-of-control

Now, the average worker who's just lost their job may not understand "divi recaps" or "2-and-20" or "carried interest tax loopholes," but they do understand that something is deeply rotten in the world today.

What happens to that understanding is a matter of politics. The Republicans – firmly affiliated with, and beloved of, the wreckers – have chosen an easy path to capitalizing on the rising rage. All they need to do is convince the public that the system is irredeemably corrupt and that the government can't possibly fix anything (hence Reagan's asinine "joke": "the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: 'I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help'").

This is a very canny strategy. If you are the party of "governments are intrinsically corrupt and incompetent," then governing corruptly and incompetently proves your point. The GOP strategy is to create a nation of enraged nihilists who don't even imagine that the government could do something to hold their bosses to account – not for labor abuses, not for pollution, not for wage theft or bribery.

The fact that successive neoliberal governments – including Democratic administrations – acted time and again to bear out this hypothesis makes it easy for this kind of nihilism to take hold.

Far-right conspiracies about pharma bosses colluding with corrupt FDA officials to poison us with vaccines for profit owe their success to the lived experience of millions of Americans who lost loved ones to a conspiracy between pharma bosses and corrupt officials to poison us with opioids.

Unhinged beliefs that "they" caused the hurricanes tearing through Florida and Georgia and that Kamala Harris is capping compensation to people who lost their homes are only credible because of murderous Republican fumble during Katrina; and the larcenous collusion of Democrats to help banks steal Americans' homes during the foreclosure crisis, when Obama took Tim Geithner's advice to "foam the runway" with the mortgages of everyday Americans who'd been cheated by their banks:

https://www.salon.com/2014/05/14/this_man_made_millions_suffer_tim_geithners_sorry_legacy_on_housing/

If Harris gives in to billionaire donors and fires Khan and her fellow trustbusters, paving the way for more looting and scamming, the result will be more nihilism, which is to say, more electoral victories for the GOP. The "government can't do anything" party already exists. There are no votes to be gained by billing yourself as the "we also think governments can't do anything" party.

In other words, a world where Khan doesn't run the FTC is a world where antitrust continues to gain ground, but without taking Democrats with it. It's a world where nihilism wins.

There's factions of the Democratic Party who understand this. AOC warned party leaders that, "Anyone goes near Lina Khan and there will be an out and out brawl":

https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1844034727935988155

And Bernie Sanders called her "the best FTC Chair in modern history":

https://twitter.com/SenSanders/status/1843733298960576652

In other words: Lina Khan as a posse.

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

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/2024/10/11/democracys-antitrust-paradox/#there-will-be-an-out-and-out-brawl