Reading list
Shortform reading
This is an incomplete list of the shortform reading (and listening and watching) I’ve been doing lately.
Microsoft is using Bing to trick people into thinking they're on Google
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but Microsoft spoofing the Google homepage is another tactic in its long history of tricks to confuse users & limit choice,” says Tabriz. “New year; new low Microsoft.”
FTC Chair Lina Khan: The Better Offline Interview (Podcast)
FTC Chair Lina Khan joins Ed Zitron to talk about competitiveness in the tech industry, controlling the cloud giants, and what should give you hope as we head into 2025.
Algorithms and Oligopolies with Thomas Germain (Podcast)
The open web is still there. It's still being built, and thanks to the good services, it's still growing, and it's still accessible and it's still cool. If we can realign these search engines, or maybe there is a future Google competitor (it is not SearchGPT), I think that, I don't know, we could find it again. I think that there could be if these companies were realigned so that they could actually, I don't know, index the Internet. There is plenty of original, human-created content out there. It's just that Google and Being and all of these sites have kind of defaulted on that position of showing us it and we have to search for it through social networks. It's why as an independent journalist it's tough to build a following because all of the algorithms people are built to rely on are broken now.
The new good internet is in our grasp: an internet that has the technological self-determination of the old, good internet, and the greased-skids simplicity of Web 2.0 that let all our normie friends get in on the fun.
Tech bosses want you to think that good UX and enshittification can’t ever be separated. That’s such a self-serving proposition you can spot it from orbit. We know it, 'cause we built the old good internet, and we’ve been fighting a rear-guard action to preserve it for the past two decades.
It’s time to stop playing defense. It's time to go on the offensive. To restore competition, regulation, interop and tech worker power so that we can create the new, good internet we’ll need to fight fascism, the climate emergency, and genocide.
#adversarial-interoperability · #enshittification · #monopoly · #right-to-repair · #workers'-rights
Enzittification with Cory Doctorow & Brian Merchant
In the third live-to-tape episode of Better Offlive, Ed Zitron is joined in-studio in Los Angeles by Cory Doctorow and Brian Merchant to talk about the forces that have turned the tech industry away from innovation - and how we might turn the tide against them.
#adversarial-interoperability · #enshittification · #monopoly · #right-to-repair · #tech-industry · #workers'-rights
Google Is on a Real Losing Streak. The Latest Blow Is the Most Brutal Yet.
The decision is likely to be one of the biggest antitrust defeats for a tech giant in decades.
Episode 365: Link Taxes Are (Still) Bad (Podcast)
Earlier this year, we had an episode looking at Canada’s proposed social media link tax and the many ways it would be terrible. Since then, that link tax has become law (though not yet come into effect), and unsurprisingly proven that the dire predictions were correct. Also since then, the Cato Institute’s Paul Matzko published an excellent paper on link taxes in general, and Paul joins us on this week’s episode to discuss the many reasons that a link tax won’t save the newspaper industry.