These other fights are more important than the internet, but we can’t win them without a free, fair, and open internet.

“If we will not endure a king as a political power we should not endure a king over the production, transportation, and sale of any of the necessaries of life. If we would not submit to an emperor we should not submit to an autocrat of trade, with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity.”

Recall that Congress hasn’t bestirred itself to update federal consumer privacy law since 1988, when it made it illegal to leak your VHS rental history. This inaction—expensively procured by the commercial surveillance industry—has hurt a lot of groups. Many of those groups are starting to recognize that while they are all concerned with very

The reason Biden’s Democratic administration backed a generationally significant antitrust agenda is that the people demanded it. You. Me. Us. We were pissed off enough, and loud enough, about corporate abuse that a party and a politician with a long history of doing nothing (or worse than nothing) on these issues finally did something. This is

It’s as though we used to put down rat poison, and we didn’t have a rat problem. Then the millionaire economists convinced us to stop putting down the poison, and now the rats are gnawing our faces off and the economists are all saying, “Now, now, don’t get hysterical, dears. There’s no way to know if these rats have anything to do with our pro-rat

In other words, once Google stopped growing, it started squeezing. Lacking competitors, having locked in its users and business customers, Google could make things worse for both groups in order to make things better for its shareholders and its executives.

Like everyone who ever claimed to have developed a mind-control system, Google and Meta are lying (to us and possibly to themselves). From Mesmer to Rasputin, from the CIA’s MK-ULTRA to “neuro-linguistic programming” to the sad men who style themselves “pickup artists,” everyone who has claimed or still claims to be able to bypass our rational

Respect for your privacy isn’t a rebate you get for every $1,000 you spend on an iPhone. Companies abuse you if they can get away with it. That’s the crux of enshittification. Apple didn’t treat its customers well because it loved them. It treated them well to lure them into its walled garden, which was then revealed to be a prison.

All told, Amazon makes so much money charging merchants to deliver the wares they sell through the platform that Amazon’s own shipping is fully subsidized. In other words, Amazon gouges its merchants so much that it pays nothing to ship its own goods, which compete directly with those merchants’ goods.3