Activity

The point of radical interoperability isn’t merely to provide “choice” or “competition” or “innovation,” or any other empty Silicon Valley buzzword: it’s to let people decide for themselves how to live their lives. It’s to clear the way for the exercise of self-determination. You, the user of a pro…

These limitations are why even antitrust specialists look toward other forms of regulation, especially for reining in abusive buyer power. We should absolutely be using antitrust and its remedies to their full capacity, but we shouldn’t rely on them to do all the heavy lifting. And we don’t need to…

Systemic problems can’t be solved with individual actions alone. Your individual purchase decisions, which services you do or don’t create accounts on, whether you recycle, and whether you drive or take the bus make almost no difference to our social outcomes. If we want to change the world, we hav…

And, of course, if all that isn’t enough and a new player is somehow able to enter their kill zone, these behemoths know exactly what to do. Venture capitalists know that too, making them cautious about where they invest, and thus making it even more difficult for nascent competitors to get a toeho…

Figuring out how to get your program played on a phone without paying a toll to the phone maker isn’t a copyright violation, but it is a business-model violation. Congress could easily have written section 1201 of the DMCA to say, “Bypassing DRM to violate copyright is illegal,” but it didn’t. It c…