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[...] Google and Facebook are based on what seem to be natural monopolies. Feeble calls in Europe to weaken or break them up lack any alternative vision, economically, politically, or ecologically.

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The continual demand by local politicians to launch a European Google, and most of the ot…

‘Big data’ isn’t something unique to the last few years. To understand what’s driving this data collection, you need to forget Internet debates and start focusing on the data banks selling information on the secondary market—companies like Axiom and Epsilon. Who are they selling their data to? To b…

[...] companies now reject any analogy with utilities, since that might open up the possibility of a publicly run, publicly controlled infrastructure.

[...] So if you wanted to provide education to students in Africa, you’d be better off doing it through Facebook, because they wouldn’t have to pay for it. You would then end up with a situation where data about what people learn is collected by a private company and used for advertising for the re…

This is where we need to be explicit about the normative benchmarks by which we want to assess the situation. If the question is just privacy, then of course open-source is far better. But that doesn’t resolve the issue of whether we want a company like Google that already has access to an enormous…