The huge search and social media platforms of the internet are reaching an inflection point. For decades they have been able to deflect attention from their role as content providers. The issue is now front and center in our national debate and the long-reigning status quo is likely […]
Your body may be a wonderland or a wasteland, but it is a goldmine of data. Collectors of information have noticed. In our midwinter exploration of the economic and legal foundations of data regulation, we next turn to a natural tool for personal identification, for ongoing transactions (like […]
Last week I jumped from the starting point of the newest U.S. anti-trust action against Google into a discussion about the legal and economic status of data. I would like to carry the discussion of data further. To briefly recap: data is history (it describes someone at a […]
In 2020, a more tragic year than most, we lost giants of the technology world. We lost Larry Tesler, PARC’s magician, later at Apple, who helped develop the computer commands that run our lives, like ‘search and replace’ and ‘copy and paste,’ and other concepts crucial for user-friendly […]
Two weeks ago I collected the major recent anti-trust/competition lawsuits, by regulators and competitors alike, filed against U.S. big technology companies. My point was that, after a long fallow period where these giants received the benefit of the doubt for their successful competitive practices, the public trust has […]
Tim Wu, the bard of big tech, has written multiple books about the rise and coming fall of technology monopolies, oligopolies, and empires. In The Master Switch, Wu tells the story of how, in the 19th Century, the existing telegraph empire tried to smother telephone technology in its […]
Stung by Brexit and set adrift by a neglectful U.S. foreign policy, the European Union has started to explore new ways of breaking away from the rest of the world, including taking steps to cordon EU data into locally managed systems. While this kind of protectionist move is […]
Meet the Euro-crats who think that the European Union needs to behave more like Russia and China. More like Nigeria, Kazakhstan, and Indonesia. These leaders are pushing not just to punish U.S. firms for successfully building data-focused businesses, but pushing to actively pull data away into localized pods […]
How is a refrigerator like a stoplight camera and a delivery drone? Each of these devices and hundreds of millions of others are part of the internet of things (IoT), meaning that manufacturers are building them with sensors for their environment and connectivity to send information elsewhere. The […]
We work hard for our businesses, and those of you who started your own enterprise are even more deeply concerned about it than others. Which is why criticism of your business can be so frustrating. Nobody likes to be torn apart in public, especially when a bad review […]
