🚨New Preprint 📝👨‍🎓 Digital Platform #Interoperability – almost unanimously proposed in Economics and Policy literature to counter #BigTech platform power. The EU's Digital Markets Act already mandates it for messengers. BUT: Empirical evidence so far? Scarce. Let's see what I found. 🧵👇

When a private company controls critical infrastructure and gets the power to influence the course of war: Elon Musk switches off Starlink for Russia. www.forbes.com/sites/davidh...

We're ready for another term of our "Digital Economic Security Seminar" at @oii.ox.ac.uk and @aalto.fi. We've got 8 exciting sessions lined up around tech geopolitics. Warm invitation to join for fellow researchers! diesl.eu/digital-econ...

Very lucky to be working within such a brilliant community of fellow Internet scholars

The next season of our “Digital Economic Security Seminar” is about to embark - organised by yours truly and Vili Lehdonvirta. Check out our schedule and sign up here: diesl.eu/digital-econ...

The new 🇩🇪German Coalition just made an explicit commitment to #EuroStack - the plan for digital strategic autonomy supported by European industry which doesn’t rely on a Brussels fund showering taxpayer money on projects w no commercial prospects, that no one wants - like #AI_factories. Big deal.

German government's "Centre for Digital Sovereignty" (ZenDIS) develops open source collaboration suite "openDesk" by bundling multiple great OSS projects - and deploys into public administration. Exciting! @sovereign.tech

The municipality of Aarhus in Denmark moved its cloud hosting from a US provider (Microsoft Azure) to German Hetzner. This brings data within EU borders, ensuring data protection and digital sovereignty. Most surprisingly, it even reduced costs by 2/3. itk.aarhus.dk/nyheder/proj...

I have never seen anything as disgusting as that. Genuinely no words.

If it’s technically possible, it will inevitably be abused in illegitimate ways. A clear NO to encryption backdoors and chat control.

Challenging @timbl.bsky.social's view that internet concentration has a technical fix. The issue is network economics & social institutions. SOLID/EWADA has great use cases (e.g., healthcare) but can’t decentralise multi-sided platforms. @oxmartinschool.bsky.social

The rise of a fascist party in Germany - a repetition of history? This page by @michaelkreil.bsky.social illustrates the chilling similarities. datajournal.org/schon-wieder/

Fantastic update of @beeper.com iOS and Desktop! Wouldn't want to miss the luxury anymore of using only one chat app for all the networks. Living the dream of client-side #interoperability based on @matrix.org. blog.beeper.com/2025/02/24/t...

My doctoral research at @oii.ox.ac.uk deals with the Political Economy of Internet (De-)Centralisation. In particular, the governance (and power implications) of internet platforms. Bluesky (alongside the Fediverse/Mastodon) are both quite interesting cases I look at.

Hello Bluesky! I have been in a social media freeze lately, with all the centralised internet platforms and their worrying governance. Much of my crowds have come here - so, let's give this a try.