NEW: @maxvonthun.bsky.social and Claire Lavin (@openmarkets.bsky.social) argue that the European Commission must revise its merger guidelines to emphasize how competition policy can protect goals beyond prices, including innovation, security, and democracy.

Funny… I remember when they promised Brexit would do that.

"Rightwing populists all over Europe want to destroy the ability of the UK and the EU to regulate large tech platforms — a move that might threaten their disinformation campaigns with genuine political debate." @ranaforoohar.bsky.social www.ft.com/content/62b1...

“people with lower AI literacy are typically more receptive to AI," "people with lower AI literacy are more likely to perceive AI as magical and experience feelings of awe in the face of AI's execution of tasks that seem to require uniquely human attributes." futurism.com/more-people-...

One of the weaknesses of modern liberalism is not realising this and so not using state power in a responsible way to regulate companies.

Mostly, they say “don’t.”

When centrists adopt far-right rhetoric, they don’t make themselves stronger. They make themselves look inauthentic, legitimise the far right, and shift the political debate onto terrain defined by their opponents. www.theguardian.com/politics/liv...

This might sound like a lot of money, but Google has already been fined over €8 billion in the EU, and remains as dominant as ever. Until a few weeks ago, the Commission was convinced that a break up was the only viable path to dismantling Google's adtech monopoly - and that remains true.

""I understand it's not a decision not to proceed, but it is a postponement of a decision, which is bad enough for the credibility of competition policy. I'm not sure I would have accepted this and remain in the position" Mario Monti www.linkedin.com/posts/rebecc...

Big Tech CEOs are dining with Trump while facing lawsuits over child deaths and monopoly abuses. “They’re hoping to buy their way out of the many lawsuits and legislation coming to hold them accountable. This is corruption in the Rose Garden.” - @sachalouise.bsky.social

"Judge Mehta’s order...lets Google and every other monopolist know that even the most egregious violation of law will be met with a slap on the wrist." Read @openmarkets.bsky.social full statement on the underwhelming US Google Search remedies decision: www.openmarketsinstitute.org/publications...

The demand for European integration has never been clearer. What are national leaders waiting for? - 68% want the EU to play a bigger role in protecting them from global crises. - 90% say member states should be MORE united. - 77% say the EU needs MORE resources (eg EU wide taxes)

Good news about the cutting-edge AI tools from the $3-trillion-dollar company.

"Imagine knowing electricity or the internet were coming ... before both fully and wholly upended business, culture and life. That's the AI moment we see unfolding today" - possibly one of the stupidest things i've seen written about AI, great work Axios!

Europe Always Chickens Out wins yet again. www.foreignaffairs.com/united-state...

Es ist Zeit, die dreisten Angriffe auf die regulatorische #Souveränität der EU durch die Trump-Regierung mit harten Gegenmaßnahmen zu beantworten, fordern @maxvonthun.bsky.social & @spielkamp.bsky.social in einem offenen Brief 👉 t1p.de/wu4g8 @algorithmwatch.org @openmarkets.bsky.social

If true, this update is astonishing. The Commission climbed down from a planned break up of Google’s ad business to a mere fine, and then dropped even the fine for fear of offending Trump. This is for market violations that have been proven in U.S. court.

Yet another capitulation to Reform, when all the evidence shows that following the far right agenda is a disaster for centrist parties. Politics 101, which Starmer has once again entirely failed to grasp.

It's only logical that a government which is trampling on the rule of law at home would also try to undermine it abroad. If US corporations refuse to comply with overseas laws then they should lose their market access, it's as simple as that.

The failure of the government and many Labour MPs to leave X after the 2024 riots suggests they just don't get the challenge they face or the power they have to fight back. Completely weak and callow.

“Far easier to carry on, either pretending that the transformation of the US is not, in fact, as severe as it is, or that normal service will resume shortly. But the world’s leaders, like US citizens, cannot ignore the evidence indefinitely.” www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

The only political battle that matters in the world right now is the one against authoritarian nationalism (the word 'fascist' is succinct). Very simply: if *any aspect* of your political platform aids authoritarian nationalism, we must oppose you with everything. *Any* aspect. Reflect on that.

Did the AI companies have a bet for who could get sued for the largest amount of damages this week

Disastrous news if true. The European Commission has been talking about a Google adtech breakup since 2023, and could now throw it all away in a pointless effort to appease Trump – at the cost of its credibility, sovereignty and democratic legitimacy. www.reuters.com/legal/litiga...

Trump is threatening tariffs on any country that enforces digital rules. But this isn’t just about trade, it’s about destabilizing Europe’s democracy. Alexandra Geese, a Member of the European Parliament, argues it’s time for Europe to wake up, enforce its tech laws and build digital autonomy.

No. Sorry, not interested. Grem? Gabbo? This isn't real. I won't acknowledge it further.

Trump is reportedly creating a loyalty scorecard that rates how hard corporations work to support his agenda.  His regime is apparently planning to consult the ratings when considering corporate requests.  This is how things work in a dictatorship.

If Putin is such a 5 dimensional strategic chess master then why is he entering year four of what was supposed to be a one week war to conquer Ukraine?

"Instead of being worried about the fingers he was missing, 16 years old, he kept pointing to his mouth & telling me to feed him. He had no fingers left on his hands, that had been blown away." A US doctor talked to me from Gaza City about starvation. Shocking testimony. zeteo.com/p/bombs-go-o...

“The conclusion is that we’re all going to be using AI all the time for everything. That’s an incomprehensible world, but one you need to believe in order to not see how this all ends up losing money.” www.ft.com/content/efe1...

It's been obvious for a while that the Trump administration doesn't care about monopoly power – the illegal firings of FTC Commissioners and soft-pedalling on mergers have made that clear. The shelving of the Biden administration's EO on competition is just the final nail in the coffin.

American fascism. You're living through it right now.

There have been a lot of crazy things that have leaked from inside Meta but this is one of the worst. sherwood.news/tech/meta-ai...

“In the aftermath of GPT-5’s launch, it has become more difficult to take bombastic predictions about A.I. at face value…”

Apple: allowing alternative app stores on iOS is a massive threat to user privacy and security. Also Apple: check out this awesome app which lets you share sensitive information about people you are dating while also leaking your personal information.

The head of antitrust at DOJ, Gail Slater, may be serious about enforcement, but monopolists like Real Page, Live Nation, and AmEx are just going over her head and lobbying Bondi and Trump to sidestep the law. www.wsj.com/us-news/law/...

central planning 2.0 is pretty wild. Let's just skip to the Five-Year Plans and be done with it

“It’s safe to say that Trump does not have a single policymaking person who knows Russia and Ukraine advising him,” said Eric Rubin, a former career diplomat who served as US ambassador to Bulgaria during Trump’s first term. www.ft.com/content/89f3...

“As AI overviews become the default gateway to information, we risk creating a generation of users who consume knowledge without question, publishers who cannot sustain quality journalism, and a public sphere increasingly shaped by the statistical patterns embedded in large language models.”

The entire reason that Google *might* be forced to sell Chrome is to prevent it from using the browser to unfairly promote its search engine. Perplexity would have exactly the same incentives to self-preference, defeating the purpose of the remedy. An independent Chrome is the only viable solution.

I grew up in Washington DC and it has never felt safer or cleaner. Trump's "emergency" is fake, straight out of the authoritarian playbook

We are truly entering the statistical Bad Place

Unlike the startup-heavy dot-com bubble, today's AI hype train is being driven by tech monopolies that are both fuelling the hype and positioning themselves to seize all the rewards. On the flip side, if/when things go wrong, we'll all know who to blame. www.newyorker.com/news/the-fin...

The biggest divide is not between “right” and “left." It’s between democracy and oligarchy. The billionaires who control our economy and democracy seek to divide us. They want us to turn on each other so we don't look up and see that they have all the wealth and power.

Is ChatGPT the reason why Peter Thiel can’t stop talking about the Antichrist? futurism.com/chatgpt-psyc...

⚡️As ceasefire deadline passes, no additional Russia sanctions announced by Trump. U.S. President Donald Trump has not imposed fresh sanctions on Russia, even as Moscow refused to cease hostilities in Ukraine by his Aug. 8 deadline.

OpenAI is now openly suggesting people use chatGPT for mental health, to „untangle their thoughts” to help them „think more clearly” or if they need to decide whether to „break up with their boyfriend”. This is unacceptable. Somebody will die. They know that. They don’t care. Fuck them.

“A legitimate PhD-level expert in anything,” they said. “Show me a diagram of the US presidents since FDR, with their names and years in office under their photos,” I said.

This obviously fails as a legal argument because the Genocide Convention defines "genocide" as certain acts committed with "an intent to destroy, in whole *or in part*..."

As tech firms keep adding the largest and most compute-intensive AI models into more and more aspects of our digital lives, they are increasingly dependent on a growing share of existing energy and natural resources, leading to rising costs for everyone else, write Sasha Luccioni & Yacine Jernite.