I demand that Apple scrap its App Store tax and search engine default. They worsen user experience, deceive consumers about privacy commitments, defund journalism and the web, are illegal collusion with Google, and undermine the fundamental right to engage in commercial activity.

The internet's in a bad place. We're not winning. How can we turn things around? We need money. What parts of the internet 1) are still under democratic control and 2) are in a position to produce significant revenue? It's mostly down to Wikipedia. But there's more… 🧵

@robin.berjon.com makes some strong arguments that shouldn't be dismissed lightly. Introducing advertising on Wikipedia is controversial and has been for a long time. Funding the open internet with sustainable advertising products is essential, and Wikipedia's scale can make that happen.

As a court weighs remedies in Google’s adtech monopoly case this week, will it shift power online or merely rearrange the company’s empire? Robin Berjon instead envisions a Wikipedia-scale ad platform alternative—built for the public interest—to sustain democracy online, rather than undermine it.

👀Is that EU competition chief @teresaribera.ec.europa.eu taking a hammer to break up Google?? Today we're sending a loud message to @ec.europa.eu to dismantle Google's toxic advertising monopoly! #BreakUpBigTech. Great work @lobbyctrl-tech.bsky.social bsky.social @rebalance-now.bsky.social 👏👏👏

What a terrible take. As someone who engaged at a policy level with the ePrivacy Directive (& its predecessor 97/66EC), the ePD didn’t ’plaster the online world with pop-ups’. Privacy invading & eroding business models are responsible for that - biz could have chosen a different path

Lot of people dunking on this, but it's good to see Mark Zuckerberg getting back to the thing that first made him passionate about coding: rating girls online.

Fox has been named Head of the Hen House in #ireland. https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2025/09/17/ex-tech-lobbyist-named-to-data-protection-commission/ #Dataprotection #Privacy #gdpr #meta #lobbying #facebook #revolvingdoor cc @lobbyctrl_tech @corporateeurope

We cooperated with RTE PrimeTime over the last year on this very significant story about RTB data exposing the movements of Irish people, including military and political personnel. Link to this morning's preview piece is here --> www.rte.ie/news/primeti...

📣My analytical op-ed in @ForeignPolicy on AI-powered information warfare. Is the window for combating AI-driven propaganda is closing? Local, open-weight models let State, non-state and micro-operators run industrial-scale influence ops with no central points. foreignpolicy.com/2025/09/18/a...

Grading Your Own Homework www.adexchanger.com/comic-strip/...

Ah — surely not even The New York Times Editorial Board could manage to both-sides this one…

A German teen told Meta's child safety researchers his under-10 little brother had been sexually propositioned multiple times on its VR platform. Meta deleted the evidence. New internal whistleblower docs indicate that was part of a broader cover-up: www.washingtonpost.com/investigatio...

"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...

When people say "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear." the correct response is: "I need privacy, not because my actions are questionable, but because your judgement and intentions are."

"Trump also addressed Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai about a federal judge’s ruling this week on an antitrust case related to Google’s monopoly in search...“You had a very good day yesterday,” Trump said. “Do you want to talk about that big day you had yesterday?”" www.wsj.com/politics/tru...

Swedish data brokers on suicide watch

😳 Google needs to offer a RTB control to its Chrome and Android users? Basically stripping the bid requests to what Kobler is now doing through its Prebid adaptors ... h/t Wendy Davis

This is exactly how it works: @ec.europa.eu declares that the US cannot interfere with EU legislation, but enforcement will be so weak and slow that legislation becomes effectively null and void. The result of @vonderleyen.ec.europa.eu using enforcement as political currency @douwekorff.bsky.social

Trotz des Handelsabkommens fährt Donald Trump seine Angriffe auf die Souveränität und Demokratie Europas fort. Gemeinsam mit über 40 Organisationen aus ganz Europa fordern wir @vonderleyen.ec.europa.eu auf, standhaft zu bleiben und unsere demokratisch beschlossenen Gesetze zu verteidigen. /1

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.

☠️Europe has got to wake up and do better. News and arts depend on advertising. This sector is worth *billions* to Europe's economy, and Google has drained the value from it for years. A fine can't prise open the market. To balk even at that? Speeches about sovereignty are fine words until we act.

NEW: Analysis finds UK's age verification rollout is producing exactly the opposite of the desired effect: Driving traffic non-compliant adult sites. Which punishes compliant ones. Entirely predictable. That's not the worst part 1/ By @drewharwell.com www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

Lindstrøm and Why Kai making sure Oslo stays active all night

Did you just read about how traditional Medicare is about to require prior approval - and they’re going to hire **AI companies** to dole out those approvals? Then you need to learn about Dr. Gary Bent.

Denmark invests 80M DKK in digital sovereignty. Minister of Digital Affairs @carolinestage.bsky.social will lead initiatives to reduce dependency of big tech. Money will be spent on developing and testing alternatives. www.digmin.dk/digitaliseri...

Should the EU start demanding that US laws shouldn't apply to European companies doing business in the US? www.ft.com/content/010c...

De stor teknologiselskapene tar seg dessverre alt for ofte til rette. Sist ut er Snapchat, som har skrudd på AI-trening på folks "offentlige" innhold på tjenesten. Det er ikke greit og sannsynligvis brudd på flere lover, mener vi i Forbrukerrådet. www.nrk.no/norge/na-tre... #personvern #AI #KI

In terms of EU tech sovereignty, as far as I can tell, BlueSky has raised $36m in funding to get this far. It's not very much. Is it impossible to find a few hundred million to fund European, democracy protecting social networks? You could fund it with a single DSA fine.

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.

Tech isn't about innovation, it's about power and networking chokepoints for power. You can innovate all you want, if you don't control or neutralise existing chokepoints your innovation will almost certainly fail to garner any real market success. Silicon Valley is about moats not research.

FTC threatens US companies with fines if they comply with EU laws. This would incentivise such tech companies not complying, or exiting EU/UK market entirely. www.ftc.gov/system/files... www.ftc.gov/system/files...

The Court stated that "Neither the mere communication of a complex mathematical formula (such as an algorithm) nor the detailed description of each step of automated decision-making meets these requirements, as neither is a sufficiently precise and comprehensible explanation."

So the 🇺🇸 is importing the Social Credit Score 👲🏼 from 🇨🇳? Is that with or without tariffs?

Building your first feed on Bluesky just got way easier 🎉 Our new Simple Editor helps you start small, then level up when you’re ready. Plus: big wins from Blacksky + Ghost in this week’s Graze update. Read it all here: graze-newsletter.beehiiv.com/p/making-it-...

"We were surprised that a newspaper tries to suddenly discredit the work of NGOs in front of the courts [🤦‍♀️🤦‍♂️🤦🏼]. We are glad to see that the Court has rejected such ideas"

“There’s a lack of imagination for the worst case scenario,” EFF’s Beryl Lipton told Government Technology News. The only way to definitively keep this data from those who aren't supposed to have it is by not collecting and storing it in the first place. www.govtech.com/public-safe...

"An antitrust lawyer who was dismissed last month from the Justice Department accused senior officials of cutting deals with favored lobbyists and undermining the independence of antitrust enforcement" voilà www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

An interesting thing about Reform's digital advertising is that they barely target ads at all. Almost every ad they've bought since last year's election has been targeted at everyone over 18 in the UK.

We need to call this out LOUD and clear: There is NO *personality* here - just knobs and settings!

Both answers dodge what Judge Mehta saw in liability phase: Google isn’t just a “better product.” It’s a stack of services built atop world’s most powerful surveillance engine - leveraging scale in user data, clicks, queries and web scraping, masked by a noble mission. 2/12

Claypool said that this kind of massive retreat from corporate enforcement will have long term effects on society. “It distorts the incentives. It gives companies that are willing to risk pushing the limits of the law an unfair advantage over law abiding companies” www.404media.co/trump-has-dr...

No this is not the latest view of 3I/ATLAS! In fact its just an animation showing the scale of unconsented tracking cookies on the site just fined by the Spanish DPA.

Wait what? 🤯 Beeline, one of Russia’s leading mobile operators, has opened a telecommunications data centre in Helsinki, yle.fi/a/74-20176716

A New List Reveals Top Websites Meta Is Scraping of Copyrighted Content to Train Its AI. Meta is sidestepping guardrails that websites use to prevent being scraped, data show, in a move whistleblowers say is unethical and potentially illegal. www.dropsitenews.com/p/meta-faceb...

don't think I saw this earlier pitchdeck from Perplexity to advertisers (using the unfortunate terminology of "answer page takeover" and "locked answers" lol)

Emerging Antitrust Implications for "Fact Checking” Content

AI propaganda is here, and this is only the beginning. Exactly as I predict in my book. A Chinese (apparent) subcontractor, is reportedly using AI combined with massive data collection and analysis to run targeted influence operations. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/06/u...

Just updated data in light of eye-popping acceleration of 'zero-click' searches as Google's AI Overview scheme captures web traffic. I've been watching G's ad revenue mix shift from network (publishers) to its own properties for over a decade. It just hit 90% for first time. 1/2