Right now, companies are hawking new AI features. They're not built for users -- they're built to satisfy management and investors. I'll know they're serious when they start pushing new features that *happen* to use AI, but are designed to solve specific problems.

Social media companies baking fake notification indicators into their favicon is borderline abusive behaviour.

The Open Web means several things to different people, depending on context, but recently discussions have focused on the Web's Openness in terms of access to information -- how easy it is to publish and obtain information without barriers there. https://www.mnot.net/blog/2026/01/20/open_web

Software update #2: I've made a small tweak to https://rfc.fyi/ to make it much more useful; when considering how many references an RFC has, it also counts those from the RFCs it obsoletes. That means that searching for a term like 'HTTP' or 'DNS' returns the most relevant RFCs first!

Software update #1: https://redbot.org/ has a range of new tests -- including updates to caching and support for Content Security Policy, Permissions Policy, and CORS -- and now is multilingual! Please take a look and give feedback.

French-speaking friends, does this make sense? How awful is the translation? https://gist.github.com/mnot/47d819b1907ca13a8968b611dc56bb82

“An industry without newcomers is a dying industry.” -- Rolex CEO Jean-Frédéric Dufour at Dubai Watch Week

"[G]overnments that seek to systematically undermine democratic institutions will seek, first and foremost, to move away from the law and from expertise." https://academic.oup.com/jeclap/advance-article/doi/10.1093/jeclap/lpaf068/8306543

Davies draws an interesting line between Ferdinand Porsche, Donald Knuth, and startup culture. https://monocle.com/business/in-defence-of-middle-management/

"[Meta and Alphabet] are not merely participants in the advertising industry; they are its epistemic gatekeepers. By institutionalizing concepts like programmatic targeting, multi-touch attribution, and performance-based media as unquestioned "best practices" they have engineered a paradigm in which

Some thoughts about how to schedule online meetings for a global organisation in an equitable way. https://www.mnot.net/blog/2025/10/26/equitable-meetings

"AI hucksters [...] will tell you that there is only one way that this technology can be used: to fire a whole ton of workers and make the survivors do their job at frantic Lucy-in-the-chocolate-factory cadence. While it’s true that this is the only way that their companies could possibly be worth

RFC 9842 is HTTP Compression Dictionary Transport -- this is a big one! Congrats @Yoav and @PatMeenan ! https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9842.html

Achieving policymakers' goals in coordination with Internet standards activity can be difficult. This post explores some of the options and considerations involved. www.mnot.net/blog/2025/09...

What is this new rounded corner hell?

What the fuck is wrong with the country I was born in? https://punchdrink.com/articles/ice-immigration-resources-bars-restaurants/

I've put up a quick archive of the old Syndication mailing list that I ran way back when on Yahoo! Groups. An artefact of simpler times... https://www.mnot.net/rss/syndication/

If you work on HTTP implementations, deploy it at scale, or have a unique perspective or interest in the protocol, you might find other people to talk to at the 2026 HTTP Workshop: https://github.com/HTTPWorkshop/workshop2026?tab=readme-ov-file#2026-http-workshop

This picture is from 3 August. Since then, the Toll signage you see on the building (owned by Mirvac, I think) has disappeared -- likely because there was a protest action targeting Toll due to (AIUI) their involvement in shipments of arms to Israel. Without knowing any more than that, I suspect

Mad.

I guess you could say that things are getting serious… #ietf https://www.ietf.org/blog/ai-pref-progress/

@pluralistic perhaps the amount of power that monopolists amass scares even those with masses of power.

More than anything, the latest Supreme Court ruling signifies a disruption of the structure of American law -- nothing is safe anymore. https://music.apple.com/au/album/nothing-is-safe/1473856273?i=1473856276

"The Supreme Court took a wrecking ball to Internet Law today in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton. The majority (disingenuously) overturned two critical decades-old precedents restricting online age authentication [...]. By upending long-standing and well-settled rules to reach a pro-censorship

Is AI a useful option for policymakers who want to evaluate open standards? Let's take a look. https://www.mnot.net/blog/2025/06/04/using_ai

So, Google just launched a major new AI demo that requires people to relax their browser security settings. Wow.

"A surprising potential consequence of digital tariffs could be the accelerated development and adoption of open-source technologies," Shah wrote. "As proprietary digital products and services become subject to cross-border tariffs, open-source alternatives—which can be freely shared, modified, and

"Yet beneath their ideological differences, the American and Chinese models are converging in function. One is driven by market logic, the other by political imperatives—but both prioritize efficiency over accountability, control over consent, and scale over individual rights. In a world where

Stanley Tucci for pope. #tucci25

Set your iPhone language to “English (Australia)” and then try to type some words. Realize aluminum color Those are American spellings. For a company that obsessively auto capitalizes (argh capitalises) words like “FaceTime” and “Apple”, it’s hard to see this as unintentional. They employ

Breaking big tech's hold over people's experience of the Internet is not "breaking the Internet." https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/brewing-transatlantic-tech-war

Koji hard shake!

"We therefore suggest that one of the most pragmatic anti-capitalist things that one can do is to push for any organizations that you might be involved with to participate in the standards development process. Encouraging organizations within a capitalist system to participate in a process that

Rongros

Almost 90% of the nuclear warheads in the world are now effectively controlled by one man.

Very relevant piece from @coopdanger on why divesting Chrome from Google isn't the end of the Web. https://www.techpolicy.press/the-true-cost-of-browser-innovation-why-chromes-divestiture-wouldnt-end-the-open-web/

Design Rules, Volume 2: How Technology Shapes Organisations is out! Highly recommended read, and open access. direct.mit.edu/books/oa-mon...

I don't monitor every @ - if you want to make sure I see something, e-mail.

It's crazy this idea that if you're open about your perspective, show your work, and report like a human being then your readers — who are also human beings — might trust you more than an opaque box with a tone of affected detachment pretending to be unbiased.

The Justice Department has filed a lawsuit against approximately two dogs.

Timely & sobering thoughts from @danielstone.bsky.social about how those who want to make tech work for people need to change their thinking and messaging. Simiar thoughts about the new administration came up at a recent @thegni.bsky.social event I attended... www.techpolicy.press/the-public-d...

pretty grim when health insurance company executives have to try to hide their identities online like they're public school history teachers, government employees or doctors who care for transgender people

A new book explores an intriguing idea: that there are core processes in some platforms that naturally tilt the table towards being implemented in a single company. www.mnot.net/blog/2024/11...

Assuming this place is centralized until proven otherwise.

*Great* work by the Human Rights Law Centre here --https://www.hrlc.org.au/reports-news-commentary/rights-first

Getting ready.