Tags: antitrust

Pluralistic: With Great Power Came No Responsibility (26 Feb 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Like I was saying:

The web is open, apps are closed. The majority of web users have installed an ad blocker (which is also a privacy blocker). But no one installs an ad blocker for an app, because it’s a felony to distribute that tool, because you have to reverse-engineer the app to make it. An app is just a website wrapped in enough IP so that the company that made it can send you to prison if you dare to modify it so that it serves your interests rather than theirs.

DEF CON 31 - An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet’s Ensh*ttification - Cory Doctorow - YouTube

A great rousing—practical—speech from Cory.

QuirksBlog: Opera's antitrust complaint and political control of web standards

PPK points out a potentially dangerous aspect to Opera's actions, one that that the rest of us have missed: "Without consulting anybody, Opera is trying to give a political body the right to decide what does and what does not constitute a web standard."