Two years ago, I delivered the closing keynote at the Internet Archive's inaugural Decentralized Web event; last week, we had the second of these, and once again, I gave the closing keynote, entitled Big Tech's problem is Big, not Tech. Here's the abstract: Read the rest

Once upon a time, online services differentiated themselves from competitors by promising not to lock their users in (memorably, Flickr offered an API that would let you export all your photos, your social graph and the comments and other metadata to any other service that had a similar API), but as slumbering antitrust regulators allowed wave after wave of mergers and acquisitions, so tech become Big Tech, walled gardens made a roaring comeback, with services quietly shelving the ability to move between them. Read the rest

We're months removed from the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the public outrage of #DeleteFacebook, and new information continues to surface about Facebook's sloppy handling of data and hunger for surveillance. Last month, we learned about an Orwellian patent that might allow Facebook to track you via mobile microphone. Though some have cast doubt on the reports, mobile spyware like the now-infamous Alphonso do track mobile devices via sound emitted by TVs.

John Deere is notorious for arguing that farmers who buy its tractors actually "license" them because Deere still owns the copyright to the tractors' software; in 2015, the US Copyright Office affirmed that farmers were allowed to jailbreak their tractors to effect repairs and modifications. Read the rest

Apple has rejected Spotify's latest app for inclusion in the Ios App Store, citing its rules against app vendors processing their own payments; Apple requires software vendors to pay to use Apple's own payment processor -- which collects hefty commissions -- in their apps. Read the rest