Discover and read the best of Twitter Threads about #EUCD
Most recents (4)
Mobile tech is a duopoly run by two companies - Google and Apple - with a combined $3.5T market cap. Each uses a combination of tech, law, contract and market power to force sellers to do commerce via apps, and each extracts a *massive* commission in-app sales - 15-30%! 1/ 
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
pluralistic.net/2022/12/13/kit… 2/
pluralistic.net/2022/12/13/kit… 2/
This is bad for users and workers. Many companies' gross margins are less than 30%. In some categories, that means there's *no* competition. 3/
This week on my podcast, I read my @Medium column, "The Best Defense Against Rubber-Hose Cryptanalysis," about what the cypherpunks got wrong, what they got right, and what that says about claims that cryptocurrency will defend us from tyranny:
onezero.medium.com/rubber-hoses-f… 1/
onezero.medium.com/rubber-hoses-f… 1/
If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
pluralistic.net/2022/04/04/att… 2/
pluralistic.net/2022/04/04/att… 2/
30 years ago, the cypherpunks - forerunners of the cryptocurrency movement - waged an epic battle to ensure that we could all access working cryptography. 3/
This week on my podcast, I read the final part of "The Internet Heist," my @Medium series on the copyright wars' early days, when the entertainment and tech giants tried to leverage the digital TV transition into a veto over every part of our lives.
onezero.medium.com/the-internet-h… 1/
onezero.medium.com/the-internet-h… 1/
In Part I, I described the bizarre #BroadcastFlag project, where Hollywood studios and Intel colluded with a corrupt congressman (later @phrma's top lobbyist) to ban any digital product unless it had DRM and blocked free/open source software:
onezero.medium.com/the-internet-h… 2/
onezero.medium.com/the-internet-h… 2/
In Part II, I recount the failure of the Broadcast Flag (killed by a unanimous Second Circuit decision), and how the studios pivoted to "plugging the #AnalogHole": mandatory kill-switches for recorders to block recording of copyrighted works:
onezero.medium.com/the-internet-h… 3/
onezero.medium.com/the-internet-h… 3/
The DMCA was signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1998. It has a weird history. Its inception came from Bruce Lehmann, Microsoft's chief copyright enforcer, whom Clinton tapped to serve as his Copyright Czar. 1/
This was back in the "Information Superhighway" days, when Al Gore was holding hearings on the demilitarization and commercialization of the internet. 2/
Lehmann presented Gore with a proposal that was so utterly bonkers that it made subsequent net.lunacy ("series of tubes," etc) look reasonable by comparison.
eff.org/files/filenode… 3/
eff.org/files/filenode… 3/
