Remarkable that big tech has managed to advance the narrative that a suite of antitrust bills which emerged from a two-year deliberative process with half a dozen hearings, a 450-page committee report, and hard-won bipartisan support is somehow "rushed." nytimes.com/2021/06/22/tec…
Here are three CA dems coming out against parts of the antitrust package on the grounds that it would hurt tech workers. But it seems a lot more plausible that it would hurt the tech giants who are spending zillions on lobbying. The workers would be fine. washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/… Image
Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-San Jose, joins big-business Republicans in opposing the bipartisan antitrust measure that would restrict dominant internet firms from competing on their own platforms. She calls it "very extreme," suggests Big Tech has been good for the economy on balance. Image
Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Seattle, is calling out Lofgren, her fellow Democrat, for her pro-Big Tech stance on this antitrust bill. "Big Tech, Big Tech, Big Tech... Why are we not talking about small business?" Image
Meanwhile, Rep. Dan Bishop (R-NC) is calling out his fellow Rs Ken Buck and Matt Gaetz for participating in the bipartisan antitrust push. He argues they're getting hoodwinked by their fellow Dems on the antitrust subcommittee into supporting regulatory overreach.
Interestingly, there is an element of the Republican opposition to the antitrust package is *not* opposition to antitrust action per se--the opposition is to expanding the FTC's power/discretion. Bishop claims he'd be open to Big Tech breakups if they avoided empowering the FTC.

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More from @WillOremus

18 Jun
It's remarkable how widely the journalistic elite came to accept and even venerate the famous Janet Malcolm quote, which, while valuable as a puncturing corrective to the profession's smarmier conceits, is at best plainly untrue and at worst deeply damaging.
I've quoted it approvingly myself. It's a good line. It has shock value to the right people. It's a little bit punk. But let's not pretend it's true of all or even most journalists, at a time when perhaps half the country believes we really are immoral liars and con artists.
The quote, for those unfamiliar: (The first line is the most iconic, but the whole paragraph is journalism-famous, sort of like the j-school equivalent of the final paragraphs of Gatsby.)
Read 4 tweets
9 May
Test-drove a Tesla Model 3 today. It's truly inspiring the amount of human ingenuity and innovation that went into making something as simple as driving a sedan so complicated that you need a full tutorial on things like how to adjust the mirrors or open the glovebox
From the moment you slide into in the driver's seat of the futuristic Tesla Model 3, it's clear that a team of brilliant engineers and designers has reimagined every aspect of the automobile from the ground up with one singular goal in mind: How can we make this shit *confusing*
Despite some initial setbacks, I was feeling pretty slick after I successfully adjusted the left mirror by tapping the correct 3-icon sequence on the touchscreen and twiddling the left knob on the steering wheel. Then I twiddled the right knob to adjust the right mirror but NOPE
Read 7 tweets
3 May
Twitter just announced, as of 1pm ET, that Twitter Spaces is now available to everyone with 600+ followers, on iOS *and Android.* A few quick thoughts...
Twitter Spaces is *very* similar to Clubhouse, the social audio app that has boomed to a $4b valuation and 10m+ active users in just one year. You can host a live conversation, invite audience members on stage, send them back down, mute people's mics, etc.
One significant difference: Clubhouse rooms are organized in a public "hallway" by topic, and there's a lot of serendipity—and some risk—in discovering rooms hosted by people you've never heard of, and hosting rooms attended by people who've never heard of you.
Read 10 tweets
27 Apr
This leaked internal Facebook report on its content moderation failures (and qualified successes) leading up the Jan. 6 riot makes for a fascinating, concerning, and also just plain ~weird~ read. buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanma…
Facebook at this point has whole teams and task forces full of Very Serious People devoted to monitoring the site for bad guys. They've developed a CIA-worthy lexicon of jargon and acronyms to diagnose and classify the different types of bad guys and intel techniques.
It's clear some folks at FB are putting real effort into making the site non-democracy-destroying. Yet all of their topic classifiers, CIRD pipelines, regex and classifier tracking in HELLCAT, and manual analysis via CORGI modeling are no match for the site's underlying dynamics.
Read 13 tweets
23 Apr
I wrote for @slate about big-name journalists going independent as the inevitable next phase of the unbundling of news from everything else that used to cross-subsidize it. What Craigslist did for classifieds, Substack is doing for columnists. slate.com/business/2021/…
Unbundling has generally been painful for news organizations, and if (big if!) Substack et al continue to outcompete them for their best-known writers, that could hurt too. But it's not insurmountable, and it may not even be a bad thing in the long run. slate.com/business/2021/…
One shortcoming of my piece is that it risks making it sound like Substack is all big-name pundits raking in six figures (or seven!). In fact, there are all kinds of people doing all kinds of work on the platform, most of them for not a whole lot of money.
Read 5 tweets
12 Apr
OK here is a take I don't think I've seen yet. Imagine Substack takes all the big-name opinion writers, gutting traditional publishers' op-ed pages and leaving them with nothing but news reporters. They're forced to refocus on news, which turns out to be... not such a bad thing??
This is not a pro-Substack tweet or an anti-Substack tweet, I'm just musing out loud, please adjust your replies and dunks accordingly.
I'm pretty sure they do, as currently constructed. But I think the resulting dynamic has not been entirely healthy, since many readers don't grasp or even notice the distinction, and end up associating news brands with their most polarizing opinion voices.
Read 4 tweets

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