@Anton_P_Nym@theKeenUrbanist Mandate interoperability so that people can leave the platforms without leaving their communities, and set moderation policies that reflect their interests, not multinational corporate priorities.
@Anton_P_Nym@theKeenUrbanist Prevent tax evasion through profit shifting by imposing a global minimum tax, so that Canadian rivals don't start with a 35% penalty relative to giant tech companies.
@Anton_P_Nym@theKeenUrbanist Fully fund the Competition Bureau, to subject anticompetitive mergers to meaningful scrutiny, and unwind previous mergers.
@Anton_P_Nym@theKeenUrbanist Create a duty not to overblock that accompanies any duty not to underblock. Prohibit automated filtering. Mandate due process for blocking, and backstop it with civil remedies - all in the EU DSA/DMA.
@Anton_P_Nym@theKeenUrbanist Pass national privacy legislation that prohibits targeted advertising without meaningful consent that can be withdrawn at any time, so that paid disinformation becomes a de facto crime.
@Anton_P_Nym@theKeenUrbanist Ensure that such legislation carries a private right of action, so that people whose privacy is violated don't have to convince a government prosecutor to represent their interests.
@Anton_P_Nym@theKeenUrbanist Pass national anti-SLAPP legislation so our courts can't be used to silence critics of the rich and powerful.
@Anton_P_Nym@theKeenUrbanist I could do this all day. There are literally hundreds of steps that Canada could take that would materially improve its discourse, stop paid disinformation, and protect free expression. None of those things are in the Liberal proposal.
@Anton_P_Nym@theKeenUrbanist If someone has told you that opponents of "harmful content" rules are nihilists who don't care about discourse and have no concrete solutions, that person lied to you.
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In "The New Antitrust/Data Privacy Law Interface," @TempleLaw's Erika M Douglas presents a fascinating look at the tensions between privacy and competition.
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:
It's only fitting that Douglas published her paper in the @YaleJREG, as that's the same journal that kickstarted the modern antitrust revolution when it published @linakhanFTC's "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox," while she was a law student.
Today, the @nytimes published an analysis of hospital pricing in the US, comparing prices charged to uninsured people, to Medicare, and to different insurers, revealing that these prices can vary up to 900%, often to the detriment of large insurers.
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:
This represents a marked contrast to the story we are often told about health-care pricing in America - that large insurers use their might to negotiate lower rates from price-gouging hospitals. That might be true sometimes, but often, it's not.
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This past weekend in the @FT, Kim Stanley Robinson ponders the nature of the current climate emergency, trying to capture the "structure of the feeling" of our current moment.
In 2020, Robinson published an astonishingly good, optimistic and furious novel about the climate emergency, "The Ministry For the Future," whose goal was imagining what that "structure" feel like if we actually averted the end of civilization.
What's that mean? It's going beyond, "It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism." It's EASY to imagine the end of capitalism - I've written many postcapitalist worlds. The hard part is writing the ENDING of capitalism - the actual transition.
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The Unraveling is @Ben_Rosenbaum's debut novel. If you've followed Rosenbaum's work to date - glittering, cerebral, hilarious short fiction - then it will not surprise you to learn that this is a book that is as weird and wild as shoes on a snake.
I wrote a novella with Ben, "True Names," a tribute to the Vernor Vinge classic. It took something like five years to write and got nominated for a Hugo. Writing with Rosenbaum was a genuinely surreal experience.
Like, I'd add 500 words to the story and email it back to him, and he'd mail back 500 more, along with a 2,000 word essay on the nature of consciousness and identity and reality and what he was trying to get at with his 500 words.
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