#monopoly lawsuit resources

[tedrakitty]

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-google-monopolizing-digital-advertising-technologies

https://www.npr.org/2023/09/12/1198558372/doj-google-monopoly-antitrust-trial-search-engine#:~:text=After%20the%20Justice%20Department%20filed,trial%20kicking%20off%20on%20Tuesday.

https://www.reuters.com/legal/why-is-us-suing-google-antitrust-violations-2023-09-11/

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/03/not-feeling-lucky/#fundamental-laws-of-economics

https://www.tumblr.com/thesoulofthebeautiful/731274818307178496/note-the-suit-is-specifically-about-google-having

DON'T LET THIS GO OUT OF CIRCULATION. ADD MORE ONTO IT. QUEUE IT. DON'T LET THIS SITE FUCKING FORGET. THIS TRIAL COULD HAVE MASSIVE CONSEQUENCES FOR THE WHOLE INTERNET.

EDIT:

Originally I linked an MSN article. I was unaware they're not a trustworthy source, but many lovely people in the notes pointed it out and pointed out that the article I linked had issues, linking much better sources.

Here's an excellent addition to the post by @/thesoulofthebeautiful:

Also, I saw a lot of people freaking out in the notes like "Oh shit, is Google gonna get completely taken down????" No. It won't. Google's a trillion dollar company, this won't completely destroy it. What it'll hopefully do is keep them from having Google be the default engine EVERYWHERE. If Google loses, that is a good thing. This WILL shake up the internet, but it won't be the end.

Cool? Cool. Here's a Destiel meme:

IF YOU REPOST THIS MEME, LINK THE SOURCES

[jackwhiteprophetic]

Board games that have been banned at the 118 and why:

MONOPOLY: Ravi kept talking about real estate, Chim made an awkward lawsuit joke when Eddie got sent to jail and Buck kept demanding he be allowed to pay the bail.

SETTLERS OF CATAN: Buck and Eddie just simply end up sharing all their resources because they can't say no to each other. Buck said "thanks I'm so bricked up now" after Eddie traded him bricks once and Bobby threw the board off of the loft balcony.

CLUEDO: Chim has NO poker face (poker is ironically also banned after an LAFD wide notice was sent around following the poker date) and Bobby kept trying to call Athena for tips.

UNO: No one could agree on the rules and Hen ended up trying to use the official Uno twitter posts as proof and Bobby stormed off. On a second attempt, Chim started a +2 chain that went around the group twice and ended up with him having to pick up +16 cards, and as revenge he said the Q-word. Bobby burned the pack at the next group barbecue.

PICTIONARY- Eddie and Hen are too good at it because they've had to spend recent years deciphering their kids' drawings.

They also tried to do heads up but Buck didn't know any of the films and Eddie refused to use a phone for a "board game".

PLEASE ADD MORE IDEAS THIS IS SO FUN

Also thank you to @wayfarers0 @eddiesfagstache @blue-desert13 AND THE OTHER AMAZING EDDIEBUDDIEBLR PEOPLE I LOVE YOU ALL

[mostlysignssomeportents]

SoCal Gas spent millions on astroturf ops to fight climate rules

Today (19 Aug), I'm appearing at the San Diego Union-Tribune Festival of Books. I'm on a 2:30PM panel called "Return From Retirement," followed by a signing:

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/festivalofbooks

It's a breathtaking fraud: SoCal Gas, the largest gas company in America, spent millions secretly paying people to oppose California environmental regulations, then illegally stuck its customers with the bill. We Californians were forced to pay to lobby against our own survival:

https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article277266828.html

The criminal scheme is spelled out in eye-watering detail in a superb investigative report by Joe Rubin and Ari Plachta for the Sacramento Bee, which names the law firms and individual lawyers involved in the scam.

Here's the situation: SoCal Gas is California's private, regulated gas monopoly. They are allowed to lobby, but are legally required to charge their lobbying activities to their shareholders, and are prohibited from raising customer rates to pay for lobbying.

The company spent years secretly violating this rule, in the sleaziest way possible: working with corporate cartels like the California Restaurant Association and BizFed, the monopoly paid BigLaw white-shoe firms to procure people who posed as concerned citizens in order to oppose climate regulations that are essential to the state's very survival.

The bill topped $36 million – and it was illegally charged to its customers, the Californians whose immediate health and long-term survival these efforts opposed. SoCal Gas refuses to disclose the full extent of the spending, as do its lawyer-procurers, who cite legal confidentiality and a First Amendment right to secretly seek to influence policy in their refusal to disclose their profits from this illegal conduct.

The law firms involved are a who's-who of California's most prominent corporate fixers, including Reichman Jorgensen and Holland & Knight. The partners involved have a long rap sheet for anti-climate dirty tricking, most notably Jennifer Hernandez, notorious in climate justice history for an incident where activists claim she posed as one of them, infiltrating a campaign to force corporate despoilers to clean up their pollution in order to sabotage it, while secretly on a wealthy, prominent landowner's payroll.

Hernandez claims to care about the environment and says that her longstanding, corporate-funded, extensive campaigns and lawsuits against state environmental regulations are motivated by concern over their impact on working people. Her firm, Holland & Knight, denies serving SoCal Gas in opposing gas regulations, but it received $594k in ratepayer dollars, and submitted comments opposing the rules on its own behalf. Those comments were nearly identical to the comments submitted by SoCal Gas.

Hernandez also represents an obscure organization called The Two Hundred for Home Ownership in "a flurry of lawsuits" over California Air Resources Board rules on pollution, seeking to overturn the state's landmark climate change regulations.

Two Hundred for Home Ownership was founded by Robert Apodaca, who told the Bee that Hernandez's work for him is pro bono and not funded by SoCal Gas, but his entry into the fray occurred just as SoCalGas was founding an astroturf group called Californians for Fair and Balanced Energy (C4BES), which pretended to be an independent organization, disguising its relationship with SoCal Gas.

Apodaca is also founder of United Latinos Vote, an organization that had been largely dormant for seven years, not receiving any donations, until 2018, when the California Building Industry Association gave it $99k. The CBIA is a large-dollar recipient of donations from SoCal Gas, and its CEO insists that it was not acting on SoCal Gas's behalf when it made its unpredented donation to Apodaca.

The CBIA donation to United Latinos Vote was forerunner to a flood of corporate donations from the likes of Chevron, Marathon and Phillips 66. Shortly after receiving this cash, United Latinos Vote ran a full page ad in the LA Times, accusing the Sierra Club of pushing for anti-gas appliance rules that would harm working class Latino families.

This ad, in turn, featured prominently in advocacy by the SoCal Gas front group C4BES, funded with $29.1m in ratepayer money, which it then spent seeking to link clean appliance rules with anti-Latino racism. A quarter of California's carbon emissions come from home gas use.

SoCal Gas is regulated by the California Public Utility Commission (CPUC), which tolerated this mounting illegal conduct for many years, even as the company circulated internal memos as early as 2015 discussing its plans to oppose electrification in the state on the basis that it constituted "a significant risk to our business."

But last year, CPUC fined SoCal Gas $10m. Now, CPUC's Public Advocate office has filed a damning, extensive report on SoCal Gas's unlawful conduct, seeking $80m in rate cuts to compensate Californians for the funds misappropriated to protect the company's shareholder interests:

https://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/PublishedDocs/Efile/G000/M517/K407/517407314.PDF

Additionally, the Public Advocate is demanding $233m in fines for the company's refusal to allow investigators to audit its books and discover the full extent of the fraud.

SoCal Gas is the nation's largest utility, but (incredibly), it's not the dirtiest. That prize goes to Ohio's FirstEnergy, which handed $60m in ratepayer dollars to state politicians in illegal bribes in exchange for coal and nuclear subsidies and cancellation of state climate rules. That scandal led to GOP speaker of the Ohio House Larry Householder being sentenced to 20 years in prison:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_nuclear_bribery_scandal

There is something extraordinarily sleazy about using ratepayers' own money to lobby against their interests. SoCal Gas and its Big Law enablers have funneled millions in Californian's money into campaigns to poison us and boil us alive, and they did it while using workers and racialized people as human shields.

I'm kickstarting the audiobook for "The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation," a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and make a new, good internet to succeed the old, good internet. It's a DRM-free book, which means Audible won't carry it, so this crowdfunder is essential. Back now to get the audio, Verso hardcover and ebook:

http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/19/cooking-the-books-with-gas/#reichman-jorgensen

Image: Maryland GovPics (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/mdgovpics/6635539089/

Jackie (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/79874304@N00/197532792

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[mariacallous]

A long trip on an American highway in the summer of 2024 leaves the impression that two kinds of billboards now have near-monopoly rule over our roads. On one side, the billboards, gravely black-and-white and soberly reassuring, advertise cancer centers. (“We treat every type of cancer, including the most important one: yours”; “Beat 3 Brain Tumors. At 57, I gave birth, again.”) On the other side, brightly colored and deliberately clownish billboards advertise malpractice and personal-injury lawyers, with phone numbers emblazoned in giant type and the lawyers wearing superhero costumes or intimidating glares, staring down at the highway as they promise to do to juries.

A new Tocqueville considering the landscape would be certain that all Americans do is get sick and sue each other. We ask doctors to cure us of incurable illnesses, and we ask lawyers to take on the doctors who haven’t. We are frightened and we are angry; we look to expert intervention for the fears, and to comic but effective-seeming figures for retaliation against the experts who disappoint us.

Much of this is distinctly American—the idea that cancer-treatment centers would be in competitive relationships with one another, and so need to advertise, would be as unimaginable in any other industrialized country as the idea that the best way to adjudicate responsibility for a car accident is through aggressive lawsuits. Both reflect national beliefs: in competition, however unreal, and in the assignment of blame, however misplaced. We want to think that, if we haven’t fully enjoyed our birthright of plenty and prosperity, a nameable villain is at fault.

To grasp what is at stake in this strangest of political seasons, it helps to define the space in which the contest is taking place. We may be standing on the edge of an abyss, and yet nothing is wrong, in the expected way of countries on the brink of apocalypse. The country is not convulsed with riots, hyperinflation, or mass immiseration. What we have is a sort of phony war—a drôle de guerre, a sitzkrieg—with the vehemence of conflict mainly confined to what we might call the cultural space.

These days, everybody talks about spaces: the “gastronomic space,” the “podcast space,” even, on N.F.L. podcasts, the “analytic space.” Derived from some combination of sociology and interior design, the word has elbowed aside terms like “field” or “conversation,” perhaps because it’s even more expansive. The “space” of a national election is, for that reason, never self-evident; we’ve always searched for clues.

And so William Dean Howells began his 1860 campaign biography of Abraham Lincoln by mocking the search for a Revolutionary pedigree for Presidential candidates and situating Lincoln in the antislavery West, in contrast to the resigned and too-knowing East. North vs. South may have defined the frame of the approaching war, but Howells was prescient in identifying East vs. West as another critical electoral space. This opposition would prove crucial—first, to the war, with the triumph of the Westerner Ulysses S. Grant over the well-bred Eastern generals, and then to the rejuvenation of the Democratic Party, drawing on free-silver populism and an appeal to the values of the resource-extracting, expansionist West above those of the industrialized, centralized East.

A century later, the press thought that the big issues in the race between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy were Quemoy and Matsu (two tiny Taiwan Strait islands, claimed by both China and Taiwan), the downed U-2, the missile gap, and other much debated Cold War obsessions. But Norman Mailer, in what may be the best thing he ever wrote, saw the space as marked by the rise of movie-star politics—the image-based contests that, from J.F.K. to Ronald Reagan, would dominate American life. In “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” published in Esquire, Mailer revealed that a campaign that looked at first glance like the usual black-and-white wire-service photography of the first half of the twentieth century was really the beginning of our Day-Glo-colored Pop-art turn.

And our own electoral space? We hear about the overlooked vs. the élite, the rural vs. the urban, the coastal vs. the flyover, the aged vs. the young—about the dispossessed vs. the beneficiaries of global neoliberalism. Upon closer examination, however, these binaries blur. Support for populist nativism doesn’t track neatly with economic disadvantage. Some of Donald Trump’s keenest supporters have boats as well as cars and are typically the wealthier citizens of poorer rural areas. His stock among billionaires remains high, and his surprising support among Gen Z males is something his campaign exploits with visits to podcasts that no non-Zoomer has ever heard of.

But polarized nations don’t actually polarize around fixed poles. Civil confrontations invariably cross classes and castes, bringing together people from radically different social cohorts while separating seemingly natural allies. The English Revolution of the seventeenth century, like the French one of the eighteenth, did not array worn-out aristocrats against an ascendant bourgeoisie or fierce-eyed sansculottes. There were, one might say, good people on both sides. Or, rather, there were individual aristocrats, merchants, and laborers choosing different sides in these prerevolutionary moments. No civil war takes place between classes; coalitions of many kinds square off against one another.

In part, that’s because there’s no straightforward way of defining our “interests.” It’s in the interest of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to have big tax cuts; in the longer term, it’s also in their interest to have honest rule-of-law government that isn’t in thrall to guilds or patrons—to be able to float new ideas without paying baksheesh to politicians or having to worry about falling out of sixth-floor windows. “Interests” fail as an explanatory principle.

Does talk of values and ideas get us closer? A central story of American public life during the past three or four decades is (as this writer has noted) that liberals have wanted political victories while reliably securing only cultural victories, even as conservatives, wanting cultural victories, get only political ones. Right-wing Presidents and legislatures are elected, even as one barrier after another has fallen on the traditionalist front of manners and mores. Consider the widespread acceptance of same-sex marriage. A social transformation once so seemingly untenable that even Barack Obama said he was against it, in his first campaign for President, became an uncontroversial rite within scarcely more than a decade.

Right-wing political power has, over the past half century, turned out to have almost no ability to stave off progressive social change: Nixon took the White House in a landslide while Norman Lear took the airwaves in a ratings sweep. And so a kind of permanent paralysis has set in. The right has kept electing politicians who’ve said, “Enough! No more ‘Anything goes’!”—and anything has kept going. No matter how many right-wing politicians came to power, no matter how many right-wing judges were appointed, conservatives decided that the entire culture was rigged against them.

On the left, the failure of cultural power to produce political change tends to lead to a doubling down on the cultural side, so that wholesome college campuses can seem the last redoubt of Red Guard attitudes, though not, to be sure, of Red Guard authority. On the right, the failure of political power to produce cultural change tends to lead to a doubling down on the political side in a way that turns politics into cultural theatre. Having lost the actual stages, conservatives yearn to enact a show in which their adversaries are rendered humiliated and powerless, just as they have felt humiliated and powerless. When an intolerable contradiction is allowed to exist for long enough, it produces a Trump.

As much as television was the essential medium of a dozen bygone Presidential campaigns (not to mention the medium that made Trump a star), the podcast has become the essential medium of this one. For people under forty, the form—typically long-winded and shapeless—is as tangibly present as Walter Cronkite’s tightly scripted half-hour news show was fifty years ago, though the D.I.Y. nature of most podcasts, and the premium on host-read advertisements, makes for abrupt tonal changes as startling as those of the highway billboards.

On the enormously popular, liberal-minded “Pod Save America,” for instance, the hosts make no secret of their belief that the election is a test, as severe as any since the Civil War, of whether a government so conceived can long endure. Then they switch cheerfully to reading ads for Tommy John underwear (“with the supportive pouch”), for herbal hangover remedies, and for an app that promises to cancel all your excess streaming subscriptions, a peculiarly niche obsession (“I accidentally paid for Showtime twice!” “That’s bad!”). George Conway, the former Republican (and White House husband) turned leading anti-Trumper, states bleakly on his podcast for the Bulwark, the news-and-opinion site, that Trump’s whole purpose is to avoid imprisonment, a motivation that would disgrace the leader of any Third World country. Then he immediately leaps into offering—like an old-fashioned a.m.-radio host pushing Chock Full o’Nuts—testimonials for HexClad cookware, with charming self-deprecation about his own kitchen skills. How serious can the crisis be if cookware and boxers cohabit so cozily with the apocalypse?

And then there’s the galvanic space of social media. In the nineteen-seventies and eighties, we were told, by everyone from Jean Baudrillard to Daniel Boorstin, that television had reduced us to numbed observers of events no longer within our control. We had become spectators instead of citizens. In contrast, the arena of social media is that of action and engagement—and not merely engagement but enragement, with algorithms acting out addictively on tiny tablets. The aura of the Internet age is energized, passionate, and, above all, angry. The algorithms dictate regular mortar rounds of text messages that seem to come not from an eager politician but from an infuriated lover, in the manner of Glenn Close in “Fatal Attraction”: “Are you ignoring us?” “We’ve reached out to you PERSONALLY!” “This is the sixth time we’ve asked you!” At one level, we know they’re entirely impersonal, while, at another, we know that politicians wouldn’t do this unless it worked, and it works because, at still another level, we are incapable of knowing what we know; it doesn’t feel entirely impersonal. You can doomscroll your way to your doom. The democratic theorists of old longed for an activated citizenry; somehow they failed to recognize how easily citizens could be activated to oppose deliberative democracy.

If the cultural advantages of liberalism have given it a more pointed politics in places where politics lacks worldly consequences, its real-world politics can seem curiously blunted. Kamala Harris, like Joe Biden before her, is an utterly normal workaday politician of the kind we used to find in any functioning democracy—bending right, bending left, placating here and postponing confrontation there, glaring here and, yes, laughing there. Demographics aside, there is nothing exceptional about Harris, which is her virtue. Yet we live in exceptional times, and liberal proceduralists and institutionalists are so committed to procedures and institutions—to laws and their reasonable interpretation, to norms and their continuation—that they can be slow to grasp that the world around them has changed.

One can only imagine the fulminations that would have ensued in 2020 had the anti-democratic injustice of the Electoral College—which effectively amplifies the political power of rural areas at the expense of the country’s richest and most productive areas—tilted in the other direction. Indeed, before the 2000 election, when it appeared as if it might, Karl Rove and the George W. Bush campaign had a plan in place to challenge the results with a “grassroots” movement designed to short-circuit the Electoral College and make the popular-vote winner prevail. No Democrat even suggests such a thing now.

It’s almost as painful to see the impunity with which Supreme Court Justices have torched their institution’s legitimacy. One Justice has the upside-down flag of the insurrectionists flying on his property; another, married to a professional election denialist, enjoys undeclared largesse from a plutocrat. There is, apparently, little to be done, nor even any familiar language of protest to draw on. Prepared by experience to believe in institutions, mainstream liberals believe in their belief even as the institutions are degraded in front of their eyes.

In one respect, the space of politics in 2024 is transoceanic. The forms of Trumpism are mirrored in other countries. In the U.K., a similar wave engendered the catastrophe of Brexit; in France, it has brought an equally extreme right-wing party to the brink, though not to the seat, of power; in Italy, it elevated Matteo Salvini to national prominence and made Giorgia Meloni Prime Minister. In Sweden, an extreme-right group is claiming voters in numbers no one would ever have thought possible, while Canadian conservatives have taken a sharp turn toward the far right.

What all these currents have in common is an obsessive fear of immigration. Fear of the other still seems to be the primary mover of collective emotion. Even when it is utterly self-destructive—as in Britain, where the xenophobia of Brexit cut the U.K. off from traditional allies while increasing immigration from the Global South—the apprehension that “we” are being flooded by frightening foreigners works its malign magic.

It’s an old but persistent delusion that far-right nationalism is not rooted in the emotional needs of far-right nationalists but arises, instead, from the injustices of neoliberalism. And so many on the left insist that all those Trump voters are really Bernie Sanders voters who just haven’t had their consciousness raised yet. In fact, a similar constellation of populist figures has emerged, sharing platforms, plans, and ideologies, in countries where neoliberalism made little impact, and where a strong system of social welfare remains in place. If a broadened welfare state—national health insurance, stronger unions, higher minimum wages, and the rest—would cure the plague in the U.S., one would expect that countries with resilient welfare states would be immune from it. They are not.

Though Trump can be situated in a transoceanic space of populism, he isn’t a mere symptom of global trends: he is a singularly dangerous character, and the product of a specific cultural milieu. To be sure, much of New York has always been hostile to him, and eager to disown him; in a 1984 profile of him in GQ, Graydon Carter made the point that Trump was the only New Yorker who ever referred to Sixth Avenue as the “Avenue of the Americas.” Yet we’re part of Trump’s identity, as was made clear by his recent rally on Long Island—pointless as a matter of swing-state campaigning, but central to his self-definition. His belligerence could come directly from the two New York tabloid heroes of his formative years in the city: John Gotti, the gangster who led the Gambino crime family, and George Steinbrenner, the owner of the Yankees. When Trump came of age, Gotti was all over the front page of the tabloids, as “the Teflon Don,” and Steinbrenner was all over the back sports pages, as “the Boss.”

Steinbrenner was legendary for his middle-of-the-night phone calls, for his temper and combativeness. Like Trump, who theatricalized the activity, he had a reputation for ruthlessly firing people. (Gotti had his own way of doing that.) Steinbrenner was famous for having no loyalty to anyone. He mocked the very players he had acquired and created an atmosphere of absolute chaos. It used to be said that Steinbrenner reduced the once proud Yankees baseball culture to that of professional wrestling, and that arena is another Trumpian space. Pro wrestling is all about having contests that aren’t really contested—that are known to be “rigged,” to use a Trumpian word—and yet evoke genuine emotion in their audience.

At the same time, Trump has mastered the gangster’s technique of accusing others of crimes he has committed. The agents listening to the Gotti wiretap were mystified when he claimed innocence of the just-committed murder of Big Paul Castellano, conjecturing, in apparent seclusion with his soldiers, about who else might have done it: “Whoever killed this cocksucker, probably the cops killed this Paul.” Denying having someone whacked even in the presence of those who were with you when you whacked him was a capo’s signature move.

Marrying the American paranoid style to the more recent cult of the image, Trump can draw on the manner of the tabloid star and show that his is a game, a show, not to be taken quite seriously while still being serious in actually inciting violent insurrections and planning to expel millions of helpless immigrants. Self-defined as a showman, he can say anything and simultaneously drain it of content, just as Gotti, knowing that he had killed Castellano, thought it credible to deny it—not within his conscience, which did not exist, but within an imaginary courtroom. Trump evidently learned that, in the realm of national politics, you could push the boundaries of publicity and tabloid invective far further than they had ever been pushed.

Trump’s ability to be both joking and severe at the same time is what gives him his power and his immunity. This power extends even to something as unprecedented as the assault on the U.S. Capitol. Trump demanded violence (“If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore”) but stuck in three words, “peacefully and patriotically,” that, however hollow, were meant to immunize him, Gotti-style. They were, so to speak, meant for the cops on the wiretap. Trump’s resilience is not, as we would like to tell our children about resilience, a function of his character. It’s a function of his not having one.

Just as Trump’s support cuts across the usual divisions, so, too, does a divide among his opponents—between the maximizers, who think that Trump is a unique threat to liberal democracy, and the minimizers, who think that he is merely the kind of clown a democracy is bound to throw up from time to time. The minimizers (who can be found among both Marxist Jacobin contributors and Never Trump National Review conservatives) will say that Trump has crossed the wires of culture and politics in a way that opportunistically responds to the previous paralysis, but that this merely places him in an American tradition. Democracy depends on the idea that the socially unacceptable might become acceptable. Andrew Jackson campaigned on similar themes with a similar manner—and was every bit as ignorant and every bit as unaware as Trump. (And his campaigns of slaughter against Indigenous people really were genocidal.) Trump’s politics may be ugly, foolish, and vain, but ours is often an ugly, undereducated, and vain country. Democracy is meant to be a mirror; it shows what it shows.

Indeed, America’s recent history has shown that politics is a trailing indicator of cultural change, and that one generation’s most vulgar entertainment becomes the next generation’s accepted style of political argument. David S. Reynolds, in his biography of Lincoln, reflects on how the new urban love of weird spectacle in the mid-nineteenth century was something Lincoln welcomed. P. T. Barnum’s genius lay in taking circus grotesques and making them exemplary Americans: the tiny General Tom Thumb was a hero, not a freak. Lincoln saw that it cost him nothing to be an American spectacle in a climate of sensation; he even hosted a reception at the White House for Tom Thumb and his wife—as much a violation of the decorum of the Founding Fathers as Trump’s investment in Hulk Hogan at the Republican Convention. Lincoln understood the Barnum side of American life, just as Trump understands its W.W.E. side.

And so, the minimizers say, taking Trump seriously as a threat to democracy in America is like taking Roman Reigns seriously as a threat to fair play in sports. Trump is an entertainer. The only thing he really wants are ratings. When opposing abortion was necessary to his electoral coalition, he opposed it—but then, when that was creating ratings trouble in other households, he sent signals that he wasn’t exactly opposed to it. When Project 2025, which he vaguely set in motion and claims never to have read, threatened his ratings, he repudiated it. The one continuity is his thirst for popularity, which is, in a sense, our own. He rows furiously away from any threatening waterfall back to the center of the river—including on Obamacare. And, the minimizers say, in the end, he did leave the White House peacefully, if gracelessly.

In any case, the panic is hardly unique to Trump. Reagan, too, was vilified and feared in his day, seen as the reductio ad absurdum of the culture of the image, an automaton projecting his controllers’ authoritarian impulses. Nixon was the subject of a savage satire by Philip Roth that ended with him running against the Devil for the Presidency of Hell. The minimizers tell us that liberals overreact in real time, write revisionist history when it’s over, and never see the difference between their stories.

The maximizers regard the minimizers’ case as wishful thinking buoyed up by surreptitious resentments, a refusal to concede anything to those we hate even if it means accepting someone we despise. Maximizers who call Trump a fascist are dismissed by the minimizers as either engaging in name-calling or forcing a facile parallel. Yet the parallel isn’t meant to be historically absolute; it is meant to be, as it were, oncologically acute. A freckle is not the same as a melanoma; nor is a Stage I melanoma the same as the Stage IV kind. But a skilled reader of lesions can sense which is which and predict the potential course if untreated. Trumpism is a cancerous phenomenon. Treated with surgery once, it now threatens to come back in a more aggressive form, subject neither to the radiation of “guardrails” nor to the chemo of “constraints.” It may well rage out of control and kill its host.

And so the maximalist case is made up not of alarmist fantasies, then, but of dulled diagnostic fact, duly registered. Think hard about the probable consequences of a second Trump Administration—about the things he has promised to do and can do, the things that the hard-core group of rancidly discontented figures (as usual with authoritarians, more committed than he is to an ideology) who surround him wants him to do and can do. Having lost the popular vote, as he surely will, he will not speak up to reconcile “all Americans.” He will insist that he won the popular vote, and by a landslide. He will pardon and then celebrate the January 6th insurrectionists, and thereby guarantee the existence of a paramilitary organization that’s capable of committing violence on his behalf without fear of consequences. He will, with an obedient Attorney General, begin prosecuting his political opponents; he was largely unsuccessful in his previous attempt only because the heads of two U.S. Attorneys’ offices, who are no longer there, refused to coöperate. When he begins to pressure CNN and ABC, and they, with all the vulnerabilities of large corporations, bend to his will, telling themselves that his is now the will of the people, what will we do to fend off the slow degradation of open debate?

Trump will certainly abandon Ukraine to Vladimir Putin and realign this country with dictatorships and against NATO and the democratic alliance of Europe. Above all, the spirit of vengeful reprisal is the totality of his beliefs—very much like the fascists of the twentieth century in being a man and a movement without any positive doctrine except revenge against his imagined enemies. And against this: What? Who? The spirit of resistance may prove too frail, and too exhausted, to rise again to the contest. Who can have confidence that a democracy could endure such a figure in absolute control and survive? An oncologist who, in the face of this much evidence, shrugged and proposed watchful waiting as the best therapy would not be an optimist. He would be guilty of gross malpractice. One of those personal-injury lawyers on the billboards would sue him, and win.

What any plausible explanation must confront is the fact that Trump is a distinctively vile human being and a spectacularly malignant political actor. In fables and fiction, in every Disney cartoon and Batman movie, we have no trouble recognizing and understanding the villains. They are embittered, canny, ludicrous in some ways and shrewd in others, their lives governed by envy and resentment, often rooted in the acts of people who’ve slighted them. (“They’ll never laugh at me again!”) They nonetheless have considerable charm and the ability to attract a cult following. This is Ursula, Hades, Scar—to go no further than the Disney canon. Extend it, if that seems too childlike, to the realms of Edmund in “King Lear” and Richard III: smart people, all, almost lovable in their self-recognition of their deviousness, but not people we ever want to see in power, for in power their imaginations become unimaginably deadly. Villains in fables are rarely grounded in any cause larger than their own grievances—they hate Snow White for being beautiful, resent Hercules for being strong and virtuous. Bane is blowing up Gotham because he feels misused, not because he truly has a better city in mind.

Trump is a villain. He would be a cartoon villain, if only this were a cartoon. Every time you try to give him a break—to grasp his charisma, historicize his ascent, sympathize with his admirers—the sinister truth asserts itself and can’t be squashed down. He will tell another lie so preposterous, or malign another shared decency so absolutely, or threaten violence so plausibly, or just engage in behavior so unhinged and hate-filled that you’ll recoil and rebound to your original terror at his return to power. One outrage succeeds another until we become exhausted and have to work hard even to remember the outrages of a few weeks past: the helicopter ride that never happened (but whose storytelling purpose was to demean Kamala Harris as a woman), or the cemetery visit that ended in a grotesque thumbs-up by a graveside (and whose symbolic purpose was to cynically enlist grieving parents on behalf of his contempt). No matter how deranged his behavior is, though, it does not seem to alter his good fortune.

Villainy inheres in individuals. There is certainly a far-right political space alive in the developed world, but none of its inhabitants—not Marine Le Pen or Giorgia Meloni or even Viktor Orbán—are remotely as reckless or as crazy as Trump. Our self-soothing habit of imagining that what has not yet happened cannot happen is the space in which Trump lives, just as comically deranged as he seems and still more dangerous than we know.

Nothing is ever entirely new, and the space between actual events and their disassociated representation is part of modernity. We live in that disassociated space. Generations of cultural critics have warned that we are lost in a labyrinth and cannot tell real things from illusion. Yet the familiar passage from peril to parody now happens almost simultaneously. Events remain piercingly actual and threatening in their effects on real people, while also being duplicated in a fictive system that shows and spoofs them at the same time. One side of the highway is all cancer; the other side all crazy. Their confoundment is our confusion.

It is telling that the most successful entertainments of our age are the dark comic-book movies—the Batman films and the X-Men and the Avengers and the rest of those cinematic universes. This cultural leviathan was launched by the discovery that these ridiculous comic-book figures, generations old, could now land only if treated seriously, with sombre backstories and true stakes. Our heroes tend to dullness; our villains, garishly painted monsters from the id, are the ones who fuel the franchise.

During the debate last month in Philadelphia, as Trump’s madness rose to a peak of raging lunacy—“They’re eating the dogs”; “He hates her!”—ABC, in its commercial breaks, cut to ads for “Joker: Folie à Deux,” the new Joaquin Phoenix movie, in which the crazed villain swirls and grins. It is a Gotham gone mad, and a Gotham, against all the settled rules of fable-making, without a Batman to come to the rescue. Shuttling between the comic-book villain and the grimacing, red-faced, and unhinged man who may be reëlected President in a few weeks, one struggled to distinguish our culture’s most extravagant imagination of derangement from the real thing. The space is that strange, and the stakes that high. ♦

[xenosagaepisodeone]

As much as copyright law sucks, its unfortunately one of the only legal venues with any sort of real power for artists working in creative industries to protect their livelihoods and colleagues. Unionization alone isn't going to stop companies from scraping people's work, especially not people who are non-union or freelancers, and unions like SAG-AFTRA keep throwing people who aren't making top-dollar under the bus for "ethical" AI startups they partner with anyway, even when said members call them out for siding with corporate over their own due-paying members. When corporations who normally try to shut down creators with DMCA takedowns are now violating the IP of countless creators themselves, why shouldn't we at least hold them accountable to the same laws they already use against us?

because it will not work. I truly cannot stress this enough, whatever meager personal gains that some industry artists are able to acquire in isolated cases against startups and other boutique tech ventures will set the precedent for which the corporations that actually control your country (who have infinite resources to expend on legal ventures) will use to push the law further in their favor. disney already does so much to prevent their IPs from entering the public domain! if you give them an avenue to exploit, they will do it! and it won't matter who was actually right because they have they have so much more money. artists and indie animation studios that could pose any threat to corporate monopolies on art will get C&D'd out of existence for superficial similarities. karla ortiz' lawsuit was so vaguely worded that you could hypothetically pursue someone legally if they had artwork of yours saved in a pinterest inspo board since CLIP models were framed as "trade dress databases". this entire movement is more concerned with potentially obstructed opportunities to rent-seek than it actually is about workers rights- or even simply art that was not created with the intent of being 'content'. and the same industry artists who spearheaded this frenzy will side the the corporations when it comes to it because they've already got theirs.

copyright is never made with the interests of individuals in mind. like, i can't even begin to explain how historically, the little guy is the one getting fucked over by copyright law! how so much of what shapes our culture exists in spite of copyright law as opposed to because of it. what drives me insane is how ai is the thing that artists end up rallying around in unity; not anything to actually improve the quality of life working within the arts, but instead a fad technology. i've seen people describe working in animation as being like a form of debasement and act like nothing can be done while i'm witnessing an entire movement unfold to protect that because a lot of artists seem to think of themselves as temporarily embarrassed small business owners over workers.

[afusionoffandoms]

HOLY SHIT

A US judge has ruled that Google acted illegally to maintain a monopoly on online searches and related advertising. The decision could reshape how technology giants do business in the future. Google was sued by the US Department of Justice for its control of about 90% of the online search market. In the decision, District Judge Amit Mehta noted that Google paid billions to ensure it is the default search engine on smartphones and browsers. “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” Judge Mehta wrote in his opinion.

The decision is a significant victory for federal antitrust regulators who have filed other pending lawsuits against Big Tech companies, accusing them of operating unlawful monopolies. Federal regulators have sued Meta Platforms, which operate Facebook and Whatsapp, Amazon.com and Apple Inc. Doing so, prosecutors said, meant other companies did not have the opportunity or resources to meaningfully compete.

[bizarrequazar]

hi! i'm pretty new here (yes i am horribly late i regret it immensely) and i have a few questions on this whole /hand wavey/ situation with zzh.

1. so i've read that he's submitted a defamation lawsuit in dec 2021 and seeing as there aren't any updates i could find and how it's currently 2023, i'm just wondering if the length of this process is normal in china's judiciary system?

2. this one would be more of a matter of personal opinion. the more i discover about this whole scheme the more it seems as if it's deeply entrenched in the very workings of c-ent. people seem to be overall quite optimistic but as a person somewhat looking in it seems like he'd have to dismantle the whole system before being able to obtain justice. do u personally think that zzh will be able to return to the industry - even if it does take a very long time? (asking this to protect my own heart bc i think i'm love him)

3. i've found the link of the woh archive and the link in your master post of some of junzhe's individual works but i'm just wondering if there's a comprehensive archive of zzh's past appearances (reality shows, interviews, etc.). i would be very grateful if u could direct me to people who have access to these - either in the intl fandom or on weibo.

thank u so much for reading through all of that and for making information readily accessible to new fans! i was so confused for a while trying to navigate social media ... please only do respond if u would like to i'm aware that i'm asking a lot. have a good day!

1. Length of the defamation lawsuit

(I'm going to preface this by just clarifying that I have no formal legal training. My knowledge largely comes from what I've learned since I started following Zhang Zhehan's case, and if anyone has corrections please do let me know.)

To give you a short answer, yes the length is really nothing surprising.

To give you a long answer, please see [this post] for a good breakdown on the legal process in relation to Zhang Zhehan's case. In summary, even the simplest cases usually take half a year at best to be seen by a judge due to backlog, and Zhang Zhehan's case is far from simple. As a comparitive, I like to bring up a much more standard lawsuit Gong Jun had against an anti in 2021 which took 13 months to be fully settled. That was a civil lawsuit, while Zhang Zhehan's is likely a criminal lawsuit, which I'll get into in the next paragraph. The complexity of his case is also increased by things such as what the scam gang has been doing—one of the main purposes of the Instagram account, Zhang Sanjian, etc. is likely to complicate things in order to drag the legal case out longer.

This goes a bit into your next question, but part of the situation with Zhang Zhehan's case is that while his individual aim is the defamation suit, that's not all there is to it. CAPA has a monopolizing presense within c-ent, which is why 813 was as successful as it was. Last spring, the Chinese government began an initiative aimed at dismantling industry monopolies, and CAPA is the prime target of that since 813 is a spectacular example of association overreach. When Li Xuezheng was active, he stated that a lot of not only legal bodies but also government representatives were very interested in the case, and this is exactly why—813 was meant to make an example out of Zhang Zhehan, now Zhang Zhehan's legal case is seeking to make an example out of CAPA. The government itself is likely invested in this case, which is a double-edged sword: it means that Zhang Zhehan has a better chance of winning, but it also means that they're going to be very meticulous in order to ensure the victory, which takes more time. (This is also probably why CAPA is still continuing to put resources into defaming him: Zhang Zhehan's victory may mean that CAPA is dismantled altogether.)

One other thing to keep in mind with regard to news of progress is that while usually legal cases in China are public information, exceptions can be granted by the government in instances of very sensitive cases. Given what I said above, it's possible that Zhang Zhehan's case falls under this.

Also, while there haven't been any official updates on his case, based on the scam gang's pattern of activity and the recent attempted attack on Li Xuezheng, a number of us who have been following things closely suspect that something has recently happened behind the scenes.

2. Returning to the industry

I think this is going to come down to a matter of Zhang Zhehan's own desires more so than the industry at large.

As stated above, there's a heavy chance that his victory will mean that CAPA will disappear as a force against him—even if it's not dismantled, he will have the legal proof that they have no grounds against him. On a more individual level, I think it's reasonable to say that there are probably a lot of people within c-ent who would be happy to see his victory and his return, either because of personal connections with him or simply because it will eliminate (or at least mitigate) the threat of another 813 happening to them. It's also clear that, despite the scam gang's efforts, he still has a very large and loyal fanbase within China.

The real question is whether he wants to return to the industry, and that's really something that only he can answer. 813 really showed just how cruel c-ent can be. It may be that he decides to return fully to acting, it may be that he decides to take a more behind the scenes role such as becoming a director, or it may be that once he wins his case he will choose to pursue another career. Only time will tell.

3. Archive of work

Ironically this is actually the trickiest part to answer 😅 The issue is less that interviews are hard to find and more just that most of the accounts that have uploaded them have turned whaler... I recently set up a YouTube channel of my own to try to circumvent this issue, but I haven't had time to do much with it yet, sorry. (I should be getting to it towards to the end of this month, hold me to that.)

Some resources that I'll give you are Shi'er on Twitter, who has compiled an AMAZING archive of Zhang Zhehan's Weibo posts including videos, and 浪钉之家, GJ & ZZH, and wenzhou subs on YouTube which have more recent (ie. 2020-2021) stuff. zzhellyfish is one of those who has turned whaler, but on YouTube at least they haven't uploaded anything since 813; they're a good resource for subbed interviews including some older stuff.

Hopefully this answered everything you were wondering about. Please never be worried about sending me questions, I enjoy having the excuse to talk about him.

[employehub]

Alibaba agrees to pay $433.5 million to settle a shareholder lawsuit over monopoly allegations.

Introduction: Understanding Alibaba’s Legal Battle

Alibaba, one of China’s most prominent e-commerce giants, has agreed to a substantial settlement of $433.5 million to resolve a shareholder lawsuit accusing the company of engaging in monopolistic practices. This settlement comes as Alibaba continues to navigate regulatory scrutiny, not only domestically but also on the international stage. The lawsuit, which has been ongoing, marks a significant event in the company’s history, highlighting the regulatory challenges faced by large tech companies in today’s competitive and scrutinized markets.

Background: The Monopoly Allegations Against Alibaba

Alibaba faced accusations from shareholders of monopolistic behavior, which they claimed harmed the company’s reputation and, by extension, its stock value. These allegations centered around practices such as pressuring merchants to exclusively sell on Alibaba’s platforms instead of its competitors, a move seen by regulators as an attempt to stifle market competition. Because of such actions, Alibaba became a primary target for regulatory investigations, prompting the shareholders’ legal action against the company.

The Shareholders’ Concerns

The shareholders argued that Alibaba’s alleged monopolistic practices, while beneficial to its market share, posed long-term risks to the company’s financial health and reputation. As a result, these shareholders sought legal recourse, believing the company’s actions would have lasting negative impacts on their investments. This settlement now represents an attempt to address those concerns and mitigate the financial impacts they feared.

The Settlement Decision: $433.5 Million Payment

To resolve the lawsuit, Alibaba has agreed to pay $433.5 million, a sum intended to compensate shareholders for their losses. The decision to settle rather than continue the legal battle signals Alibaba’s intent to close this chapter, likely to refocus its energy and resources on business operations rather than protracted legal conflicts. Although the amount is substantial, the decision to settle may provide the company with more stability moving forward.

Alibaba’s Perspective on the Lawsuit

Alibaba, while agreeing to the settlement, has not admitted to any wrongdoing. The company has maintained that it operates within the boundaries of the law, serving customers, merchants, and shareholders ethically and competitively. However, this settlement allows Alibaba to avoid a lengthy court case that could potentially expose it to even greater scrutiny and financial liability.

Impact on Alibaba’s Business Operations

Despite the financial hit, Alibaba’s business operations may not be significantly impacted by the settlement. With its vast resources, Alibaba can absorb the cost, ensuring minimal disruption to its e-commerce, logistics, and cloud services. However, the settlement brings to light the risks of regulatory challenges, especially for tech companies that dominate significant portions of their respective markets.

Regulatory Climate: Challenges for Big Tech in China

Alibaba’s case is part of a larger trend in which Chinese regulatory bodies are increasing scrutiny over big tech companies to prevent monopolistic practices and ensure fair competition. In recent years, China’s antitrust regulations have intensified, targeting companies that exercise significant influence over the market. This climate not only affects Alibaba but also other major players like Tencent and Meituan, who must now navigate more complex regulatory requirements.

Broader Implications for Global Tech Giants

This settlement sends a strong message to other global tech companies operating in highly regulated environments. As governments worldwide clamp down on perceived monopolistic practices, companies such as Amazon, Google, and Facebook are likely observing these developments. Alibaba’s situation illustrates the potential consequences of monopolistic behavior, thereby encouraging a more cautious approach.

Looking Ahead: Alibaba’s Future Strategy

In light of this settlement, Alibaba may re-evaluate its market strategies to reduce the risk of further legal issues. By potentially diversifying its merchant agreements and fostering a more open marketplace, Alibaba could align itself more closely with regulatory expectations. This shift could help improve its public image, reassure investors, and protect it from future legal disputes.

Conclusion: A Strategic Move for Stability

Alibaba’s decision to settle this lawsuit for $433.5 million marks a strategic step toward stability amid regulatory pressures. Although costly, the settlement allows the company to move forward without the uncertainty of ongoing litigation. In a landscape where tech giants are increasingly held accountable, Alibaba’s move could serve as a blueprint for other companies facing similar challenges, highlighting the balance between growth, regulatory compliance, and shareholder interests.

[general-cerberus]

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/04/disney-desantis-lawsuit-explained.html

Fun Fact! if disney wins, it'll give all corporations rights that haven't had since the great depression! Rights that will, among over things, nullify rent control laws, allow them to better establish monopolies over natural resources, and nullify any form of eviction moratoria!

[speed-seo]

Google Asserts Its Search Quality Keeps Improving in Court Filing

Search engine giant Google recently made some bold claims about its search quality in a court filing responding to an antitrust lawsuit. The company ardently argued that its search engine quality has steadily improved over the years thanks to continuous innovation and enhancements. This article will analyze Google's statements on search quality, assess whether the claims hold up, provide context on the antitrust case, and consider what it means for the search landscape going forward. Google's Statements on Improving Quality In its filing with the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, Google asserted that it operates the highest quality general search engine in the United States. The company stated, "Google's search engine today is of remarkably high quality - higher than it was 10 years ago, and dramatically better than its peers." Google went on to describe having an "unrelenting focus on improving search quality" and highlighted setting explicit quality goals to measure progress each year. Some of the sample annual search quality goals mentioned include improving spelling correction, understanding conversational queries, and ranking authoritative healthcare information higher. The filing specifically called out innovations like Google's RankBrain algorithm, Knowledge Graph, intuitive voice searching, and improvements in local search as key drivers of enhancing search quality over time. Google argued that continuous advancement of its search algorithms, along with growing its index of web pages, has steadily made its results more comprehensive, relevant, and useful for those searching online. Responses to Monopoly Power Claims A significant motivation behind Google's search quality assertions appears to be responding to monopoly power allegations. The company forcefully rejected claims that it has illegally maintained its dominant position in the search market, arguing there has been no degradation in quality. Google stated that barriers to entry are decreasing, not increasing, in the internet search ecosystem. The filing points to search services like Microsoft's Bing, along with specialized vertical search engines, as evidence that competition continues to grow. Google believes this dynamic marketplace will organically prevent any potential decline in the quality of its search product. You can read Google´s response Here Assessing Google's Search Quality Claims But does the available data back up Google's bold claims that its search quality keeps dramatically improving year after year? There are a few ways to evaluate: - Benchmarking Studies - Organizations like NIST periodically conduct academic studies comparing Google against competitors on metrics like relevance, freshness, and accuracy. The latest studies give Google high marks but do not show conclusively improving quality over time. - User Surveys - Statista Research suggest ~80% of US search engine users rate Google as a good or excellent resource, on par with previous years. Satisfaction and engagement levels appear stable. - Webmaster Community Feedback - Sentiment from the SEO community on webmaster forums points to frustrations with certain algorithm updates. But many believe core search relevancy has stayed consistent. - Search Analytics - Click-through rates and other metrics indicate Google has maintained its dominant popularity with users, indirectly suggesting sustained quality. But metrics do not show obvious improvement trends. - Financial Performance - Google's ongoing growth in advertising revenue points to a satisfied customer base willing to pay more for clicks. However, revenue expansion alone does not confirm the degree of quality enhancement. - Industry Experts - Leading search marketing authorities like Rand Fishkin of SparkToro and Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land agree Google continues to innovate but question claims of revolutionary leaps in quality. Overall, there are no smoking gun data points validating or invalidating Google's claims that search quality improves significantly year after year. The truth likely lies somewhere in the middle. While innovations occur, Google search today behaves much like the Google search of a decade ago for most queries. Complementary article: The Economic Rationale of United States v. Google Evaluating Google's Market Dominance Google linking its search quality assertions to monopoly debates prompts deeper consideration of its dominance. Google holds an undisputed leading position in general search, with ~90% market share in the US. Competitors like Microsoft's Bing have single-digit share. This dominance forms the crux of the antitrust lawsuit Google aims to appeal. The case alleges Google unlawfully maintains its monopolistic position through exclusionary agreements locking out rivals, violating antitrust laws. But Google claims competition is thriving and anything less than its best quality will lose users. Most experts agree Google initially gained its commanding position through delivering a superior product. But there are concerns its scale now creates insurmountable competitive barriers, even if challengers build a better mousetrap. Key points in assessing Google's market power: - Scale advantages in data, infrastructure make matching Google's quality difficult for new entrants. - Lack of portability in search queries/history across engines creates inertia in switching. - Google properties like YouTube increasingly keep users within its ecosystem. - Billions spent annually on advertising and default mobile deals solidify Google's reach. - Alternative search engines represent thin slivers of market share. In spite of these advantages, Google does face a long-term threat: The rise of voice search and assistants like Alexa. Over 40% of searches will be voice-initiated by 2022. As the gatekeeper, Amazon holds power in the voice ecosystem, potentially challenging Google. This emerging dynamic will take years to play out but illustrates the competitive forces still constraining Google from abusing its market power in traditional search. The threat of voice assistants rising further reinforces that barriers to entry may not be as impermeable as critics contend. The Road Ahead Google's forceful defense of its search quality improvements provides an insightful window into its mindset on competition issues. Few would argue Google has not pushed web search technology forward in meaningful ways. But claims of continuous, dramatic gains should be evaluated with healthy skepticism. Ongoing legal action and regulatory scrutiny of Google's dominance can be expected. But the clearest test of Google's search quality will be the daily choices of its billions of users. If Google traffic and engagement wane substantially over time, it would signal a degradation in meeting searcher needs. Google's public commitments to improving search quality also necessitate increased transparency. Providing third parties access to evaluate search algorithm updates and releasing metrics on quality KPIs could bolster trust and accountability. But in the absence of such steps, Google merits the benefit of the doubt that its search team remains dedicated to evolving an engine people choose to use because it makes their lives easier. If Google's future innovations match its past contributions to pioneering web search, searchers worldwide stand to benefit. Key Takeaways - Google claims its search quality has steadily improved over time but supporting data is inconclusive. - Legal pressure around Google's market dominance contributed to its quality claims. - Voice search rise poses a long-term threat though barriers to entry still limit competition. - Ongoing scrutiny expected but users' collective actions will determine if Google's quality regresses. The coming years will reveal whether Google can maintain its position that developing the world's best web search engine precludes being a monopoly. But if search quality truly remains Google's north star, the future of finding information online appears promising. Read the full article

[wmproprt]

The Biden campaign is well underway: dehumanize Trump by using the fascist/Marxist tactic of dehumanizing your opponent and repeating the big lie that Trump is Hitler, block Trump from ballot access in blue states while claiming it is he who opposed democracy, drain Trump of personal and campaign resources through civil and criminal lawsuits aka lawfare, keep Trump in court after court to prevent him from running a proper campaign, ultimately convict him of some phony crime and sentence him to prison. And none of this is possible without the relentless support of the Democrat Party media monopoly and a corrupt mostly Democrat judiciary.

@marklevinshow @realDonaldTrump

@kamalaharris Claims Trump’s Rhetoric Is ‘Similar’ to Adolf Hitler

[coprelawland]

An Overview of the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) Anti-Trust Lawsuit Against Amazon

By Summer Lee, University of Colorado Boulder Class of 2023

October 2, 2023

On September 26, 2023, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and seventeen states filed a lawsuit against Amazon.com, Inc. for engaging in monopolistic marketing practices and preventing other companies from competing in the market. The FTC claimed that Amazon has employed several anti-competition strategies to maintain its influence in the market, such as anti-discounting tactics, seller punishments and conditional contracts, along with the use of a price tracking and adjusting algorithm [1]. 

Appealing to Section 2 of the Sherman Act, 15 U.S.C. § 2, the FTC asserted that Amazon’s use of anti-discounting tactics is detrimental to other online retailers because it prevents them from offering goods at lower prices. By using marketing algorithms to track product discounts on the internet, Amazon penalizes its sellers that offer the same product at a higher price. When affiliated sellers sell their products for a lower price outside of Amazon.com, Amazon removes the “Buy Box” box display, which allows consumers to add a product to their shopping cart or purchase it right away. In addition, Amazon can also place sellers at the very bottom of the website’s search results to prevent consumers from viewing their products. The FTC stated how Amazon’s tactics of removing the “Buy Box” and placing sellers at the bottom of Amazon’s search results is detrimental to the seller because it causes their sales to significantly decrease. The FTC also argued that since the anti-discounting tactics set Amazon’s inflated prices as the new price floor for online shopping, consumers are paying higher prices for online goods and services offered by Amazon or other online retailers than they usually would [1].

The FTC also emphasized how Amazon’s use of coercive conditional contracts affects sellers’ competitiveness on the online market.  In order to have orders fulfilled by Amazon, Amazon requires sellers’ products to be eligible for Amazon Prime shipping. The FTC commented on how Amazon implements this policy to accommodate Amazon Prime members, who make up a majority of the company’s customer base. The FTC also referred to the antitrust investigations that were conducted by European and U.S. regulators in 2022 and 2019 to emphasize on Amazon’s past anti-competition policies [1].

 The FTC also claimed that Amazon’s use of an algorithm called Project Nessie does not comply with Section 5(a) of the FTC Act, 15 U.S.C. § 45(a), which prohibits acts of unfair competition [1]. Although the FTC has not publicly released additional information yet, author and journalist Jason Del Rey stipulates that Project Nessie could be an algorithm that collects data on prices from a variety of different online retailers and lowers the prices of goods on Amazon to match with its competitors [2]. 

In response to the FTC’s allegations, Amazon asserted that its business practices do support consumers and sellers alike. On Amazon’s news website, the company alleges that sellers can set their prices independently and that the company offers educational tools and resources to help them provide competitive prices [3]. Amazon then appeals to its relationships with its customers, arguing that the company only displays a list of sellers that can offer competitive prices to “maintain customer trust”. In response to the FTC’s complaints, Amazon also emphasized how advertising and Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) services are completely optional [3]. 

Although the estimated settlement date for the case is unknown, George Washington University law professor William E. Kovacic states that the FTC’s ability to win the case will depend on how long it will take to go on trial [4]. 

______________________________________________________________

[1] Graham, V. (2023, September 26). FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power. Federal Trade Commission. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/09/ftc-sues-amazon-illegally-maintaining-monopoly-power

[2] Bishop, T. (2023, September 26). FTC Targets Alleged Secret Amazon Pricing Algorithm “Project Nessie” in Antitrust Complaint. GeekWire. https://www.geekwire.com/2023/ftc-targets-alleged-secret-amazon-pricing-algorithm-project-nessie-in-antitrust-complaint/

[3] David Zapolsky, S. V. P. (2023, September 26). The FTC’s Lawsuit Against Amazon Would Lead to Higher Prices and Slower Deliveries for Consumers-and Hurt Businesses. Amazon Company News. https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-ftc-antitrust-lawsuit-full-response. 

[4] Zakrzewski, C., Oremus, W., & Thadani, T. (2023, September 26). U.S., 17 States Sue Amazon Alleging Monopolistic Practices Led to Higher Prices. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/09/26/amazon-antitrust-lawsuit-ftc/

[fulviavincit]

Taylor’s in a no-win situation. If the previously sold tickets were to be voided like some fans are asking for, people who purchased from third parties have lost out and scalpers will have been paid and refunded, earning likely more than 10x the original amount. If she goes ahead with the tour as-is, there will be big gaps where scalpers bought up groups of seats which is disheartening to see as a performer and a complete waste of resources for the venues. If she comes back online and announces a Rep style approach for the remaining tickets and rest of the tour, the people who got their tickets in the presales will have paid way more than everyone else and will ask why she didn’t do that in the first place. The scalping also makes it impossible to know what the actual fan demand is for these shows, do they need to consider more dates? Change the ticket options for future shows? Do fans actually want those VIP packages or was that their only option? All of these things are being placed on her despite it being a huge group of professionals’ JOB to organise big events and ensure it’s a positive experience for the artist and the fans so people aren’t so put off they don’t bother trying again. If she says fuck it and pushes the rest of the tour back until she can be sure it won’t happen every time, I’d understand.

I think what is also so frustrating is that the Reputation boost/verified fan system worked so well that it was considered the future of touring, and then Ticketmaster refused to do it again because they didn’t make the right profit. They function as a monopoly precisely by allowing scalpers and bots to purchase blocks of tickets and charging exorbitant fees - they always have and their profits have only increased with the dynamic pricing! Taylor can’t back out because there is nowhere else to sell tickets and she’s invested too much money and manpower in the tour already. I do suspect that she will release a press statement in the next few days once her legal team have figured out a way for her to criticise ticketmaster without opening herself up to lawsuits, but overall yes - she has no option but to soldier onwards and hope that by her next tour the anti-trust laws will have kicked in. It’s so disappointing for fans, I just hope no one is caught in the resale trap. No entertainer is worth $1000 a ticket and being ripped off and scammed taints the whole experience.

[bilbobagginsomebabez]

there's unfortunately no copyright law in which that's possible. increasingly strong intellectual property protections are easily weaponized by large corporations with the money to pursue (likely expensive and extended) lawsuits or wrangle complicated, expensive hearings into private mediation that favors said large corp.

but that's okay because this is something that is only successfully regulated by anti-monopoly laws. it's just masquerading as a copyright issue because it makes people feel confused and feel like challenging monopolistic anti-competitive* bullshit is challenging small artists right to control their own work.

the lovely corey doctorow whose post this is has an excellent short book called How To Destroy Surveillance Capitalism which thoroughly explains issues with tech monopolism and copyright along with explaining that most tech dystopia issues are actually just the same old issues of runaway monopolistic capitalism pretending to be new sorts of confusing and complex problems.

if tech feudalism is a fire, stronger protections around intellectual property ownership is like pouring fuel on that fire. we do not need stronger ip. stronger copyright feels like an oxygen mask because the fire is already so big it feels like protecting air is the right decision, but only powerful and privileged people get access to protected resources. if you're not careful, you'll protect the air right out of your lungs.

in this case, we've "protected" intellectual property rights to the point the manufacturer has more control over your property that you bought and lives in your house than you do. for real we have to stop. ip law is strong enough already, your problem is with megacorps on the loose unbeholden to laws that already exist.

*hypocritical even under their own stupid capitalist "ethics"

Unauthorized water

It’s not clear when General Electric started boobytraping appliances with DRM. I first encountered it in January when Shane Morris tweeted about his fridge refusing to accept the $19 generic filter he replaced the GE $55 filter with.

https://twitter.com/IamShaneMorris/status/1220367934947758080

The fridges use an RFID detector to distinguish original GE filters from generic replacements, and engage in lots of anti-owner trickery, like memorizing the IDs of previously used filters and refusing to accept them.

https://bbs.boingboing.net/t/unauthorized-charcoal-ge-fridges-wont-dispense-ice-or-water-unless-your-filter-authenticates-as-an-official-55-component/159552/41

Morris isn’t the only one ourtaged that his fridge is plotting against him. One (anonymous) owner was so offended that they created a site dedicated to warning off potential buyers and explaining to other suckers how to bypass GE’s lockouts.

https://gefiltergate.com/

There’s a good reason for the anonymity. Under Sec 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, showing how to bypass an “access control” to a copyrighted work (eg RFID-detecting code in the fridge) is a potential felony, carrying a 5-year prison sentence and a $500k fine.

This is quite the moral hazard. Manufacturers have learned that if they design their products so that any use that hurts their shareholders (like buying third party parts) requires bypassing DRM, it becomes a felony to use your own property to your own advantage.

Which is why we’ve seen DRM creep into all manner of devices, from insulin pumps to tractors to car engines to Iphone screens. “Felony contempt of business model” is the statute that every monopolist has dreamt of, and with DMCA 1201, they have it in their grasp.

Back in 2011, I wrote a short story about this for MIT Tech Review’s first sf anthology, called “The Brave Little Toaster” (in tribute to Tom Disch).

https://craphound.com/news/2011/09/28/the-brave-little-toaster-from-trsf/

The issue only got worse, and so last year I published “Unauthorized Bread” as part of my collection “Radicalized” (it’s being turned into a TV show by Topic):

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/

The metastasis of DRM into every product category shows that when business apologists talk about the sanctity of property, they mean the sanctity of CORPORATE property.

If the manufacturer gets to override your decisions about the things you buy - and felonize any attempt to wrest control back - they property ceases to exist. We become tenants of our devices, not owners.

It’s digital feudalism, in which an elite owns all the property and we get to use it in ways they proscribe. The difference is that today, our aristocracy isn’t even human.

It’s the immortal, remorseless colony organism called the Limited Liability Corporation, to which we are mere inconvenient gut flora.

[fatehbaz]

what’s happening with “North America’s oldest company” and “Canada’s most prominent department store”

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The largest anchor tenant at Coquitlam Centre has been forced to shutter its doors. A representative with the shopping mall told Daily Hive Urbanized the lease for Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) has been terminated after the retailer failed to pay rent. Hudson’s Bay was Coquitlam Centre’s largest anchor retailer for decades [...]. According to the report, HBC has not paid any rent to eight landlords in Ontario, Quebec, British Columbia, and Florida, based on legal filings. The leases are worth $20 million monthly across 21 locations. In the BC interior, the landlord of Cherry Lane Mall in Penticton served their HBC location with an eviction notice last week, and filed a lawsuit against the retailer for unpaid rent totalling $546,000. [...] In Eastern Canada, landlord Oxford Properties sued HBC for $2.3 million in unpaid rent for two locations in Quebec City and Ottawa. The retailer indicated its sales at the two locations fell by more than 99% in April. Furthermore, HBC has reportedly not paid rent for its stores at eight of the 11 Oxford-owned malls in Canada where it has locations. [...]

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Excerpt:

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Three-and-a-half centuries after Hudson's Bay Co. received its first charter — giving Prince Rupert and his "Company of Adventurers of England" an exclusive trading monopoly over the entire Hudson Bay drainage basin — its biggest symbol of colonization is coming to an end.

In February [2021], the company plans to close its six-storey flagship store at Portage Avenue and Memorial Boulevard, literally Canada’s gateway to the West. When it opened in 1926, its palatial architecture was an homage to proper and profitable English civilization. As a testament to the Empire, the Union Jack once flew high on its rooftop, towering over a burgeoning city, pronouncing progress and evolution.

Inside were goods manufactured from Canada’s settling of the plains: furs, blankets, and, eventually, Guess cologne [...]. Everything Canada, including Olympic gear, came from HBC. [...]

So, this is how colonization ends. The people who profit the most take all they can from the land and people within it, and then quietly leave when there’s nothing left to take. Soon, all that will be left is an empty, lifeless pile of plaster and metal that will cost millions to repair or remove for those who actually live here.

Really, though, this is how colonization continues. HBC is not a retail empire — never really was — but a massive real estate company. Just as King Charles II gave Prince Rupert lands that were not his to give, HBC holds deeds to billions of dollars of global property (much within former Rupertsland itself) and will march on. [...]

HBC’s legacy of exploitation, violence and theft is permanent, though. 

HBC began with profits from the slave trade and cheap goods from the British colonies. It was instrumental in manufacturing goods for the Commonwealth [...]. Alongside were billions built off Indigenous lands and resources.

On its website, HBC admits it "relied on Indigenous expertise for general survival, surveying, trapping, translating, kinship and much more" to build the company, but when it came to sharing profits and the land (particularly when transferring Rupertsland to Canada in 1870), everything was done "without consulting First Nations or Métis inhabitants." [...]

So, yes, the HBC building means a lot to Winnipeg beyond warm memories of the Paddlewheel restaurant [...]. The building is the face of British occupation [and] theft [...].

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Text published by: Niigan Sinclair. “Right place, right time: Downtown Bay building a monument to colonization’s brutality, but it could be transformed into a place of Indigenous positivity, reconciliation.” Winnipeg Free Press. 5/6 October 2020.

[azspot]

The contract the Krutchfields signed allowed the processor to do any number of things, including requiring upgrades, and near the end of their first 10 years, they were told three of their older chicken houses needed improvements. This meant they would have to take out another $250,000 to $300,000 loan, shoving them back in a debt cycle for at least another 10 years. At the time, they were 60 years old, likely more ready to retire than commit to more. When they told the processor they couldn’t make the upgrades, their contract was canceled, and—because they had lost their connection to their processor—they were forced into bankruptcy. In the documentary, their processor isn’t identified, but Tyson is the major chicken processor for Arkansas and that part of the country.

The contracts that chicken farmers sign with processors are crammed with other devastating stipulations. While the farmer has a fixed cost to raise the chickens, processors are allowed to pay the farmers a variable rate come time for harvest. Not only are farmers not guaranteed a price, but they can’t bargain. (The processors also own the feed and chick-raising companies, so they are the ones setting most of these fixed costs.) And the farmers are contractually barred from discussing their price with fellow farmers, further suppressing their bargaining power; they are also forbidden to talk about any other aspect of their farming. Not that it would matter, as the farmers have almost no say in how they raise their chickens. The processors determine everything: what type of feed the farmers buy, what type of chicks they get, the bedding they use, lighting and watering schedules, whether they keep their curtains up or down, and of course, the structure and design of the chicken houses. The processors can experiment on the farmers, by, say, introducing a new feed or new type of chick, which allows the processors to collect mountains of data about chicken farming (which they don’t share with the farmer). As one farmer told PBS, his only real job is to remove sickly or dead chickens from the barns. Hopelessness abounds in chicken farming, so much so that when distributors send out twice-monthly checks and price listings, they also include a pamphlet of mental health resources for suicidal farmers.

What’s strange is that people in the U.S. are eating more food than ever, especially chicken. In an alternate reality, this might mean that chicken farmers would be wealthier than ever. But of course, they’re not. Chicken is a $90 billion industry, but 70 percent of chicken farmers are making poverty wages. “In 1985,” writes Zephyr Teachout in Break ’Em Up, her new book about monopoly power, “farmers were paid 40 cents for every dollar we spent on food.” After 40 years of market concentration, today it is closer to 15 cents. But you don’t hear much about the plight of chicken farmers. That’s because, along with every other agency-ablating aspect of their contracts, the farmers sign arbitration agreements. This ensures any problem that the farmer has with the processor stays secret. For Teachout, chicken farming shows “a transformation of citizens into subjects of experimentation and arbitrary power.” Farmers are rendered politically impotent by a monopolized market and system of contracts.

The business model of chicken farming, where the processor controls the market (sometimes called “chickenization”), is notable because it has been replicated and spread widely across the business world: a Macarena for ruthless corporate types. For example, “one way to understand the Amazon marketplace,” Teachout says, “is as a big chicken processor, where all the sellers are chicken farmers. But the scope of Amazon’s chickenization regime is at another level of magnitude.” Amazon not only has its sellers sign arbitration agreements but its customers, too, who are barred from bringing class action lawsuits. And it profits on data collected from both.