Keep pulling the thread on Cory Doctorow.
The process of 'inshittification' describes how platforms first are good to their end users to lock them in, then make things worse for users to benefit business customers, and finally abuse business customers to harvest all available surplus for shareholders.
Laws protecting Digital Rights Management (DRM), such as the DMCA, make it illegal to modify a browser to add accessibility features, like dampening strobe effects for users with epilepsy, or to conduct security research on video modules.
In an email to his CFO, Mark Zuckerberg stated that a reason for acquiring Instagram was to reduce competition, as users were leaving Facebook for Instagram.
Google pays Apple approximately $20 billion annually to remain the default search engine on Apple's devices and to prevent Apple from launching a competing search engine.
Amazon engaged in predatory pricing by losing $200 million over several months selling newborn-related goods below cost to drive its competitor, diapers.com, out of business.
Evidence presented in the Department of Justice's 2023 antitrust case against Google showed that the company deliberately worsened its search results in 2019 to compel users to perform more searches, thereby increasing ad views.
The U.S. Copyright Office has determined that content generated solely by AI is not eligible for copyright protection.
The generative AI industry has an estimated $700 billion in capital expenditures against only $45 billion in annual gross revenue.
A significant portion of reported AI revenue is from accounting maneuvers, such as Microsoft booking its $10 billion in Azure credits to OpenAI as revenue when OpenAI used them for cloud services.
Adding a linear amount of context to a large language model requires an exponential increase in compute power, representing a fundamental scaling problem for AI.
In 2017, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was pressured by major movie studios and tech companies to add Digital Rights Management (DRM) to web browsers.
Procter & Gamble experienced a 0% drop in sales after eliminating its $100 million per year surveillance ad spend, suggesting high levels of ad fraud on digital platforms.