Tag: Internet

A Free State First

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Maryland has become the first state in the nation to enact a tax on online advertisements.

They had to override a veto though, because Governor Larry “Rat-F%$#” Hogan vetoed the bill, because he promised no new taxes ever.

Revenue is to be dedicated to education:

Maryland today became the first state in the nation to impose a tax on digital advertising revenue, overriding an earlier veto from the governor and incurring the wrath of piles of Big Tech businesses that are all but guaranteed to sue.

The bill (PDF) levies a state tax of up to 10 percent on the annual gross revenues of all digital advertising aimed at users inside Maryland state. Proceeds from the new tax are explicitly earmarked to go into an education fund dedicated to improving Maryland public schools.

“Right now, they don’t contribute,” the bill’s primary sponsor, Sen. Bill Ferguson (D) said of the bill. “These platforms that have grown fast, and so enormously, should also have to contribute to the civic infrastructure that helped them become so successful.”

Both chambers in the state’s General Assembly, its Senate and its House of Delegates, approved the bill by wide majorities last year. Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan vetoed the bill in May, but it had sufficiently high support in both chambers of the legislature to pass a veto override, and both houses approved the veto override this week.

It will work on a sliding scale, with larger companies, like Google and Facebook, paying up to 10% of gross revenue from the portion of their ads from Maryland, which constitutes about 1.8% of the US population.

………

A coalition of small and medium businesses and trade groups launched a coalition last year to lobby against the tax. The group, which bills itself as Marylanders for Tax Fairness, argues that the tax will “place an unnecessary and undue burden on the state’s entrepreneurs and job creators.”

Yadda, yadda, yadda,

The internet economy wants not to pay taxes.

F%$# that.

………

Among the coalition members are not only several Maryland-based businesses and organizations, including several local Chambers of Commerce, but also most of the large tech-related trade groups. All of the usual suspects who represent advertising, Internet, tech, telecom, or media firms are on the list, including the Internet Association, the IAB, the NCTA, and TechNet. Those four groups represent every online firm from Amazon to Zillow and just about any brand you can name in between.

The stakes for all the firms involved may go well beyond Maryland. Other states, including high-population New York, are considering similar advertising revenue bills of their own.

I’m not sure what the right rate is, though I do support an aggressively progressive tax.

This is a Great Prank

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You can now get a Verified Badge crest on your Bay Area home if you’re an influencer, public figure, or represent a brand. https://t.co/SyoURdSGe7 pic.twitter.com/H1Sz3gwBdL

— Writer for Black Mirror (@djbaskin) January 30, 2021

Truly Sublime

An artist in San Francisco had a tweet go viral where she offered “Blue Check” plaques to be placed on the homes of “Influencers” in an obvious reference to the Twitter program.

I am not surprised that it went viral, but I am surprised  that some people actually thought it was real, and made an application for approval.*

On Friday, a viral Twitter thread announced the unexpected rollout of “Blue Check Homes” — a new service allowing Bay Area residents to apply to have a “Verified Badge crest” (read: blue check mark) installed on the facade of their homes to essentially identify themselves as an authentic public figure in real life.

In a matter of hours, the thread garnered international attention, swiftly amassing thousands of retweets and likes, and over 40 million impressions. The reactions from the public were wide-ranging. Some were, understandably, annoyed by the concept. Others caught onto the joke rather quickly.

But Danielle Baskin, the SF-based artist behind the prank, had no idea the website she crafted to back up the fake service would receive 495 applicants, all hoping for a crest of their own.

“I will say a percentage of them are not from a real person. People added, like, Kim Kardashian, and that was clearly a joke,” said Baskin, who in 2019 attempted to remove a series of controversial “anti-homeless boulders” from a city sidewalk by listing them on the Craigslist free section.

“But everyone else thought the website was real. I did what I thought was a mediocre Photoshop job … I thought, ‘This is all very clickbait-y.’ All of the copy, I thought, was so obviously satire.”

Until 2½ weeks ago, Donald John Trump was President.

There is no such thing as “Obvious Satire” anymore.

*Full disclosure, I went to the website and submitted Joe biden for sh%$s and giggles.

Destroying Wall Street for the Lulz

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If I was a Hedge Fund losing billions to Reddit shitposters, I would get a second job driving for Uber, cut out the Starbuck’s, and skip the avocado toast.

— Jean-Paul Blarte: Mall Cop (@OldPappyThomas) January 27, 2021

This is Beautiful


The Hedge Funds are Pissants

MaY NeEd tO gEt BaiLeD oUt pic.twitter.com/JrGW4hsxyI

— Aimee into the Sun🌹 (@AimeeDemaio) January 27, 2021

Too True


The inevitable sea shanty

to be clear. This has nothing to do with gamestop as a business. They are just a piece of rope being used in a tug of war between internet nerds and wall st suits.

the rally cry on r/wallstreet bets:

“we can remain retarded for longer than they can stay solvent!”

— Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) January 26, 2021

The real bottom line

It appears that a bunch of Redditors have taken down at least 2 hedge funds, and on one side are the titans of Wall Street saying something must be done to stop this, and on the other side is literally everyone else in the world, who are pointing and laughing:

GameStop’s stock price continued to soar in after-hours trading last night to over $300. While many are waiting for it to come crashing back down, it might be too late for some major hedge funds. With the stock still sitting at well over $250 a share (unthinkable just last year when it was trading at under $5) after the market reopened, Melvin Capital, one of the largest hedge funds betting against the company, is reportedly getting out of the game after suffering major losses, seemingly driven out by amateurs trading on their phones and joking on Reddit in what continues to be one of the most bizarre stories of 2021 so far.

“Melvin Capital closed out its short position in GameStop on Tuesday afternoon after taking a huge loss,” the fund’s manager told CNBC this morning.

The firm, which was worth about $12.5 billion before the battle between short sellers and Redditors began, bet big against GameStop and a number of other companies, only to see 30% of the fund disappear over the last few days. That prompted other billionaires to swoop in and lend Melvin $2.75 billion to help cover the losses. Andrew Left, a notorious short-seller activist, also announced in a new YouTube video today that his investment firm moved away from most of its bets against GameStop’s stock at “a loss of 100%.”

………

Meanwhile, the ensuing chaos caused GameStop stock trading to be temporarily halted yet again this morning and caused outages on the trading app Robinhood. Other companies like Blackberry and AMC are also seeing smaller, though still dramatic stock climbs, as Reddit traders attempt to go boost other companies massively shorted by big hedge funds.

All of this is the culmination of a long game that’s been brewing on the WallStreetBets subreddit for a while now as amateur day traders decided to turn the misfortunes of a floundering brick-and-mortar game seller into their cause celebre for dunking on professional investment firms. In some ways it’s a very complicated story driven by the weird mechanics of Wall Street, but in other ways it’s a familiar tale of extremely online people trying to stick it to someone, in part to make a buck, but also for the “lulz.” Here’s a quick rundown of how things got here.

Short version:  A bunch or Redditors, seeing that the moribund console game store GameStop was the most shorted stock in America, decided to take down said short sellers by bidding up the price and creating a “Short Squeeze”.

The mechanism is such that the hedge funds are incredibly exposed to this, and at least one had to be bailed out by other Wall Street Parasites because it was essentially insolvent.

What’s more, it appears that the same thing is happening with AMC Theaters, Bed Bath & Beyond, and Blackberry as I am typing this. (Scroll down) 

One thing that is not clear at this point is whether some other hedge fund type entity might be involved in this on the other side, though even if they did, they have done nothing illegal, since the information, “Let’s do it for the lulz,” is both accurate and publicly available.

One thing that is clear at this point is that this entire affair is showing most of the short selling activity out there serves no useful purpose, and that the arguments in favor of it, basically that shorting stocks create a financial incentive aggressive due diligence of companies, are 6 pounds of shit in a 5 pound bag.

It is one step removed from the infamous Bucket Shops of the early 1900s.

Tweet of the Day

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Here’s how this is gonna go, Klan of Green Gables.
Your little stunt is going to get you all sorts of praise from the stupid, racist cult zombie horde folks who attacked the Capitol two weeks ago.
It’s also going to get you laughed out of Congress, because you’re a joke.
So stop.

— Jo (@JoJoFromJerz) January 21, 2021

The QAnon Congresswoman, Marjorie Taylor Greene, submitted articles of impeachment against Joe Biden, because ……… OK, I have no desire to figure out what is going on in that head, thank you very much. 

In response, Jo from Jersey, who has been, “Blocked by Chachi,” tagged her as “Klan of Green Gables.”

I wish that I had thought of that slam.

Antitrust Smoking Gun

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It turns out that Google and Facebook colluded to keep Facebook out of the advertising market in exchange for preferential rates.

This is pretty much a slam dunk, and yes, both organizations should broken up in the long term (Other limits fail over time) and be prevented from acquiring any other companies in the short term:

In 2017, Facebook said it was testing a new way of selling online advertising that would threaten Google’s control of the digital ad market. But less than two years later, Facebook did an about-face and said it was joining an alliance of companies backing a similar effort by Google.

Facebook never said why it pulled back from its project, but evidence presented in an antitrust lawsuit filed by 10 state attorneys general last month indicates that Google had extended to Facebook, its closest rival for digital advertising dollars, a sweetheart deal to be a partner.

Details of the agreement, based on documents the Texas attorney general’s office said it had uncovered as part of the multistate suit, were redacted in the complaint filed in federal court in Texas last month. But they were not hidden in a draft version of the complaint reviewed by The New York Times.

Executives at six of the more than 20 partners in the alliance told The Times that their agreements with Google did not include many of the same generous terms that Facebook received and that the search giant had handed Facebook a significant advantage over the rest of them.

………

The disclosure of the deal between the tech giants has renewed concerns about how the biggest technology companies band together to close off competition. The deals are often consequential, defining the winners and losers in various markets for technology services and products. They are agreed upon in private with the crucial deal terms hidden through confidentiality clauses.

Google and Facebook said that such deals were common in the digital advertising industry and that they were not thwarting competition.

………

The Wall Street Journal had reported on aspects of the draft complaint earlier.

………

“This idea that the major tech platforms are robustly competing against each other is very much overstated,” said Sally Hubbard, a former assistant attorney general in New York’s antitrust bureau who now works at Open Markets Institute, a think tank. “In many ways, they reinforce each other’s monopoly power.”

Because maintaining a monopoly is more profitable than developing a superior product.

One need only look at the cost and speed of broadband in the US to know that this is true.
The agreement between Facebook and Google, code-named “Jedi Blue” inside Google, pertains to a growing segment of the online advertising market called programmatic advertising. Online advertising pulls in hundreds of billions of dollars in global revenue each year, and the automated buying and selling of ad space accounts for more than 60 percent of the total, according to researchers.

In the milliseconds between a user clicking on a link to a web page and the page’s ads loading, bids for available ad space are placed behind the scenes in marketplaces known as exchanges, with the winning bid passed to an ad server. Because Google’s ad exchange and ad server were both dominant, it often directed the business to its own exchange.

A method called header bidding emerged, in part as a workaround to reduce reliance on Google’s ad platforms. News outlets and other sites could solicit bids from multiple exchanges at once, helping to increase competition and leading to better prices for publishers. By 2016, more than 70 percent of publishers had adopted the technology, according to one estimate.

Seeing a potentially significant loss of business to header bidding, Google developed an alternative called Open Bidding, which supported an alliance of exchanges. While Open Bidding allows other exchanges to simultaneously compete alongside Google, the search company extracts a fee for every winning bid, and competitors say there is less transparency for publishers.

The threat of Facebook, one of the biggest ad buyers on the internet, supporting header bidding was a grave concern at Google. The draft of the complaint reviewed by The Times cited an email from a Google executive calling it an “existential threat” that required “an all hands on deck approach.”

………

Before Google and Facebook signed the deal in Sept. 2018, Facebook executives outlined the company’s options to Mark Zuckerberg, its chief executive, according to the draft of the complaint: hire hundreds more engineers and spend billions of dollars to compete against Google; exit the business; or do the deal.

………

Facebook disclosed that it had joined Google’s program in one line in a Dec. 2018 blog post. But it did not reveal that Google, according to the draft complaint, provided Facebook with special information and speed advantages to help the company succeed in the auctions that it did not offer to other partners — even including a guaranteed “win rate.”

In this market, where fractions of a second count, a speed advantage was decisive. Facebook had 300 milliseconds to bid for ads, according to court documents. But the executives at Google’s partner companies said they usually had just 160 milliseconds or less to bid.

Facebook had yet another advantage: Direct billing relationships with the sites where ads would appear, according to the court documents. For most other partners, Google controlled pricing information, effectively putting up a wall between Open Bidding participants and site owners and hiding how much of winning bids sites end up receiving, the executives at other companies said.

………

Facebook promised to bid on at least 90 percent of auctions when it could identify the end user and committed to spending a certain amount of money — as much as $500 million a year by the fourth year of the agreement, according to the draft of the complaint. Facebook also demanded that data about its bids not be used by Google to manipulate auctions in its own favor, a level playing field not explicitly promised to other Open Bidding partners.

Perhaps the most serious claim in the draft complaint was that the two companies had predetermined that Facebook would win a fixed percentage of auctions that it bid on.

“Unbeknown to other market participants, no matter how high others might bid, the parties have agreed that the gavel will come down in Facebook’s favor a set number of times,” the draft complaint said. A Google spokeswoman said Facebook must make the highest bid to win an auction, just like its other exchange and ad network partners.

While both companies said that the deal is not an antitrust matter, they included a clause in the agreement that requires the parties to “cooperate and assist” each other if they are investigated for competition concerns over the partnership.

“The word ‘antitrust’ is mentioned no less than 20 times” throughout the agreement, the draft complaint said.

Seriously, this is not just unlawful, this is an actual criminal offense.

Executives used to be jailed for this sort of crap, at least until the 1980s, when Reagan gutted antitrust enforcement.

I’d like to see Sundar Pichai, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg frog marched out of the corporate offices in handcuffs.

It Really Sucks to be You

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It appears that in addition to being contemptible people, the purveyors of Parler, the now-shuttered right-wing Twitter, were technically incompetent.

Their tech was incompetently managed, and  a security researcher managed to download almost every post in Parler, including deleted posts and extensive metadata.

I’m sure that the FBI will be most interested in this information:

In the wake of the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol by scores of President Trump’s supporters, a lone researcher began an effort to catalogue the posts of social media users across Parler, a platform founded to provide conservative users a safe haven for uninhibited “free speech” — but which ultimately devolved into a hotbed of far-right conspiracy theories, unchecked racism, and death threats aimed at prominent politicians.

The researcher, who asked to be referred to by her Twitter handle, @donk_enby, began with the goal of archiving every post from January 6, the day of the Capitol riot; what she called a bevy of “very incriminating” evidence. According to the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, among other sources, Parler is one of a several apps used by the insurrections to coordinate their breach of the Capitol, in a plan to overturn the 2020 election results and keep Donald Trump in power.

………

In the wake of the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol by scores of President Trump’s supporters, a lone researcher began an effort to catalogue the posts of social media users across Parler, a platform founded to provide conservative users a safe haven for uninhibited “free speech” — but which ultimately devolved into a hotbed of far-right conspiracy theories, unchecked racism, and death threats aimed at prominent politicians.

The researcher, who asked to be referred to by her Twitter handle, @donk_enby, began with the goal of archiving every post from January 6, the day of the Capitol riot; what she called a bevy of “very incriminating” evidence. According to the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, among other sources, Parler is one of a several apps used by the insurrections to coordinate their breach of the Capitol, in a plan to overturn the 2020 election results and keep Donald Trump in power.

………

Operating on little sleep, @donk_enby began the work of archiving all of Parler’s posts, ultimately capturing around 99.9 percent of its content. In a tweet early Sunday, @donk_enby said she was crawling some 1.1 million Parler video URLs. “These are the original, unprocessed, raw files as uploaded to Parler with all associated metadata,” she said. Included in this data tranche, now more than 56 terabytes in size, @donk_enby confirmed that the raw video files include GPS metadata pointing to exact locations of where the videos were taken.

………

Hoping to create a lasting public record for future researchers to sift through, @donk_enby began by archiving the posts from that day. The scope of the project quickly broadened, however, as it became increasingly clear that Parler was on borrowed time. Apple and Google announced that Parler would be removed from their app stores because it had failed to properly moderate posts that encouraged violence and crime. The final nail in the coffin came Saturday when Amazon announced it was pulling Parler’s plug.

………

The privacy implications are obvious, but the copious data may also serve as a fertile hunting ground for law enforcement. Federal and local authorities have arrested dozens of suspects in recent days accused of taking part in the Capitol riot, where a Capitol police officer, Brian Sicknick, was fatally wounded after being struck in the head with a fire extinguisher. 

My suggestion to @donk_enby is that if someone comes sniffing around for the archive that she made, don’t without a subpoena.  Providing the information under compulsion indemnifies you, so if someone wants to sue you for someting like “Invasion of Privacy”, you are covered.  (NOte that I am an engineer, not a lawyer, dammit.*

My second piece of advice is that turning your personal information over to an online site is a stupid thing, and doing so to a business that caters to reactionaries is even dumber.

Businesses that cater to conservatives on the basis of politics tend to be scams.  All you have to do is listen to Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity, and see how many of the ads are transparent bullshit like fat burning plant extracts, overpriced gold, phony ED cures, Corona Virus Cures, etc.

For them, it’s all about the Benjamins.

*I love it when I get to go all Dr. McCoy!

Today in the Internet of Shit

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It turns out that internet connect chastity penis locks with poor security is a very bad idea.

I know what you are thinking, “What, did hackers hold someone’s penis for ransom?”

Why yes, someone was hacking these devices to take command of their joy stick, and they were demanding Bitcoin to unlock the device, and hence the penis.

Thankfully no one was actually wearing the “Chastity Cages” at the time.

Full disclosure:  I did not even know that such a device existed, either with or without internet connectivity, until I read about this today.

My penis is in a long term exclusive engagement with Sharon*, thank you very much:

A hacker took control of people’s internet-connected chastity cages and demanded a ransom to be paid in Bitcoin to unlock it.

“Your cock is mine now,” the hacker told one of the victims, according to a screenshot of the conversation obtained by a security researcher that goes by the name Smelly and is the founder of vx-underground, a website that collects malware samples.

In October of last year, security researchers found that the manufacturer of an Internet of Things chastity cage—a sex toy that users put around their penis to prevent erections that is used in the BDSM community and can be unlocked remotely—had left an API exposed, giving malicious hackers a chance to take control of the devices. That’s exactly what happened, according to a security researcher who obtained screenshots of conversations between the hacker and several victims, and according to victims interviewed by Motherboard.

A victim who asked to be identified only as Robert said that he received a message from a hacker demanding a payment of 0.02 Bitcoin (around $750 today) to unlock the device. He realized his cage was definitely “locked,” and he “could not gain access to it.”

“Fortunately I didn’t have this locked on myself while this happened,” Robert said in an online chat. 

Yes Robert, you were a very fortunate person not to have been wearing when this got locked down.

We could make a movie out of this, Free the Willie.

 *Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.

Tweet of the Day

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'Due to Covid-19 travel restrictions, this year the United States were forced to organise the coup d'état at home.'

[This is from @fdecollibus and r/t by the Italian extraordinaire satirical collective @spinozait, translated into English by yours truly] https://t.co/bB5hfdnWMW

— Paolo Sandro (@PaoloSandro2) January 6, 2021

This tweet is so grim, and so cynical, and so funny, that I initially thought it was Russian.

12 Hours: What You Get for Suggesting that Megan McCain Have Carnal Knowledge of a Cactus, or for Calling On Your Supporters to Storm the Capitol

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As a result of the unprecedented and ongoing violent situation in Washington, D.C., we have required the removal of three @realDonaldTrump Tweets that were posted earlier today for repeated and severe violations of our Civic Integrity policy. https://t.co/k6OkjNG3bM

— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) January 7, 2021

Future violations of the Twitter Rules, including our Civic Integrity or Violent Threats policies, will result in permanent suspension of the @realDonaldTrump account.

— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) January 7, 2021

We’ll continue to evaluate the situation in real time, including examining activity on the ground and statements made off Twitter. We will keep the public informed, including if further escalation in our enforcement approach is necessary.

— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) January 7, 2021

Following a particularly moronic statement in which Meghan McCain insisted that mockery of her by a Jewish cartoonist was antisemitic, my son replied to her on Twitter that she should, “Go F%$# yourself with a cactus.”

Twitter gave him a 12 hour time out.

It now appears that for calling for a violent insurrection to overthrow the government of the United States, Twitter will also give you a 12 hour time out.

Needless to say, Charlie is considering how best to use that rather perverse juxtaposition of Twitter’s enforcement of its, “Civil Integrity Policy,” as a bit for his standup.

On the bright side, with the pandemic, he’ll have plenty of time to polish the bit.

On the dark side, Covid-19 is why he’ll have plenty of time to polish the bit.

I’m actually a bit jealous about his getting the suspension, it’s been a goal of mine.

I have not managed to do this yet, I have a self-imposed rule that I can’t post something just to get banned.  I must post something that I would normally posts.

I even changed my Twitter handle to, “Jack Dorsey Is Objectively Pro-Nazi (M.G. Saroff),” in an attempt to get the elusive ban.

Much to my surprise, and to the surprise of those who know and love me, it appears that my normal behavior is not sufficient to get me banned from Twitter.

(Update)

Facebook gave the Trumpster Fire a time out as well.

Speaking of the Silly Season

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Trump has vetoed the Defense Authorization bill, because he wants to keep Confederate names on military bases and because Twitter has been mean to him.

No, this is not The Onion.

Trump is demanding a repeal of section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, and he is objecting to changing the names of military bases named after traitors:

President Trump made good Wednesday on his repeated threats to veto a $741 billion defense spending bill, setting up what is expected to be the first successful veto override of his presidency during his last weeks in office.

………

The House and Senate each passed the defense bill earlier this month with strong veto-proof majorities, rejecting Trump’s insistence that it be changed to meet his oftentimes shifting demands. Both chambers are expected to sustain the two-thirds majorities needed to override the president’s veto, despite pledges from House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and other stalwart Trump allies not to cross the president’s wishes.

In his veto message, Trump complained that the legislation includes “provisions that fail to respect our veterans’ and military’s history” — a seeming reference to instructions that the Defense Department change the names of installations commemorating Confederate leaders. He also scorned the bill as a “ ‘gift’ to China and Russia,” slammed the bill for restricting his ability to draw down the presence of U.S. troops in certain foreign outposts, and excoriated lawmakers for failing to include an unrelated repeal of a law granting liability protections to technology companies that Trump has accused, without significant evidence, of anti-conservative bias.

………

Trump and his advisers have repeatedly objected to various provisions in the behemoth defense legislation, including its mandate to the Pentagon to rename the 10 military installations bearing titles that honor the Confederacy and the bill’s limitations on reducing troop levels in Germany, South Korea and Afghanistan.

Trump’s insistence that the defense bill become a vehicle for a repeal of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects companies from bearing legal responsibility for content third parties post on their websites, became a breaking point between the president and congressional Republicans during the final days of negotiations over the legislation. Trump views its repeal as a way to punish social media companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter.

It’s stupid and petty, but Trump does Stupid and Petty better than anyone.

Who Knew that Minnesota Nice Meant, “Choking on Passive Aggressive Rage?”

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Congratulations @PeteButtigieg! From roads to rail, there is so much to be done and I’m looking forward to working with you! I know you will bring both your big ideas & your local government experience to the job. John & I look forward to welcoming you & Chasten to Washington.

— Amy Klobuchar (@amyklobuchar) December 15, 2020

Now this is an award worthy sub-tweet. 

I am amused.  It’s both a well deserved take-down, deeply nasty, and does not involve chucking office supplies at subordinates.

As I dislike both the author of the tweet and its subject intensely, I am simply amused.

Cuck Fomcast

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After billions in public subsidies, Comcast has instituted data caps throughout its network.

The lesson here is that if you want to expend tax dollars for broader internet access, it is best that the networks receiving those subsidies should be owned by the taxpayer:

With millions of Americans trapped at home to protect themselves from a deadly pandemic during the holiday season, the Internet is one of the only conduits connecting them to friends, family and the outside world. Now, Comcast, one of the monopoly corporations that controls the conduit, is extending its fees on bandwidth usage to all 39 states where it operates — even as the company has received hundreds of millions of dollars of public subsidies and new tax breaks.

Whether or not those data caps remain permanent could hinge on whether president-elect Joe Biden and Democrats are willing to take action against a corporation that has been one of their major campaign donors.

At issue is Comcast’s move on Monday that caps home internet usage at 1.2TB of data per month for its customers in 12 additional states, and charging customers up to $100 per month if they exceed the cap. Comcast’s move was flagged by Stop The Cap, which discovered that the company had quietly updated language on its website.

The new limits, which will take effect in March, are being imposed in states that have given Comcast and its subsidiaries more than $738 million in tax subsidies in the last few decades. Those states include New York, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania, where state and local governments have given Comcast and its subsidiaries $484 million, $132 million, and $79 million in tax subsidies, respectively, according to data from Good Jobs First.

In all, Comcast and its subsidiaries — which include NBC and MSNBC — have received nearly $1 billion in state and local subsidies. Additionally, Comcast received $861 million in federal tax subsidies during the first year of the Trump tax cuts, according to the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy.

“This is why monopolies are bad,” tweeted Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy organization. “Comcast can arbitrarily exploit us for profit during a pandemic just because it feels like it. Meanwhile, Comcast collects tons of tax breaks and government subsidies. Comcast should be broken up.”

No, Comcast should be expropriated and become a public agency operated for a public benefit. 

Creating 50 Comcasts where there was only 1 is not a fix.

Neither will happen though, they gave big bucks to the Biden campaign.

Kill it With Fire

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In response to the anti-trust lawsuit filed against it, Google will no longer give favorable placement to media outlets that use its AMP HTML dialectt.

This is a good thing.

First, AMP sucks, second, it was an invitation for Google to violate user privacy and extend its ad and search monopolies, and third, AMP sucks:

Four years after offering special placement in a “top stories carousel” in search results to entice publishers to use a format it created for mobile pages, called AMP, Google announced last week that it will end that preferential treatment in the spring.

“We will prioritize pages with great page experience, whether implemented using AMP or any other web technology, as we rank the results,” Google said in a blog post.

The company had indicated in 2018 that it would drop the preference eventually. Last week’s announcement of a concrete timeline comes less than a month after the Department of Justice called Google a “monopoly gatekeeper to the internet” in a lawsuit alleging antitrust violations and as pressure mounts on officials in the European Union, which has already fined Google more than $9 billion for antitrust violations.

“I did always think AMP posed antitrust concerns,” said Sally Hubbard, author of the book “Monopolies Suck” and an antitrust expert with the Open Markets Institute. “It’s, ‘If you want to show up on the top of the search results, you have to play by our rules, you have to use AMP.’ ”

………

Whatever prompted the timing of the change, some news sites are relieved that they won’t have to keep using Google’s preferred mobile standard.

“We are encouraged to see Google beginning to outline a path away from AMP,” Robin Berjon, head of data governance at The New York Times, said in a written statement in response to questions from The Markup. “It’s important Google addresses the core challenge with the format, so that it is no longer a requirement for news products and performance ranking.”

News publishers and others have been griping about AMP for years. Some called it Google’s attempt to exert the same kind of control over the larger web that Facebook exerts over posts in its closed system.

That’s because AMP is more than just a set of formatting rules. Once a website sets up an AMP page, Google copies it and stores it on Google servers. When users click on the link for an AMP page in search results—or its news reading app—Google serves up that cached version from its servers.

“AMP keeps users within Google’s domain and diverts traffic away from other websites for the benefit of Google,” read a 2018 open letter signed by more than 700 technologists and advocates. “At a scale of billions of users, this has the effect of further reinforcing Google’s dominance of the Web.”

………

In an analysis published by The Markup earlier this year of 15,269 popular searches on Google, we found that AMP-enabled results appeared often, taking up more than 13 percent of the first results page. Google took another 41 percent of the page for its own products.

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As the news industry struggled over the past decade, with dropping newspaper subscription rates and ad revenue and plateauing online traffic leading to massive job losses, many publishers adopted AMP in hopes that it would help their bottom lines. Most of the roughly 2,000 members of the News Media Alliance, a trade organization that represents newspapers, use it.

“They don’t really feel there is a choice,” said Danielle Coffey, the group’s general counsel and senior vice president.

Her opinion is widely shared.

“We essentially have a coercion by Google upon publishers to allow people to host their content,” said Andrew Betts, a former member of the Technical Architecture Group at the international web standards organization W3C, who has written about his concerns with AMP. “And publishers who decide they don’t want that to happen because they want to serve their own content, thanks very much, will not ever appear in the first set of search results.”

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And AMP sometimes causes issues that publishers lack the power to fix on their own. In one prominent example, publishers discovered there was no way to allow users to opt out of having their data sold, a requirement under the California Consumer Privacy Act, which went into effect this year.

Talk about burying the lede.

AMP allows Google to take control of user data from media outlets.

Now we know why Google pushed it so hard, they wanted to slurp up more user data.

We Are Definitely in the Political Weird Season

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As a part of the get out the vote efforts, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez headlined an Among Us gaming session on Twitch to almost ½ a million viewers.

I’m not sure if this is brilliant, or just silly:

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) drew more than 430,000 concurrent viewers to her first-ever Twitch stream Tuesday night.

Ocasio-Cortez’s 3.5 hour Among Us session—which she used in part to encourage viewers to vote—included fellow Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and popular streamers like Pokimane and Disguised Toast, who responded rapidly to an off-handed tweet invite on Monday. And just in case you were wondering, Omar tweeted out the specs of her (very nice) gaming rig.

The debut instantly made Ocasio-Cortez—who admitted to having little experience with Among Us beforehand—one of the most popular streamers on the Amazon-owned video streaming service. Her peak of 435,000 viewers put her in the top 20 most popular streams ever on the site, according to data gathered by TwitchTracker, an echelon that’s dominated by major gaming brands with massive marketing departments. As of this writing, the AOC Twitch account has over 571,000 followers, and her debut video clip has attracted over 4.73 million views.

In between gasp-filled games full of Among Us‘ usual accusations and back-biting, Ocasio-Cortez directed viewers to “make a voting plan” via IwillVote.com. She also found time to talk about universal health care with her fellow players and share some thoughts on the world-building of Among Us itself. “When it comes to video games, it’s the lore,” she said on the stream. “How did these people get here? What year are we in? Et cetera.”

My son watched some clips, and thought it was brilliant.

Me, I’m dubious, but maybe I’m just an old fart.

I Learned 2 Things Today

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The first is that when you clear private data from the Chrome browser it keeps data for Google and Youtube, which is owned by Google.

The second, and completely related thing that I learned today is that the DoJ has finally filed an anti-trust lawsuit against Google.

I’m a bit dubious of the lawsuit, it reeks of William Barr rat-f%$#ery, it appears to be timed to maximize the political benefit to Trump and his Evil Minions™, but it’s been pretty clear for a while that much of tech company profitability is based on extracting monopoly rents.

I do hope that Google, and Facebook, and (particularly) Amazon get nailed to the wall, but I think that this effort is more likely to benefit the monopolists than reign them in:

The Justice Department accused Google on Tuesday of illegally protecting its monopoly over search and search advertising, the government’s most significant challenge to a tech company’s market power in a generation and one that could reshape the way consumers use the internet.

In a much-anticipated lawsuit, the agency accused Google of locking up deals with giant partners like Apple and throttling competition through exclusive business contracts and agreements.

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“For many years,” the agency said in its 57-page complaint, “Google has used anticompetitive tactics to maintain and extend its monopolies in the markets for general search services, search advertising and general search text advertising — the cornerstones of its empire.”

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Google called the suit “deeply flawed.” But the agency’s action signaled a new era for the technology sector. It reflects pent-up and bipartisan frustration toward a handful of companies — Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook in particular — that have evolved from small and scrappy companies into global powerhouses with outsize influence over commerce, speech, media and advertising. Conservatives like President Trump and liberals like Senator Elizabeth Warren have called for more restraints over Big Tech.

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Democratic lawmakers on the House Judiciary Committee released a sprawling report on the tech giants two weeks ago, also accusing Google of controlling a monopoly over online search and the ads that come up when users enter a query.

“A significant number of entities — spanning major public corporations, small businesses and entrepreneurs — depend on Google for traffic, and no alternate search engine serves as a substitute,” the report said. The lawmakers also accused Apple, Amazon and Facebook of abusing their market power. They called for more aggressive enforcement of antitrust laws, and for Congress to consider strengthening them.

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He put the investigation under the control of his deputy, Jeffrey Rosen, who in turn hired Mr. Shores, an aide from a major law firm, to oversee the case and other technology matters. Mr. Barr’s grip over the investigation tightened when the head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, Makan Delrahim, recused himself from the investigation because he represented Google in its acquisition of the ad service DoubleClick in 2007.

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This sort of revolving door is precisely why we haven’t seen meaningful antitrust lately:  That revolving door is tremendously lucrative.

While it is possible that a new Democratic administration would review the strategy behind the case, experts said it was unlikely that it would be withdrawn under new leadership.

Your mouth to God’s ear.

 And if you are wondering, I am VERY MUCH aware of the irony involved in my saying this on a Google owned platform.

Adding to My List of They Who Must Not Be Named

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Jeffrey Toobin.

I’m pretty sure that he won’t care about this.  He has his hands full. (Heh)

My standard statement upon putting someone on this list is:

Absent some sort of political activity, such as endorsements, running for office (PLEASE GOD NO!!), or their attempting to assassinate someone, they will not be mentioned here.

Toobin is primarily a pundit, so it’s unlikely that he will actually break news, or have an original idea, so this is probably the last time that you will hear about him here.