Articles from Digitopoly

The Aftermath of the Dyn DDOS Attack

Nobody knows who organized the attack. It might have come from an angry gamer, or from a rogue spy, or, perhaps, an angry rogue spy playing games. The program hijacked many cameras and home devices, and redirected them to engineer a series of distributed denial of server (DDOS) attacks on a few hours apart, all on October 21, 2016. By executing this novel and rather clever hijack of many devices for a DDOS attack, the attack exposed an important vulnerability in today’s internet.

Report on Media Regulation

Following a comprehensive report on market structure and antitrust, the Committee for the Study of Digital Platforms (at the Stigler Center at the University of Chicago) has

Misapplied metaphors in AI policy

Many querulous conversations fan the flames in policy debates about artificial intelligence. Everyone agrees we are transitioning to something, but not on what that will be. Anyone want to venture a guess? It is safe to bet on widespread use of neural networks and deep learning. Anything else?

The unintended consequences of France’s ban on statistical analysis of Judges

If someone had said that I would be writing a blog post to consider a law that might imprison people for conducting statistical analysis on publicly available data, I would have thought that was unlikely because who would ever propose, let alone enact, such a law?

The other day we got our answer: France! The very country that produced Laplace, Pascal and Guerry!

A new one for price discrimination: taxing the late

One of the popular travel options in Toronto is Porter Airlines which operates out of the City Airport and so is just 15 minutes from my University of Toronto office. Because it is a small airport, it is the kind of airport where you can literally leave an hour before your flight with no problems.

An old result on automation and wages

The first issue of AER Insights is out and the very first article is one by Francesco Caselli and Alan Manning on “Robot Arithmetic: New Technologies and Wages.” Here is the abstract:

A tax on targeted ads?

When Paul Romer expresses an opinion, it is always worthwhile to listen because it is always well-considered. In an opinion piece in the New York Times, he puts forward a proposal to restore what he terms is the “public commons” of the provision of information in support of democracy.

The Podcast Business Model

This week saw the launch of a new podcast startup, Luminary. With $100 million in the bank and podcasters like Trevor Noah and Adam Davidson signed up, they are hoping to become the Netflix of Podcasts. To access that content costs $7.99 but the content is ad-free. They had a post on Twitter proclaiming that “podcasts don’t need ads.”

Are broken promises an antitrust violation?

That is the question that Dina Srinivasan answers in the affirmative in her paper “The Antitrust Case Against Facebook.” This is an interesting set of issues because, frankly, my observation is that Facebook, while having a dominant position in social media (which is not an antitrust violation) had not violated antitrust law getting to that position and did not appear to b

Spotify v. Apple and a mess of claims

A couple of days ago, Spotify announced it was pushing the European Commission to investigate Apple’s app store practices. They claimed that Apple was discriminating against them (and presumably other streaming services) on account of their own competing Apple Music service. Spotify claimed they had to pay Apple 30 per cent of their revenue which was a ‘cost’ that Apple Music didn’t have to bear.

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