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.
There are many people wanting to unroll past tech acquisitions. Others certainly would advocate doing it differently if there was another chance.
I don’t mean to be spending time critiquing Elizabeth Warren per se, I kinda like most of her policies but this antitrust stuff is just crazy.
Elizabeth Warren wants to break up Facebook, Amazon and Google. Why?
Today internet infrastructure encompasses root servers, broadband lines, routers, content delivery net-works, cloud storage and cellular towers. Broadly construed, these physical assets perform two related and essential services for the modern digital economy. Infrastructure acts as an intermediate input for the production of many services by firms and it acts as an intermediate input into the delivery of access and related services to the internet for households.
By Thomas Hubbard.
I learned this morning that Harold Demsetz passed away last week. He was 88.
From its very early days, one of the main areas where blockchain enthusiasts argued there was potential for radical innovation was in the ability of the technology to house smart contracts. The Ethereum network was designed with this in mind: to be a distributed ledger with a ‘Turing complete’ virtual machine on top of it.
It is time once again to give awards for the biggest events in IT in 2018. And what a fun year to review! So many crazy events deserve ridicule. Where to start?
At a conference in Brussels last week I made a short speech about Facebook and its poor approach to regulatory management and innovation. I refer at the end to this paper from The Hamilton Project.
Economists like to say that there are no free lunches. How does that attitude apply to free software and services? It is no secret that many prominent platforms give away services, and so do many widely used open-source projects. The answer should help us understand our world.