President Trump is poised to sign an executive order that applies to social networks; its reasoning about Section 230 and public forums is not in line with judicial precedent.
May 2020
Twitter and Trump, YouTube and China, Facebook and Polarization
Twitter fact-checks Trump, YouTube censors Chinese words, and Facebook reportedly declines to police polarization.
Platforms in an Aggregator World
Facebook Shops are good for Shopify merchants, but bad for Shopify; the answer is to push more into the real world.
Steve Jobs and OpenDoc, Fluid Framework, Microsoft Lists
At Build Microsoft’s vision for their enterprise operating system in the cloud was clearer than ever.
Joe Rogan and Spotify, Luminary and Howard Stern, Apple’s Response
Joe Rogan is exclusive to Spotify, which suggests the streaming service realizes it needs to steal share to get its Aggregation flywheel spinning.
Chips and Geopolitics
TSMC showed the power of modularization, and now they are core to the U.S. national security strategy.
Facebook Acquires GIPHY, Data Credits and Critical Suppliers, SDK Insights
The GIPHY acquisition makes sense for Facebook, but for more pragmatic reasons than malicious ones.
Exponent Podcast: Open, Free, and Spotify
On Exponent, the weekly podcast I host with James Allworth, we discuss Dithering and Open Versus Free. Listen to it here.
Media, Regulators, and Big Tech; Indulgences and Injunctions; Better Approaches
Blaming Facebook and Google for the media industry’s trouble inevitably leads to bad regulations with unintended consequences and the end of accountability for big tech.
Uber + Grubhub?, Aggregator Acquisitions, Uber and Lime
An Uber acquisition of GrubHub makes all kinds of sense, but for the same reasons that it will be frowned upon by regulators (and for good reason). Then, Uber’s investment in Lime makes sense as well.