by Ian Brown, Douwe Korff and friends
This morning, I’ve been giving evidence to the European Parliament’s Internal Market and Consumer Protection Committee on the Digital Markets Act (which the committee led on). Alongside Epic Games, we discussed the provisions requiring “gatekeeper” tech firms (currently, Apple, Google and Microsoft) to enable users to install apps from outside the gatekeeper’s own app stores.
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Wikimedia has blocked anyone using Virtual Private Networks, including Apple’s Private Relay service, from editing pages — even when logged in 😬 It’s easier to block wiki-vandals if they can’t easily hop from one IP address to another. But it means anyone using a VPN to protect their privacy — including Tor and Apple’s Private Relay — is collateral damage.
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What I’m missing most from Bluesky, Mastodon, LinkedIn and X is auto-translation. Manual translation doesn’t work well in a scrolling feed model, because you’re less likely to pause on foreign language posts to manually translate them.
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I hesitated even in linking to this preposterous article. But its definition of ‘end-to-end’ encryption as requiring ‘identical endpoints’ is not one I’ve seen before (and my PhD title literally includes the phrase!)
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Android, iOS and Windows have all been designated as gatekeeper operating systems (OSes) under the Digital Markets Act. Does this mean they must support direct installation of third-party apps?
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More from the ongoing saga of the side dish! On Friday, European Commission Margrethe Vestager gave a speech to the College of Europe where she hit back at unfavourable comparisons of the EU’s approach to digital market competition with the antitrust hipsters in Washington DC. I sadly found it disappointing.
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Exciting news indeed from Brussels. Apparently X has told the European Commission it meets the criteria to be designated as a gatekeeper under the Digital Markets Act 🤩🍿. If so, then we REALLY need the DMA Art. 7 messaging interoperability mandate expanded to social networking services, and aggressive enforcement of those existing provisions which would partly enable this.
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With X/Twitter, Elon Musk seems to be singlehandedly illustrating the exciting antitrust concept of Significant Non-transitory Decreases in Quality while having limited impact on X usage (thanks to network effects).
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I finally had time to watch the AI tech summit very well-organised by the US Federal Trade Commission on 25 January. I’ve tried to note some key points from each speaker.
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This new analysis identifies at least five areas where the final text of the EU AI Act on law enforcement use of “real time” remote biometric identification (RBI) systems in publicly accessible spaces could be improved from a fundamental rights perspective.
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