Thread · 3 tweets · 28 Oct 2021

Because the value of data is superadditive, notably when exploited across contexts. With no cap on data, things revert to anticompetitive winner-take-all dynamics. Basically, I'm looking at privacy as a key part of an antitrust structural intervention.

As for the value of antitrust in fighting bad speech, it's a question of not having an amplification monoculture. We used to have hundreds of thousands of gatekeepers worldwide. Bad speech sure go through, but spreading massively was hard and rare.

Now we have a world with basically two gatekeepers. It's exactly as if we had let Murdoch and Berlusconi buy up and run all the media everywhere. Any bad speech (as a parasite) that cracks the code will build scale — just like you'd expect from a monoculture.