The sixth interim report of the Digital Platform Services inquiry by the ACCC was released on Friday and it doesn't contain any new recommendations. What it does note however, is that Meta still has "substantial market power", there have been "no material entry or expansion" by any alternatives to Meta since 2019 and that it does not expect any new competitors to Meta in the short or medium term. You might be thinking, what about TikTok? The ACCC reckons it is not an "effective alternative" because so many of its users are under the age of 25 and has a "high degree of product differentiation". Facebook isn't going anywhere, unfortunately.
The EU is discussing an AI Act in an attempt to regulate this growing technology that could have severe impacts on society if left unchecked. One part of the legislation is requiring "companies deploying generative Al tools, such as ChatGPT ... to disclose any copyrighted material used to develop their systems" and "make publicly available a summary disclose the use of training data protected under copyright law". Good. It's not even about money really. It's about being able to say no to these data suckers, not having things I create participate in their bullshit and having some form of recourse if they ignore me.
Jack Dorsey's attempt at Twitter 2.0, Bluesky has been getting a bit of buzz lately now that "famous" Twitter users like Dril and AOC are on it and a smartphone app is now available. I was lucky enough to get an invite to the beta (thanks Dana!) and it looks almost identical to Twitter and works practically the same way but with a few rough edges, hence, the beta. Underlying it is something called AT Protocol feels to me like Mastodon's ActivityPub, an official W3C standard, just slightly tweaked. Hopefully they manage to interconnect the two somehow. Personally, I still like Mastodon. I like the fact it hasn't got quote tweets, system-wide search and that there's no algorithm determining what I see. Little posts in chronological order from people I follow - what more do I want? Techdirt has a nice blog post outlining alternatives that have popped up in the 6 months since Musk took over Twitter.
Bob Pierce Computer Services, Victoria Mill, Ingham, North Queensland. CSR Photography Project Collection - Bicentennial Gift of CSR Limited 1988 (Art Gallery NSW)
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