July, 2018 | Chris Aldrich

👓 How regulators can prevent excessive concentration online – A new school in Chicago | The Economist

Read How regulators can prevent excessive concentration online (The Economist)

Conventional antitrust thinking is being disrupted from within

It is not the data that are valuable, he says, but the services powered by them. Some firms are just better at developing new offerings than others. ❧

So big piles of data can become a barrier to competitors entering the market, says Maurice Stucke of the University of Tennessee. ❧

“When feedback data from large players is available to smaller competitors, then innovation…is not concentrated at the top,” he argues in “Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data”, a new book co-written with Thomas Ramge, a journalist. ❧

This sounds like something which could be worth reading.

👓 There is no single solution to making the internet more decentralised – The art of the possible | The Economist

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Stopping the internet from getting too concentrated will be a slog, but the alternative would be worse

This has generally been an interesting series of articles in The Economist.

As John Sherman, the senator who gave his name to America’s original antitrust law in 1890, put it at a time when the robber barons ruled much of America’s economy: “If we will not endure a king as a political power, we should not endure a king over the production, transportation and sale of any of the necessaries of life.” ❧

👓 Wrapping My Head Around Webmentions Pt 2 | Interdependent Thoughts

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Ton Zijlstra (Interdependent Thoughts)

I very much appreciate how Sven Knebel extensively responded to my previous posting on some Webmention issues I came across. Some of his responses do make me have new questions. About the wrong URL, i.e. not the source of the webmention, showing up in a Webmention, Sven writes: …. There’s a href...

👓 Controlling How Webmentions are Rendered | ruk.ca

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Peter Rukavina (ruk.ca)

Ton continues to wrap his head around Webmention, and wonders about how mentions should be displayed on the “mentioned” site: What strikes me as odd now is how little control I have over how the Webmention and Semantic Linkbacks plugins actually deal with webmention data. The stuff I’d like to...

👓 U.S. Opposition to Breast-Feeding Resolution Stuns World Health Officials | New York Times

Read U.S. Opposition to Breast-Feeding Resolution Stuns World Health Officials by Andrew Jacobs (nytimes.com)

Trade sanctions. Withdrawal of military aid. The Trump administration used both to try to block a measure that was considered uncontroversial and embraced by countries around the world.

You know what I want for my birthday? Stupidity like that described in this article not to exist.

Nestle gave a half-assed response here. They can do far better. Now that their US headquarters has left Glendale, California for Virginia, I suspect their political stance will actually get worse on these issues.

A 2016 Lancet study found that universal breast-feeding would prevent 800,000 child deaths a year across the globe and yield $300 billion in savings from reduced health care costs and improved economic outcomes for those reared on breast milk. ❧

Pure corruption here. Protectionism to prop up profits of approximately 630 million versus major benefits and savings of 300 billion. Even if you look at the calculus of the entire industry of 70 billion it becomes a no brainer.

👓 Retroactive Webmentioning | Peter Rukavina

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Peter Rukavina (ruk.ca)

By way of testing out my Webmention module for Drupal, I took the 256 posts I’ve written here this year, ferreted out all the external links, discovered their Webmention endpoints, and sent a Webmention. Those 256 posts contained 840 links in total; of those links, 149 were to a target that suppor...

There are some interesting/useful statistics here. There’s also an interesting kernel of an idea about how one links to one’s own website internally as well. I find this very intriguing with respect to owning a digital commonplace book. Perhaps there are some ways to modify IndieMap for extracting some useful metadata out of one’s own website?