Controversial Reads 040321

please note I do not necessarily agree with anything contained in the articles linked here, nor do I necessarily support any of the sites I link to—I gather these links because I think they are interesting and present an interesting point of view worth hearing

Join us as we talk with Michael about the attention economy and its impact on the rise of everything from influencers to QAnon and its consequences on belief, facts and democracy.

As stated earlier, o.com along with most of the single-character .com labels were registered by Dr. Postel on December 1, 1993 as a way of reserving these domain names for a since-unrealized potential development path for the Internet’s Domain Name System (DNS).

But it strains credulity to believe random tweets can lead otherwise normal people to drive across the country and stage an insurrection. That places an undue focus on misinformation itself, rather than on the people and institutions sharing it and on the people who choose to access and believe it.

Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai and Jack Dorsey will visit with Congress today, as each has multiple times since last October, to testify about the spread of misinformation (gossip, mistakes and lies) and disinformation (propaganda) across digital platforms controlled by the companies they run.

No, you don’t. No one loves videoconferencing. No one loves finding a tidy part of their house, or brushing their hair, or having to look at their own face while they talk, or sitting through boring two-hour presentations while staring at a screen.

Google is about to fundamentally change how the web works. Sometime in 2022, most likely during the first six months, its Chrome browser will ditch the third-party cookies on which much of the digital economy is built.

As Mark Zuckerberg tries to sell Congress on Facebook’s preferred method of amending the federal law that serves as a key pillar of the internet, lawmakers must see it for what it really is: a self-serving and cynical effort to cement the company’s dominance.

In the name of combating misinformation and conspiracy theories, Microsoft has teamed with several other companies to trace content online back to its original author in what some people are calling a huge setback in data privacy.

Patent databases may be a smoke screen that hides the true issues, problems, and dynamics of innovation behind the illusion that innovation is booming—and that patent activity measures the boom.

But Belt and Road isn’t going away. China is making more rigorous lending decisions while focusing somewhat less on heavy-duty construction and more on digital technology, says a Council on Foreign Relations task force report released on March 23.

For the past four years, Washington and Beijing have been locked in an epic battle over 5G dominance. How this saga will play out under President Biden is unclear.

Beijing is making good on its threats to clamp down on the sprawling “platform economy”, with President Xi Jinping weighing in on the need to rein in behemoths that play a dominant role in the country’s consumer sector.