Vera Franz

EU slaps Google with €2.95B fine despite Trump trade threat Brussels hammers U.S. search giant after internal Commission feud.

The multibillion fine against Google proves that the EU can act. Google’s ad monopoly bleeds media dry. This ruling is only the first crack in Google’s monopoly in the ad tech market — but it sends a signal far beyond Europe.
Next step: structural remedies!

www.politico.eu/article/eu-s...

"A study examining 2.6m Bluesky posts referencing more than 500k scholarly articles over the past 2.5 years found they demonstrated 'substantially higher levels of interaction' – likes, reposts, replies and quotes – and greater 'textual originality' than previously reported for X, formerly Twitter."

Congrats to @davidthewid.bsky.social and @nathanckim.bsky.social on this must-read report on how #bigcloud is entrenching power off the AI gold rush #AI&MarketPowerFellowship

Cloud Overview - Bert Hubert Over the past few years I’ve written a lot about the cloud, and what it means for Europe. Here I want to pull the various articles together into a coherent story. Note, nothing of what follows is in a...

I've just updated the 'Cloud overview' page, which ties together what I have written on Europe's cloud woes. The page provides a coherent narrative of what is going on (I think). And if you want to go into more depth, the underlying articles provide a lot more detail: berthub.eu/articles/pos...

Wondering if Chrome could operate independently from Google if it were to be divested? We've got a comprehensive technical assessment for you:

Digital sovereignty can’t be bargained away The European Commission has tools, public support and a mandate to act on Big Tech. Trading that away for short-term calm would be a costly mistake.

New poll shows huge majorities of Europeans--74% of Von Der Leyen's own CDU--want a tough stance on Big Tech.

This is no time to roll over. Tech is vital infrastructure, and it can be ours again--with a three-part play:

Break, build, enforce.

w/ @robin.berjon.com: www.politico.eu/article/digi...

Why We’re Unlikely to Get Artificial General Intelligence Anytime Soon

www.nytimes.com/2025/05/16/t...

3/ Here's the thing: there's a global market for trustworthy privacy-respecting apps.

The secure messaging market alone is worth billions & growing.

If it can move past the anti-encryption myopia, Europe is a natural place to incubate & innovate these exciting industries.

Google has been found by a US court to hold an illegal monopoly for the second time in a year, this time in adtech.

We're still far from an actual break-up – Google will appeal and Trump could intervene at the 11th hour – but this gives Brussels all the cover it needs to move ahead in Europe.

📢 An easy way for activists, academics, and journalists to monitor Big Tech's mergers and acquisitions 🔍

Our new Big Tech M&A Tracker gives an overview of the unchecked expansion of the world’s largest tech companies.

Free and accessible to all. Get started:

Big: Trump DOJ holding the line (so far) on breaking up Chrome and forced access to the Google search index. Good omen for the upcoming ad tech case.

Signal President Meredith Whittaker calls out agentic AI as having 'profound' security and privacy issues | TechCrunch Signal President Meredith Whittaker warned Friday that agentic AI could come with a risk to user privacy. Speaking onstage at the SXSW conference in

There’s no way an AI agent can work "on device”. "That’s almost certainly being sent to a cloud server where it’s being processed and sent back...there’s a profound issue with security and privacy that is haunting this hype around agents" @meredithmeredith.bsky.social techcrunch.com/2025/03/07/s...

It's infuriatingly stupid: "#Google and the German Federal Office for Information #Security (#BSI) have concluded a strategic cooperation agreement with the aim of promoting the development of "secure and #sovereigncloud solutions for federal, state and local authorities."

This is how this […]

My dining nook has never looked better 😂

Thanks @abeba.bsky.social for this incredibly insightful piece on the #AIActionSummit incl on what #publicinterestAI is and is not, the fact that the Summit overlooked how AI is increasingly entangled with global market concentration, and concrete steps on how make #publicinterestAI about the public

"If Europe’s tech regulations are necessary (if not sufficient) conditions for alternative products and technologies to emerge, Big Tech’s visceral opposition makes more sense. It is a sign that Europe is on the right track. It should plough on rather than be deflected."
www.ft.com/content/86ec...

Our book of the week reveals how slavery, stolen labor, and ecological destruction in the Caribbean laid the foundations for today’s twin crises of racism and climate collapse.

By @taoleighgoffe.bsky.social on @doubledaybooks.bsky.social

https://buff.ly/4jWERnH

It’s hard to keep up with all the risk assessments, audits, and other major new info dumps from platforms about their DSA compliance. Here’s a great overview from @davidsullivan.bsky.social of where we stand, what is noteworthy so far, and what should happen next.

Reuters 1, AI pirates 0.

Microsoft's own research confirms something that was already pretty obvious: relying on a text generating machine to come up with answers erodes critical thinking, and is a method favoured by those who never liked doing critical thinking in the first place

advait.org/files/lee_20...

ICC braces for swift Trump sanctions over Israeli arrest warrants Leadership at international criminal court fears new US administration will move quickly to shut it down

Reminder that the ICC is expecting sanctions from Trump which may cut off the Court‘s Microsoft Azure/365 access. Relying on US tech infrastructure is even more of a systemic risk for a big organisation now — even more the NSA access you have to typically assume. www.theguardian.com/law/2025/jan...

Tech media is leaps and bounds ahead of the traditional newspapers covering Trump. I highly recommend subscribing to

@404media.co
@techdirt.com.web.brid.gy (follow @mmasnick.bsky.social)
@wired.com

They are putting in the work and not dancing around what's really happening.

Fascinating interview with Arm CEO Rene Haas, who acknowledges that regulators “got it right” when they blocked Nvidia’s takeover attempt in 2022. Arm’s market cap has since exploded from $40 billion to $175 billion.

Antitrust enforcement is good for innovation.

on.ft.com/4hNB0aA

The AI startup outperforming Google Translate in Ethiopian languages "Chatbots like ChatGPT are utterly broken or useless for these languages."

If you're attending the AI Action Summit in Paris, check out Lesan AI's demo at the African AI Village on Tuesday. Asmelash is also a @dairinstitute.bsky.social fellow. Talk to him about how OpenAI + friends have been going around threatening small businesses.
restofworld.org/2023/3-minut...

Friends, for something to be open source, we need to see

1. The data it was trained & evaluated on

2. The code

3. Model architecture

4. Model weights.

DeepSeek only gives 3, 4. And I'll see the day that anyone gives us #1 without being forced to do so, because all of them are stealing data.