Max von Thun

Europe’s Tech Firms Need Regulation to Grow Max von Thun explains why watering down legislation like the GDPR and the AI Act will only undermine digital sovereignty.

Europe’s failure to produce globally competitive tech firms should be attributed not to excessive regulation, but rather to weak enforcement, writes @maxvonthun.bsky.social. bit.ly/3Meln1z

Europe plays along as phony peace process for Ukraine continues With the 28-point plan, European leaders have yet again been left as spectators on the sidelines as Washington and Moscow decide the fate of this continent.

The 28-point plan was dead on arrival. Ukraine can't accept it, Trump doesn't have the cards to force them since he's ended most US assistance to them, and Russia won't accept adjustments.

Yet for the past two weeks, Europeans have again had to scramble to go along with a charade.

Decline and Fall

Couldn't agree more with this point and article by @martinsandbu.ft.com

The EU has a ready-made tool – the Anti-Coercion Instrument – designed precisely for these situations. Next time the U.S. threatens tariffs on Europe, the EU should use the ACI to target Big Tech.

www.ft.com/content/89f1...

Tech Titans Amass Multimillion-Dollar War Chests to Fight AI Regulation Some are battling state AI laws and threatening to punish candidates who oppose rapid deployment of the technology.

"Billionaires, tech titans and their opponents are amassing multimillion-dollar war chests for a chaotic, bruising battle over AI regulation ahead of the 2026 midterm elections."

Large Language Models Will Never Be Intelligent, Expert Says The AI industry is staking its future on language models. But LLMs, an expert argues, are fundamentally incapable of being intelligent.

“Yes, an AI system might remix and recycle our knowledge in interesting ways,” Riley writes. “But that’s all it will be able to do. It will be forever trapped in the vocabulary we’ve encoded in our data and trained it upon — a dead-metaphor machine.”

futurism.com/artificial-i...

There is never any daylight between the positions of Russia and JD Vance.

Heres steve witkoff helping the Russians, get a deal with Donald Trump

same

“There is a long tradition of great powers in Europe making deals over the heads of smaller countries, leading to terrible suffering. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact…brought us World War II. The Yalta agreement gave us the Cold War. The Witkoff-Dmitriev pact…will fit right into that tradition.”

Cabinet rankings: Mahmood sees sharp drop in approval among Labour members – LabourList Shabana Mahmood’s approval among Labour members has plummeted since her announcement on reform of asylum policy, exclusive polling for LabourList has revealed. The poll, conducted…

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has seen her favourability drop 32 points among Labour members since her plans for asylum policy reform were announced

Hear me out… is there a way Ukraine can make Mamdani their ambassador to the United States?

We don’t need another delegation of European leaders flying off to Washington to kiss Trump’s ring now. We need them to get on the train to Kyiv and stand shoulder to shoulder with Zelenskyy.

Oh my god

was already feeling insane from the Trump/Mamdani meeting but I now worry that my brain chemistry will simply never be the same

I just think Trump understands Mamdani is not someone he wants to tangle with. Too smart, too charismatic, too New York, too straightforward, too young. Easier targets elsewhere, like everyone who works for him and most of Congress. (1/2)

1/ What a Russian breaking of the ceasefire will look like, step by step.

There are far better experts on this, but I was an Australian diplomat in Ukraine in 2014 so I've seen this play out up close.

So join me, brothers and sisters, as we count down to a fullscale re-invasion.

This is a must-read analysis of the Trump administration's disgraceful, Kremlin-authored plot to sell Ukraine down the river and rehabilitate Putin's Russia as a respectable economic and political actor.

Europe cannot be complicit in this betrayal.

Judge rules Meta doesn't have a social media monopoly It's the latest decision against the government's push to limit the size of Big Tech.

A judge ruled Meta does not have a monopoly, solidifying the tech giant’s $1.5 trillion future.

Trump suggests Khashoggi had it coming: "You're mentioning someone that was extremely controversial. A lot of people didn't like that gentleman that you're talking about. Whether you like him or didn't like him, things happen. But he knew nothing about it. You don't have to embarrass our guest."

Commission launches market investigations on cloud computing services under the Digital Markets Act The European Commission opened three market investigations on cloud computing services under the Digital Markets Act (DMA).

And here's the announcement itself from the Commission, published just a few minutes ago:

ec.europa.eu/commission/p...

“Tech billionaire Peter Thiel's hedge fund has sold off its entire stake in Nvidia during the third quarter, a regulatory filing showed, intensifying worries of an artificial intelligence bubble.” www.reuters.com/business/med...

EU Considers Cracking Down on Big Tech's Cloud Power Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Corp.’s Azure, and Alphabet Inc.’s Google Cloud risk being dragged into the scope of the European Union’s crackdown on Big Tech as antitrust watchdogs prepare to study t...

Very promising news as the European Commission moves towards bringing Big Tech’s cloud arms under the Digital Markets Act, as long called for by @openmarkets.bsky.social.

Cloud alternatives won’t take off until we loosen the hyperscalers’ chokehold on the market.

www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

“The Commission must reject this paltry offer and force Google to break up its adtech monopoly once and for all.”

Our response to Google's wholly insufficient remedies for its adtech conflicts of interest: www.openmarketsinstitute.org/publications...

We need to talk about JD Not nearly enough news coverage has focused on JD Vance's influences and his extreme views.

"The fact that JD Vance has openly cited Curtis Yarvin as an inspiration and that Thiel is the person most responsible for creating Vance as a politician should be viewed as a national emergency."

My comments to @thorbenson.bsky.social

madness.ghost.io/we-need-to-t...

The UK Labour Party doing an incredible job - like many other centrist parties - at alienating their natural progressive base while failing to win over voters that don’t buy their performative anti-immigrant schtick.

This App Lets ICE Track Vehicles and Owners Across the Country Material viewed by 404 Media shows data giant Thomson Reuters enriches license plate data with marriage, voter, and ownership records. The tool can predict where a car may be in the future.

These capabilities ICE has via Thomson Reuters and Motorola are mind boggling. marries license plate data with voter and ownership records, future location prediction (unclear how good this is), face recognition. Surveillance state continues apace

www.404media.co/this-app-let...

Google Offers Ad Tech Tweaks in €3 Billion EU Antitrust Fight Google has offered to tweak its ad tech products to settle a European Union order after a near-€3 billion ($3.4 billion) antitrust penalty, stopping short of a partial breakup watchdogs favor.

As anyone could have predicted, Google’s adtech “solution” - consisting of minor behavioural fixes - falls far short of what is needed.

As the European Commission has repeatedly made clear, the only workable solution is a breakup. Google’s offer must be rejected.

www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Europe’s Biggest Rare Earths Producer Forges U.S. Deals

America is eating Europe’s lunch again.

Solvay’s rare earth processing plant in France is a genuine strategic asset. It could have scaled to cover 30% of Europe’s needs.

But...

www.nytimes.com/2025/11/12/b...

Is AI making job recruitment less meritocratic? We're getting some v interesting research studies on this question now, and the news is... not good. @jburnmurdoch.ft.com & I dive in, in the latest edition of our newsletter The AI Shift www.ft.com/content/e5b7...