2026-04-14 06:04:00
Europe should regulate Big Tech instead of banning kids from social media, Estonia says https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-should-stand-up-to-big-tech-instead-of-imposing-social-media-bans-estonia-says/
« J’ai décidé de faire mes adieux Š Gmail » : ces initiatives pour se passer des Big Tech américaines
https://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/article/2026/03/14/j-ai-decide-de-faire-mes…
Tech billionaires are leveraging tens of millions of dollars
to influence California politics
in a marked uptick from their previous participation in affairs at the state capitol.
Behemoths such as #Google and #Meta are getting involved in campaigns for November’s elections,
as are venture capitalist…
Anthropic partners with CodePath to help redesign computer coding curricula at hundreds of US community and state colleges, integrating Claude AI tools (Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-take…
The Guardian view on changes to copyright laws: authors should be protected over big tech
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/mar/13/the-guardian-view-on…
Is this the disturbed view of AI / BigTech optimists, or does he have a point?
"Something Big Is Happening"
#ai
RE: https://tech.lgbt/@somebitslinks/116058348297956373
I was suspicious of the etymology of molly-guard because it only dates to 1982, and the devices are much older. But Ed Krol from UIUC tells the story about his daughter Molly on page 14 of this PDF.
The only thing about it was that on one side was a big red switch—kid-sized, about 2 inches wide. ... I took my daughter Molly in to work with me. I said, ‘You play with your trucks on the floor while I work,’ and she saw this amazing big red thing and gave it a yank and turned it off.
/cc @…
What’s in it for people who work for the big tech companies who enable one morally bankrupt thing after another for decades on end just to make the billionaire owners richer?
Is that truly fulfilling work?
What @… forgot to mention is that you can (and should) attend her talk at #CablesOfResistance today at 11 am:
Cables of Resistance - Bewegungskonferenz gegen Big Tech: The AI/Energy/Fascism Nexus: An Ana…
This is the most depressing thing I've read in a long time.
https://shumer.dev/something-big-is-happening
Of particular note:
"The people building this technology are simultaneously more excited and more frightened than anyone else on the planet. They believe it…
FTM heeft een nuttig artikel (nuttig als in: lastig, anti-autoritair) over BZK en NLdigital.
"BZK wees branchevereniging NLdigital aan als ‘poortwachter’ voor het organiseren van de gesprekken van het aanjaagteam Cloud. En die keuze is opmerkelijk. Anders dan de naam doet vermoeden, maakt de belangenbehartiger met ruim 500 leden zich namelijk ook hard voor Amerikaanse belangen van leden als Microsoft, Google, Amazon, IBM en Oracle.”
"Van het ministerie mag big tech de gesprekken over digitale autonomie zelf leiden"
https://www.
Von 2023...
BIG TECH MUSS WEG - Martin Andree
#UnplugBigTech
Please note I don’t mean this in a snarky “yet you work under capitalism lol” way.
I specifically mean big tech (like Microsoft, Google or Meta) and staying there for years without even looking for another job.
You can make choices for your life.
Don't know who this guy is, but I would love someone else's take on what he is saying here. I can't decide if this is utterly apocalyptic, or a guy who is just up to his eyeballs in the Kool-Aid.
Context: was sent to me by a financial advisor friend
https://shumer.dev/something-big-is-ha
Apple, whose capital expenditure is just a fraction of its peers, is the only Big Tech company that saw capex decline YoY in Q4, decreasing 19% to $2.37B (Rani Molla/Sherwood News)
https://sherwood.news/tech/apple-is-the-only-big-tech-company-…
Gruselig! 😬
Hörsaal - Deutschlandfunk Nova: Digital-Oligarchie - Der Rechtsruck der Big-Tech-Bosse
Webseite der Episode: https://www.deutschlandfunknova.de/beitrag/digital-oligarchie-der-rechtsruck-der-big-tech-bosse
Medi…
Digital-Oligarchie - Der Rechtsruck der Big-Tech-Bosse
Big-Tech-Bosse vertreten verstärkt rechte Ideen und nehmen vermehrt politischen Einfluss. In ihren ideologischen Konzepten und in der aktuellen US-Politik macht der Politikwissenschaftler Christopher Coenen faschistische Tendenzen aus.
📻 https:…
I think this should be off-putting for any self-respecting NZer. The parties should also, perhaps, lose popular support due to their willingness to accept the money. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/in-depth/589237
RE: https://esq.social/@SuffolkLITLab/116054463472872585
For Big Tech, “deleted” means setting deleted = false to deleted = true.
An independent journalist argues against using AI to help journalists write, saying "the process is the purpose" even if you don't always enjoy it (Marisa Kabas/The Handbasket)
https://www.thehandbasket.co/p/refusing-to-accept-big-t…
Berlin 😍
I can relate when #socialmedia is a synonym with the #megacorp #algorithms (because the general public doesn't know about healthy alternatives
A spate of big developments emerged yesterday regarding Anthropic, its status as a "supply chain threat," and what that means for organizations that have deployed the company's tech as well as what it means for the company.
Don't miss today's Metacurity for a précis on these critical developments and other top infosec news you should know, including
--FBI warns of phishing campaigns impersonating city and county officials,
--TX governor warns health ag…
Big Tech verkauft uns Bequemlichkeit – und kauft sich politische Macht. Die Recherche von WECHANGE zeigt: Datenhandel, Sucht-Design und Empörungsalgorithmen sind kein Kollateralschaden, sondern Geschäftsmodell. Die Liaison mit Trump ist kein Zufall, sondern Kalkül.
https://wechange.coop/big-tech/
GPT-5.3-Codex and Claude Opus 4.6 can handle the full app development lifecycle on their own, a sign of what's coming for most knowledge work within five years (Matt Shumer)
https://shumer.dev/something-big-is-happening
By 2027, 2.5 million French civil servants will stop using video conference tools from U.S. providers — including Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Webex and GoTo Meeting — and switch to Visio, a homegrown service.
https://apnews.com/article/europe-digital…
The audience at Cables of Resistance (the movement conference against Big Tech) just celebrated this talk by Simone Robutti from the Tech Workers Coalition:
Their basic approach is to reverse-engineer workforce apps (with cooperation from workers) to find out if they send surveillance (or other illegal data) to the companies. If they find evidence, they try to push data protection authorities to have a look at those companies' serve…
Software used in German public offices has become geopolitical.
Part of the solution: #OpenSource
https://www.zdfheute.de/video/heute-journal/abkehr-us-software-…
'I am scared to live in a society whose members are incapable of having deep discussions and arguments'
From: @…
https://scholar.social/@gedan…
“Big Tech’s AI hype is distracting users from the rapid and dangerous expansion of giant, energy and water-intensive data centres […].
There is simply no evidence that AI will help the climate more than it will harm it.
Rather than relying on credible and substantiated data, Big Tech companies are writing themselves a blank cheque to pollute on the empty promise of future salvation. We cannot bet the climate on these baseless claims.”
It is day 12 of waiting for an #iOS App Store review of an update (the app is already live; they approved our previous version). Not a single bit of feedback in those 12 days.
Did they replace their review staff with poorly-functioning LLMs like the rest of Big Tech?
Seriously, though, is this abnormally-long delay happening to everyone right now?
“The founder of OpenClaw, vibe coder Peter Steinberger, was also hired by a Big Tech firm.”
If there’s one thing that gives me comfort in this world, it’s knowing I will never be called “vibe coder”.
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/03/meta-acquire…
A healthy (in body and mind),
active, frugal, sociable, mostly offline citizen
who is highly educated and informed, in full control of their data, avoiding Big Tech’s platforms and algorithms,
with a positive self-esteem and self-image,
is probably persona non grata for the tech billionaires.
But a small, insignificant nuisance, like a fly
– they don’t care about ONE.
But imagine having thousands,
then hundreds of thousands,
then millio…
Hear hear!
Universiteit Groningen probeert zich los te rukken van big tech: ‘Geen alternatief voor Microsoft’ | BNR Nieuwsradio
https://www.bnr.nl/nieuws/tech-innovatie/10593189/universite…
Wow. Finally a truly good article about moving away from big tech in the national news here in Denmark. And yes, Mastodon is in it. It’s not a perfect list, but it’s the first good one I’ve seen outside of personal blogs. https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/viden/teknolo…
US DOJ antitrust chief Gail Slater says she is leaving, in a departure viewed as a victory for tech giants over some of MAGA's more populist voices (Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2026/02/12/justice-antitrust-chief-gail-slateer-resigns
The EU appoints Anthony Whelan as its top competition official; Whelan says he will press ahead with Big Tech investigations despite President Trump's pressure (Barbara Moens/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/5781c054-9190-4ed0-8f91-3af94a6c313e
…
Ich bin auf einen Artikel gestoßen, den ich sehr inspirierend finde - auch und gerade im Zusammenhang mit dem #diday:
📌 Sichtbar ohne #BigTech. Warum echte #Verbindung rebellisch ist.
I'm actually believing this, the main reason "AI" hype has become this big is tech people being impressed by it "writing code".
Then they were wrongly extrapolating capabilities to other fields (because "programming is super hard, harder than any other vocation, therefore 'AI' can do anything!!!1!"). To them, it clearly appears be god because they see themselves as gods—because they can write quicksort and linked lists or something.
Meanwhile, LLMs are only passable at generating code because it is laughably easy, mainly because programming languages and "best practices" are extremely verbose, repetitive and clunky; requiring endless boilerplate and infinite layer cakes to achieve even the most trivial things.
Because other people that don't care about that shit are so dependent on technology, it gets pushed to everyone without consent.
Kind of like a hubris ouroboros.
Comments by heads of Amazon, Microsoft, Anthropic, OpenAI and others, many delivered at the World Economic Forum in Davos, reveal a shift of narrative from optimistic inevitability towards recognition of geopolitical tensions, energy scarcity, economic bubbles and the race to make AI truly useful.
https://www.
This whole thread.
It's a love letter to the Fediverse..
https://mastodon.social/@_elena/116368379234020589
_elena@mastodon.social - Dear Fedi friends,
Next week I have the honor of doing a presentation advocating for the Fediverse in a really prestigious venue (I can't share more now, but I will after it takes place).
I'm currently working on slides and I would love to hear testimonies from YOU. Why the Fediverse is so special to you in contrast to Big Tech platforms (bonus points if you speak French & can reply en français).
I'll share a selection of your testimonies in my slideshow presentation.
Merci beaucoup ❤️
Despite the hot air from government about protecting children, they've voted down our Bill to turn off the toxic algorithms.
These algorithms push toxic content promoting eating disorders, self harm, misogyny and hate.
Big Tech profits should not come before children's health.
— Paul Murphy, Member of the Irish Parliament for the party People before Profit.
How independent of the US corporations is your website that you use or even operate?
«Replace US tech with European alternatives:
Your current stack sends EU data to US servers under US law. Find sovereign, GDPR-native replacements in seconds.»
🇪🇺 https://www.cloudinfraatlas.eu
ICE Asks Companies About 'Ad Tech and Big Data' Tools It Could Use in Investigations (Caroline Haskins/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/ice-asks-companies-about-ad-tech-and-big-data-tools/
http://www.memeorandum.com/260125/p35#a260125p35
Es increíble cómo esta gente tiene una lógica de "no me gusta la historia, la reescribiré a mi gusto"
@… https://mastodon.green/@gerrymcgovern/
Empfehlung für die ganze Verwandtschaft (von @… und @…:
"Genau hier setzt die Artikelserie an: Sie macht den Wechsel konkret, priorisiert und machbar – und zwar ausdrücklich für Einsteiger. Big Tech…
📢 Trump fordert, dass Big Tech eigene Kraftwerke für KI-Rechenzentren baut – angeblich, um Verbraucher vor steigenden Stromkosten zu schützen. Doch die Mehrheit dieser Anlagen soll mit Erdgas laufen, obwohl sich Konzerne zu sauberer Energie verpflichtet haben. 🇺🇸 Autor: Business Insider Deutschland
#Energiepolitik
Let's stop calling them "big tech" and start calling them "tech oligarchs".
"Big tech" is too ambiguous. E.g. Linux could be called "big tech" too.
Also the problematic aspect is immediately revealed: the individuals at the top, their corruption and misuse of the power.
Over the past year, tech industry lobby groups have used their lavish budgets to aggressively push for the deregulation of the EU’s digital rulebook.
The intensity of this policy battle is also reflected in the fact that Big Tech companies have on average more than one lobby meeting per day with EU Commission officials.
This lobbying offensive appears to be paying off.
Recently, a string of policy-makers have called for a pause of the Artificial Intelligence Act,
a…
Amazon, Google, and Microsoft reported a collective $1.1T backlog of cloud computing revenue in their latest quarterly earnings, including Microsoft's $625B (Jon Keegan/Sherwood News)
https://sherwood.news/tech/big-techs-usd1-1-trillion-cloud-computing-backl…
Big Tech Should Pay for What It Has Done to Us
"The truth is, it’s hard for profit-motivated companies to decide to make less money. So we can raise the cost of bad behavior. It worked with smoking. You can still smoke, but it could cost $15 a pack and you often can’t find a place where it’s allowed these days."
Det var på tide med en god artikel om alternativerne hos DR! https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/viden/teknologi/kan-man-klare-sig-uden-amerikansk-big-tech-her-er-nogle-af-alternativerne
Vom AI-Hype zur AI-Angst: Warum Tech-Aktien 2026 so stark verlieren
Backlash: Big-Tech-Aktien notieren seit Jahresbeginn im Minus. Die Wall Street ist über das Disruptionspotenzial besorgt.
https://www.…
"If your business model requires doing something unethical, you don't have a business model." --Larry Garfield
By that metric, I don't think there's any big-tech company with a valuation over $1 billion that has a business model.
The entire US economy is well and truly fucked.
US DOJ antitrust chief Gail Slater says she is leaving, in a departure viewed as a victory for tech giants over some of MAGA's more populist voices (Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2026/02/12/justice-antitrust-chief-gail-slateer-resigns
Der "Big Tech Tobacco Moment", analysiert von @… :
"Es geht um viel mehr. Das Urteil könnte die Big-Tech-Konzerne in ihrem Innersten treffen, weil es nicht auf die Inhalte, sondern die Plattformlogik zielt: Infinite Scroll, Autoplay, Benachrichtigungen, Filter Bubble und Echokammer."
und:
"Wenn die Plattform bei den Teenag…
Exclusive: Big Tech companies band together to fight global scams
https://www.axios.com/2026/03/16/tech-companies-scam-accord-google-meta-amazon
Alphabet has lined up banks to sell a rare 100-year bond,
stepping up a borrowing spree by Big Tech companies racing to fund their vast investments in AI this year.
The so-called century bond will form part of a debut sterling issuance this week by Google’s parent company, said people familiar with the matter.
Alphabet was also selling $20 billion of dollar bonds on Monday
and lining up a Swiss franc bond sale, the people said.
The dollar portion of the deal was…
Just saw how various websites are using 50 GB total in Chrome. A big culprit is every site with an embedded YouTube video seems to have its own copy of 313MB of YouTube crap. It's partitioned for privacy purposes and I'm guessing nothing is de-duping that storage. I wonder if every site has to download it too?
OpenAI buying TBPN makes little sense, par for the course for a company that, like Twitter, stumbled into a big market and may never build a functional business (Ben Thompson/Stratechery)
https://stratechery.com/2026/openai-buys-tbpn-tech-and-the-token-tsunami/
“A jury in LA has delivered a damning verdict for two of the world's most popular digital platforms, Instagram and YouTube.
It ruled those apps are addictive, and deliberately engineered that way – and that its owners have been negligent in their safeguarding of the children who have used them.
…
Some experts have described the verdict as big tech's "big tobacco" moment, and we know how that worked out - although it didn't stop people smoking altogether…
heise | Tschüss, Big Tech: Acht sichere E-Mail-Alternativen aus Europa im Vergleich
Gmail, iCloud, Outlook – die größten E-Mail-Anbieter sitzen in den USA. Mit diesen europäischen Alternativen erklären Sie Ihre digitale Unabhängigkeit.
Die gefährlichsten Firmen der Welt - Big Tech
Überwachung, Datenhandel, Manipulation - welche Macht haben globale Digitalkonzerne? Wie verändern Daten und Algorithmen Wirtschaft, Politik und Gesellschaft?
📺 https://www.zdf.de/dokus/zdfinfo-die-gefaehrl…
The two best feelings in the world are:
1. Helping another person
2. Learning something new
Interesting how both big tech with “AI” and “conservatives” do not want you to do either.
Google unveils WAXAL, a new open speech dataset for 21 African languages to ease speech technology development; African institutions own the dataset (Damilare Dosunmu/Rest of World)
https://restofworld.org/2026/google-waxal-african-languages-ai-sovereignty/…
Fox, Sinclair, and NAB file FCC comments urging US regulators to address the trend of Big Tech companies buying sports rights, saying it could weaken local TV (David Shepardson/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/sustaina…
The US Senate passed COPPA 2.0 again, which would create new protections for young users; the bill now heads to the House, where it has struggled to pass (Anna Washenko/Engadget)
https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/coppa-20-passes-the-sen…
If your stated goal is to make computing into a “utility” (aka subscription) you can only obtain from Big Tech and if your entire industry is comprised of rentiers, it makes perfect sense to also make actually owning a general computing device as expensive as possible.
As far as Big Tech is concerned, this is a feature, not a bug.
It’s capitalists acquiring capital and pricing it out of the reach of those they want to make dependent on them.
Also: fuck these people.
Google unveils Home updates to fix a long list of annoyances and idiosyncrasies, and debuts Live Search to let Gemini analyze and describe live camera feeds (Thomas Ricker/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/tech/888008/big-google-home-updat…
I thought that was a really interesting thing, when people rebelled against social media bullshit of big tech
Some startups and researchers who can't access the most advanced chips are adopting a "frugal AI" approach, building smaller models on open-weight systems (Rina Chandran/Rest of World)
https://restofworld.org/2026/frugal-ai-big-tech/
Hey @…, you want to incentivise small sustainable online organisations in the EU (e.g., small not-for-profits like Small Technology Foundation) as an alternative to Big Tech?
Raise the EU's €10,000 cross-border OSS threshold to €1M (or even €10M).
You’ll still stop Big Tech corporations from jurisdiction shopping and you’ll r…
Investors have grown accustomed to buying into major selloffs because stocks recover quickly
— not this time so far.
"This is a little bit of a more protracted, longer duration selloff than what investors have become used to,"
"Ironically, I think that's keeping people from feeling that they can buy the dip."
Big Tech firm's are spending at such a record rate to fund their AI ambitions, their capital expenditure is a bigger driver…
Sources: Amazon, Google, and others plan to skirt Trump's $100K H-1B fee by finding workers in categories that don't include the fee, like existing H-1B holders (Amrith Ramkumar/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.co…
The war in Iran is complicating plans by Gulf nations to spend $300B on AI investments, putting at risk a potential source of funding for tech companies (Miles Kruppa/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/iran-war-imperils-300-billio…
Source: Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, xAI, Oracle, and OpenAI will sign White House's initiative to build their own electricity supply for AI data centers (Emma Colton/Fox News)
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/scoop-trump-brings-…
A look at India's push to become a major provider of AI services, as US tech companies pledge tens of billions in Indian data center investments (Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/world/india/why-big-te…
Tech stocks suffer their worst week in almost a year, driven by the Iran war and Meta's legal defeats; Meta fell 11%, Alphabet fell ~9%, and Microsoft fell ~7% (Ari Levy/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/27/tech-stocks-iran-war-meta-verdict.html
Court docs: Zuckerberg texted Musk approvingly about his work with DOGE in February 2025, offering to "take down content doxxing or threatening" DOGE staffers (Karissa Bell/Engadget)
https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/mark-zuc
GoDaddy integrates Cloudflare's AI Crawl Control into its hosting platform, enabling site owners to block, permit, or possibly monetize automated crawler access (Alistair Barr/Business Insider)
https://www.businessinsider.com/cloudflare
US data center demand has driven stock surges of contractors and equipment makers like Corning, Sterling Infrastructure, Comfort Systems USA, and Carrier Global (Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/business/meet-the-non-
Recon: the US market share of Copilot as paid users' first choice fell from 18.8% in July 2025 to 11.5% in January 2026, while Gemini's rose from 12.8% to 15.7% (Sebastian Herrera/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/microsofts-piv
A look at the fundamental questions facing OpenAI: its models have a very large user base but very narrow engagement, incumbents are matching its tech, and more (Benedict Evans)
https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2026/2/19/how-will-openai-compete-nkg2x
Arizona sues Kalshi for allegedly operating an illegal gambling business and unlawfully facilitating betting on elections; Kalshi faces a similar suit in Nevada (Anna Washenko/Engadget)
https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/arizona-
Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Meta, Amazon, OpenAI, Adobe, and Match sign a voluntary pledge to share threat intelligence on scammers abusing their services (Sam Sabin/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2026/03/16/tech-companies-scam-accord-google-meta-amazon…
How Anthropic's ruthless efficiency comes in part from its mission-obsessed culture, which eliminates the friction that tends to slow things down at Big Tech (Parmy Olson/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2026-0…
Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft forecast capital expenditures that reach a combined ~$650B in 2026, a 60% YoY increase driven by data center construction (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20