Don’t Sleep on the EU’s Digital Markets and Digital Services Acts

(This is a preview of a piece I’m working on for Signal360, to be published next week.)

“The US litigates, the EU legislates.” That’s what one confidential source told me when I asked about the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act, the European Union’s twin set of Internet regulations coming into force this year. And indeed, even as the United States government continues an endless parade of lawsuits aimed at big tech, the EU has legislated its way to the front of the line when it comes to impacting how the largest and most powerful companies in technology do business. It may be tempting to dismiss both the DSA and the DMA as limited to only Europe, and impacting only Big Tech, but that would be a mistake. It’s still very early – much of the laws’ impact has yet to play out – but there’s no doubt the new legislation will drive deep changes to markets around the world. And even if you aren’t a digital platform, your own business practices may well be in for meaningful change.

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The Sites That Never Get Built: Why Today’s Internet Discourages Experimentation

 

The Dude knows the pitfalls of scattering a loved ones’ ashes…

Every so often I get an idea for a new website or service. I imagine you do as well. Thinking about new ideas is exciting – all that promise and potential. Some of my favorite conversations open with “Wouldn’t it be cool if….”

Most of my ideas start as digital services that take advantage of the internet’s ubiquity. It’s rare I imagine something bounded in real space – a new restaurant or a retail store. I’m an internet guy, and even after decades of enshittification, I still think the internet is less than one percent developed.  But a recent thought experiment made me question that assumption. As I worked through a recent “wouldn’t it be cool” moment, I realized just how moribund the internet ecosystem has become, and how deadening it is toward spontaneous experimentation.

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Google Will Become the World’s Largest Subscription Service. Discuss.

A Google subscription box via Dall-E

Those of you who’ve been reading for a while may have noticed a break in my regular posts – it’s August, and that means vacation. I’ll be back at it after Labor Day, but an interesting story from The Information today is worth a brief note.

Titled How Google is Planning to Beat OpenAI, the piece details the progress of Google’s Gemini project, formed four months ago when the company merged its UK-based DeepMind unit with its Google Brain research group. Both groups were working on sophisticated AI projects, including LLMs, but with unique cultures, leadership, and code bases, they had little else in common. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai combined their efforts in an effort to speed his company’s time to market in the face of stiff competition from OpenAI and Microsoft.

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At Threads, No News Is Good News, For Now. But That’s About To Change.

Threads is a week old today, and in those short seven days, the service has lapped generative AI as the favorite tech story of the mainstream press. And why not? Threads has managed to scale past 100 million users in just five days — far faster than ChatGPT, which broke TikTok’s record just a few months ago. That’s certainly news — and news is what drives the press, after all.

Threads has re-established Meta as a hero in tech’s endless narrative of good and evil — I can’t count the number of posts I’ve seen from influential public figures joking that, thanks to Threads, they actually like Mark Zuckerberg again. And Meta can certainly relish this win — the company has been the scapegoat for the entire tech industry for the better part of a decade.

But were I an executive at Meta responsible for Threads, I’d not be sleeping that well right about now. As they well know, the relationship between the tech industry and the press can shift in an instant. Glowing stories about breaking app download records can just as quickly become hit pieces about how Meta has leveraged its monopoly position in social media to vanquish yet another market, killing free speech and “real news” along the way. So far that story has been confined to the fringes of Elon’s bitter troll army over on whatever remains of Twitter these days, but should Threads lap Twitter as the largest app focused on creating a “public square” — whatever that means — the worm will quickly turn.

Meta has a tiger by the tail here, and so far, they’ve been working hard to tamp down expectations. Both Zuckerberg and Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri have been active on Threads, posting daily with both practiced humility (“gosh this thing is succeeding well beyond our expectations,” “we’re just at the starting line,” “we know we’re over our skis”) and reminders about how Threads isn’t like Twitter. Mosseri, for example, has downplayed the role of news — Twitter’s main differentiation and its endlessly maddening Achilles hell; Zuckerberg’s first Thread defined his new service as “an open and friendly public space” — prompting Musk to fire back that he’d rather be “attacked by strangers on Twitter” than live in “hide the pain” world of Instagram.

But The News — with all of its complications — is coming for Threads. I left Twitter more than six months ago, and while I sometimes missed feeling connected to the real time neural net the app had become for me, I almost instantly felt better about both myself and the world. Living on Twitter means navigating an unceasing firehose of toxicity, and Musk’s interventions only worsened the poisonous atmosphere of the place. I joined Threads a half hour after it launched, and indeed, it was a giddy place, its initial users basking in the app’s surprising lack of toxicity.

Other journalists have noticed the same thing. For now, the narrative around Threads centers on its extraordinary growth, but a close second is how “nice” the place feels compared to Twitter. Meta executives would like to keep it that way — combining “what Instagram does best” with “a friendly place for public conversation,” as Zuck put it in his first post.

To that fantasy, I say good luck to you, Mr. Zuckerberg. Keeping Threads “nice” means controlling the conversation in ways that are sure to antagonize just about everyone. No company — not Facebook, not Instagram, not Reddit, and certainly not Twitter, has figured out content moderation at scale. If, as Zuckerberg claimed, the goal with Threads is to create a “town square with more than 1 billion people,” the center of that square will have to contain news. And news, I can tell you from very personal experience, is the front door to a household full of humans screaming at each other.

“Politics and hard news are inevitably going to show up on Threads,” Mosseri told the Hard Fork podcast last week, “But we’re not going to do anything to encourage those verticals.”

I’ll have more to say about that sentiment in another post, but for now, I’ll leave it at this: When Threads hits 300 million active users — roughly the size of Twitter — the love affair between the press and Threads will more than likely come to an end.

I’ll be talking to Meta’s head of advertising Nicola Mendelsohn at P&G Signal tomorrow. You can register here for free.

You can follow whatever I’m doing next by signing up for my site newsletter here. Thanks for reading.

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Threads: We Don’t Want to “Hang Out With Everybody.” Sometimes, We Want To Leave.

(AP Photo/Richard Drew)

Apparently the open web has finally died. This the very same week Meta launches Threads, which, if its first day is any indication, seems to be thriving (10 million sign ups in its first few hours, likely 50 million by the time this publishes…).

But before Threads’ apparent success, most writers covering tech had decided that the era of free, open-to-the-public, at scale services like Twitter, Reddit, and even Facebook/Insta is over. I’ll pick on this recent one from The Verge: So where are we all supposed to go now?

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It Takes Time, And It Ain’t For Sure.

We’re all waiting for AI.

Not since the iPhone, in the mid aughts. No, not since the rise of the browser and the original web, in the early nineties. No, not since the introduction of the PC, in the 1980s. Ah hell, honestly, not since the Gutenberg printing press in the 15th century – or, fuck it, let’s just go there: Not since the invention of language, which as far as we know marked the moment when homo sapiens first branched from its primate cousins.

That’s how big a deal AI is, according to academics, politicians, and a rapt technology and capital  ecosystem starved for The Next Big Thing.

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Can Gather Change the Course of Internet History?

The Gather founding team from top left: Zan Doan, CTO, Sudhir Kandula, COO, Mengmeng Chen, Cofounder & CPO, Sumit Agarwal, Cofounder & CEO

A few weeks ago I was genuinely thunderstruck. My co-editor at P&G Signal (thanks Stan!)  introduced me to a new company – one that promised to give consumers control over their personal data in new and innovative ways. At first I was skeptical – I’d seen quite a few “personal data lockers” come and go over the past decade or so. I even invested in one way back in 2012. Alas, that didn’t work out.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been writing – over and over and over – about how the Internet’s central problem is the lack of leverage that consumers have over the data they co-create with the hundreds of apps, sites, and platforms they use. But data lockers never got any traction – most were confusing to install and run, and they all suffered from a lack of tangible consumer benefits. Sure, having a copy of all my personal data sounds great, but in the end, what can it do for me? Up till now, the answer was not much.

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AI’s “Oppenheimer Moment” Is Bullshit.

Well that was something. Yesterday the Center for AI Safety, which didn’t exist last year, released a powerful 22-word statement that sent the world’s journalists into a predictable paroxysm of hand-wringing:

“Mitigating the risk of extinction from A.I. should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

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The Firefox Test

The Information today reports that Mozilla plans to integrate GPT-like chat technology into its widely used Firefox browser. Mozilla has long partnered with Google for search, yielding a reputed hundreds of millions in revenue as a result.

The tech press has breathlessly speculated that, freshly invigorated thanks to ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Bing might steal a major distribution partner from Google. First it was Samsung (wrong), then it was Apple (unlikely), and always there was Firefox, with its 200 million monthly users and its tumultuous relationship with its Googley paymaster.

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Google Splits the Web Into “Commercial” and “Non Commercial” Search

Last week I was traveling – and being in four places in six days does not make for a good writing vibe. But today I’m back – and while the pace is picking up for the annual Signal conference I co-produce with P&G, I wanted to take a minute to reflect on last week’s news – no, not that CNN shitshow, but Google’s big I/O conference, where the company finally revealed its plans around search, AI, and a whole lot more.

Leading tech analyst Ben Thompson summarized how most of the pundit-ocracy responded to Google I/O: “the ‘lethargic search monopoly’ has woken up.” He also noted something critical: “AI is in fact a sustaining technology for all of Big Tech, including Google.” Put another way, the bar has been reset and no one company is going to own a moat around AI  – at least not yet.  Over time, of course, moats can and will be built, just as they were with core technologies like the microprocessor, the Internet itself, and the mobile phone. But for now, it’s a race without clear winners.

Head to The Verge if you want a summary of what went down at I/O – beyond AI, Google doubled down on devices – positioning itself as a serious competitor to Apple (I’ve been a Google Pixel user for years, and all I want is for the two companies to figure out how to deliver a text…).

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