Tag: regulation

Anthropic Goes Public (Predictions 2026 #9)

According to the Financial Times (and pretty much everyone else), 2026 has the potential to be the biggest IPO year in history. SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic all could go public this year; the proceeds from those three combined “would outstrip the total haul from about 200 US IPOs in 2025.”

Were any one of the three companies to successfully complete a public offering this year, they’d not only make thousands of lawyers, investors, bankers, and employees very rich, they’d also be setting a record: Each company is already privately valued at well above the benchmark for the largest public offering in history, which was Alibaba’s 2014 debut at $170 billion.

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Algorithms and Capitalism: Cleaning Up The Waze Parade

Where are we all going?!

Do you feel it? A simmering discontent with the state of capitalism in American life? I certainly do. My kids engage with social media only if they have to – never because they wish to. They believe their feeds are  manipulated by corporate interests, and they are distrustful of anyone who believes otherwise. My wife is convinced that anything she buys online – particularly the bigger ticket items like flights or hotels – is priced based on what algorithms calculate she can afford to pay – not what might be fair or offered to others. Parents in my friend group are terrified that their kids are using ChatGPT as a confidante and therapist whose motivations are unfathomable. The stock market keeps pushing ever upwards, but my colleagues are increasingly convinced a crash is around the corner.

Something just feels….off. The complex socio-economic system that we’re all a part of seems rigged. And we feel powerless to do anything about it.

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Larry Lessig – Why Can’t We Regulate the Internet Like We Regulate Real Space?

Wikipedia

I’ve known Larry Lessig for more than 25 years, and throughout that time, I’ve looked to him for wisdom – and a bit of pique – when it comes to understanding the complex interplay of law, technology, and the future of the Internet. Lessig is currently the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School. He also taught at Stanford Law School, where he founded the Center for Internet and Society, and at the University of Chicago. He is the author of more than half a dozen books, most of which have deeply impacted my own thinking and writing.

As part of an ongoing speaker series “The Internet We Deserve,” a collaboration with Northeastern’s Burnes Center For Social Change, I had a chance to sit down with Lessig and conduct a wide-ranging discussion covering his views on the impact of money in government’s role as a regulator of last resort. Lessig is particularly concerned about today’s AI-driven information environment, which he says has polluted public discourse and threatens our ability to conduct democratic processes like elections. Below is a transcript of our conversation, which, caveat emptor, is an edited version of AI-assisted output. The video can be found here, and embedded at the bottom of this article.

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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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Predictions 2021: How’d I Do? Pretty Damn Well.

As has been my practice for nearly two decades, I penned a post full of prognostications at the end of last year.  As 2021 subsequently rolled by, I stashed away news items that might prove (or disprove) those predictions – knowing that this week, I’d take a look at how I did. How’d things turn out? Let’s roll the tape…

My first prediction: Disinformation becomes the most important story of the year. At the time I wrote those words, Trump’s Big Lie was only two months old, and January 6th was just another day on the calendar.  A year later, that Big Lie has spawned countless others, culminating in one of the most damaging shifts in our nation’s politics since the Civil War. The Republican party is now fully captured by bullshit, and countless numbers of local, state, and national politicians are busy undermining democracy thanks to the Big Lie’s power.  A significant percentage of the US population has become unmoored from truth – and an equally significant group of us have simply thrown our hands up about it. Trust is at an all time low. This Barton Gellman piece in The Atlantic served as a wake up call late in the year – and its conclusions are terrifying: “We face a serious risk that American democracy as we know it will come to an end in 2024,” Gellman quotes an observer stating. “But urgent action is not happening.” I’m not happy about getting this one right, but as far as I’m concerned, this is still the most important story of the year – and the most terrifying.

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Sundar Pichai in the FT: Please Regulate Us (And Good Luck with All That)

Google’s (and now Alphabet’s) CEO opines in the FT (sub required) on why AI needs to be regulated, joining the chorus of tech leaders who have taken the apparent high road when it comes to regulation, even as governments around the world have shown next to no ability to actually regulate anything (well, I guess the Chinese have certainly regulated tech…in a not so great way). Astute readers will note that an op-ed in a paywalled publication, on a holiday no less, is not exactly placed to go viral. However, look a bit deeper, and you’ll realize that the Financial Times is very well read by Wall St., number one, and number two, it ain’t a holiday in Europe, where the most powerful people on the planet are gathering for Davos this week. Indeed.

While most of the op-ed is pretty weak sauce, a predictable call for governments to “work together” to “harness this technology for good,” I found this quote the most interesting: “Companies such as ours cannot just build promising new technology and let market forces decide how it will be used.” I wish Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple had that point of view before they built the AI-driven system we now all live with known as surveillance capitalism.

Maybe they’re learning. Or, maybe we’re not.

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Instead of Breaking Up The Tech Oligarchs, Let’s Try This One Simple Hack

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Social conversations about difficult and complex topics have arcs – they tend to start scattered, with many threads and potential paths, then resolve over time toward consensus. This consensus differs based on groups within society – Fox News aficionados will cluster one way, NPR devotees another. Regardless of the group, such consensus then becomes presumption – and once a group of people presume, they fail to explore potentially difficult or presumably impossible alternative solutions.

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Facebook Can’t Fix This.

The last 24 hours have not been kind to Facebook’s already bruised image. Above are four headlines, all of which clogged my inbox as I cleared email after a day full of meetings.

Let’s review: Any number of Facebook’s core customers – advertisers – are feeling duped and cheated (and have felt this way for years). A respected reporter who was told by Facebook executives that the company would not use data collected by its new Portal product, is now accusing the company of misrepresenting the truth  (others would call that lying, but the word lost its meaning this year). The executive formerly in charge of Facebook’s security is…on an apology tour, convinced the place he worked for has damaged our society (and he’s got a lot ofcompany).

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The Accountable Capitalism Act: It’ll Never Happen, But At Least Now the Conversation Will

The past week or so has seen a surge in commentary on the role of corporations in society, a theme familiar to readers of this site. While it might be convenient to peg the trend to Senator Elizabeth Warren’s newly minted Accountable Capitalism Act (more on that in a second), I think it’s more likely that – finally – our collective will is turning to our most logical and obvious instrument of social change, namely, the instrument of business.

We humans like to organize ourselves into social units. They range from the informal (pickup basketball games) to the elaborately structured (Senate hearings). Our ability to harness collective will is unsurpassed in the animal kingdom, it’s one of our key evolutionary adaptations, driving the success of our species across the globe.

As I’ve argued elsewhere, one of our most sophisticated social structures is the corporation, which has co-evolved with our various systems of government over the past half millennium or so. The very first corporations were in fact formed (or chartered) by governments – the Dutch East India Company is the most common example of this. In the past century, however, corporations have largely sought to shake the yoke of government regulation – and nowhere have corporations won more freedoms than in the United States, where firms are now considered legal persons with an unrestrained right to “free speech” (IE, the ability to fund political positions).

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The Waze Effect: Flocking, AI, and Private Regulatory Capture

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A couple of weeks ago my wife and I were heading across the San Rafael bridge to downtown Oakland for a show at the Fox Theatre. As all Bay area drivers know, there’s a historically awful stretch of Interstate 80 along that route – a permanent traffic sh*t show. I considered taking San Pablo road, a major thoroughfare which parallels the freeway. But my wife fired up Waze instead, and we proceeded to follow an intricate set of instructions which took us onto frontage roads, side streets, and counter-intuitive detours. Despite our shared unease (unfamiliar streets through some blighted neighborhoods), we trusted the Waze algorithms – and we weren’t alone. In fact, a continuous stream of automobiles snaked along the very same improbable route – and inside the cars ahead and behind me, I saw glowing blue screens delivering similar instructions to the drivers within.

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