Foreign Policy: “America has a Resilience Problem”

As in prior moments of contestation, we are starting to hear the argument that America must protect its domestic monopolies to ensure we stay ahead on the global stage. Rather than double down on promoting free and fair competition, this “national champions” argument holds that coddling our dominant firms is the path to maintaining global dominance.

We should be extraordinarily skeptical of this argument and instead recognize that monopoly power in America today is a major threat to America’s national interests and global leadership. History and experience show that lumbering monopolies mired in red tape and bureaucratic inertia cannot deliver the breakthrough technological advancements that hungry start-ups tend to create. It is precisely these breakthroughs that have allowed America to harness cutting-edge technologies and have made our economy the envy of the world. To stay ahead globally, we don’t need to protect our monopolies from innovation—we need to protect innovation from our monopolies. And one of the clearest illustrations of how consolidation threatens our national interests is the risk monopolization poses to our common defense.

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A basic tenet of the American experiment is that real liberty means freedom from economic coercion and from the arbitrary, unaccountable power that comes with economic domination. Our antitrust laws were passed as a way to safeguard against undue concentration of power in our economic sphere, just as the Constitution creates checks and balances to safeguard against concentrated power in our political sphere.

Lina M. Khan

I haven’t been terribly impressed by Lina Khan’s ideas of antitrust at first, but I have to say that she seemed to be doing a good job as FTC chair during the Biden administration – as evidenced by the alarmed reactions of tech CEOs. The example she cites in this speech – Boeing being crowned ‘national champion’ and allowed to eliminate its domestic competition – is quite relevant, given the numerous issues the company has faced recently, which have been linked to decreasing quality and cost cutting through offshoring.

The Verge: “Microsoft’s AI CEO thinks Copilot will age and ‘have a room that it lives in’”

Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft’s AI CEO, has a vision of Copilot that involves it being so highly personalized that “it will age”. Microsoft has been increasingly pushing Copilot to be a personalized AI assistant, with a big redesign last year that included a conversational voice mode. Now, Suleyman’s Microsoft AI team is launching a new Copilot virtual character that will interact in real-time with you.

Copilot will certainly have a kind of permanent identity, a presence, and it will have a room that it lives in, and it will age, says Suleyman on an episode of The Colin & Samir Show this week. I’m really interested in this idea of digital patina. The things I love in my world are the things that are a little bit worn or rubbed down, and have scuff marks. Unfortunately in the digital world we don’t have a sense of age.

Tom Warren

While the analogies to Clippy are beyond obvious, this description reminded me instead of Tamagotchi and their rudimentary digital pets you had to care for and interact with constantly to raise. There’s a certain measure of gamification involved in this idea of an always-present AI assistant, an unspoken tactic to anthropomorphize and create emotional connections with these digital constructs. These tactics have a long history in the tech world to boost engagement; the fact that they’re being introduced to drive AI adoption reveals that AI assistants don’t provide much inherent value to their users, otherwise people wouldn’t need artificial incentives to come back to them.

heise online: “EU launches its own DNS service with practical functions”

The EU now offers its own DNS resolution service (Resolver) and wants to help its citizens to become less dependent on offers from large US companies such as Cloudflare and Google. The service is called DNS4EU and pre-filters internet addresses at the user’s request: In addition to phishing and fraud sites, it blocks websites and advertising that are harmful to minors.

A DNS resolver is one of the almost invisible basic services for stable Internet access: it works in the background, usually at the provider, and ensures that Internet addresses such as www.heise.de are translated into IP addresses such as 2a02:2e0:3fe:1001:7777:772e:2:85. However, in many countries – including Germany –, blocking orders by lobby associations or youth protection authorities are often implemented at DNS level. For this reason and for reasons of speed, users often make do with alternative providers such as Google, which not only uses one of the most beautiful IP addresses with the resolver 8.8.8.8, but also answers over a trillion queries a day. Cloudflare (1.1.1.1) and Quad9 (9.9.9.9) also operate open resolvers. The problem is that many of these servers are located in the USA, which is why the Quad9 consortium has already moved its headquarters to Zurich.

Dr. Christopher Kunz

Good to see the European Union taking – albeit small – steps towards that elusive digital sovereignty and autonomy from US-based companies. While far from the flashy headlines about AI and quantum, DNS over HTTPS improves user privacy and security by preventing eavesdropping and manipulation of DNS data by man-in-the-middle attacks.

Authentication issues in Adobe Digital Editions

Since the start of the pandemic back in 2020 and the sudden shift to working from home, I have found myself reading far less than before. On one hand I had lost my regular reading time slot, during my commute to and from work on my Kindle, on the other it felt that the real world delivered a whole lot more excitement than before, and fiction couldn’t quite keep up with that. And of course, there are so many more things competing for your time, from TV series to games.

But lately I have joined a new book club, an offshoot of my circle of photographers in Bucharest. Since our next book selection is a work I had already read years ago (and reviewed here), I wanted to read it again. I had it as an e-book, purchased in the Romanian edition from a local publisher. The ePub file, as with most e-books not published in the Kindle store, is DRM-protected, and to activate it and read the book you need Adobe Digital Editions installed. As I have switched laptops since the last time I’ve read ePub files, I hadn’t installed Digital Editions yet on the new laptop, so I downloaded and installed it to get things going.

The Wall Street Journal: “T-Mobile to buy Ryan Reynolds’ Mint Mobile in $1.35 Billion Deal”

Ryan Reynolds used his celebrity and wit to build Mint Mobile into a low-cost competitor in the crowded wireless business.

Now, the Hollywood star and his backers are cashing in: selling the upstart brand to T-Mobile US Inc. in a cash and stock deal valued at up to $1.35 billion. Mr. Reynolds owns roughly 25% of Mint Mobile, according to people familiar with the matter. That means he stands to personally receive more than $300 million in cash and stock from the transaction.

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Mint Mobile resells service using T-Mobile’s network, so the deal will save costs but doesn’t bring new customers to T-Mobile. The companies didn’t disclose how many customers Mint Mobile has.

Over the long term, we’ll also benefit from applying the marketing formula Mint has become famous for across more parts of T-Mobile, T-Mobile Chief Executive Mike Sievert said.

It gives T-Mobile another prepaid brand, along with Metro by T-Mobile and Connect by T-Mobile, that caters to lower-income users. Mint charges as little as $15 a month. T-Mobile ended 2022 with about 21.4 million prepaid subscribers.

Will Feuer & Lauren Thomas

I’m not sure why this piece of news popped up recently on the Vergecast – the deal itself was struck more than two years ago, and completed last year – but I found it very indicative of the American economy. Mint Mobile has always operated as a MVNO on T-Mobile’s network, meaning that Mint did not own any wireless infrastructure, instead leasing access to T-Mobile’s towers and spectrum to provide service to its customers. So essentially Ryan Reynolds took T-Mobile’s services, put a different label on them, used his fame to attract customers, then sold this thing back to the owner for a hefty profit!

The Cut: “Why Don’t We Dream about Our Smartphones?”

I asked Alice Robb, author of the forthcoming book Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey, to explain our phones’ relative absence from our dreams, and she introduced me to what’s called the “threat simulation hypothesis” of dreaming. [This theory] basically suggests that the reason why we dream is that dreams allow us to work through our anxieties and our fears in a more low-risk environment, so we’re able to practice for stressful events, says Robb. This hypothesis also posits that because our dreams are an evolved defense mechanism, we tend to dream more often about fears and concerns that were relevant to our ancestors — so, less about, say, hacking, and more about running from wild animals. People tend not to dream quite as much about reading and writing, which are more recent developments in human history, and more about survival related things, like fighting, even if that has nothing to do with who you are in real life, says Robb.

While the threat simulation hypothesis can be interpreted to support the tweet that started this whole thing, Robb tells me there’s also evidence to suggest it’s not totally accurate. (Shocking.) For instance, analyzing data from more than 16,000 dream reports, researchers have shown that cell phones appear in 3.55 percent of women’s dreams (and 2.69 percent of men’s) — not a huge number, but it’s higher than the frequency with which movies (3.18 percent), computers (1.2 percent), and airplanes (1.49 percent) appear in our dreams.

Katie Heaney

I’ve never really thought about this before seeing someone share a LinkedIn article on the topic, but I have also never dreamt about my smartphone! Or at least I don’t recall in case I have.

Financial Times: “OpenAI and Jony Ive accused of trying to ‘bury’ rival start-up”

The trademark dispute comes just a month after OpenAI revealed plans to acquire Ive’s hardware start-up in a bet on alternatives to the smartphone as the dominant device to access AI.

Over the weekend, OpenAI removed a blog post and short video about the deal, following a restraining order by a US federal judge on Friday. OpenAI and LoveFrom, Ive’s design firm, have denied any intentional trademark infringement or wrongdoing.

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In its lawsuit, filed this month, iyO detailed the meetings between Rugolo, OpenAI and Ive’s team leading up to May.

Tan requested that several team members try out the iyO device, according to emails disclosed in the suit. Tan, Welinder, and Evans Hankey — the former Apple design chief who joined Ive at io — met iyO again in May for a presentation of its product, according to the lawsuit.

They were talking about buying our company, said Rugolo. They got everything, right down to how the software stack works. I foolishly trusted them, because I thought we were collaborating and serious about working together.

The meetings came three years after an initial round of contacts. In April 2022, iyO said it met Ryan Cohen, an executive at Altman’s personal investment fund Apollo Projects, and LoveFrom team member and former Pinterest co-founder Evan Sharp. Both passed on investing at the time.

Michael Acton & Cristina Criddle

What a perfect analogy for LLMs, copying original work from others and claiming it as their own! Although in business these kind of maneuvers are well-known: walk up to a smaller company with promises of investments or even an acquisition, get them to show you their most-prized ideas to prove their worth, then walk away and launch something similar to bury them essentially for free.