antitrust
Peter Thiel once famously argued that competition is for losers. His Wall Street Journal op-ed from 2014 captures his thinking as well as the giddy mood of American tech giants during the Obama-era when they had become too big to fail, but not yet too big to govern.
Tech Legal Brief
In the previous Tech Legal Brief, we covered the EU’s proposed KIDS Act, a late attempt to turn back the clock on children’s social media addiction. Creating tech regulations in the EU that protect the rights of citizens, but without angering Trump and his tech billionaires has become
tech billionaires
Editorial note: I noticed that my latest newsletter was only made available to paid members by mistake. Here is the free version. The polls indicate a sweeping blue wave at the midterm elections. In all likelihood, Trump and MAGA will dispute the results. There is also a realistic chance that
No regular newsletter post today, but check out this LinkedIn article co-written by Aysu Kececi, How Should the EU Approach AI & Data Centres? More Like China. Very soon, I will give a special offer to paid subscribers and the most dedicated free subscribers of this newsletter. I thought
AI Consciousness
Most people have had the experience of yelling and cursing at their computer when it stops working. Soon, we’ll have to be careful about what we say. We may run the risk of hurting the computer’s feelings and then it will altogehter refuse to collaborate with us. That
democracy
The West is under an existential threat at the moment. But it’s not climate change, AI, the far-right, wars or pandemics. The threat is our own cowardice. The enlightenment ideas of democratic governance and human rights cannot be sustained, if we are too afraid or just indifferent to
ai bubble
Anthropic’s filing for its upcoming IPO - which will most likely happen in November after the midterms - was leaked to Reuters. The numbers are… interesting. Anthropic made $4.6 billion in 2025 with over a billion of that coming from just two customers: Google and Amazon. These two companies are
Weekly Newsletter About Human Rights & IT
Introduction The title of today's post is inspired by a quote from Luciano Floridi’s paper Rules Without Models: Why Europe Must Build the AI It Regulates: “A decade of rule-making has produced a Europe that others are legally obliged to consider yet can ignore technologically.” That
Ursula Von Der Leyen said in her State of the Union speech to the EU parliament last Wednesday that Europe’s future prosperity and security will greatly depend on how it manages two tipping points: climate change and AI. Ambitions on the latter seemed notably tempered compared to last year’
“We need to build and maintain vast AI infrastructure and the energy to power it. To do that, we will continue to reject radical climate dogma and bureaucratic red tape, as the Administration has done since Inauguration Day. Simply put, we need to “Build, Baby, Build!” - From “America’s AI
There is an iconic clip from the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner where comedian Seth Meyers jokes about Donald Trump’s ambitions to become President. While the whole room is boiling over with laughter, Trump sits still like a statue with an ice cold stare on his face. Fifteen years
How much better would life be if we always had the right to a human? Unfortunately, we don’t. Companies are increasingly saving on customer service workers in favor of AI assistants and good advice is expensive, so is therapy. Most of the time, we’ll have to make do
Two weeks ago, I invited members to participate in my BigNerve challenge where they can (still) suggest ideas for new posts. So far, I have received three really good suggestions: * The deviousness of infinite scroll * Overview of different state laws on AI/AI data centers * The right to deal with
Let me release the tension right away by answering the post title: Nothing. Nothing happened. But that’s pretty remarkable, right? Over so many years, different people have told me to be on different platforms. “Everyone is on Snapchat nowadays. That is how the new generation communicates” “If you are
Before the printing press, I imagine storytelling was a bonfire activity that inspired a sense of awe, mystique, excitement and wonder in the audience. Storytelling is the ability to stimulate people’s imagination, giving them mental images and a conception of the unknown; what they can’t see, touch, feel
In a previous decade, American social media platforms managed to make surveillance seem “sexy”. Sexyveillance. Facebook normalized the idea of people sharing everything about their personal lives online as a way of better connecting with others. Nothing should be hidden. Hobbies, personal interests, political views, vacation photos, date of birth,
Welcome to the 16th edition of my newsletter concept Tech Legal Brief. The first edition on Ghost. Our main story today concerns the geopolitics around the billion-dollar fine the EU Commission recently imposed on Google for breaching its landmark law the Digital Markets Act. Here is what else we
This is my first post on Ghost. I have migrated all Substack subscribers over to this platform (which is why you receive this mail, if you are wondering). It feels like a small era is over for me, personally, after four years writing on Substack, so now must be a
The American market has been slow to get the memo.