The Internet: Now With Less Inter

[Mongrel]

That dude got BRAIN PROBLEMS.

[Grath]

Internet Archive ends the National Emergency Library after book publishers filed a suit against it

I blame Chuck Wendig.

My understanding is that he had nothing to do with the lawsuits, but had tweeted about the national emergency library being piracy as a joke and now has gotten sufficiently buried under death threats that he's privated his Twitter. Not sure if you were aware of that but given that context it's less funny.

Edit: did some research and the "piracy!" tweet may have been what alerted other authors to the existence of the library. Still not worth death threats.

[beatbandito]

In my opinion: if a jackass does something dumb and damaging, regardless of overreactions from other people, you can still call them out for doing something dumb and damaging.

[Thad]

I'm skeptical of the assumption that the publishers never would have found out about it if not for Chuck Wendig. The copyright industries have been sharpening their knives looking for a chance to take on the Internet Archive for years, and this was it.

[Thad]

Trump's Plan To Turn US Global Media Operations Into State-Sponsored Breitbart... Could Threaten The Open (And Encrypted) Internet

[Thad]

Research Libraries Tell Publishers To Drop Their Awful Lawsuit Against The Internet Archive

[Mongrel]

The Verge's article on SA and the Imgur news led to this fun dissection Google AMP: how Google tried to fix the web by taking it over - The Verge

For publishers over the last decade, chasing platform policies and supporting new products has become the only means of survival. “That’s the sort of tradeoff publishers are used to,” says one media executive who was involved with AMP in its early days. “Do it this way and you’ll get an audience.” But while publishers had long been wary of the tendency of Big Tech companies to suck up ad dollars and user data, they had seen Google as something closer to a partner. “You meet with a Facebook person and you see in their eyes they’re psychotic,” says one media executive who’s dealt with all the major platforms. “The Apple person kind of listens but then does what it wants to do. The Google person honestly thinks what they’re doing is the best thing.”

(emphasis mine)

[Thad]

The thing about AMP is that a streamlined subset of HTML/CSS that doesn't allow all the obnoxious JS bullshit that's making most websites miserable to use isn't an inherently bad idea.

Blocking most ad networks wouldn't be a problem, if the company doing it weren't, itself, an advertising company. Setting strict technical limits on advertising isn't a bad thing in itself; the problem is when the company setting the limits just happens, by a crazy coincidence, to run the only advertising service that they allow.

I've long believed that vertical integration inherently creates conflicts of interest. Here's yet another case in point.

[Büge]

[Thad]

Stitcher is shutting down, RSS continues to exist.