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December 29, 2019 09:32 am PST

2019: EFF enters the competition fray

None of us signed up for an Internet composed of "a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four", but here we are, watching as hyper-concentrated industries rack up catastrophic victories against net neutrality, right to repair, security auditing, and a host of other issues.

These gains come at the expense of the public interest, and endanger the public interest Internet: the parts of the net that let anyone, anywhere collaborate with anyone, anywhere without permission from someone who has interposed themselves between them. They represent a triumph of lobbying over evidence, and such lobbying is only possible because the industries behind it are so fantastically concentrated that their top executives literally fit around a modest boardroom table.

In 2019, EFF became part of a global movement to restore competition to our markets. Our competition work cuts across so many of the issues that we've been committed to for three decades: privacy, the right to tinker, coders' rights, independent security research, the right to repair, and the right of users to technological self-determination.

It's a critical juncture: lawmakers are circulating pro-interoperability legislation and holding hearings, even as leaks reveal that the Big Tech companies grew through cheating and the Department of Justice is greenlighting disastrous mergers in the telecom sector.

EFF has a unique contribution to make in this new era of trustbusting: it's not enough to restore the historic commitment to antitrust (though that would be a start). Read the rest


Original Link: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/8Nrgoa79tSo/new-gilded-age-3.html

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