I guess these "gig" companies will simply need to do what so many other industries already do, hire a middleman.

The middleman (i.e. staffing firm/temp agency) is a company who hires "workers" so the "gig" company can easily scale down or up and reduce employee cost and associated risks. The middleman company's provided workers will likely be regulated by an entirely different set of rules, because they are not technically employees of the "gig" company.

I'll take half of what ever Uber etc. is paying their lawyers and MBAs for that little gem.

Yes, the constitution is amendable. But when the founding fathers put the numbers in place, they only had to get 3/4 of 13 states to agree on it, about 9 states. Now it's about 37 states. Not to mention the minimum number of votes within a state's legislature. Instead of getting a couple hundred people to agree on something, it's a few thousand. Good luck with that.

The last 3 amendments have mostly been constitutional clarifications and procedural matters.
23. Presidential succession
24. Age 18 to vote (aligning with legal adult status)
25. Checks Senate compensation (200 years in the making)

Is this data collection subsidizing the cost of any of these TVs? Or is this the typical "power of default"?

I'm pretty sure none of the marketing about how easy and all-in-one the TV is says anything about sending thousands of screen shots back to the mothership to enhance your experience.

These companies understand the power of default choices and pay billions to keep it that way. They want to stifle potentially disruptive newcomers, the likes of which they once were.

If there are legitimate alternatives to the Apple and Google app stores you'd see a race to the bottom, like companies shopping around their HQ mailing address to the country with the lowest tax rate and stable government.

There is clearly a power imbalance when companies routinely prevent pricing transparency or alternative payment methods to provide customers with information and choice. They are 2 functional players in the mobile app market, Apple and Google.

Congratulations to them, they have reached the top and triggered a market rebalance.

The article is pay walled, so maybe I'm missing something. Let's use Netflix as an example. Is this model/path basically correct? Netflix (OTT) => Netflix's ISP => back haul => end user ISP => end user Who is on the internet for free? I know that some back hauls have peering agreements where they pass each other's traffic, and this makes total sense since they are private geographic monopolies and need to cheaply get through each other's networks, or the internet wouldn't really work. When a Netflix comes along and wants in they pay for internet access via an ISP, even if that is provided by a company that also provides back haul services. Then if all the traffic monitors point to Netflix as a significant source of congestion, then charge them more and fix the shortcomings in your network. If the ISP has no direct business with Netflix, then the options to increase overall network capacity. You can do this by either not paying bonuses and stock buy backs every few years or charge your customers more for direct/explicit investment into the network. Arguably, the ISP should always be charging some amount to improve the network as future needs arise.

Isn't this a case where the ISP should simply charge more to connect companies like Google and Netflix to the internet? Why go through the hassle of government?

Phil Spencer: How can we juice more money out of our mobile gaming platform?

M$ employee: Put ads in more places in the UI and inside games, like between levels and cut scenes. But there's a problem.

Phil Spencer: What?

M$ employee: We don't have a mobile gaming platform.

Phil Spencer: Let's buy Nintendo.

(US centric viewpoint) When it comes to text books, larger states and larger universities should at least make their basic/common course texts in-house and free to students and staff without any DRM or convoluted access methods. You should be able to download the entire "book" as a PDF. I attended a university where all their core math books were made in house, PDF only. If you needed or want to print something, that's on you.

Texas spends more than $500 Million annually on text books. https://ncse.ngo/evolution-sti...

That kind of money could surely go toward making their own digital and print textbooks much cheaper. Many public schools only buy "classroom" sets because making sure every child can take home a textbook is too expensive. On a side note, many schools no longer let student use lockers to store items, so book storage is also a problem if every student is expected to manage 6-8 books. I also believe textbook costs tip the scales of "no homework" policies. Furthermore, it is deal dependent whether or not you can photocopy consumable materials so you don't need to repurchase entire workbooks at 10x the price of a photo copy.

The only "added value" I see in the corporate publishers is they may come with proprietary web portals to serve "enhanced" content. Digital access commonly does not last as long as a school may keep a textbook.

An especially egregious textbook publisher tactic at the university level is to require school work be submitted digitally and the access portal can only be accessed with an key from a new, current edition textbook. They even go so far as to invalidate unused keys from previous editions (some only 1 or 2 years old) that were not used.

I can see a case for specialty texts, but that's about it.

What I get from this is a large number of users are likely illegally hosting and distributing media on a platform (Plex) that phones home and rats them out?

Or else...

Why would Plex block an entire ISP for behavior that cannot be proved comes from Plex servers using the IPS?

Excellent argument! /s

Once I pay for and eat a McDonald's combo will it cost me millions to switch to Burger King? Will McDonald's start charging extra for salt on my fries simply because I can no longer afford to switch to Burger King who still offers "free" salt?

You're very incorrect. Plenty of people at Microsoft care about linking your mug shot to any other internet/technology presence they can to create a larger data profile on you to monetize.

My work account tied into M$ doesn't have my picture. I told my boss when the US has better privacy laws and user protections, I'd do it. I didn't choose to work for a company to help M$ or any other 3rd party build a profile on me, nor should I have to. And don't come back with "just find another job", that's a straw-man argument. The whole point of this is tech companies with too much power to force people into doings things they'd rather not (like massive data harvesting and selling said data) because there really isn't a viable alternative or our government refuses to protect it's citizens.

Google may have been the best search engine and preferred by most internet users due to the quality of search results. But once they had billions of dollars to spend and are really just an advertising company, they started using tactics to prey on users lack of concern or difficulty to choose another search engine, especially in the mobile arena, by paying to have Google as the default search engine.

If Google is still so desirable, they why do they pay billions of dollars to be the default? Wouldn't users intentionally seek out Google and set it as the default if it were not already so?

It genuinely confuses me that corporations have this kind of logic. i.e. The way for Google to stay desirable as a search provider that users choose to use it to force it on them?

My U.S. company switched from Cisco WebEx to Teams in 2020 because Teams was "free" with all of our other M$ stuff. Zoom was clobbering Teams in the video conference market, so M$ quickly implemented more features and integrations for "free" with existing M$ bundle. Now that M$ has gotten enough corporate users, it has implemented price tiers for certain Teams features, even moving some out of free. To me, this is clearly monopoly-like market abuse.

Duopoly problem.
$98 billion just in fees... talk about dragging down the economy.
So the credit card model of making money on the interest against my loan is not enough? They also need to take a cut of the transaction from the merchant for the privilege to allow customers to easily take out more loan money to for the CC company to make more money from increased or revolving loan amount?

How hard would it be to create a mandatory open processing standard for point of sales terminals to accept any secure card that meets the standard? Then the cards can compete on features and services.