Skip to main content

Anti-trust - 21st century style

Anti-trust – 21st century style

All of us know when a particular company or cabal of companies begin to and then control a sector of products, it invokes attention.  These companies are sometimes subject to the anti-trust provisions of the law, i.e. Sherman Anti-Trust.  That was yesterday, when companies created an unfair market advantage to increase profits.  Many companies were broken up in this way, notably Standard Oil.

Today is different, with monopolies and cabals created to hold information, the commodity of the future.  Implied here is that large corporations such as Amazon and Facebook contain so much information about citizens, it can actually affect what people do and how they buy.  By marketing information, they will soon be moving into altering what citizens think, and even how they vote.  The tip of this is already evident, with many pundits and news anchors discussing that such firms are becoming too big and controlling too much leverage in America. Alas, even they don’t know what to do.   Shipping multiple millions of units pales next to mining and controlling multiple million-exabytes of data.

Information is the commodity of the future.

Just take a quick look at how many “information” companies are surging financially and continue to do so. They have tools, such as deep learning, that few understand. It seems obvious that some politician will adopt these ideas and develop legislation to rein in such firms, restricting how information can be used and sold.  This is a tall order, with most all of them having little understanding of how powerful massive information data lakes can be. 

I say, hurry, hurry, hurry somebody before the process is so deeply embedded, it will be nearly impossible to extricate from this trend.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Please Comment.

Popular posts from this blog

Behavioral Science and Problem-Solving

I.                                       I.                 Introduction.                Concerning our general behavior, it’s high about time we all had some understanding of how we operate on ourselves, and it is just as important how we are operated on by others. This is the wheelhouse of behavioral sciences. It is a vast subject. It touches our lives constantly. It’s influence is pervasive and can be so subtle we never notice it. Behavioral sciences profoundly affect our ability and success at problem-solving, from the elementary level to highly complex wicked problems. This is discussed in Section IV. We begin with the basics of behavioral sciences, Section II, and then through the lens of multiple categories and examples, Section III. II.     ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Principles of Insufficiency and Sufficiency

   The principles we use but don't know it.  1.      Introduction . Every field, scientific or otherwise, rests on foundational principles—think buoyancy, behavior, or democracy. Here, we explore a unique subset: principles modified by "insufficiency" and "sufficiency." While you may never have heard of them, you use them often. These terms frame principles that blend theory, practicality, and aspiration, by offering distinct perspectives. Insufficiency often implies inaction unless justified, while sufficiency suggests something exists or must be done. We’ll examine key examples and introduce a new principle with potential significance. As a principle of principles of these is that something or some action is not done enough while others may be done too much. The first six (§2-6) of our principles are in the literature, and you can easily search them online. The others are relatively new, but fit the concepts in the real world. At times, these pri...
Post a Comment
Read more

Fake News

If you've been following the news the last couple of days, you will note the flurry of copy devoted to fake news.  Both sides are blaming whatever has befallen them the consequence of fake news.  Let's look at this phenomenon a bit.    When I was a student years ago, a friend climbed some mountain in Peru.   A article was written in the local newspaper about the event.   In only three column inches, the newspaper made about six errors.   An easy article to write you say?   Just interview and reproduce.   Yet so many errors?   The question is this: was this fake news or bad reporting?   The idea here is that fake news comes in various flavors. Bad reporting – errors made by the author or editor Opinion presented as news     Deliberate creation of falsehoods to favor a point of view       The reporting of selected truths to favor a particular point of view Now we have the big social media ...
Post a Comment
Read more