Platforms

Our working definition of a digital platform (with a hat tip to Harold Feld of Public Knowledge) is an online service that operates as a two-sided or multi-sided market with at least one side that is “open” to the mass market

Is AI Use Increasing Among Small Businesses?

Recent research shows that advanced technology adoption and use are concentrated in large firms. This pattern also applies to artificial intelligence (AI). Evidence from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Annual Business Survey for the years 2017 and 2018 indicates that AI use in producing goods and services rises with firm size (Zolas et al., 2020 and Acemoglu et al., 2022). However, this pattern may be changing in the wake of recent advances in generative AI, which may have a disproportionate impact on small firms’ adoption and use of AI. 

Amazon eyes news partners for revamped AI Alexa voice assistant

Amazon is reaching out to news publishers about opportunities to license their content for the next generation of Amazo

Critics said Musk 'overpaid' for Twitter. Thanks to Trump and xAI, it could actually be a steal.

When Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion, it was panned as one of the worst tech acquisitions in history. Two years, an election, and a generative-AI boom later, it's starting to look like more of a bargain. Shortly after the deal closed in October 2022, the Wedbush Securities tech analyst Dan Ives said it would "go down as one of the most overpaid tech acquisitions in the history of M&A deals on the Street." Yet the deal has provided significant benefits for Musk.

Online Nation 2024 Report

This annual publication looks at what people in the UK are doing online, how they are served by online content providers and platforms, and their attitudes to and experiences of using the internet. In May 2024, UK adults spent an average of 4 hours 20 minutes a day online, across smartphones, tablets and computers.  Almost half (48%) of the time UK adults spend online is on services owned by Alphabet or Meta. Reddit was the fastest-growing large social media platform in the UK, reaching more than half of UK online adults by June 2024. Eighteen to 24-year-old TikTok and Snapchat visitors spe

Australia’s Social Media Ban for Under 16s to Become Law

Australia’s social media ban for children under the age of 16 will become law after passing the Senate, the upper house of Parliament, even as questions linger over how the new restrictions will be implemented. Under the new laws, which are scheduled to come into effect in about one year, children in Australia under the age of 16 will be banned from setting up accounts on popular social media sites including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok.

Musk admits X throttles links as ‘news influencers’ take over

X owner Elon Musk seemed to confirm what sharp-eyed users have suspected for months: that putting a link in your post on his social network is a good way to ensure it won’t go viral. Musk was replying to a post by the influential Silicon Valley investor Paul Graham, who opined that “the deprioritization of tweets with links in them is Twitter’s biggest flaw.” X’s main draw, Graham said, is “to find out what’s going on, and you can’t do that without links.” Musk’s 

Threads adds 35 million new signups this month

Instagram's X rival, Threads, has seen 35 million new users sign up for the platform since November 1st. Threads and rival BlueSky are competing to attract d

Letter to the Censorship Cartel

Over the past few years, Americans have lived through an unprecedented surge in censorship. Your companies [Google, Microsoft, Meta/Facebook, and Apple] played significant roles in this improper conduct. Big Tech companies silenced Americans for doing nothing more than exercising their First Amendment rights. They targeted core political, religious, and scientific speech.

Supreme Court allows shareholder lawsuit against Facebook to go forward

The Supreme Court dismissed an appeal by Meta’s Facebook, allowing to go forward a lawsuit brought by investors who claim they were misled by the social media giant about risks from a massive data breach. The justices wrote in a unanimous, one-line opinion that the case was “improvidently granted,” meaning the court should not have taken it in the first place.

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Finalizes Rule on Federal Oversight of Popular Digital Payment Apps to Protect Personal Data, Reduce Fraud, and Stop Illegal “Debanking”

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) finalized a rule to supervise the largest nonbank companies offering digital funds transfer and payment wallet apps. The rule will help the CFPB to ensure that these companies—specifically those handling more than 50 million transactions per year—follow federal law just like large banks, credit unions, and other financial institutions already supervised by the CFPB.