However, I recently met other open source developers that make a living from donations, and they helped widen my perspective. At Amsterdam.js, I heard Henry Zhu speak about sustainability in the Babel project and beyond, and it was a pretty dire picture. Later, over breakfast, Henry and I had a deeper conversation on this topic. In Amsterdam I also met up with Titus, who maintains the Unified project full-time. Meeting with these people I confirmed my belief in the donation model for sustainability. It works. But, what really stood out to me was the question: is it fair?

I decided to collect data from OpenCollective and GitHub, and take a more scientific sample of the situation. The results I found were shocking: there were two clearly sustainable open source projects, but the majority (more than 80%) of projects that we usually consider sustainable are actually receiving income below industry standards or even below the poverty threshold.

What the data says

I picked popular open source projects from OpenCollective, and selected the yearly income data from each. Then I looked up their GitHub repositories, to measure the count of stars, and how many “full-time” contributors they have had in the past 12 months. Sometimes I also looked up the Patreon pages for those few maintainers that had one, and added that data to the yearly income for the project. For instance, it is obvious that Evan You gets money on Patreon to work on Vue.js. These data points allowed me to measure: project popularity (a proportional indicator of the number of users), yearly revenue for the whole team, and team size.

[…]

Those that work full-time sometimes complement their income with savings or by living in a country with lower costs of living, or both (Sindre Sorhus).

Then, based on the latest StackOverflow developer survey, we know that the low end of developer salaries is around $40k, while the high end of developer salaries is above $100k. That range depicts the industry standard for developers, given their status as knowledge workers, many of which are living in OECD countries. This allowed me to classify the results into four categories:

• BLUE: 6-figure salary
• GREEN: 5-figure salary within industry standards
• ORANGE: 5-figure salary below our industry standards
• RED: salary below the official US poverty threshold

The first chart, below, shows team size and “price” for each GitHub star.

More than 50% of projects are red: they cannot sustain their maintainers above the poverty line. 31% of the projects are orange, consisting of developers willing to work for a salary that would be considered unacceptable in our industry. 12% are green, and only 3% are blue: Webpack and Vue.js. Income per GitHub star is important: sustainable projects generally have above $2/star. The median value, however, is $1.22/star. Team size is also important for sustainability: the smaller the team, the more likely it can sustain its maintainers.

The median donation per year is $217, which is substantial when understood on an individual level, but in reality includes sponsorship from companies that are doing this also for their own marketing purposes.

The next chart shows how revenue scales with popularity.

You can browse the data yourself by accessing this Dat archive with a LibreOffice Calc spreadsheet:

dat://bf7b912fff1e64a52b803444d871433c5946c990ae51f2044056bf6f9655ecbf
 [...]

The total amount of money being put into open source is not enough for all the maintainers. If we add up all of the yearly revenue from those projects in this data set, it’s $2.5 million. The median salary is approximately $9k, which is below the poverty line. If split up that money evenly, that’s roughly $22k, which is still below industry standards.

The core problem is not that open source projects are not sharing the money received. The problem is that, in total numbers, open source is not getting enough money. $2.5 million is not enough. To put this number into perspective, startups get typically much more than that.

Tidelift has received $40 million in funding, to “help open source creators and maintainers get fairly compensated for their work” (quote). They have a team of 27 people, some of them ex-employees from large companies (such as Google and GitHub). They probably don’t receive the lower tier of salaries. Yet, many of the open source projects they showcase on their website are below poverty line regarding income from donations.

[…]

GitHub was bought by Microsoft for $7.5 billion. To make that quantity easier to grok, the amount of money Microsoft paid to acquire GitHub – the company – is more than 3000x what the open source community is getting yearly. In other words, if the open source community saved up every penny of the money they ever received, after a couple thousand years they could perhaps have enough money to buy GitHub jointly.

[…]

If Microsoft GitHub is serious about helping fund open source, they should put their money where their mouth is: donate at least $1 billion to open source projects. Even a mere $1.5 million per year would be enough to make all the projects in this study become green. The Matching Fund in GitHub Sponsors is not enough, it gives a maintainer at most just $5k in a year, which is not sufficient to raise the maintainer from the poverty threshold up to industry standard.

Source: André Staltz – Software below the poverty line

Unfortunately I’ve been talking about this for years now.

It’s time to make open source open but less free for the big users.

The man heading up any potentially US government antitrust probes into tech giants like Apple and Google used to work for… Apple and Google.

In the revolving-door world that is Washington DC, that conflict may not seem like much but one person isn’t having it: Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) this week sent Makan Delrahim a snotagram in which she took issue with him overseeing tech antitrust efforts.

“I am writing to urge you to recuse yourself from the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) reported antitrust investigations into Google and Apple,” she wrote. “Although you are the chief antitrust attorney in the DoJ, your prior work lobbying the federal government on behalf of these and other companies in antitrust matters compromises your ability to manage or advise on this investigation without real or perceived conflicts of interest.”

Warren then outlines precisely what she means by conflict of interests: “In 2007, Google hired you to lobby federal antitrust officials on behalf of the company’s proposed acquisition of online advertising company DoubleClick, a $3.1 billion merger that the federal government eventually signed off on… You reported an estimated $100,000 in income from Google in 2007.”

It’s not just Google either. “In addition to the investigation into Google, the DoJ will also have jurisdiction over Apple. In both 2006 and 2007, Apple hired you to lobby the federal government on its behalf on patent reform issues,” Warren continues.

She notes: “Federal ethics law requires that individuals recuse themselves from any ‘particular matter involving specific parties’ if ‘the circumstances would cause a reasonable person with knowledge of the relevant facts to question his impartiality in the matter.’ Given your extensive and lucrative previous work lobbying the federal government on behalf of Google and Apple… any reasonable person would surely question your impartiality in antitrust matters…”

This is fine

Delrahim has also done work for a range of other companies including Anthem, Pfizer, Qualcomm, and Caesars but it’s the fact that he has specific knowledge and connections with the very highest levels of tech giants while being in charge of one of the most anticipated antitrust investigations of the past 30 years that has got people concerned.

This is ridiculous, of course, because Delrahim is a professional and works for whoever hires him. It’s not as if he would do something completely inappropriate like give a speech outside the United States in which he walks through exactly how he would carry out an antitrust investigation into tech giants and the holes that would exist in such an investigation, thereby giving them a clear blueprint to work against.

Because that would be nuts.

He definitely did not do that. What he actually did was talk about how it was possible to investigate tech giants, despite some claiming it wasn’t – which is, you’ll understand, quite the opposite.

“The Antitrust Division does not take a myopic view of competition,” Delrahim said during a speech in Israel this week. “Many recent calls for antitrust reform, or more radical change, are premised on the incorrect notion that antitrust policy is only concerned with keeping prices low. It is well-settled, however, that competition has price and non-price dimensions.”

Instead, he noted: “Diminished quality is also a type of harm to competition… As an example, privacy can be an important dimension of quality. By protecting competition, we can have an impact on privacy and data protection.”

So that’s diminished quality and privacy as lines of attack. Anything else, Makan?

“Generally speaking, an exclusivity agreement is an agreement in which a firm requires its customers to buy exclusively from it, or its suppliers to sell exclusively to it. There are variations of this restraint, such as requirements contracts or volume discounts,” he mused at the Antitrust New Frontiers Conference in Tel Aviv.

Source: Anyone else find it weird that the bloke tasked with probing tech giants for antitrust abuses used to, um, work for the same tech giants? • The Register

So it looks as though he is ignoring most of what is making this antitrust predatory as he’s mainly looking at price, then a bit at quality and privacy. Except he’s not looking at quality and privacy. Or leverrage. Or the waterbed effect. Or undercutting. Or product copying. Or vertical integration. Or aggression.

For more on why monopolies are bad, check out

In an interview this week with CNN, Google CEO Sundar Pichai attempted to turn antitrust questions around by pointing to what they say is the silver lining of size: Big beats China. In the face of an intensifying push for antitrust action, the argument has been called tech’s version of “too big to fail.”

“Scale does offer many benefits, it’s important to understand that,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said. “As a company, we sometimes invest five, ten years ahead without necessarily worrying about short term profits. If you think about how technology leadership contributes to leadership on a global economic scale. Big companies are what are investing in AI the most. There are many benefits to taking a long term view which big companies are able to do.”

Pichai, who did allow that scrutiny and competition were ultimately good things, made points that echoed arguments made by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg who made his point a lot more frankly.

“I think you have this question from a policy perspective, which is, ‘Do we want American companies to be exporting across the world?’” Zuckerberg said last year. “I think that the alternative, frankly, is going to be the Chinese companies.”

Pichai never outright said the word “China” but he didn’t have to. China’s rising tech industry and increasingly tense relationship with the United States

“There are many countries around the world which aspire to be the next Silicon Valley. And they are supporting their companies, too,” Pichai said to CNN. “So we have to balance both. This doesn’t mean you don’t scrutinize large companies. But you have to balance it with the fact that you want big, successful companies as well.”

This has been one of Silicon Valley’s safest fallback arguments since antitrust sentiment began gaining steam in the United States. But the history of American industry offers a serious counterweight.

Columbia Law School professor Tim Wu spent much of 2018 outlining the case for antitrust action. He wrote a book on the subject, The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age, and appeared all over media to make his argument. In an op-ed for the New York Times, Wu called back to the heated Japanese-American tech competition of the 1980s.

IBM faced an unprecedented international challenge in the mainframe market from Japan’s NEC while Sony, Panasonic, and Toshiba made giant leaps forward. The companies had the strong support of the Japanese government.

Wu laid out what happened next:

Had the United States followed the Zuckerberg logic, we would have protected and promoted IBM, AT&T and other American tech giants — the national champions of the 1970s. Instead, the federal government accused the main American tech firms of throttling competition. IBM was subjected to a devastating, 13-year-long antitrust investigation and trial, and the Justice Department broke AT&T into eight pieces in 1984. And indeed, the effect was to weaken some of America’s most powerful tech firms at a key moment of competition with a foreign power.

But something else happened as well. With IBM and AT&T under constant scrutiny, a whole series of industries and companies were born without fear of being squashed by a monopoly. The American software industry, freed from IBM, came to life, yielding companies like Microsoft, Sun and Lotus. Personal computers from Apple and other companies became popular, and after the breakup of AT&T, companies like CompuServe and America Online rushed into online networking, eventually yielding what we now call the “internet economy.”

Silicon Valley’s argument, however, does resonate. The 1980s is not the 2010s and the relationship between China and the U.S. today is significantly colder and even more complex than Japan and the U.S. three decades ago.

American politicians have echoed some of big tech’s concerns about Chinese leadership.

Congress just opened what promises to be a lengthy antitrust investigation into big tech that barely talked about China.

Source: Facing Antitrust Pressure, Google Starts Spinning Its Own Too Big to Fail Argument

I’d agree with Wu – the China argument is a fear trap. Antitrust history – in the tech, oil and telephony industries, among others – has shown that when titans fall, many smaller, agile and much more innovative companies spring up to take their place, fueling employment gains, exports and better lifestyles for all of us.

The investigation will include a series of hearings held by the Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law on the rise of market power online, as well as requests for information that are relevant to the investigation.

A small number of dominant, unregulated platforms have extraordinary power over commerce, communication and information online. Based on investigative reporting and oversight by international policymakers and enforcers, there are concerns that these platforms have the incentive and ability to harm the competitive process. The Antitrust Subcommittee will conduct a top-to-bottom review of the potential of giant tech platforms to hold monopoly power.

The committee’s investigation will focus on three main areas:

• Documenting competition problems in digital markets;
• Examining whether dominant firms are engaging in anti-competitive conduct; and
• Assessing whether existing antitrust laws, competition policies and current enforcement levels are adequate to address these issues.

“Big Tech plays a huge role in our economy and our world,” said Collins. “As tech has expanded its market share, more and more questions have arisen about whether the market remains competitive. Our bipartisan look at competition in the digital markets gives us the chance to answer these questions and, if necessary, to take action. I appreciate the partnership of Chairman Nadler, Subcommittee Chairman Cicilline and Subcommittee Ranking Member Sensenbrenner on these important issues.”

“The open internet has delivered enormous benefits to Americans, including a surge of economic opportunity, massive investment, and new pathways for education online,” said Nadler. “But there is growing evidence that a handful of gatekeepers have come to capture control over key arteries of online commerce, content, and communications. The Committee has a rich tradition of conducting studies and investigations to assess the threat of monopoly power in the U.S. economy. Given the growing tide of concentration and consolidation across our economy, it is vital that we investigate the current state of competition in digital markets and the health of the antitrust laws.”

“Technology has become a crucial part of Americans’ everyday lives,” said Sensenbrenner. “As the world becomes more dependent on a digital marketplace, we must discuss how the regulatory framework is built to ensure fairness and competition. I believe these hearings can be informative, but it is important for us to avoid any predetermined conclusions. I thank Chairman Nadler, Ranking Member Collins, and Chairman Cicilline as we begin these bipartisan discussions.”

“The growth of monopoly power across our economy is one of the most pressing economic and political challenges we face today. Market power in digital markets presents a whole new set of dangers,” said Cicilline. “After four decades of weak antitrust enforcement and judicial hostility to antitrust cases, it is vital for Congress to step in to determine whether existing laws are adequate to tackle abusive conduct by platform gatekeepers or if we need new legislation.”

Source: House Judiciary Committee

Basically they are looking at how antitrust works, which is a great thing, because recently antitrust in the US has focused on consumer prices and ignored everything else. With the price gauging of Amazon, this is not the way to look at things. Have a look at my talk on this if you’re interested

The company sought to completely change how we interact with computers, but now Leap Motion is selling itself off.

Apple reportedly tried to get their hands on the hand-tracking tech, which Leap Motion rebuffed, but now the hyped nine-year-old consumer startup is being absorbed into the younger, enterprise-focused UltraHaptics. The Wall Street Journal first reported the deal this morning; we’ve heard the same from a source familiar with the deal.

The report further detailed that the purchase price was a paltry $30 million, nearly one-tenth the company’s most recent valuation. CEO Michael Buckwald will also not be staying on with the company post-acquisition, we’ve learned.

Leap Motion raised nearly $94 million off of their mind-bending demos of their hand-tracking technology, but they were ultimately unable to ever zero in on a customer base that could sustain them. Even as the company pivoted into the niche VR industry, the startup remained a solution in search of a problem.

In 2011, when we first covered the startup, then called OcuSpec, it had raised $1.3 million in seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz and Founders Fund. At the time, Buckwald told us that he was building motion-sensing tech that was “radically more powerful and affordable than anything currently available,” though he kept many details under wraps.

Source: Once poised to kill the mouse and keyboard, Leap Motion plays its final hand – TechCrunch

Just 376 people hold a third of all Ether, the cryptocurrency that powers the Ethereum blockchain, according to new research by Chainalysis Inc.

Large holders are known in the crypto market as “whales,” which Chainalysis defines as individuals who hold their assets in digital wallets and not on an exchange, Kim Grauer, a senior economist at the company, said in an interview. By comparison, 448 people own 20 percent of all Bitcoin, she said.

Chainalysis also looked at the effect Ether whales have on price, and found that large holders don’t move their cryptocurrency often.

“The majority of whales aren’t traders,” she said. “They’re mostly holding.”

The study also found that when a whale moves Ether from a wallet to an exchange, there is a small but statistically significant effect on market volatility.

Investor sentiment and the price of Bitcoin are strong indicators of where Ether will trade, the Chainalysis research found. As Bitcoin rallied 52 percent since the beginning of May, Ether rose 48 percent.

Source: One-Third of Ether Held by 376 People – Bloomberg

The company’s mistakes — the sloppy privacy practices that dropped tens of millions of users’ data into a political consulting firm’s lap; the slow response to Russian agents, violent rhetoric and fake news; and the unbounded drive to capture ever more of our time and attention — dominate the headlines. It’s been 15 years since I co-founded Facebook at Harvard, and I haven’t worked at the company in a decade. But I feel a sense of anger and responsibility.

[…]

he’s [Mark -ed] human. But it’s his very humanity that makes his unchecked power so problematic.

Mark’s influence is staggering, far beyond that of anyone else in the private sector or in government. He controls three core communications platforms — Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — that billions of people use every day. Facebook’s board works more like an advisory committee than an overseer, because Mark controls around 60 percent of voting shares. Mark alone can decide how to configure Facebook’s algorithms to determine what people see in their News Feeds, what privacy settings they can use and even which messages get delivered. He sets the rules for how to distinguish violent and incendiary speech from the merely offensive, and he can choose to shut down a competitor by acquiring, blocking or copying it.

[…]

Facebook’s board works more like an advisory committee than an overseer, because Mark controls around 60 percent of voting shares. Mark alone can decide how to configure Facebook’s algorithms to determine what people see in their News Feeds, what privacy settings they can use and even which messages get delivered. He sets the rules for how to distinguish violent and incendiary speech from the merely offensive, and he can choose to shut down a competitor by acquiring, blocking or copying it.

[…]

I’m worried that Mark has surrounded himself with a team that reinforces his beliefs instead of challenging them.

[…]

After Mark’s congressional testimony last year, there should have been calls for him to truly reckon with his mistakes. Instead the legislators who questioned him were derided as too old and out of touch to understand how tech works. That’s the impression Mark wanted Americans to have, because it means little will change.

[…]

America was built on the idea that power should not be concentrated in any one person, because we are all fallible. That’s why the founders created a system of checks and balances. They didn’t need to foresee the rise of Facebook to understand the threat that gargantuan companies would pose to democracy.

[…]

For many people today, it’s hard to imagine government doing much of anything right, let alone breaking up a company like Facebook. This isn’t by coincidence.

Starting in the 1970s, a small but dedicated group of economists, lawyers and policymakers sowed the seeds of our cynicism. Over the next 40 years, they financed a network of think tanks, journals, social clubs, academic centers and media outlets to teach an emerging generation that private interests should take precedence over public ones.

[…]

This shift, combined with business-friendly tax and regulatory policy, ushered in a period of mergers and acquisitions that created megacorporations. In the past 20 years, more than 75 percent of American industries, from airlines to pharmaceuticals, have experienced increased concentration, and the average size of public companies has tripled. The results are a decline in entrepreneurship, stalled productivity growth, and higher prices and fewer choices for consumers.

[…]

Over a decade later, Facebook has earned the prize of domination. It is worth half a trillion dollars and commands, by my estimate, more than 80 percent of the world’s social networking revenue. It is a powerful monopoly, eclipsing all of its rivals and erasing competition from the social networking category. This explains why, even during the annus horribilis of 2018, Facebook’s earnings per share increased by an astounding 40 percent compared with the year before.

[…]

Facebook’s monopoly is also visible in its usage statistics. About 70 percent of American adults use social media, and a vast majority are on Facebook products. Over two-thirds use the core site, a third use Instagram, and a fifth use WhatsApp. By contrast, fewer than a third report using Pinterest, LinkedIn or Snapchat. What started out as lighthearted entertainment has become the primary way that people of all ages communicate online.

Even when people want to quit Facebook, they don’t have any meaningful alternative, as we saw in the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Worried about their privacy and lacking confidence in Facebook’s good faith, users across the world started a “Delete Facebook” movement. According to the Pew Research Center, a quarter deleted their accounts from their phones, but many did so only temporarily. I heard more than one friend say, “I’m getting off Facebook altogether — thank God for Instagram,” not realizing that Instagram was a Facebook subsidiary. In the end people did not leave the company’s platforms en masse. After all, where would they go?

[…]

When it hasn’t acquired its way to dominance, Facebook has used its monopoly position to shut out competing companies or has copied their technology.

The News Feed algorithm reportedly prioritized videos created through Facebook over videos from competitors, like YouTube and Vimeo. In 2012, Twitter introduced a video network called Vine that featured six-second videos. That same day, Facebook blocked Vine from hosting a tool that let its users search for their Facebook friends while on the new network. The decision hobbled Vine, which shut down four years later.

Snapchat posed a different threat. Snapchat’s Stories and impermanent messaging options made it an attractive alternative to Facebook and Instagram. And unlike Vine, Snapchat wasn’t interfacing with the Facebook ecosystem; there was no obvious way to handicap the company or shut it out. So Facebook simply copied it.

Facebook’s version of Snapchat’s stories and disappearing messages proved wildly successful, at Snapchat’s expense. At an all-hands meeting in 2016, Mark told Facebook employees not to let their pride get in the way of giving users what they want. According to Wired magazine, “Zuckerberg’s message became an informal slogan at Facebook: ‘Don’t be too proud to copy.’”

(There is little regulators can do about this tactic: Snapchat patented its “ephemeral message galleries,” but copyright law does not extend to the abstract concept itself.)

As a result of all this, would-be competitors can’t raise the money to take on Facebook. Investors realize that if a company gets traction, Facebook will copy its innovations, shut it down or acquire it for a relatively modest sum. So despite an extended economic expansion, increasing interest in high-tech start-ups, an explosion of venture capital and growing public distaste for Facebook, no major social networking company has been founded since the fall of 2011.

As markets become more concentrated, the number of new start-up businesses declines. This holds true in other high-tech areas dominated by single companies, like search (controlled by Google) and e-commerce (taken over by Amazon). Meanwhile, there has been plenty of innovation in areas where there is no monopolistic domination, such as in workplace productivity (Slack, Trello, Asana), urban transportation (Lyft, Uber, Lime, Bird) and cryptocurrency exchanges (Ripple, Coinbase, Circle).

[…]

Facebook’s business model is built on capturing as much of our attention as possible to encourage people to create and share more information about who they are and who they want to be. We pay for Facebook with our data and our attention, and by either measure it doesn’t come cheap.

I was on the original News Feed team (my name is on the patent), and that product now gets billions of hours of attention and pulls in unknowable amounts of data each year. The average Facebook user spends an hour a day on the platform; Instagram users spend 53 minutes a day scrolling through pictures and videos. They create immense amounts of data — not just likes and dislikes, but how many seconds they watch a particular video — that Facebook uses to refine its targeted advertising. Facebook also collects data from partner companies and apps, without most users knowing about it, according to testing by The Wall Street Journal.

[…]

The most problematic aspect of Facebook’s power is Mark’s unilateral control over speech. There is no precedent for his ability to monitor, organize and even censor the conversations of two billion people.

[…]

In 2014, the rules favored curiosity-inducing “clickbait” headlines. In 2016, they enabled the spread of fringe political views and fake news, which made it easier for Russian actors to manipulate the American electorate. In January 2018, Mark announced that the algorithms would favor non-news content shared by friends and news from “trustworthy” sources, which his engineers interpreted — to the confusion of many — as a boost for anything in the category of “politics, crime, tragedy.”

[…]

As if Facebook’s opaque algorithms weren’t enough, last year we learned that Facebook executives had permanently deleted their own messages from the platform, erasing them from the inboxes of recipients; the justification was corporate security concerns. When I look at my years of Facebook messages with Mark now, it’s just a long stream of my own light-blue comments, clearly written in response to words he had once sent me. (Facebook now offers this as a feature to all users.)

The most extreme example of Facebook manipulating speech happened in Myanmar in late 2017. Mark said in a Vox interview that he personally made the decision to delete the private messages of Facebook users who were encouraging genocide there. “I remember, one Saturday morning, I got a phone call,” he said, “and we detected that people were trying to spread sensational messages through — it was Facebook Messenger in this case — to each side of the conflict, basically telling the Muslims, ‘Hey, there’s about to be an uprising of the Buddhists, so make sure that you are armed and go to this place.’ And then the same thing on the other side.”

[…]

Mark made a call: “We stop those messages from going through.” Most people would agree with his decision, but it’s deeply troubling that he made it with no accountability to any independent authority or government. Facebook could, in theory, delete en masse the messages of Americans, too, if its leadership decided it didn’t like them.

Mark used to insist that Facebook was just a “social utility,” a neutral platform for people to communicate what they wished. Now he recognizes that Facebook is both a platform and a publisher and that it is inevitably making decisions about values. The company’s own lawyers have argued in court that Facebook is a publisher and thus entitled to First Amendment protection.

No one at Facebook headquarters is choosing what single news story everyone in America wakes up to, of course. But they do decide whether it will be an article from a reputable outlet or a clip from “The Daily Show,” a photo from a friend’s wedding or an incendiary call to kill others.

[…]

Mark may never have a boss, but he needs to have some check on his power. The American government needs to do two things: break up Facebook’s monopoly and regulate the company to make it more accountable to the American people.

Source: Opinion | It’s Time to Break Up Facebook – The New York Times

Unfortunately the vision given to break up the company is limited to forcing a forced sale of Instagram and Whatsapp, which isn’t far enough and the legal oversight proposals are a bit weak too, but the case building up to “something must be done” ™ are clear and convincing.

These marketing statistics have been divided across seven key trends, both in the infographic below and in the list that follows it, helping you zero in on your primary marketing channel of interest. On the other hand, like most modern marketers, if your campaign strategy involves multiple channels, this division should help you update your notes more clearly.

Source: 7 Trends You Must Know For a Successful Digital Marketing Campaign – Serpwatch.io

March 11, a Vice President at Amazon Web Services, Amazon’s cloud computing behemoth, published a blog post announcing the release of its own version of Elasticsearch, a powerful open-source software search engine tool.

Elastic is a public company founded in 2012 that is currently worth over $5 billion; the vast majority of its revenue is generated by selling subscription access to Elastic’s search capabilities via the cloud. It’s based in Amsterdam and employs more than 1,200 people.

In the blog post, Adrian Cockcroft, VP of cloud architecture strategy at Amazon Web Services (AWS), explained that the company felt forced to take action because Elastic was “changing the rules” on how its software code could be shared. Those changes, made in the run-up to Elastic’s 2018 IPO, started mixing intellectual property into Elastic’s overall line of software products.

Open-source software is defined as code that can be freely shared and modified by anyone. But now Elastic was telling customers that certain elements in its product mix could not be accessed without payment and that the code could not be freely shared.

Elastic did not explain its strategic shift at the time. But industry observers interpreted the changes as a response to increasing competition from AWS, which had incorporated Elasticsearch’s code and search functionality into its own suite of computing services.

Elastic isn’t the only open source cloud tool company currently looking over its shoulder at AWS. In 2018 alone, at least eight firms have made similar “rule changes” designed to ward off what they see as unfair competition from a company intent on cannibalizing their services.

[…]

Open source software has been one of the biggest success stories of the software industry. In 2018 alone, Microsoft’s purchase of the open source software development platform GitHub for $7.5 billion, Salesforce’s purchase of the open source company Mulesoft for $6.5 billion, and IBM’s blockbuster $34 billion purchase of the Linux vendor Red Hat proved that open source is a crucial part of the larger software industry. And there is growing acceptance that the collaborative model of developing open source software is a winning strategy to meet the tech industry’s need for constant innovation. So, when the likes of Amazon start accusing companies of not playing fair, people notice.

Sharone Zitzman, a respected commentator on open source software and the head of developer relations at AppsFlyer, an app development company, called Amazon’s move a “hostile takeover” of Elastic’s business. Steven O’Grady, co-founder of the software industry analyst firm RedMonk, cited it as an example of the “existential threat” that open source companies like Elastic believe a handful of cloud computing giants could pose. Shay Banon, founder and CEO of Elastic, carefully defended Elastic’s new licensing practices, while at the same time making his unhappiness with Amazon crystal clear.

[…]

The reaction to Amazon’s move wasn’t all negative. Some veterans of the open source community praised Amazon’s defense of open source values, while pointing out the fundamentally messy contradictions of Elastic mixing commercial priorities with open source principles. And fundamentally, adopting open source code is entirely legal.

But the notion that Amazon was presenting itself as an altruistic defender of the digital public commons rankled community veterans like Zitzman, who says that Amazon has a poor reputation for working with the community. (GitHub data shows that Amazon has far fewer employees than Microsoft, Google, or IBM contributing code to open source projects.)

These critics see Amazon’s decision to recreate Elasticsearch as opportunistic . behavior. Amazon, they say, is leveraging its dominant power in cloud computing in order to unfairly reap intellectual property. In doing so, AWS is striking at the Achilles’ heel of open source: lifting the work of others, and renting access to it.

Source: Amazon Has Gone From Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor, Say Open Source Developers

March 11, a Vice President at Amazon Web Services, Amazon’s cloud computing behemoth, published a blog post announcing the release of its own version of Elasticsearch, a powerful open-source software search engine tool.

Elastic is a public company founded in 2012 that is currently worth over $5 billion; the vast majority of its revenue is generated by selling subscription access to Elastic’s search capabilities via the cloud. It’s based in Amsterdam and employs more than 1,200 people.

In the blog post, Adrian Cockcroft, VP of cloud architecture strategy at Amazon Web Services (AWS), explained that the company felt forced to take action because Elastic was “changing the rules” on how its software code could be shared. Those changes, made in the run-up to Elastic’s 2018 IPO, started mixing intellectual property into Elastic’s overall line of software products.

[…]

Elastic did not explain its strategic shift at the time. But industry observers interpreted the changes as a response to increasing competition from AWS, which had incorporated Elasticsearch’s code and search functionality into its own suite of computing services.

Elastic isn’t the only open source cloud tool company currently looking over its shoulder at AWS. In 2018 alone, at least eight firms have made similar “rule changes” designed to ward off what they see as unfair competition from a company intent on cannibalizing their services.

[…]

Open source software has been one of the biggest success stories of the software industry. In 2018 alone, Microsoft’s purchase of the open source software development platform GitHub for $7.5 billion, Salesforce’s purchase of the open source company Mulesoft for $6.5 billion, and IBM’s blockbuster $34 billion purchase of the Linux vendor Red Hat proved that open source is a crucial part of the larger software industry. And there is growing acceptance that the collaborative model of developing open source software is a winning strategy to meet the tech industry’s need for constant innovation. So, when the likes of Amazon start accusing companies of not playing fair, people notice.

Sharone Zitzman, a respected commentator on open source software and the head of developer relations at AppsFlyer, an app development company, called Amazon’s move a “hostile takeover” of Elastic’s business. Steven O’Grady, co-founder of the software industry analyst firm RedMonk, cited it as an example of the “existential threat” that open source companies like Elastic believe a handful of cloud computing giants could pose

[…]

The reaction to Amazon’s move wasn’t all negative. Some veterans of the open source community praised Amazon’s defense of open source values, while pointing out the fundamentally messy contradictions of Elastic mixing commercial priorities with open source principles. And fundamentally, adopting open source code is entirely legal.

[…]

These critics see Amazon’s decision to recreate Elasticsearch as opportunistic . behavior. Amazon, they say, is leveraging its dominant power in cloud computing in order to unfairly reap intellectual property. In doing so, AWS is striking at the Achilles’ heel of open source: lifting the work of others, and renting access to it.

What happened to Elastic, Zitzman says, fits into a “long-standing trend of AWS rolling out managed services of popular open source technology, or replicating such technologies… This move is a text-book commoditization move — providing Elastic’s premium services for free.” Or as Salil Deshpande, a managing director at Bain Capital Ventures and an investor in multiple open source companies, puts it: “It is clear that AWS is using its market power to be anti-competitive.”

Source: Amazon Has Gone From Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor, Say Open Source Developers

Some notes – most people who defend open source viciously as it is, formed by some idealists years ago actually have full employment at either universities or at closed source companies. It’s easy to be idealistic with a full belly.

This fits in well with a talk I gave in Zagreb in 2017: Open Source XOR Money about the problems facing the Open Source community, especially the financials.

In 2019 I gave another talk called “Break it up!” about the growing anti-competitive monopolistic powers of the big 5 tech companies.

It’s interesting to see how these subjects are suddenly flaring up in conjunction with each other.

Last night, Epic Games boss Tim Sweeney tweeted that his company would end its controversial exclusivity agreements if Steam raised its revenue cut for developers. It’s a strong statement, even if there are reasons to be skeptical of Sweeney’s position.

“If Steam committed to a permanent 88% revenue share for all developers and publishers without major strings attached,” Sweeney wrote, “Epic would hastily organize a retreat from exclusives (while honoring our partner commitments) and consider putting our own games on Steam.”

Since the Epic Game Store launched in December, the company behind Fortnite and the Unreal Engine has struck several exclusivity deals with high-profile games like Borderlands 3 and The Division 2, preventing those games from appearing on Steam. The practice has been contentious, drawing a lot of ire from PC gamers, especially considering the Epic Game Store lacks many of the features that make Steam so enticing for players. For developers, however, being on the Epic Store is a boon, as it gives 88% of revenue earned from games to the people who make them. PC megalith Steam, on the other hand, gives developers between 70-80% depending on sales.

Source: Epic Games Boss Says They’ll Stop Doing Exclusives If Steam Gives Developers More Money

Yup, exclusivity deals are a great way to differentiate yourself from the competition. No one is forcing anyone to go with the Epic store, if they don’t like it. But there is a clear victor in monopoly breaking: the developers. And happier developers should lead to better products, so eventually the customer will win too. And with any luck, the Steam game player will be a different kind of player than the Epic game player, which means that the stores will have different popularity scores,  leading to more diversity and recognition of different products in the gaming ecosphere. Again, the customer wins.

Police from around the world shut down the biggest active black market on the dark web this month, according to announcements from law enforcement agencies in the United States, Germany, and the Netherlands released on Friday.

Wall Street Market, as the black market site was known, was the target of a 1.5-year-long multinational investigation. Three Germans were arrested on April 23 and 24 inside Germany for their alleged role in creating and administering the site that sold illegal drugs, documents, weapons, and data.

“WSM was one of the largest and most voluminous darknet marketplaces of all time,” FBI Special Agent Leroy Shelton wrote in the criminal complaint released on Friday.

[…]

Wall Street Market had 1.15 million customer accounts and 5,400 registered sellers, according to the U.S. Justice Department. However, don’t take those numbers to be accurate census accounts—users are anonymous, sellers and buyers both often create multiple accounts, and there’s no way to get a realistic count on the number of individuals active on a market like this.

A better way to understand the scale of a black market like this is to look at the actual money involved. Last month, Wall Street Market administrators stole around $11 million from user accounts, authorities say.

“An ‘exit scam’ was allegedly conducted last month when the WSM administrators took all of the virtual currency held in marketplace escrow and user accounts—believed by investigators to be approximately $11 million—and then diverted the money to their own accounts.

Source: Dark Net’s Wall Street Market Falls to Police

The CheapAir.com 2019 Annual Airfare Study is based on an analysis of 917 million airfares in more than 8,000 markets. Following the recommendations could save you hundreds of dollars on your travel this year.

This report will break down:

• The average “best day” to buy your airline ticket
• The airfare booking “zones” – what you can expect to pay for an airfare depending on when you buy
• How to identify the Prime Booking Window™ – the range of dates you’ll be most likely to find a low price
• The best and worst days of the week to fly based on price
• How seasonality affects the price of your airline ticket

As you can see, this is a ton of information. But don’t worry. We’re going to break it down in digestible and easy-to-understand bites.

We’ve already done the research and we’re serving it up free. Before you know it, you’ll be buying those flights with understanding and confidence!

For 2018, the “best day to buy a flight” domestically (within the continental U.S.) was 76 days out from your travel date. That’s slightly higher than it was in last year’s report (70 days). Let’s take a bit of a deep dive into the different “booking zones” as airfares fall and rise. Each zone has benefits and risks.

The 6 Airfare Booking Zones

We came up with booking zones to easily chart what an airfare looks like from the approximate time it is published about 11 months out, all the way up to the very last minute you can buy your ticket. Over the years we refined these zones to reflect the subtle differences between each. And we think this system is solid for showing you what you pay (depending on when you buy). Let’s dig in.

First Dibs
315 to 203 Days in Advance
(about 10 months to 6.5 months)
We like to recommend First Dibs for buyers with an agenda. You know who you are. You’re less motivated by price and more motivated by your flight preferences (such as a certain flight time or seat) and you want to lock in plans well in advance. Flights in the First Dibs zone do cost about $50 more per ticket than flights in the Prime Booking Window (the most affordable zone), on average. If you like to have many options, however, there’s no better time to buy.

Peace of Mind
202 to 116 Days in Advance
(about 6.5 to 4 months)
Peace of Mind is where you might want to land if you’ve got anxiety surrounding big airfare purchases coupled with FOMO for a good deal. When you’re in the Peace of Mind zone, you’ll likely pay just about $20 more than flights in the Prime Booking Window and you’re still buying early enough to have a decent amount of choice.

Prime Booking Window
115 to 21 Days in Advance
(about 4 months to 3 weeks)
This is where the magic happens, travelers. And while some of the other zones have shifted slightly from one year to the next, the Prime Booking Window stays pretty solid. What does this mean? Well, the data shows that the lowest airfares tend to pop up about 4 months to 3 weeks in advance of your travel dates. Fares in this zone are within 5% of their lowest point. Bargain shopping? Stay in the sweet spot – the Prime Booking Window.

Push Your Luck
20 to 14 Days in Advance
(3 – 2 weeks)
We’re heading into gambling territory once you get within 2-3 weeks of your travel dates. The odds of getting a “cheap ticket” start to decrease heading into the Push Your Luck zone, though if you do like to roll the dice you may still find cheap tickets. One important factor to consider – though there could be lower priced fares in Push Your Luck, the quantity and quality of seats is more limited the closer we get to the travel date. You may find yourself paying slightly more for a subpar seat.

Playing with Fire
13 to 7 Days in Advance
(2 – 1 weeks)
No matter how long we’re in the airfare prediction game, we find that some people just like to play with fire. Hence, we carved out the Playing with Fire zone. You’ll almost always pay more than Prime Booking Window buyers, but pay less (close to $135, on average) than people who wait until the very last minute to buy. In this zone, choice is even more limited.

Hail Mary
6 to 0 Days in Advance
(less than a week)
How did we get here? Usually, people who are buying in the Hail Mary zone are doing so because of an unexpected trip, not because waiting until less than a week from your travel date was a conscious choice. You’re going to have to cope with the least amount of choice in the Hail Mary zone, and you’re apt to pay almost $220 more than you would have if this ticket was purchased in the Prime Booking Window.

Hawaii as Outlier
Our 50th state is a bit of a standalone. We do not include Hawaii in our main airfare data for a couple of reasons. Hawaii’s distance from the mainland in conjunction with its unique characteristic as a leisure destination means that is has a different dynamic. Check out our separate post on Buying Flights to Hawaii for the best tips and strategies for snagging a low fare to the islands.

There are other factors to consider aside from when you buy that will affect your travel budget. Let’s look at days of the week, for example.

Do Days of the Week Have an Effect on Price?

We can start by dispelling one myth. What day of week you purchase a flight has a negligible effect on flight cost. The average low fare only varies by $1 based on the purchase day of week. Whether you buy that ticket on Tuesday or Sunday it’s going to cost about the same.

On the other hand, there are definitely less expensive days and more expensive days to fly. Tuesday is the cheapest day of the week to fly, nearly $85 cheaper on average than the most expensive day of the week to travel, Sunday. Wednesdays are also great days for air travel. Friday is the second most expensive day of the week to fly. A good rule of thumb – weekends are more expensive and midweek flights save travelers cash.

Don’t Underestimate Seasonality

What time of year you travel can also have an impact on your flight cost. We broke down the seasons and included the most popular time frames in each, to offer travelers an easy reference for finding the best fares. This simple chart tells the story:

When to Buy Winter Flights
If you can avoid Christmas week and ski destinations, most winter destinations offer good value for the money.

• The average best time to buy is 94 days from travel (just over 3 months)
• The prime booking window is 74 to 116 days (about 2.5 months to nearly 4 months)
• The average domestic fare for winter travel is $433, by far the most expensive time of the year for air travel
• The difference between the best and worst priced days is $168, which is quite a bit lower than in other seasons. There is much less volatility in airfare pricing all season.

When to Buy Spring Flights
Plan ahead for spring flights. There are no major travel holidays in the spring, but both families and college students enjoy spring break for much of March and April. Take advantage of lower mid-week prices to help keep costs down.

• The average best time to buy is 84 days from travel, or nearly 3 months
• The prime booking window is 47 to 119 days (about 1.5 months to just under 4 months)
• The average domestic fare for spring travel is $354
• The difference between the best and worst priced days is $285

When to Buy Summer Flights
Americans travel a ton in the summer, and the peak summer dates of June 15 – August 15 are when the bulk of travel happens. You can find the best deals the closer you get to the end of the season (late August and September will give you the best odds to score low airfare.

• The average best time to buy is 99 days out from travel
• The prime booking window is 21 to 150 days (about 3 weeks to 5 months)
• The average domestic fare for peak summer travel is $365
• The difference between the best and worst priced days is $260
• Late summer and early fall is shoulder season, and as such, offers great deals (Labor Day weekend notwithstanding). Flying the second half of August on into September is the sweet spot for these deals.

When to Buy Fall Flights
Overall, fall offers great value for budget travelers. Fall is shoulder season for a lot of destinations, and people simply do not travel as much. Of course, the one exception to this rule is Thanksgiving week. Traveling during Thanksgiving? Better buy on the early side.

• The average best time to buy is 69 days from travel
• The prime booking window is 20 to 109 days (about 3 weeks to 3.5 months)
• The average domestic fare for fall travel is $342, which makes it the best season to find travel bargains
• The difference between the best and worst priced days is $280

Takeaways

Airfares change all the time. Don’t get bogged down in watching the tiny, incremental fluctuations. We recommend buying an airline ticket when you see a good fare and not hesitating or waffling. Since fares change a lot, when shoppers go away to think about it “for a while,” they’re often disappointed when they come back to find that the good fare has disappeared. Be prepared to buy.

Bookmark this page or commit the Prime Booking Window to memory. It’s where you should focus the bulk of your shopping efforts. Keep in mind that there is still volatility within the prime booking window. Though you can expect peaks and valleys in price, the best fares on average will be found here.

Also, keep in mind that CheapAir.com will “protect” your purchase with Price Drop Payback. Should your fare drop after you buy, we’ll reimburse you up to $100 per ticket.

Need advice for your next vacation abroad? Check back soon for our International When to Buy study results.

Happy Travels!

Source: CheapAir.com’s 5th Annual Airfare Study Reveals the Best Time to Buy Airline Tickets | CheapAir

“Google has cemented its dominance in online search adverts and shielded itself from competitive pressure by imposing anti-competitive contractual restrictions on third-party websites,” EU antitrust commissioner Margrethe Vestager said on Wednesday. “This is illegal under EU antitrust rules. The misconduct lasted over 10 years and denied other companies the possibility to compete on the merits and to innovate – and consumers the benefits of competition.”

[…]

Vestager noted that in response to the Android fine, Google has done a better job offering users choices for browsers and search engines.

“We’ve seen in the past that a choice screen can be an effective way to promote user choice,” Vestager said. “It is welcome that Google is stepping up its effort and we will watch closely to see how the choice-screen mechanism evolves.”

In a statement and press conference from Brussels, Vestager described Google’s transgressions that led to the latest fine.

Google’s AdSense, which Vestager called “by far the strongest player in online search advertising” in Europe, works when websites embed search functions and the results are displayed alongside advertisements where the revenue is split with publishers.

In contracts with customers reviewed by investigators, Google at various times prohibited any search advertisements from competitors like Microsoft or Yahoo, prohibited any competitors ads from displaying above their own and also required publishers to get written approval from Google before changing the way they handle advertisements from tech rivals.

“Google’s rivals were not able to compete on the merits, either because there was an outright prohibition for them to appear on publisher websites or because Google reserved for itself by far the most valuable commercial space on those websites, while at the same time controlling how rival search adverts could appear,” Vestager said. “Google’s practices amount to an abuse of Google’s dominant position in the online search advertising intermediation market by preventing competition on the merits.”

Source: Google Hit With $1.7 Billion Fine in Europe for Abusing Advertising Dominance

A Japanese court sentenced the former high-flying creator of the MtGox bitcoin exchange to a suspended jail sentence of two and a half years Friday after finding him guilty of data manipulation.

The Tokyo District Court convicted Mark Karpeles, a 33-year-old computer whizz from France, for tampering with computer data but acquitted him over charges of embezzling millions from client accounts.

The sentence was suspended for four years.

In a summary of the ruling, the court said Karpeles had “harmed the users’ trust greatly” by manipulating data and “abused his expertise as an IT engineer and his position and authority”.

Prosecutors had claimed that Karpeles had pocketed some 341 million yen ($3 million) of client’s money and splashed it on a lavish lifestyle. They called for him to serve 10 years behind bars.

However, in throwing out the embezzlement charges, the judge said there was no financial damage done to MtGox and ruled that Karpeles did not intend to cause any damage.

The judge cited an expert opinion that said owners of small and medium enterprises often borrow funds without proper accounting and ruled that the court assumed Karpeles intended to return the money.

Karpeles entered the courtroom wearing a dark suit and black shoes and he bowed politely to the judge. He was motionless after the verdict was read out.

After the sentencing, the judge asked if Karpeles understood the sentence. Karpeles responded simply: “Yes, I did.”

‘Cold wallet’

MtGox was shut down in 2014 after 850,000 bitcoins (worth half a billion dollars at that time) disappeared from its virtual vaults.

The scandal left a trail of angry investors, rocked the virtual currency community, and dented confidence in the security of bitcoin.

At one point, MtGox claimed to be handling around 80 percent of all global bitcoin transactions.

During his trial, Karpeles apologised to customers for the company’s bankruptcy but denied both data falsification and embezzlement.

“I swear to God that I am innocent,” Karpeles, speaking in Japanese, told the three-judge panel hearing when his trial opened in 2017.Karpeles always claimed the bitcoins were lost due to an external “hacking attack” and later claimed to have found some 200,000 coins in a “cold wallet”—a storage device not connected to other computers.

“Most people will not believe what I say. The only solution I have is to actually find the real culprits,” he told reporters his trial hearing in July 2017.

Doubts about bitcoin

The acquittal on embezzlement came as a surprise as the vast majority of cases that come to trial in Japan end in a conviction.

Karpeles himself said in an interview with French business daily Les Echos on Wednesday that he had little chance of acquittal.

“All I can hope for is a light sentence which will mean I do not have to go back into detention and do forced work,” he said.

The Frenchman was first arrested in August 2015 and, in an echo of another high-profile case against former Nissan chief and compatriot Carlos Ghosn, was re-arrested several times on different charges.

Karpeles eventually won bail in July 2016—nearly a year after his arrest—paying 10 million yen to secure his freedom pending a trial, which began in July 2017.

During his time on bail, Karpeles has been active on social media—notably voicing doubts about bitcoin and replying to some media questions about conditions in Japanese detention centres.

However, he has largely avoided commenting on his case in detail.

In many ways, the rollercoaster ride of Karpeles has mirrored that of the bitcoin cryptocurrency that made him rich.

At its height in December 2017, the value of a single bitcoin was around $20,000.

It has since slumped and is now worth just under $4,000.

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2019-03-mtgox-bitcoin-founder-sentence-tampering.html#jCp

Source: MtGox bitcoin founder gets suspended sentence for data tampering

American consumers spend, on average, 13 hours per year in calling queue. According to a 2010 study by Mike Desmarais in the journal Cost Management, a third of complaining customers must make two or more calls to resolve their complaint. And that ignores the portion who simply give up out of exasperation after the first call. In fact, according to a 2017 survey by Customer Care Measurement and Consulting the Carey School of Business at the Arizona State University, over three quarters of complaining consumers were less than satisfied with their experience with the given company’s customer service department.

These accounts seem at odds with the pledges by many companies that they are committed to great customer service. Consider United Airlines, among the lowest ranked of major airlines on customer service, which claims to offer a “level of service to our customers that makes [United] a leader in the airline industry”. This is in line with surveys over time that indicate that consumers consistently perceive that customer service is generally bad and even possibly becoming worse. Despite promises companies make to treat people well, customers don’t seem to be buying it.

There’s some evidence that customer queues may be unavoidable at times. Caller complaints tend to arrive randomly, making it impossible to staff agents to handle unpredictable fluctuations in call volume. But our research suggests that some companies may actually find it profitable to create hassles for complaining customers, even if it were operationally costless not to.

Source: Why Is Customer Service So Bad? Because It’s Profitable.

As more retailers—including Drybar and Sweetgreen—ban paper money, it’s making things awkward for customers without plastic. [paywalled]

Source: Your Cash Is No Good Here. Literally. – WSJ

Oh dear, not accepting money – when the pain signals in your brain are not set off by clicking a bank pass, but are when you have to pay cash. Don’t be fooled people: cash is central to what money is – for the whole economy, but also for you as a person. See what happens when people with trillions start chucking it about (because what does that amount really mean, anyway!?) or the personal debt people spending on credit build up.

The Indian government sent a strong screw you to Amazon and the Walmart-owned Flipkart on Wednesday, banning e-commerce companies from selling products from companies that they have an equity interest in or “entering into exclusive agreements with sellers,” CNBC reported.

India already bans e-commerce sites from selling products directly, per the New York Times, which has led to them acquiring stakes in affiliate companies that serve much the same purpose at arm’s length. At issue is the power of e-commerce companies to make bulk purchases of goods that they then sell to “select sellers, such as their affiliates or other companies with which they have agreements,” CNBC wrote. The strategy allows giants like Amazon to offer products at low prices that smaller competitors often find hard to match.

In a statement to CNBC, India’s commerce ministry said the new rules would go into effect on Feb. 1, 2019, adding the new rules specify that: “An entity having equity participation by e-commerce marketplace entity or its group companies, or having control on its inventory by e-commerce marketplace entity or its group companies, will not be permitted to sell its products on the platform run by such marketplace entity.”

The move could mean Amazon would be forced “to stop competing with independent sellers and end its offerings of proprietary products like its Echo smart speakers in India, its top emerging market,” the Times wrote. It’s also a blow to Walmart, which bought a 77 percent stake in Flipkart for $16 billion this year, and may be forced to stop selling products produced by companies it owns. As the paper noted, both companies’ competitive strategies rely on highly efficient supply chains and pressuring retailers to comply with their requirements, so this is not a good sign for their Indian ambitions.

The Times wrote that the decision appears to have been motivated by concerns from India’s prime minister, right-wing populist culture warrior Narendra Modi, that his party is losing ground ahead of upcoming elections:

Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India initially courted foreign companies to invest more in the country after his 2014 election victory, but his administration has turned protectionist as his party’s re-election prospects have dimmed in recent months. Mr. Modi has increasingly sought to bolster Indian firms and curb foreign ones through new policies, including one that requires foreign companies like Visa, Mastercard and American Express to store all data about Indians on computers inside the country. The government has also declared its intention to impose tough new rules on the technology industry.

According to CNBC, beneficiaries of the move will likely include owners of small businesses like farms and corner stores, the latter of which “dominate Indian retailing,” who believe that U.S.-based tech giants are trying to undermine their economic position. The site added that the Confederation of All India Traders issued a statement saying that tech giants will no longer to be able to commit “malpractices, predatory pricing policies and deep discounting.”

However, the law was vaguely written and contains some sections that appear to contradict each other, lawyer Salman Waris of New Delhi’s TechLegis told the Times, which means that its ultimate impact remains unclear. The paper also noted that Amazon is well-known for navigating Indian law to remain in compliance without losing its ability to steer markets, though Walmart’s decision to acquire Flipkart has already been questioned by analysts as a potentially unwise financial move.

Source: In Blow to Amazon and Walmart, India Bans a Key Part of Their Business Strategy

It is way beyond time to start breaking up the monopolies and 0.00000001%ers. Way to go, India!

Over 12,000 Uber drivers found a way to weaponize the ridesharing platform’s restrictive contract in what’s possibly the funniest labor strategy of the year.

But first: a bit of background. One of the more onerous aspects of the gig economy is its propensity to include arbitration agreements in the terms of service—you know, the very long document no one really reads—governing the rights of its workers. These agreements prohibit workers from suing gig platforms in open court, generally giving the company greater leverage and saving it from public embarrassment. Sometimes arbitration is binding; in Uber’s case, driver’s can opt out—but only within 30 days of signing, and very few seem to realize they have the option.

Until an unfavorable U.S. Supreme Court ruling earlier this year, independent contractors often joined class-action lawsuits anyway, arguing (sometimes successfully) that they ought to have been classified as employees from the get-go. With that avenue of remuneration cut off, a group of 12,501 Uber drivers found a new option that hinges on the company’s own terms of service. While arbitrating parties are responsible for paying for their own attorneys, the terms state that “in all cases where required by law, the Company [Uber] will pay the Arbitrator’s and arbitration fees.”

If today’s petition in California’s Northern District Court is accurate, those arbitration fees add up rather quickly.

A group of 12,501 drivers opted to take Uber at its word, individually bringing their cases up for arbitration, overwhelming the infrastructure that’s meant to divide and conquer. “As of November 13, 2018, 12,501 demands have been filed with JAMS,” the notice states. (JAMS refers to the arbitration service Uber uses for this purpose.) Continuing on, emphasis ours: “Of those 12,501 demands, in only 296 has Uber paid the initiating filing fees necessary for an arbitration to commence […] only 47 have appointed arbitrators, and […] in only six instances has Uber paid the retainer fee of the arbitrator to allow the arbitration to move forward.” (Emphasis ours.)

While a JAMS representative was not immediately available for comment, the cause of the holdup is Uber itself, according to the notice:

Uber knows that its failure to pay the filing fees has prevented the arbitrations from commencing. Throughout this process, JAMS has repeatedly advised Uber that JAMS is “missing the NON-REFUNDABLE filing fee of $1,500 for each demand, made payable to JAMS.” JAMS has also informed Uber that “[u]ntil the Filing Fee is received we will be unable to proceed with the administration of these matters.

We have no reason to assume this fee would be different based on the nature of each case, so some back-of-the-envelope math indicates the filings alone would cost Uber—a company that already loses sickening amounts of money—over $18.7 million. We’ve reached out to Uber for comment and to learn if they have an estimate of what that number would be after attorney fees and other expenses.

Source: Uber’s Arbitration Policy Comes Back to Bite It in the Ass

By tracking the sales of 19,978 deals on Groupon.com and conducting a battery of identification and falsification tests, we find that deep discounts reduce sales. A 1% increase in a deal’s discount decreases sales by 0.035%–0.256%. If a merchant offers an additional 10% discount from the sample mean of 55.6%, sales could decrease by 0.63%–4.60%, or 0.80–5.24 units and $42–$275 in revenue. This negative effect of discount is more prominent among credence goods and deals with low sales, and when the deals are offered in cities with higher income and better education. Our findings suggest that consumers are concerned about product quality, and excessive discounts may reduce sales immediately. A follow-up lab experiment provides further support to this quality-concern explanation. Furthermore, it suggests the existence of a “threshold” effect: the negative effect on sales is present only when the discount is sufficiently high. Additional empirical analysis shows that deals displaying favorable third-party support, such as Facebook fans and online reviews, are more susceptible to this adverse discount effect.

Source: When Discounts Hurt Sales: The Case of Daily-Deal Markets | Information Systems Research

Under the new rules, traders will not be able to discriminate between customers with regard to the general terms and conditions – including prices – in three cases: for goods that are either delivered in a member state to which the trader offers delivery or are collected at a location agreed with the customer for electronically supplied services such as cloud, data warehousing and website hosting for services such as hotel accommodation and car rental which are received by the customer in the country where the trader operates

Under the new rules, traders will not be able to discriminate between customers with regard to the general terms and conditions – including prices – in three cases:

• for goods that are either delivered in a member state to which the trader offers delivery or are collected at a location agreed with the customer
• for electronically supplied services such as cloud, data warehousing and website hosting
• for services such as hotel accommodation and car rental which are received by the customer in the country where the trader operates

Source: Geo-blocking: unlocking e-commerce in the EU – Consilium

Geo-blocking refers to practices used by online sellers that result in the denial of access to websites from other Member States. It also includes situations where access to a website is granted, but the customer from abroad is prevented from finalising the purchase or being asked to pay with a debit or credit card from a certain country. “Geo-discrimination” also takes place when buying goods and services off-line, e.g. when a consumer is physically present at the trader’s location but is either prevented from accessing a product or service or being offered different conditions.

The Geo-blocking Regulation aims to provide for more opportunities to consumers and businesses within the EU’s internal market. In particular, it addresses the problem of (potential) customers not being able to buy goods and services from traders located in a different Member State for reasons related to their nationality, place of residence or place of establishment, hence discriminating them when they try to access the best offers, prices or sales conditions compared to nationals or residents of the traders’ Member State.u

https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/faq/geo-blocking

Above FAQ link has  more answers to questions

Telecomaanbieders moeten stoppen met het laten vervallen van ongebruikte data en belminuten. Dat schrijft de Consumentenbond in een brief aan de tien grootste aanbieders.

Consumenten met een mobiel abonnement verliezen nu aan het einde van iedere maand hun ongebruikte belminuten en data binnen hun bundel. Tegelijkertijd betalen ze extra voor iedere minuut of MB die ze búiten hun bundel verbruiken. Soms tot wel 0,31 euro per minuut of 0,15 euro per MB.

Source: ‘Providers pak ongebruikte data en belminuten niet af’ – Emerce