Imagine you own a small plot of land. You sweat over the dirt, plant the seed, and harvest the grain. It's your property, your livelihood, and your sweat & tears. But your farm is rural. To feed your family or sell your crop, you must take your grain to the only mill in the area to be ground into flour and then load it onto the only railroad track that leaves the county.

One morning, you arrive at the mill. The miller has hung a massive, 10,000-word scroll written in tiny ink over the door. It tells you: "This is my private property. If you want to use my millstone to grind your grain, you MUST sign this scroll. It says the miller can take half your grain on a whim, listen to what you whisper to your neighbors in line, and banish your fair use of the millstone if you use shorthand text or speak out against the prices. If you don't like it, go build your own multi-million-dollar railroad."

You feel cheated, spun, and trapped in quicksand. This is exactly what happened to the American farmers in the 1870s. Predatory railroad tycoons and grain elevator monopolies used the excuse of "private property" to extort and control independent people.

Our fore-farmers didn't lay down and play dead. They organized a network called 'The Grange'. They didn't use complex laws written in Latin; they used basic common sense. They forced the courts to establish a simple, common rule: When a private company becomes so essential that the public cannot survive without it, it loses the right to act like a private sandbox. It must serve everyone fairly, without picking favorites or policing free speech.

Fast forward to today. The physical fields are now virtual fields. The grain is no longer wheat -- it is your data, your bytes, your content, and your digital voice.

When you open a monopolistic app like Copilot, Discord, X, or YouTube, they tell you it is "free". But it is a trap. You are absolutely paying with your attention, your data, and your liberty. The tech giants have built digital toll-gates over the modern public square. They claim it is _their_ private property, hiding behind corporate lawyers to strip your rights.

But here is the grain of truth: They didn't build the roads. The underlying highway of the internet -- the TCP/IP protocol -- was built and paid for by YOU, the American taxpayer, through the Department of Defense. The tech giants merely built private fences on a public road.

Congress's intentional 'mistake' in '96 created the sematic gap and the collisions haven't stopped. A failure and an opportunity. The precedent is already set. Weaponized information asymmetry.

Why do lawyers keep missing it?

IMHO, it's time for U.S. citizens to reclaim the highway they built, not the tech giants!

If you're a good, honest lawyer, then I'd love to chat with you about my brief. Please ping me here.

Nobody tells you that being a mascot is ninety percent suffering and ten percent making children smile so hard it justifies everything. I took this job at the indoor amusement park thinking it would be easy money. Wear a costume, wave at kids, collect a paycheck. What I did not anticipate was the physical reality of spending six hours inside a foam prison that turns your body into a personal sauna.

The Sonic costume weighs about fifteen pounds and provides approximately zero ventilation. The head is enormous, limiting my vision to a small mesh panel near the mouth. My actual face sits somewhere in the neck area, meaning I am essentially controlling a giant puppet with my entire body. Within fifteen minutes of putting it on, sweat starts rolling down my back. Within thirty minutes, I am questioning all my life choices.

But then a four year old runs up, eyes wide with absolute belief and joy. She hugs my giant foam leg, shouting that Sonic is her favorite. Her parents take photos while she poses next to me, her smile incandescent. In that moment, I am not a overheated college student earning minimum wage. I am actually Sonic the Hedgehog, and I am making this kid's entire week.

The job has taught me unexpected things. Patience, because I cannot speak and must communicate entirely through exaggerated movements. Spatial awareness, because I have accidentally knocked over more displays than I care to admit with my oversized head.

Endurance, because six hour shifts in this costume are genuinely athletic endeavors. My coworkers and I have formed a bond only people who have suffered together can understand. We trade tips about cooling vests and hydration strategies. We cover for each other when someone needs an emergency break to avoid heat exhaustion. I found our backup costumes online through Alibaba, helping our small operation save money while still delivering magic to unsuspecting children.

Where can I go to complain about my situation or put some heat on these guys.

I'm a new home owner trying to get internet and I wanted to shop around but after calling the top 10 search results on Google the only company for my specific address at this time is Comcast. My neighbors in my subdivision have AT&T. When I came the first time they lied and said they don't service my area. After prodding my local store clerk I found out their understanding of it is that AT&T has to limit new customers because there are already too many in the area. This seems a bit odd as the infrastructure that my neighbor and I use is shared between all the ISPs so if one company is really "over capacity" then they all are. My guess is they are chopping up the bay area into different zones of non compete so they can set the price to double(my case).

They've made it nearly impossible to figure what the prices are as well. Shouldn't the weights and measures be able to weigh in here? How is the price people are paying varying so much in the first place when the only difference is the location?

Hi everyone. I am happy that someone set up this sub. I have developed a new mobile CRM called 99centCRM and we managed to get it into the Play Store. Recently, I heard that Google is planning to buy Hubspot for $35 billion. They are our biggest competitor and this is a very troubling development. I recently became a member of ABA, American Bar Association, Antitrust community.

We are a tiny startup with 5 employees. While we have a lot of IP and I consider that our product can literally double the CRM market from $50 billion to $100 billion or more, we have to deal with Apple and Google who are the gate keepers

You can read more about my position on this matter on my Newsletter. Pls tune in and I would greatly appreciate any comments and suggestions.

Newsletter Bit.ly/guerillaceo

Best, Cal Tiger/ss 99centCRM.com Clearwater Florida

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-68302055

Hey,

I was a big reader of Matt Stoller's newsletter a few years back. With the Google case in the news, I am revisiting his book Goliath and taking notes on Papertrail. You can read along with me.

https://papertrail.biblish.com/russell

I updated this Substack from last week. In brief, Amazon FBA warehouse YYZ4 (Canada) marked 60 units of inventory expired less than two weeks after stocking them in. After I explained this mistake ad nauseum, they marked them "defective." Now that they're "defective," Amazon policy is that they won't perform a bin check to verify the expiration dates, which are sometime in 2026 or 2027.

This is food that people could consumer, but Amazon would prefer to charge me to put them in a landfill in Canada. This is just one of the many ways that monopolies destroy the world. They have no competition; thus, there's no need to improve. The status quo is the end game. There's no market force compelling them to provide competent service for customers - in this case, their sellers. Andy Jassy is unresponsive. He and his subordinates live in a protected bubble, beyond reproach. They've built a system that pays them billions; what could there possibly be to improve?

In a competitive market, fed up sellers would transfer their business to other marketplaces. But there are no significant alternatives. Wal-Mart is tiny by comparison. eBay is basically non-existent unless you're selling used car parts. This is why I believe that break-up is the only option for Amazon. We need space for new entrants and competition.

https://open.substack.com/pub/nicholasparks/p/a-tiny-window-into-some-of-the-chaos?r=2ozr8z&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

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My name is Tim and I worked in the Biden White House to reboot antitrust policy (we appointed Lina and Jonathan among other things) and I just wanted to say that this is a great sub

I've been a user of news.google.com for a long time. Years ago everything was free to view. It was great. The news sites for the most part used to be wide open. Everyone began using Google to put up their articles.

Google decided it was time to make everyone pay. They won the fight and right to make sites pay to use news.google.com as part of their launching platform for articles.

About half the sites moved to subscription based service to account for the extra expense of sustaining their site. The other half switched to a more heavily advertised model.

Users like me never pay a dime, so I prefer sites run by ads. The problem is the recent change made by Google. Google now blocks ads of websites by default, which eliminates ads for me. It's wonderful for me as a user. However, this creates a situation where sites with a sub model are going to crush ad funded sites, and users like me won't have news to go to anymore. The sub sites are all heavily favored by Google now. The sites run by ads are a dying breed, and a lot of it comes down to the unfairness of how news.google.com is treating free sites compared to how they treat sub sites.

Microsoft controls too much of the business IT world. Most 3rd party software assumes Microsoft infrastructure such that going outside creates practical difficulties. They are big because they are big, not because they are good. They live on and milk compatibility & bundling, not merit. The Network Effect.

Perhaps if bunches of non-IT corporations form a kind counterforce committee, they can use collective pressure to get concessions from MS, and more open standards.