RE: mamot.fr/@pluralistic/11696882…

"When it comes to making a new, good internet, there's plenty of room for labor law, civil rights legislation, antitrust, and other legal regimes. But privacy has the biggest constituency, gets us the most bang for the buck, and has the fewest harmful side-effects. It's a policy we can all agree on, even if we don't agree on much else. It's a coalition in potentia that would be unstoppable in reality." - @pluralistic

#privacy #surveillance #SurveillanceCapitalism #tech #BigTech

Cory Doctorow

2026-07-23 10:30:51

Data brokers are a cancer. There's a direct line from the collection, retention and processing of our data to deepfake porn and phishing scams; racial discrimination in hiring and ICE roundups of migrants; targeted election interference and identity theft:

pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/pri…

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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2026/07/23/dro…

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Pluralistic: Privacy first (06 Dec 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

^{pluralistic.net}

🏦 TIL: Five US tech giants are carrying $1.65 trillion in AI-related obligations that don't appear on their balance sheets, more than the $1.35 trillion that does.

A Nikkei study of Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Oracle found this invisible debt has grown 8x in four years. It's future payment obligations: data center leases, GPU supply contracts, and SPV financing, disclosed only in the footnotes.

The mechanics are legal but eye-opening. Meta's $27B Hyperion data center in Louisiana is owned by a joint venture (Meta 20%, Blue Owl Capital 80%) that raised the debt from Pimco, BlackRock, and Apollo. Meta leases it back in 4-year blocks so it stays an operating expense, not debt. Oracle's off-book commitments grew 30x in four years, much of it for the Stargate project with OpenAI.

The catch: when these facilities go live, the leases roll onto the balance sheet at once. If AI demand falls short, the losses land on lenders and insurers (including, indirectly, annuity holders).

Meanwhile Apple, which sat out the AI buildout, sued OpenAI for trade secret theft on July 10.

Read more:
asia.nikkei.com/business/techn…
financialpost.com/financial-ti…
techcrunch.com/2026/07/10/appl…

#AI #BigTech #finance

"Lured by tax breaks and a culture of gentle persiflage, giants such as Google, Meta, Apple, Microsoft, OpenAI, TikTok and X all established their European headquarters in Ireland. The EU’s “country of origin” principle determines that the country that hosts a company’s European HQ is the country responsible for regulating it across the EU. This legal quirk has turned the Irish data protectioncommission (DPC) into Europe’s primary watchdog for the tech sector: Ireland pushed to make this happen as council president in 2013.

The effects of this arrangement are staggering. The DPC’s chairperson recently admitted that apart from “amicable resolutions” on trivial issues, Ireland has not completed a single EU inquiry into Google or any of its subsidiaries in the 10 years since the GDPR was enacted. EU-wide protections are paralysed because every other member state must wait for Ireland to act in an EU-wide response.

When the DPC has enforced against big tech firms, it has done so poorly and under duress from other European regulators. It did move with uncharacteristic speed in one instance, against Elon Musk’s Grok AI, but then accepted a settlement that appears to have collapsed. Ireland’s media regulator, Coimisiún na Mean, enjoys a better reputation but has far weaker powers. For a decade now, Ireland has held open the regulatory back door that allows giant US and Chinese companies to operate with impunity across Europe. It has become not only a tax haven, but a haven from regulation.

The economic dependency is stark. Three US firms accounted for almost half of Ireland’s corporate tax revenue in 2024. In 2022, Ireland collected almost five times more corporate tax per person than France or Germany. You may admire a once small, poor and un-industrialised country for having won the race to the bottom and becoming rich. But the consequences have been grim..."

theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

#EU #Ireland #USA #BigTech #Oligopolies #TaxHavens #DigitalSovereignty