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1. 28,000 news media workers gone since the pandemic. There is a crisis of the free press, and it is directly a result of the monopoly of advertising by Google and Facebook. Today, we are re-launching our coalition, Freedom from Facebook and Google. https://www.freedomfromfacebookandgoogle.com/ https://twitter.com/marcatracy/status/1248699507795263495
2. We must decide if there is going to be a free press in the United States after the pandemic, or if we will live in an aristocracy where all information comes from Google and Mark Zuckerberg. https://www.protocol.com/tech-antitrust-coronavirus-congress-lobbyists
3. I co-authored a paper with @ZephyrTeachout and @sarahmillerdc on precisely what to do to end the monopolization of ad revenue by big tech and move it back to journalism. https://twitter.com/econliberties/status/1248720328798490631
4. The ex-CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, has predicted that we will soon be a society ruled by Google and Facebook. Bigger companies like Google, he said, tend "to emerge stronger” from a crisis. https://fortune.com/2020/04/07/google-eric-schmidt-coronavirus-big-tech-covid-19-prediction/
5. Schmidt says that big tech has realized they have a “moral responsibility” to ensure public safety by censoring speech. Structuring speech norms is what the public should do, not private monopolies.
6. Meanwhile, Apple and Google are building the deliberate means for governments to track a third of the people on the planet. These are not choices that should be vested in the hands of tech barons. That's not how democracy works. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-10/apple-google-bring-covid-19-contact-tracing-to-3-billion-people
7. The ex-CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, offered the creepiest quote about why consolidated power over advertising and media is good: “There was this belief 10 years ago that it was okay to have open networks and have free speech from anyone, including idiots."
8. Our new paper describes what Google and Facebook are, how they emerged from a specific libertarian legal framework that also produced big corporate media systems, and how to break them up and reorganize advertising markets to support democracy. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5df44e0792ff6a63789b5c02/t/5e90c1f1f177386f95c33662/1586545139529/Working+Paper+Series+on+Corporate+Power_2.pdf
9. The goal isn't to save any particular newspaper, and it's certainly not to save private equity goons who asset strip. The goal is to ensure that advertising revenue supports newsgathering, as it has for 200+ years, instead of misinformation and private jets in Palo Alto.
10. @birnbaum_e goes in depth-in our new coalition on Facebook and Google. https://www.protocol.com/tech-antitrust-coronavirus-congress-lobbyists
