Lina M. Khan On Structural Separation

In It's The Enforcement, Stupid! I argued that anti-trust enforcement was viable only if there were "bright lines". I even went further and, following Kim Stanley Robinson's Pacific Edge, suggested a hard cap on corporate revenue, as a way of making anti-trust self-executing.

Much of the recent wave of attention to anti-trust was sparked by Lina Khan's masterful January 2017 Yale Law Journal article Amazon's Antitrust Paradox (a must-read, even at 24,000 words). Now Cory Doctorow writes:

Khan (who is now a Columbia Law fellow) is back with The Separation of Platforms and Commerce -- clocking in at 61,000 words with footnotes! -- that describes the one-two punch of contemporary monopolism, in which Reagan-era deregulation enthusiasts took the brakes off of corporate conduct but said it would be OK because antitrust law would keep things from getting out of control, while Reagan-era antitrust "reformers" (led by Robert Bork and the Chicago School) dismantled antitrust). 

You should definitely read Khan's latest magnum opus. OK, maybe you can skip the footnotes, I admit I did. Below the fold I examine two threads among many in the article.

Michael Nelson's CNI Keynote: Part 3

Here is the conclusion of my three-part "lengthy disquisition" on Michael Nelson's Spring CNI keynote Web Archives at the Nexus of Good Fakes and Flawed Originals (Nelson starts at 05:53 in the video, slides).

Part 1 and Part 2 addressed Nelson's description of the problems of the current state of the art. Below the fold I address the way forward.

HAMR-ing Home My Point

In Double-headed Seagate disk drives? Yes, on their way, Chris Mellor mentions that Seagate:

expects to intro 20TB+ HAMR-based nearline HDDs in calendar 2020.

Volume production of HAMR drives is still 1 year away. In 2009 Dave Anderson of Seagate presented this roadmap. It shows HAMR drives a year away in 2010. They have been a year away ever since. A decade of real-time slip.

Only the good Dr. Pangloss believes industry roadmaps.

Michael Nelson's CNI Keynote: Part 2

My "lengthy disquisition" on Michael Nelson's Spring CNI keynote Web Archives at the Nexus of Good Fakes and Flawed Originals (Nelson starts at 05:53 in the video, slides). continues here. Part 1 had an introduction and discussion of two of my issues with Nelson's big picture.

Below the fold I address my remaining issues with Nelson's big picture of the state of the art. Part 3 will compare his and my views of the path ahead.

Michael Nelson's CNI Keynote: Part 1

Michael Nelson and his group at Old Dominion University have made major contributions to Web archiving. Among them are a series of fascinating papers on the problems of replaying archived Web content. I've blogged about several of them, most recently in All Your Tweets Are Belong To Kannada and The 47 Links Mystery. Nelson's Spring CNI keynote Web Archives at the Nexus of Good Fakes and Flawed Originals (Nelson starts at 05:53 in the video, slides) understandably focuses on recounting much of this important research. I'm a big fan of this work, and there is much to agree with in the rest of the talk.

But I have a number of issues with the big picture Nelson paints. Part of the reason for the gap in posting recently was that I started on a draft that discussed both the big picture issues and a whole lot of minor nits, and I ran into the sand. So I finally put that draft aside and started this one. I tried to restrict myself to the big picture, but despite that it is still too long for a single post. Follow me below the fold for the first part of a lengthy disquisition.

Regulating Cryptocurrencies

Satoshi Nakamoto's Bitcoin emerged not just from three decades of computer science research, but also from two interrelated cult-like ideologies of the right, libertarianism and Austrian economics. Governments are generally happy with computer science research until it gets in the way of law enforcement, but non-kleptocratic governments tend to be unhappy with both libertarianism and Austrian economics, particularly when they get in the way of law enforcement.

Below the fold, a look at the varying approaches governments are taking to the problems they perceive cryptocurrencies pose.

Ten Hot Topics

The topic of scholarly communication has received short shrift here for the last few years. There has been too much to say about other topics, and developments such as Plan S have been exhaustively discussed elsewhere. But I do want to call attention to an extremely valuable review by Jon Tennant and a host of co-authors entitled Ten Hot Topics around Scholarly Publishing.

The authors pose the ten topics as questions, which allows for a scientific experiment. My hypothesis is that all these questions, while strictly not headlines, will nevertheless obey Betteridge's Law of Headlines, in that the answer will be "No". Below the fold, I try to falsify my hypothesis.