After a decade of arguing, regulators will change Apple’s App Store rules. How much money is involved, what might happen next and, most importantly, who cares? This is a big deal for Spotify, but does it matter to anyone else?
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US politicians proposed five tech antitrust bills in June. They’re aggressive and ambitious, and contain some important concerns and ideas. Unfortunately, some of them are also pretty naive - case studies in not doing the work.
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Should we still be talking about online and offline retail, or about trucks versus boxes versus bikes?
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As cookie-based ads go away, does the targeting move from the cloud to the client, or from the reader to the content? Does this make the strong stronger? Or does the money go to Fedex instead?
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20 years ago Apple seized music, and turned it into a lever for its broader business. It failed to do the same to TV, and lost control of music, but won massively in games, where it now makes more money than the entire global digital music industry. Now, perhaps, it’s looking at advertising.
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Amazon has scaled indefinitely by treating every product as an interchangeable packet, and by not caring what they are, only what they weigh. At a fundamental level, it doesn’t know what it sells. What would happen if it could change that?
Read MoreWe’ve been arguing about app stores for a decade, but now the EU is going to change the rules. Will that actually matter, or is it just a $10bn wealth transfer to a few games companies?
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As we come out of lockdown, UK ecommerce penetration is 50% higher than the USA. What does that do to retail, and to startups, if it sticks?
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Can we get content moderation to work, or is it as much of a dead end as virus scanning? Do we need to change the whole model of social instead?
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Retailers have sold private label products for a century or more. Is something different when Amazon does it?
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