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ISK, In-Game Friendship, and AI – 3Qs to Hilmar Veigar Pétursson

Friday, April 17th, 2026

In this Netopia 3Qs feature, CCP’s Hilmar Veigar Pétursson reflects on three defining elements of EVE Online and the wider tech moment: the meaning of in-game money, the role of friendship in persistent worlds, and the accelerating impact of AI on how games and perhaps everything else are built.

From ISK to “the friendship ship” to AI-assisted development, the throughline is consistent: systems scale, but meaning emerges from how people use them. In EVE Online, that has meant economies that outlive currencies, friendships that outlast gameplay loops, and now tools that may reshape how entire worlds are built.

On In-game money

Per Strömbäck:
I want to also ask you about the in-game economy. There’s ISK, but it’s nothing to do with Icelandic króna. Is that right? It’s Interstellar Credits. Is that right?

More people use the EVE ISK than the Icelandic ISK — that’s one metric where we’ve won.

Hilmar Veigar Pétursson:
Yes. Yeah, it’s Interstellar Credits with a K because it’s cool and it’s definitely a bit of a homage to the Icelandic króna which we’ve… I mean, I guess we had assumed we would no longer be using it. But here we are in Iceland, still using the króna, which is the, I think, smaller, smallest currency system in the world. And I often joke about the fact that more people use the EVE ISK than the Icelandic ISK. So I mean, that’s some metric where we have won. I mean, the Icelandic fish money is still going strong, but at least we, we, we will keep it alive in EVE Online forever, regardless of what Iceland decides.


On In-Game Friendship

Per Strömbäck:
And what is it that keeps the players coming back to the game over time?

People play for decades because they’ve made meaningful friendships — often some of their best in life — through EVE.

Hilmar Veigar Pétursson:
So, we actually did a big study into that. We kicked it off in 2015, and we got some of the main results in 2018. And the big takeaway was people play online for decades because they have made new meaningful friendships from the game, and they often regard some of their best friends just in life overall as people they’ve met through EVE.

We were not really designing the game to be like this, but it turns out all the harshness of EVE and the shared context of EVE, meaning everyone is playing the same game in one persistent universe, help create and forge friendships. It is a fairly harsh game, and if you make a mistake, it can be extremely punishing, but these properties lend themselves well to building strong social bonds.

It has even become a strong meme in the community that the best ship in EVE Online is the friendship ship. Obviously it is a game about spaceships, but the best ship is friendship. That is a compressed version of the idea that EVE is a better experience if you have friends in it, and that your power in EVE is almost a function of your friendship network inside the game.

On AI Trends

Per Strömbäck:
You talked a little bit before about how this has played out in your company with the tools and prototypes that were previously not possible, but now you can make them. How do you see this playing out for your business?

We now have capabilities that let us go after that vision at a much better pace.

Hilmar Veigar Pétursson:
So I’m, I mean, I see it very clearly. This is a game with enormous scope, comparable to EVE Online, which has been in development for 23 years and is still nowhere near fully realised. Here we have a relatively small team tackling something of that scale.

What has changed is that we now have capabilities that let us go after that vision at a much better pace. We’ve definitely seen development speed pick up. We were just finishing a major update last week, and compared to the previous release, it was greatly assisted by agentic engineering.

That has been a massive boon for morale and momentum and for belief that we might actually be able to pull this off. It makes it easier to see how we can deliver a first version of something with that kind of scope.

What’s also interesting is that we are building part of it as a modding platform, and we assumed this would mainly be used by engineers. But now we’re seeing people who are not engineers creating things that are often more interesting, because their imagination is less constrained. They no longer have to worry about the mechanics of coding. They can just use tools like Claude to do it for them.

For the full interview – see below

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CDA 230 Thirty Year Anniversary

Monday, March 2nd, 2026

Remember the internet in the 1990s? No social media, no video-sharing, no encrypted chats. It was early days enthusiasm, the wonder of sending messages across the world, chatting with strangers on ICQ, early online games… ah, nostalgia! Back then we used to think everybody on the internet was nice people and we acted on that assumption. Information wanted to be free and so did we (never mind the second half of that Stewart Brand-quote “at the same time information wants to be expensive”).

If you thought the evolution of the internet was driven by technology, think again. More than anything, the internet as we know it has been decided by law, more specifically a US law known as the Communications Decency Act Paragraph 230 a k a CDA 230. It is the famous paragraph that stipulates that intermediaries should have no liability for what users do on the internet. Think about it: neutral platforms. Network neutrality. Principles of non-interference. Makes sense for roads so why not expand it to all kinds of services? Remember “The internet is just like the post-office”? (except the post has lots of rules of what can be sent in the mail and not, including when it should open letters)

It is fair to say that much of the regulation and compliance requirements that have been brought in the last decade – Digital Services Act, Digital Markets Act, different flavours of national regulation and so on – comes from the need to mitigate or reverse the effects of CDA 230.

What does this have to do with anything? Last month the famous paragraph turned 30! Netopia celebrates by posting a review of a book from a few years ago on CDA 230.

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Section 230 Anniversary: How It Created the Internet as We Know It

Monday, March 2nd, 2026

Review of The Twenty-Six Words that Created the Internet by Jeff Kosseff (Cornell University Press 2019)

The Twenty-Six Words that Created the Internet by Jeff Kosseff, cyber-security law professor at the U.S. Naval Academy, was one of the most amazing new publications in 2019, but more for reasons unintended than intended.

One of the book’s most important lessons is already indicated by its title. It’s not the economy, nor technology, neither the code (as Lawrence once claimed with his title “The Code is Law”). To the contrary, It is law which shapes industry evolution at large scale! Without Section 230 of the US-Communication Decency Act and corresponding rules all over the world, the internet as we know it today would not exist. Without section 230, the internet would resemble something like a digital newspaper. Social networks and user-generated content wouldn’t exist. In a programmatical reading, Kosseff’s book gives reasons for optimism: By installing adequate laws, politics indeed is able to shape the impact which technology has upon society! But let’s see how this works out for the American way of dealing with the law.

Section 230 is a blanket exemption for Internet intermediaries from any liability concerning the contents published by its users:

“No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”

The really astonishing thing is: Section 230 means what is says! Although Kosseff’s book is intended as a defence of 230, it reads as a bizarre collection of court cases where, in the name of free speech, helpless victims of online defamation are denied support by the courts.

Just take one of the many examples provided by Kosseff: Zeran vs. America Online, where, six days after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, an anonymous user posted a publicly available notice on an AOL-bulletin board. In that notice, he accused Kenneth M. Zeran – a nobody, until then – of being involved in selling T-shirts with slogans which glorified the bombing. The posts also contained Kenneth’s phone number and encouraged other users to call him in order to protest against his sales activities. Although none of the accusations were true, Kenneth M. Zeran became a victim of a witch-hunt. The courts, though, contrary to any common sense, didn’t see anything wrong with this, because the Communications Decency Act clearly stated that AOL was neither responsible for monitoring user-generated content nor taking that content down (after being informed by the victim).

The Twenty-Six Words that Created the Internet is a very detailed reconstruction of court cases that preceded, motivated, and followed upon Section 230, starting with the story of a bookshop owner convicted for selling books about the pornographic content of which he was not informed. What becomes clear, though, is that law as it is practised in the US does a very poor job when it comes to setting a political strategy. The one thing special about the US legal system is the prominent role played by rather simple and often famous snippets of text, be it in the Constitution or in other central legal documents. Around these simple snippets, one finds a history of court decisions, which, in sum, constitute the real world’s legal framework. This approach, known as “case law”, stands in stark contrast to the way the EU deals with legal rules. Infamous for their lack of sex appeal, the EU’s regulations are so full of details that they are hardly intelligible to ordinary folks. On the other hand, they give a much stricter orientation for the judges than, for instance, Section 230 does – leaving it to the courts to strike a balance between free speech and commerce on the one hand and unintended consequences of freeing Internet intermediaries from any liability on the other.

In fact, this balance has hardly been achieved in the past, as the cases presented by Kosseff demonstrate. Worse: The cases reconstructed in depth by Kosseff bear witness of how the judges’ individual idiosyncrasies and constellations of the moment lead to rules which affect future cases in ways not foreseeable. Defamation, hate speech, pornography: these are the sole topics the judges in Kosseff’s book are dealing with. But Section 230, certainly, and freedom of speech have also had an impact upon copyright violations and the evolution of the so-called gig economy, where companies like Uber, who act as service providers, pretend as if they were just intermediaries, without any responsibilities for clients and workers. These topics are hardly mentioned in the book, and this is a serious omission. As Netopia has written before:

Freedom of speech is the right to express your own opinion. It’s not the right to distribute other people’s works and expressions against their will. It’s not the right to operate a taxi service without following taxi service rules. It is not the right for a machine to distribute any data without restriction.

Another aspect where judges at court might have too limited a view of the system as a whole is when it comes to impacts for society. Freedom of speech is great and an important individual right. But what if freedom of speech is guaranteed in such a way that democratic discourse and the public sphere as such suffer? Shouldn’t freedom of speech be seen in that broader societal perspective rather than just as an individual right? What kind of regulation would be apt for intermediaries if the goal were to create a Citizens’ Internet? For Kosseff and the adherents of a full-flavoured Section 230 free-speech approach, this just is a non-topic.

A last point: Section 230 often is credited with being in support of “neutral” information. Rightly so: a certain idea of neutrality surely is one of the cornerstones when it comes to ensuring that intermediaries such as social media, which provide most of the stage for today’s political discourse, act in line with public interest. Wikimedia, for instance, on its information site on the topic of “Intermediary Liability” and Section 230, is eager to point out the following:

Neutral online platforms and publishers are critical to the free exchange of knowledge, on Wikipedia and elsewhere.

Neutral platforms are critical. But in fact, many of them are not neutral. And Kosseff is honest enough to point out that neutrality never was part of the idea behind Section 230. Thus, his recent statement in an interview:

All I can say is I’ve spoken with […]Senator Wyden and former Congressman Cox who wrote the bill, and they say that’s not true [the idea was that Section 230 granted special immunity to internet platforms but only on the condition that they are politically neutral]. I also spoke with the lobbyists who were on the civil liberties side and the tech companies’ side at the time [and]… they also told me that’s not true.

Personally, Kosseff confesses that he doesn’t regard it as realistic or possible that intermediaries such as Facebook could try to enact political influence: This hardly needs a comment. Facebook’s and other Internet intermediaries’ impact and biasing influence on elections have been a recurring topic both in the news and in research. To think that “free speech” will take care of itself is not only naïve or stupid. It is dangerously misleading.

Editor’s note: The author Jeff Kosseff has expressed that this review does not accurately represent the thinking in the book and that there are factual errors. Netopia has invited Jeff Kosseff to publish his comments.

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Comparing Age Ratings and Pears

Friday, December 12th, 2025

The world has a love/hate-relationship to age ratings. In my country – Sweden – cinema age ratings came about in the early 20th Century following mainly aesthetic criticism from what appears to be a loud minority. “Ugly hats” was one objection that may have contributed to instituting the Cinema Bureau – Statens Biografbyrå – which not only age-rated cinema films, but also banned and edited them. Yes, that’s right, the Swedish government removed parts of films as late as 1994. The last film to be cut by censors in Sweden was Martin Scorsese’s Casino. (The torture scene with the head in the vice was considered to graphic for Swedish movie-goers).

Walter Hill’s New York street gang interpretation of the Odyssey – The Warriors – was in 1979 considered so harmful that anyone who showed it to an audience could be sentenced to jail. Fast forward to 2015 when my eldest child participated in a theatre adaptation of this work organised by the municipality. I borrowed the dvd from the public library where it was found under “Children and Youth”. So times changes and so do the horrors that threaten our children. But this is not a post about folk devils and moral panics. It is about self-regulation.

The Swedish Cinema Bureau ended in 2010, some years after its director general Gunnel Arrbäck had resigned in protest that the government censored art. It was replaced by a voluntary system, where film distributors can submit films to get a formal age recommendation. No more bans or edits.

We all recognize rating labels like PG-13 from film trailers and end credits, and this rating system administered by CARA, is meant to help parents determine whether a particular movie is appropriate for their children to watch. No need for the government to step in, the independent Ratings Board formed by current parents who are making viewing decisions for their children. No tax money, no lengthy legal processes, no bans or edits. Freedom of expression intact, parental guidance provided.

In Europe, there was a similar development for video games in 2003 when PEGI, the Pan-European Game Information was installed. This came after pressure from then-Commissioner Viviane Reding in response to concerns about violent content. Resisting temptation to intervene, Reding said the industry should first get a chance to fix its own problem. Self-regulation “with teeth”, as Reding famously put it. PEGI has been in place for more than two decades and expanded far outside of Europe.

CARA and PEGI share some important functions: the ratings are to be clearly displayed in ads and trailers as well as the actual work. The ratings are decided not by the companies but through independent process: for CARA a panel of parents, for PEGI a questionnaire with corresponding scrutiny from independent experts. And: there is legal certainty – through proper procedure complaints can be made and heard. CARA is self-regulation but PEGI can rather be labelled as co-regulation as the ultimate decisions lie with the PEGI council, a body of experts appointed by the member states.

Of note – both CARA and PEGI are specific to their form of expression. It evolved from similar needs but with tailored structures and processes relevant for the specifics of games and film, respectively. It would make no sense to switch them! It would make no sense to slap them onto some other media. They were not copied willy-nilly from somewhere else in some act of desperation.

Self- and co-regulation has advantages over legislation: it is flexible to changes in the market, it is paid for by the industry (not tax-payers), it is stricter than legislation (a court must assume innocence). It needs to be solid and credible, with all the features described above.

I have often thought of something similar as an answer to Big Tech’s problems with its content. What if there was a standard for age ratings of online video? Maybe also other issues could be addressed with the same method: privacy, fake news. In advertising, press standards and many other places, self-regulation is the norm. In fact, I once had this conversation with a former Big Tech employee – why had they not considered self-regulation? The answer was depressing: there was no trust between the companies, they expected the others to stab them in the back at first opportunity.

But earlier this autumn, one Big Tech company actually tried. Hamfistedly. Meta simply copied the PG-13 rating and slapped it onto Instagram. It appears Meta did zero homework. No council of parents. No appeals process. No independent oversight. And of course no checking with the owner of the trademark – did anyone say move fast and break things?

How did it go? Not so well. But nice try Meta. If at first you don’t succeed, dust yourself of and do it right this time. Try not to think of it as damage control. Try to think of it as something that actually brings long-term value to your service. Perhaps even work together with your neighbours? With some effort, you could avoid both lawsuits and regulation. What’s not to like?

Full transparency: this writer has worked with PEGI, testified on PEGI in court in Sweden, advised the Swedish film-industry on the post-censorship age-recommendations, served on the board of the Swedish advertising standards organisation and posted on the topic of self-regulation more than anyone should do in a lifetime.

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From Geo-Blocking to Geo-Enabling: A Tool For Growth

Sunday, November 9th, 2025

There is a delicate balance to strike for Europe’s leaders: can the single market flourish together with the cultural diversity that is at the heart of our identity? A question often revisited over the years. In 2017 Netopia’s cartoonist Rodrigo interpreted the discussion with the phrase “So… now what do we watch?” As the European Commission starts a consultation on the Geo-Blocking Regulation, the topic is brought back once again.

The 2018 EU Geo-Blocking Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2018/302) was crafted to remove friction of trade and equalise the buying process for consumers, in particular those trying to buy physical goods cross-border.

For example, a French consumer might have wished to purchase from a German website but was redirected to a local language version or found their French physical address blocked. They might have been blocked entirely based on their IP – which was all in breach of Article 9 of the EU Geo-Blocking Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2018/302).

Once the regulation passed into law, it removed some of the freedom to work with geoblocking. The EU decided to force retailers to accept customers regardless of geography or regardless of local laws on certain products (e.g., age-based restrictions or the like). Retailers were no longer permitted to charge local rates (even if local storage of the goods meant selling in Germany might be more expensive than in France, for that matter).

So consumers in France could purchase a product in Germany without a price premium, compared to the same product in France, (regardless of the running costs faced by the German business!)

However, the seller isn’t required to offer delivery to France or other countries, meaning the customer is tasked with arranging carriage.

The obligation to deliver was excluded from the geo-blocking rules on account of a diverse set of national consumer rights laws (consumer guarantees, after-sales services, different language requirements, labelling rules and safety rules), not to mention tax laws.

The regulation doesn’t apply to services delivering copyright content such as films, tv content or sport  – an exception which has been backed by various studies on maintaining a healthy market place for consumer choice both in terms of content produced (where territoriality plays a key role in raising financing) and in terms of distribution channels offered (cinema, broadcasting, online services) and price points.

Not only sport, film and TV, but financial services, transport, health and telecommunications industries are alsoexempt. Each can then choose to provide local, tailored and individual geo-blocked services.

These exemptions are subject to regular review, on a five yearly basis. In 2020 the EU Commission saw fit to maintain the exemptions. In 2025 there’s a fresh opportunity for review.

The EU market is unlike any other market in the world with 27 member states and 24 main languages.

Geo-Blocking: A Threat to Local Languages?

The European Union’s plan to assess the exemptions from the ban on unjustified geo-blocking, including for film and television services, might seem like a victory for digital freedom and consumer choice, but at what cost to cultural diversity and local languages?  By eroding the bespoke local marketing of content, , the EU risks homogenizingculture, creative content, films and television and thereby stifling creativity, destroying jobs and undermining the very linguistic and cultural diversity it claims to champion

Determining the exact percentage of films released in local languages for each EU country is challenging due to varying data collection methods and the dynamic nature of film production. However, a study analysing European cinema from 2004 to 2014 provided some insights:

Top 6 Languages: Approximately 62% of European films during this period were produced in five major languages:

    • English: 18.3%
    • French: 17.3%
    • German: 10.0%
    • Italian: 8.6%
    • Spanish: 8.1%

Growth Languages: The remaining 38% of films were produced in various other languages, with notable contributions from:

    • Swedish: 3.3%
    • Dutch: 3.2%
    • Polish: 2.5%
    • Czech: 2.5%

Driving European Cultural Diversity

These figures represent production languages and not the percentage of films released in local languages within each individual EU country. These figures don’t count co-productions, distribution practices, and how audience preferences differ from country to country, driving demand (such as the keen interest for Nordic Noir across Europe or French film in Sweden) which drives the prevalence of non-national films across borders.

In total, European films were produced in 164 different languages during this decade.  The smaller languages like Swedish or Finnish over-index, often featuring as over indexing when counted in the cross-border release figures (termed: non-national works). In fact, Works: a report from the European Audiovisual Observatory  –- part of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg – reports that 51 per cent of all works broadcast in the EU in 2023 are of European origin, surpassing US works (40 per cent).

Geo-enabling not only protects local language, it encourages European output!

Mono-Market Bad for Consumers

Film and television and even sports are more than just entertainment; they are a reflection of cultural identity. Floorball in Scandinavia, Hurling or Shinty in Gaelic countries or Polo in Southern Europe – each generates a local demand.

Each European country has its own rich history, traditions, and storytelling styles, shaped by its unique language, sport and experiences. Geo-enabling allows national industries to thrive around these differences. With highly defined audiences, filmmakers can that tell stories that matter. Without it, the industry will face immense pressure to produce and distribute only for a pan-European audience, a one-size fits all, mono-culture resulting in bland, lowest-common-denominator productions that fail to capture the nuances ofeach country, culture, and languages. Instead of supporting bold, original storytelling, the industry will contract, jobs will be lost and audiences left with less – not more choice.

The Danger to Linguistic Diversity

Where smaller language groups must punch above their weight to maintain their presence in mainstream media, they will face even greater marginalisation and become a casualty of a geoblocking ban if not protected bya continued exemption. What incentive will distribution platforms have to support the smaller European languages – could film and TV soon be predominantly in English, with dubbing? Audiences in smaller nations would miss out on linguistic diversity or simply film and TV content in their own language. Without geo-enabling, the EU would ironically be creating an environment where small-language cinema becomes an endangered species.

Maintaining geo-blocking for copyrighted works and protected subject matter is one of the major tools for guaranteeing cultural diversity.”

 Free-Flow Favours Bigger Players

Without geo-enabling, only bigger players would have the resources to create a pan-European market demand

Beyond cultural concerns, there are economics which create the conditions for investment in films that sustain European cinema. Currently film distributors negotiate region- or country-specific future distribution rights which in turn contribute to funding productions – release schedules for a film may depend on a range of factors, based on local demand, events or national holidays. Without geo-enabling, only bigger players would have the resources to create a pan-European market demand. Against such pan-European distribution platforms, national film industries will struggle to be included and to reach both national and non-national audiences. Ultimately the EU economy would suffer the losses.

“The inclusion of audio-visual services in the scope of the Geo-blocking Regulation would result in a significant loss of revenue, putting investment in new content at risk, while eroding contractual freedom and reducing cultural diversity in content production, distribution promotion and exhibition; emphasises that such an inclusion would result in fewer distribution channels, ultimately driving up prices for consumers.”

Digital Rights Should Strengthen Culture, Not Undermine It

Instead of dismantling a system that allows for localised storytelling and bespoke localized marketing/creation of demand for non-national films and tv content, the EU should invest in infrastructure that expands access while preserving market structures that sustain diverse content.

If the EU is serious about growth, it should be strengthening national film industries.

Revisiting the exemption from the ban on unjustified geo-enabling will create a cultural blandness, vanilla content and undermine creativity with a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach production, marketing and distribution.

It would create a monopolised media landscape dominated by a handful of large players focused on shareholders return and not the audience.

If the EU is serious about growth, it should be strengthening national film industries, not paving the way for their demise!

Rodrigo’s brilliant cartoon with the hollow TV and the viewers as national stereotypes is a cautionary tale. Perhaps this can also be an answer to the consultation?

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Busting Fake News Like a Crazy Cat Lady

Monday, September 22nd, 2025

No shortage of disinformation, trolling, propaganda, fake news… whichever term you prefer. Some of it is just brain rot material; some of it is brought by an actor with an agenda. How can anyone navigate it?

One novel approach is to take the role of the instigator. How would you go about spreading dissent and blocking progress? The game Cat Park does precisely this. Your city plans to build a park just for cats. Your job is to stop that. With polarising rhetoric, memes, manipulated images, emotional headlines and other tricks, you can succeed in blocking the decision process and stop the cat park!

It is very difficult to decide what an audience takes a way from any media. Every reader reads the book in their own way. Moviegoers have different experiences from the same film. You may not like my favourite song. Games are no different, so this is why there is a teacher toolkit. Think of this game as part of what a teacher can bring to their students, and it makes more sense.

Has Cat Park the game helped build resistance against disinformation? Yes, very likely in every player. However, in a plot twist, the US Department of State cut the funding for the project earlier this year. (There is a pun here that Doges don’t like cats, but such jokes are beneath me).

The game and toolkit are still around online, waiting for the next crazy cat lady to step in and save democracy (or ruin it?). Perhaps we could all use a counter-psyops toolkit these days?

The truth has whiskers…

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Xanadu – The Internet Did Not Have to be Like This

Monday, August 11th, 2025

Xanadu was the home and base for comic book character Mandrake the Magician. It was Kublai Khan’s capital in the Mongol empire. Coleridge wrote of it as a paradise of sorts.

For Netopia, however, a different vision of Xanadu is more interesting. What if the problems we struggle with in today’s internet could have been avoided? No fake news. No trolling. No content theft. No flame wars. No phishing. Sound to good to be true? Maybe it is but bear with me.

Ted Nelson (b 1937) is a digital pioneer from the early days of electronic communication. He coined the term hypertext (you know… clickable links – the core of how we navigate the internet). And he designed a system for how information could be accessed and organized with this concept. The name? You guessed it: Xanadu

 In the Xanadu project, the hypertext is guided by 17 rules – such as:

  • 3 Each user is securely and uniquely identified (=no trolls)
  • 9 Every document can contain a royalty mechanism at any desired degree of granularity to ensure payment on any portion accessed, including virtual copies (“transclusions”) of all or part of the document. (=no copyright theft)
  • 10 Every document is uniquely and securely identified (= no unauthorized copies, no fake news)

… not only did Ted Nelson anticipate many of the problem’s with today’s internet, he also worked solutions to the into the Xanadu design.

But the real game-changer is rule number 7:

Links are visible and can be followed from all endpoints.

Many of the ideas from Xanadu were realised on a grander scale as the World Wide Web. But www-links are one-way only! Ted Nelson’s comment:

HTML is precisely what we were trying to PREVENT– ever-breaking links, links going outward only, quotes you can’t follow to their origins, no version management, no rights management.

Netopia’s favourite thinker Jaron Lanier explains (from Who Owns the Future [2013]):

It’s a small simple change in how online information should be stored that couldn’t have vaster implications for culture and the economy

Maybe in a parallel universe, Xanadu is what World Wide Web is in ours. Or maybe Xanadu was just too complex and simpler systems prevailed. Regardless, when somebody pretends the problems of today’s internet are complete surprises or inevitable side effects of technology – remember that Ted Nelson predicted them all in the 1960s. Perhaps some could use a reminder?

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Beyond the Digital Ambulance: The Evolving Economy of Exploitation in the Online World

Monday, July 28th, 2025

In our previous article in 2013, we explored in the first “Digital Ambulance Chasers” study how early opportunists emerged in the digital world to exploit technical loopholes, policy gaps, and user missteps—from DMCA scammers to reputation management firms. These individuals and entities—dubbed “digital ambulance chasers”—profit not by building or creating, but by circling digital misfortune like vultures.

They profit not by building or creating, but by circling digital misfortune like vultures

In this follow-up, we examine a new set of emerging behaviours and monetised schemes that go beyond the obvious. These are not mere scams or overtly criminal actions, but grey-zone tactics—often legally permissible, occasionally sanctioned, and always profitable. Together, they reflect the maturation of an informal industry built not on innovation, but on extraction.

App Store Name Squatting
The Race to Register Before You Launch

Just as domain names became hotly contested real estate in the early days of the web, the names of mobile applications are now being claimed and hoarded. Individuals and groups identify potential trends or copycat known brands, pre-registering app names on platforms like the Apple App Store or Google Play.

In some cases, these names are linked to low-effort apps with minimal functionality, designed to generate ad revenue or harvest user data. In others, the name is simply held and offered for sale to the rightful or intended owner. This tactic mirrors domain squatting but with a more immediate business impact: developers can be forced into lengthy legal disputes or expensive buy-backs simply to preserve their branding.

Early App Store policies  allowed for this kind of name hoarding. While Apple eventually cracked down on the practice—requiring uploaded binaries to maintain name claims—the enforcement remains inconsistent.

Influencer Dispute Monetisation
Turning Online Conflict Into Commercial Strategy

As digital personalities wield increasing social and commercial influence, interpersonal conflicts between them have become more than drama—they’re monetisable events. Agencies and consultants now offer dispute management services tailored specifically to influencers and content creators. These range from copyright strike services to the orchestration of PR battles designed to boost engagement.

A YouTube feud or a Twitter spat was a reputational risk, it is now a business opportunity

Where once a YouTube feud or a Twitter spat was a reputational risk, it is now a business opportunity. Some parties even use legal channels—such as takedown notices or brand defamation claims—as a first step in content strategy.

Class actions and dispute PR have become structured tools in influencer marketing. The broader academic framing is covered in the esteemed German Law Journal, where the “influencer republic” dynamic is detailed. Regulatory attention has also increased, as shown in this analysis.

Data Breach Notification Consultants
Crisis Management or Cash Grab?

For companies that suffer a data breach, the regulatory and reputational fallout is immediate and severe. In this vulnerable window, consultants emerge offering assistance with breach notifications, media communications, and regulatory filings.

While many of these firms provide legitimate crisis response services, others exploit the urgency of the situation to overcharge or upsell unnecessary cybersecurity products. Their tactics often rely on fear: exaggerated interpretations of legal exposure, or veiled threats of further reputational damage if a contract is not signed quickly.

There are many cases where consultants delay disclosure to reduce client liability. Legal observers warn of pressure sales and overreach. An example these firms often act as both emergency responders and sales arms.

Terms of Service Enforcement-as-a-Service
Private Policing with a Paywall

Several online services now offer automated monitoring and enforcement of platform terms—such as detecting fake reviews, brand misuse, or intellectual property violations. These services are marketed as compliance tools but can easily turn into forms of coercion.

They operate much like private enforcement arms—scanning, reporting, and escalating issues unless payment is rendered to ‘clean up’ infractions

In some cases, these firms contact businesses they believe are in technical violation of a platform’s terms and offer “resolution services” in exchange for a monthly fee. They operate much like private enforcement arms—scanning, reporting, and escalating issues unless payment is rendered to “clean up” infractions.

This dynamic raises ethical and legal questions about due process, as enforcement actions traditionally governed by platforms or regulators become outsourced and monetised by third parties.

A New Class of Middlemen
What emerges across these practices is a clear pattern: a growing class of digital intermediaries who position themselves not to solve problems, but to own them. From squatting on names to profiting from influencer disputes, they offer assistance with one hand while subtly charging for air with the other.

In this economy, the most valuable skill is not creation—but opportunistic timing

The internet, once lauded as a decentralised meritocracy, has now matured into a layered economy where visibility, access, and even compliance can be bought, sold, or blocked. And as long as regulatory gaps and digital uncertainty persist, so too will those who thrive in their shadow.

If the first wave of digital ambulance chasers profited from technical ignorance, the next wave profits from systemic complexity. In this economy, the most valuable skill is not creation—but opportunistic timing.

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Machine Usefulness – A Compass for Navigating the AI Revolution

Tuesday, May 13th, 2025

Book Review of Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson

Innovation lays the groundwork for the redistribution of power and wealth. In the Middle Ages, elites used water and windmills to extract wealth from the people to build cathedrals. Today, with AI, we are on the same path – unless we get up for “machine usefulness”.

Innovation lays the groundwork for the redistribution of power and wealth.

Innovation. Nothing can be wrong with that. Can it? Innovation brings us better products, leaner processes, and greener technology. We all benefit. We have better lives. This has always been the case for humanity throughout history, whenever innovation has entered the scene. Innovation is what we need to solve our problems. This applies even more to the latest and most significant innovation of our time, which is now taking off: artificial intelligence.

But what if this common narrative is simply wrong? That’s the argument made by economists Daron Acemoglu, Nobel Prize laureate in 2024, and Simon Johnson in their recent book Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity (2024).

Technology often redistributes prosperity away from ordinary people.

In an unusual move for economists, Acemoglu and Johnson take a deep dive into economic history to support their argument. As a result, their book is full of stories rather than models and statistics, making it an engaging read. The historical examples they provide vividly illustrate what happens when technology “redistributes power and prosperity away from ordinary people”. This is exactly what happened when water and windmills were introduced in the Middle Ages. Instead of enabling a better life for all those involved in production and consumption, the surplus created by the new technology was largely absorbed by the religious hierarchy. Cathedrals, monasteries, churches—that’s where much of the profit ended up.

Mills are just one of many cases Acemoglu and Johnson cite to make their point. Looms and coal mining are other examples. Looking at the broader picture, hardly any progress for ordinary people is discernible. “The quality of life of a European peasant circa 1700 was not much different from that of an Egyptian peasant two thousand or even seven thousand years earlier,” they write. “According to the best available estimates, GDP per capita (in real, price-adjusted terms) was almost the same in 1000 CE as it had been a thousand years earlier.”

But there are exceptions. And this brings us to the brighter outlook that Power and Progress points to. Whether innovation and technological change benefit the general population or just those in power is a matter of choice—both political and technological. These choices are ours to make or enforce. “Machine usefulness” is the term Acemoglu and Johnson propose for a kind of innovation that benefits society and ordinary people.

Machine usefulness means innovation that benefits society, not just elites.

Again, history provides useful examples. Electricity, for instance, embodies the kind of “usefulness” they advocate, as it allowed for diverse applications and development paths. Another example is how the American automobile industry handled automation in the postwar period. Instead of merely cutting costs, technology was used to create new tasks and jobs for workers of all skill levels.

“Managers and engineers could have chosen to double down on automation as a method to cut costs in existing industries. Instead, they […] pushed to build new systems and machinery […], augmenting the capabilities of both skilled and unskilled labour.” This led to an increase in demand for workers in the industry, “which more than made up for declining labour intensity in agriculture and some manufacturing tasks.” All of this is well-documented in recent research on economic history.

Some digital technologies also exhibit traits of “machine usefulness”. Acemoglu and Johnson highlight famous single innovations like the computer mouse, as well as broader advancements such as virtual reality and digital tools that support work in education and healthcare. Steve Jobs referred to such tools as a “bicycle for the mind”. Other examples mentioned in the book include new platforms that connect people with different skills and needs or tools that improve classroom instruction by enabling personalised learning.

AI continues this trend: disrupting labour markets, shifting power to those who control

Overall, however, the introduction of digital technologies marks a turning point—one that contrasts with the shared prosperity model associated with the automobile industry. “Wage growth slowed down, the labour share of national income declined sharply, and wage inequality surged starting around 1980.” AI continues this trend: disrupting labour markets, shifting power to those who control data and make key corporate decisions, impoverishing billions in the global south, reinforcing existing biases (such as those based on skin colour), and even undermining institutions. That’s the dark picture Power and Progress paints.

AI, Acemoglu and Johnson point out, enables “so-so automation”. AI replaces humans, but often without creating new opportunities—just leading to lower service quality. “So-so automation” occurs when stores install self-checkout kiosks that don’t improve customer service or when AI takes over customer support:

“Humans are then brought in as troubleshooters after a long series of menus. By this point, the customer is often frustrated, early opportunities for building a social bond have been lost, and the customer service representative lacks the same depth of communication, limiting their ability to learn from and adapt to specific circumstances. This makes the representative less effective and may encourage managers and technologists to find further ways to reduce their tasks.”

That’s a perfect vicious cycle.

So, what’s our task? The direction that innovation in general—and AI in particular—is taking must be brought under democratic control:

“When a company decides to develop facial recognition technology or track faces in a crowd… their engineers are best placed to decide how to design the software. But society at large should have a voice in whether such software should be developed and deployed.”

Another example: rules for social media platforms that go far beyond the relatively weak measures discussed recently:

“Even with much better monitoring, it would be unrealistic to expect that Facebook can eliminate all posts containing misinformation or hate speech. Yet it is not too much to expect that their algorithms should not amplify such material by boosting it and actively recommending it to other users.”

Will innovation automate work or create new tasks? Will it be used for surveillance or to empower workers? Will it influence political discourse and social outcomes for better or worse? These are the key questions that determine whether a technology exhibits “machine usefulness”. What we need is the right institutional framework and government policies to steer the private sector away from excessive automation and surveillance and toward technologies that serve the broader public interest.

Whether innovation serves the public is a political and technological choice.

Here’s one idea for such a framework: let’s make the direction of technological development a key criterion for investors when evaluating companies. Large investors could demand transparency on whether new technologies align with societal needs.

Last but not least: narratives matter. It is persuasion—not mere physical force—that has historically paved the way for innovation. And the ability to persuade is deeply tied to social status and political power. The tech elite, today’s global oligarchy, have successfully convinced us of their narrative about AI’s exponentially increasing capabilities. Power and Progress offers a counter-narrative. Let’s spread the word!

 

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I Have Not Been Manipulated by Algorithms, but You Have

Monday, April 21st, 2025

Giuliano da Empoli is a Swiss-Italian novelist, political essayist, and professor at Paris’s Sciences Po. He writes about how political forces rise to power and how manipulation of public discourse happens. And he has a message for you: you are being manipulated by algorithms. We are being manipulated by algorithms.

Read the headline of this post again: I Have Not Been Manipulated by Algorithms, but You Have.

Doesn’t sound right, does it? Those being manipulated are always somebody else. They. You. Never we or I. So the first step is to accept that I, too, am being manipulated. When we accept that, we can start thinking about what to do about it.

I am being manipulated by algorithms. My taste in music. My knowledge about the world. My understanding of how the world works. This is not a conspiracy theory—I am not being singled out and fed something specific to move in some certain direction. It’s just that the way the online world works—the algorithms it runs on—will bring me some sorts of information and not other sorts of information.

What do I do with this insight? First, I will stop pointing fingers and doing algo-shaming on others. Next, I will make more efforts to seek information outside of online sources. I’ll tell you when I find something—watch this space.

You don’t have to do anything, because surely you see through the algorithms. Or do you?

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