The main course notes are in the Notes Organized by Topic section on the main web page. Reading assignments, comments on the class discussion and occasional special notices are in these week-by-week notes.
Jesse Frederik and Maurits Martijn, The new dot com bubble is here: it's called online advertising
All that worry that big companies know too much about you? It turns out that they know next to nothing. For example, if Amazon wants to advertise a new product on Facebook or Google, then those platforms might prefer to show ads to known Amazon shoppers, not to people who might be interested in that new product. This is called the selection effect: send ads to people selected for their past interest in the item advertised. Compare it to the advertising effect: convert people who previously did not know about the item.
You can argue that showing ads to likely buyers isn't a bad idea. But it's not the same as converting new sales.
Amazon accused of forcing up consumer prices: bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-08/amazon-merchant-lays-out-antitrust-case-in-letter-to-congress. In the past, Amazon has been accused of a monopoly, but they have always argued they reduce prices to consumers. This is different.
In a letter sent to federal lawmakers, an online merchant has accused Amazon.com Inc. of forcing him and other sellers to use the company’s expensive logistics services, which in turn forces them to raise prices for consumers.
Google begins rollout of Chrome that no longer supports adblocking: bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/google-begins-testing-extension-manifest-v3-in-chrome-canary.
The most controversial aspect of the extension manifest v3 is the upcoming changes to the webRequest API. In v3, Google has changed the API so that extensions can only monitor browser connections, but not modify any of the content before it's displayed.
Instead Google wants developers to use the declarativeNetRequest API, which has the browser, not the extension, strip content or resources from a visited web sites. This API, though, has a limit of 30,000 rules that can be created.
American Gene Technologies International has a candidate therapy for curing HIV: americangene.com/development-portfolio/hiv-aids.
Whether this treatment works out or not, this kind of clinical-trials work finds no funding without the patent system.
Section 230(c)(1) is the clause that we've been talking about
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.
There is also 230(c)(2):
CNIL v Google
...
Source Code