Today on Cory Doctorow’s …

++ The pandemic could make Big Tech our permanent overlords

++ Hospital CEOs are making millions while slashing health care worker salaries and hours, announcing layoffs and furloughs. “The average hospital CEO gets $3.1m/year. The average nurse gets $75k.”

++ Workers at Wired Magazine are forming a union.

++ How open source has failed: The focus should be “on protocol documentation … in a cloud-based era, real software freedom comes from being able to make compatible clients for existing servers, and compatible servers for existing clients.” That’s in addition to legal protections against monopoly practices.

The traditional antitrust world did not permit firms to attain dominance through mergers with major competitors, catch-and-kill buyouts of nascent startups, or vertical monopolies where companies that owned platforms competed with the companies that used them. [But these] rules were heavily nerfed by Reagan, then further eroded by every administration since."