Pluralistic: California bans algorithmic price-fixing (09 Oct 2025)
Today's links California bans algorithmic price-fixing: Bye-bye, Realpage. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Android can't stop phoning home; FBI wants its bug back; Bikram can't copyright yoga; Prison debaters trounce Harvard. Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. California bans algorithmic price-fixing (permalink) As the Marxist pamphleteer Adam Smith wrote in his Leninist textbook The Wealth of Nations, "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices." For a commie, that Adam Smith sure had a fine grasp of the business mindset. Price-fixing conspiracies are as old as the lumber barons who gouged Noah, and they're illegal as hell. But price-gougers gonna gouge, and for most of the past 40 years, regulators have been monumentally disinterested in protecting the public from these ripoffs. All our regulators asked of the price-gougers was that they come up with the thinnest, least-convincing comb-over and in return, these regulators would pretend not to notice the glaring bald-spot shining through. The one weird trick that these guys have hit upon is to use industry-wide "pricing consultancies" – clearinghouses that pretend to offer individualized price advice to each seller in a market. In reality what these companies do is aggregate all the prices charged by every major seller in the market, then advise all of them to raise their prices in sync: https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/24/price-discrimination/ When we talk about "greedflation," we don't just mean one seller – a major grocery chain, say – raising prices because they know they've got a regional lock on their market. That happens, but far more pernicious is when all the sellers get together to raise the price of goods, via a brokerage that lets them pretend (unconvincingly) that they're just getting "price advice." Take Agri-Stats, a conspiracy in plain sight that gathers in pricing from all the major meat processors and then tells them all to jack up the price of meat: https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/04/dont-let-your-meat-loaf/#meaty-beaty-big-and-bouncy Then there's Realpage, a conspiracy that gathers rental prices from all the landlords in your town and "advises" them all to jack up prices. Landlords who don't obey this "advice" get kicked out of the conspiracy: https://popular.info/p/feds-raid-corporate-landlord-escalating These "price consultancies" are the reason you can't afford a hamburger or your apartment anymore. During the Biden administration, the Federal Trade Commission was working towards a nationwide ban on this stuff: https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/24/gouging-the-all-seeing-eye/#i-spy Of course, after Trump took office, his FTC canceled all that work and instead set up a snitch line where FTC employees could report on each other for being "woke." And, you know, fair: making sure that no one who works for the federal government has a pronoun is far more important than making sure you can afford to eat dinner and sleep indoors. But (as the saying goes) the states are the laboratories of democracy. State legislatures are (sometimes) stepping in to fill the voids where Trump has failed the American people. That's what's just happened in California, the world's fourth largest economy, where Governor Newsom has just signed AB325 into law, and banned these price consultancies: https://legiscan.com/CA/text/AB325/id/3269757 Specifically, the law makes it "unlawful for a person to use or distribute a common pricing algorithm if the person coerces another person to set or adopt a recommended price or commercial term recommended by the common pricing algorithm for the same or similar products or services." As Matt Stoller writes, this may seem like small potatoes, but it's actually a huge ideological victory, and marks a major new milestone in the long fight to slay the political ideology that welcomes oligarchy: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/how-to-overturn-an-oligarchy Stoller recounts the history of this pro-oligarch movement, and describes how it began by rejecting earlier Supreme Court decisions that banned price coercion – like when a cartel forces its members to adopt higher prices. The Chicago School – the faction of economists who took over the world in the Reagan years – rejected any kind of politics that took account of the role that power played in the economy. They insisted that if workers accepted a starvation wage, it was because they had a "revealed preference" for going hungry – and not because they needed a union to force their bosses to pay them enough to live on. The Chicago School replaced this kind of power-centric analysis with something they called "efficiency": If you were coerced by a dominant supplier, but an economist showed there was no loss of output, then that was just vigorous competition. Gradually, the notion that the antitrust laws protect business from economic violence fell away. The result is an economy of coercion machines, from Amazon to pharmacy benefit managers to RealPage. The mere existence of a law – in 2025, nearly half a century into the neoliberal era – that mentions "coercion" marks a profoud shift in ideology, a recovery of the idea that we are always under threat of "a conspiracy against the public…some contrivance to raise prices." In a way, this just proves how right Trump is: the American way of life really is under threat from the radical Marxist ideology…of Adam Smith. Hey look at this (permalink) Chat control in Europe, an open letter to the Irish Minister who wants to scan all our messages https://crookedtimber.org/2025/10/07/chat-control-in-europe-an-open-letter-to-the-irish-minister-who-wants-to-scan-all-our-messages/ Canadaland’s Artificial Intelligence Policy https://www.canadaland.com/canadalands-artificial-intelligence-policy/ A cartoonist's review of AI art https://theoatmeal.com/comics/ai_art Folk Tech https://folktechnology.org/ Object permanence (permalink) #15yrsago Student finds GPS bug on car, uploads photo, FBI demands to have their warrantless bug back https://web.archive.org/web/20101009211920/https://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/10/fbi-tracking-device/ #15yrsago THE UNIDENTIFIED: dystopian YA about education transformed into a giant, heavily sponsored game https://memex.craphound.com/2010/10/08/the-unidentified-dystopian-ya-about-education-transformed-into-a-giant-heavily-sponsored-game/ #10yrsago Court tells millionaire yoga troll Bikram Choudhury that poses can’t be copyrighted https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2015/10/08/13-55763.pdf #10yrsago Jimmy Wales calls UK’s proposed crypto ban “moronic” https://web.archive.org/web/20151009011752/https://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/e-regulation/jimmy-wales-wikipedia-encryption-178365 #10yrsago Prisoners’ debate team trounces national champs from Harvard – Cory Doctorow's MEMEX https://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/oct/07/harvards-prestigious-debate-team-loses-to-new-york-prison-inmates #5yrsago Good Intentions, Bad Inventions https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/08/hype-beast/#moral-panics #1yrago Google's new phones can't stop phoning home https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/08/water-thats-not-wet/#pixelated Upcoming appearances (permalink) NYC: Enshittification with Lina Khan (Brooklyn Public Library), Oct 9 https://www.bklynlibrary.org/calendar/cory-doctorow-discusses-central-library-dweck-20251009-0700pm New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12 http://www.contraflowscifi.org/ New Orleans: Enshittification at Octavia Books, Oct 12 https://www.octaviabooks.com/event/enshittification-cory-doctorow Chicago: How Platforms Die with Rick Perlstein (University Club), Oct 14 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/how-platforms-die-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1747916117159 Los Angeles: Enshittification with David Dayen (Diesel), Oct 16 https://dieselbookstore.com/event/2025-10-16/cory-doctorow-enshittification San Francisco: Enshittification at Public Works with Jenny Odell (The Booksmith), Oct 20 https://app.gopassage.com/events/doctorow25 PDX: Enshittification at Powell's, Oct 21 https://www.powells.com/events/cory-doctorow-10-21-25 Seattle: Enshittification and the Rot Economy, with Ed Zitron (Clarion West), Oct 22 https://www.clarionwest.org/event/2025-deep-dives-cory-doctorow/ Vancouver: Enshittification with David Moscrop (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 23 https://www.showpass.com/2025-festival-39/ Montreal: Montreal Attention Forum keynote, Oct 24 https://www.attentionconferences.com/conferences/2025-forum Montreal: Enshittification at Librarie Drawn and Quarterly, Oct 24 https://mtl.drawnandquarterly.com/events/3757420251024 Ottawa: Enshittification (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 25 https://writersfestival.org/events/fall-2025/enshittification Toronto: Enshittification with Dan Werb (Type Books), Oct 27 https://www.instagram.com/p/DO81_1VDngu/?img_index=1 Barcelona: Conferencia EUROPEA 4D (Virtual), Oct 28 https://4d.cat/es/conferencia/ Miami: Enshittification at Books & Books, Nov 5 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1504647263469 Miami: Cloudfest, Nov 6 https://www.cloudfest.com/usa/ Burbank: Burbank Book Festival, Nov 8 https://www.burbankbookfestival.com/ Lisbon: A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet, with Rabble (Web Summit), Nov 12 https://websummit.com/sessions/lis25/92f47bc9-ca60-4997-bef3-006735b1f9c5/a-post-american-enshittification-resistant-internet/ Cardiff: Hay Festival After Hours, Nov 13 https://www.hayfestival.com/c-203-hay-festival-after-hours.aspx London: Enshittification with Sarah Wynn-Williams and Chris Morris, Nov 15 https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2025/event/cory-doctorow-with-sarah-wynn-williams Seattle: Neuroscience, AI and Society (University of Washington), Dec 4 https://compneuro.washington.edu/news-and-events/neuroscience-ai-and-society/ Recent appearances (permalink) Enshittification (Everyday Anarchism) https://www.everydayanarchism.com/168-enshittification-cory-doctorow/ The Trouble with Tech Companies (and Their Strategies) (Ideadcast) https://hbr.org/podcast/2025/10/the-trouble-with-tech-companies-and-their-strategies Enshittification (The Honest Broker) https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-honest-broker-launches-an-interview Enshittification (The.Ink) https://the.ink/p/watch-cory-doctorow-on-why-everything Latest books (permalink) "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026 "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE AND SUBMITTED. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. 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