iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Nicolas Suzor @nicsuzor.bsky.social · 20/12/2025

What I can't get over is just how terrible a strategy this is when Google has been fighting so hard for so long to avoid being pushed into licensing deals for snippets, governments imposing link taxes, and coming soon to a country near you, brand new weird and made up AI training data dividends!

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Nicolas Suzor @nicsuzor.bsky.social · 19/12/2025

tl;dr: cry me a river, Google. This looks terrible, it goes against its own long-argued claims, it sucks Google even more towards a paid and licensed-search future, and makes it look even more anti-competitive. And it's just _not necessary_; it's just not that much of a threat.

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Nicolas Suzor @nicsuzor.bsky.social · 19/12/2025

If users are allowed to read books, copy facts for research, or run their own text mining, can a company build a massive digital library to enable that? Google was on the side of helping people get access to information for non-infringing uses. Maybe it still is, but the optics here are terrible.

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Nicolas Suzor @nicsuzor.bsky.social · 19/12/2025

And then the proxy problem: so many copyright cases are fought over whether a company can profitably help users do things they're entitled to. Can a library copy a chapter on my behalf? Can a web-pvr record tv on my behalf? If I'm allowed to access search results, can someone help me automate it?

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Nicolas Suzor @nicsuzor.bsky.social · 19/12/2025

Serp Api fills a niche that Google has REFUSED to service: programmattic access to search. That's really important for anyone who wants to, say, make sure their robots are well-grounded in current knowledge -- kindof a big deal, and you just can't afford to build that from scratch.

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Nicolas Suzor @nicsuzor.bsky.social · 19/12/2025

What makes this worse is just how tightly Google has fought to protect its scraping based business model by making it so hard for others to access its hoards of other people's data. It's just not a sympathetic plaintiff, and the suit is unlikely to get us useful, thoughtful precedent.

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Nicolas Suzor @nicsuzor.bsky.social · 19/12/2025

Regardless of the merits of the case, suing here makes Google look like it's pulling the ladder up after itself. It's also completely unnecessary; I'd be that someone would have sued Serp API or Perplexity or another target relatively soon. Google could have waited that out.

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Nicolas Suzor @nicsuzor.bsky.social · 19/12/2025

Google has historically been on the other side of this fight. It's the poster child for amazing innovation underpinned by making public information hard to lock up, not protecting facts with copyright, and not protecting 'non consumptive' uses of copyright material.

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Nicolas Suzor @nicsuzor.bsky.social · 19/12/2025

Best case, Google looks like a multi-billion dollar company that grew up before there were rules and developed a sweet little (massive) market advantage from its data. With robots.txt and a lot of technical control, it has pioneered an industry standard that protects that advantage.

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Nicolas Suzor @nicsuzor.bsky.social · 19/12/2025

In dumb news of the day, Google has filed suit against SerpAPI: blog.google/technology/s... I've said this before: Google is not the right plaintiff for these cases. There's some important issues to work out about robots.txt and proxy uses and scraping facts. But Google looks real bad here.

blog.google

Why we’re taking legal action against SerpApi’s unlawful scraping

We filed a suit today against the scraping company SerpApi.

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Kate Klonick @klonick.bsky.social · 05/12/2025

Join me and @noupside.bsky.social *IN FIVE MINUTES* to talk about what the European Commission's decision means for X's pocket book, Europe's ongoing access to X, JD Vance's tweets, and whether this decision really is about censoring American tech companies.

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Chris Marsden @chrismarsden.bsky.social · 13/11/2025

Tomorrow 10am AEST (midnight Brussels) is our #digitallaw25 symposium, 2nd of its kin. Packed programme, exceptional abstracts & slides! With @mariaosullivan.bsky.social @nicsuzor.bsky.social hosted at the Law Chambers @monashuniversity.bsky.social with Deakin Law. Any Oz tech law profs can follow

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Kate Klonick @klonick.bsky.social · 30/09/2025

BREAKING @knightcolumbia.org just won their case against Trump admin’s policy arresting/deporting noncitizen stud. & fac. participating in pro-Palestinian activism This is a threat mailed to chambers of the 84yo Reagan appointed judge. He started the opinion with it and this is how he ended. 1/2

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Drew Harwell @drewharwell.com · 01/10/2025

OpenAI employees are very excited about how well their new AI tool can create fake videos of people doing crimes and have definitely thought through all the implications of this

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Dave Willner @dwillner.bsky.social · 18/07/2025

A year ago at #TrustCon, I ran around like a maniac showing people something on my laptop. We'd just gotten CoPE - our policy interpretation model - working. It felt like a huge achievement, validating our ideas about LLM-powered labeling. 🧵 1/7

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Henry Fraser @henrylfraser.bsky.social · 03/07/2025

Great panel yesterday on 'Governing automated decision-making for positive social services' with @kimweatherall.bsky.social , Samantha Floreani, Jake Goldenfein, and Kath Albury, organised and chaired by Christine Parker at @admscentre.org.au . The highlights of the conversation (in thread):

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Clara Iglesias Keller @claraigk.bsky.social · 24/06/2025

The PlatGov Conference is back! What a joy! I have learned so much from this research community. Join us this year 👇 @robyncaplan.bsky.social @gorwa.ca @ameliehldt.bsky.social @naomiappelman.bsky.social @deeliu97.bsky.social

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Christian Katzenbach @ckatzenbach.bsky.social · 14/05/2025

I am getting excited! 3 weeks to go until our AoIR Symposium 2025 in Bremen will kick-off! The line-up of plenary speakers is wonderful, and the program so promising. If you are able to join in early June, don't miss to register for the few remaining seats. platform-governance.org/aoir-flashpo...

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Nicolas Suzor @nicsuzor.bsky.social · 22/02/2025

why did nobody tell me python 3.10 introduced a match/case syntax? WHAT ELSE HAVE I BEEN MISSING?

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Nicolas Suzor @nicsuzor.bsky.social · 29/11/2024

Very happy to see this work come out from the amazing @klonick.bsky.social and team — measuring relationship between outrage and the spread of false information

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Nicolas Suzor @nicsuzor.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

omg i did this last week and woke up at 1pm, i kid you not.

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ysabel @ysabel.bsky.social · 21/10/2024

I feel so proud to announce that my first book - The Kids Are Online: Confronting the Myths and Realities of Young Digital Life - will be published in March 2025, by @ucpress.bsky.social 🫶🏼

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