I am thrilled this week to join my friend and fellow media commentator Peter Bittner to chart publishing’s future in a post-Google world.
Peter is visiting lecturer of New Media at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism and an instructor at Berkeley’s Advanced Media Institute, teaching AI.
His work has been published in The New York Times, CNN, Bloomberg, NBC, Reuters, Vox, Insider, Hearst Digital, and Al Jazeera.
His clients include the United Nations, Canada, and XPRIZE. He’s a Fulbright Scholar, journalist, and author of The Upgrade newsletter.
Don’t you just love an overachiever on a Monday morning…
We dissect why the US Government is breaking up its most successful companies, the role of AI, what to do about copyright, and how news media advertising can recover.
The conversation pulls out signals that the world is reaching peak tech and looks forward to how an AI-dominant web will be different to the one we know.
We discuss the future of the browser, what Perplexity should do next to grow, how to tackle news deserts with ad quotas, and ways that taxation can solve global poverty.
We also cover the future of money, how break-ups will boost emerging start-ups, and why that’s convinced Trump to pick JD Vance as his running mate.
“AI is a chance to reimagine the delivery of information,” I argue. “And it’s not about taking the past to the future, it’s about building what people are going to need next.
“It’s not the job of big companies to do that, it’s the role of start-ups and innovators.
“And these great ideas cannot flourish under Big Tech’s yoke. That’s stopping the world from getting to a better future. That’s why they are being broken up.
“It’s a fact now that Big Tech is losing more than it is winning. It’s time to recognise this. The market was imbalanced, but now it’s being fixed by antitrust.”
I strongly recommend Peter’s newsletter The Upgrade. He’s also a great guy.
Future plans now tech's losing more than winning...