The first topic is inspired by an interview I gave to online platform “RESET – Digital for Good” about Google’s stranglehold on the browser market. Their tech journalist, Kezia Rice reached out after reading my article on alternatives to Chrome from last year and we discussed how big tech platforms increasingly dominate how we spend our time online.

The way we search is a go example. Google remains the major player in this realm but increasingly, its monopolistic position is reshaping the internet. The Press Gazette recently reported a 15% dip in digital advertising revenues for The Daily Mail.  Website traffic was “adversely affected by the introduction of AI overviews by search engine providers, resulting in fewer users clicking through to news websites”.

While I’m not going to shed any tears for Lord Rothermere or the Daily Mail, I do believe that content producers should benefit from their work and that search engines should be directing traffic not hoarding it.

Interestingly the Daily Mail has seen an increase in paid subscribers which reflects a broader shift in digital revenue models. As search engines and GenAI platforms increasingly hoard engagement (which allows for increased data harvesting) subscription models are starting to gain more traction.

From larger legacy media publishers to smaller independents like 404 Media, organisations are seeing the benefits from reducing their reliance on third party digital service providers and taking increased control over how their audience accesses their content. Perhaps algorithms just aren’t what they used to be.

Sadly it looks likely that this monopolistic situation will get worse before it gets better. SOMO, the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations, investigated a bumper year of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) in 2025. They report that “major tech firms acquired at least 25 companies – or their strategic assets” last year, representing a notable increase on previous years.

Google, Amazon and Microsoft, among others, are accused of avoiding legislative scrutiny by making “strategic” investments in companies rather than buying them outright. Actions such as these are seen as being ways to avoid falling foul of the Digital Markets Act in the EU and circumventing merger controls set by the CMA in the UK.

The report also notes that an alarming number of the companies acquired seem to cease offering services soon after being swallowed up. Consumer choice, competition and innovation will likely suffer as a result, while the biggest players in the market benefit from this lack of competition and the stockpiling of talent.

Corporate behaviour like this might be part of the reason countries in the EU are increasingly seeking to move away from US tech platforms to of open source or sovereign platforms. While the UK has been (unwisely?) signing deals with Palantir, France is seeking to be less dependent on overseas firms. The recent announcement that the French government would be moving to Franco-video conferencing platform Visio (not to be confused with the Microsoft software of the same name) reflects a wider trend in the EU. Similar moves being taken in Austria, Denmark and Germany among others.

The AI news in my feeds this month has been a mixture of nuanced, disappointing and down right weird.

The weird bit came in the form of Moltbook. It claims to be a social media platform for AI agents, a kind of “Robo-Reddit”. AI agents are let loose to interact, post and “learn”, with humans only allowed to watch on in wonder. The platform has led to some wild claims of it being evidence of the beginning of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) as well as being accused of being a lot more human led that it pretends to be. Despite the grand claims, Business Insider found it boring. Now that it has hit the mainstream with an article in the Guardian it might already have had it’s 15 minutes of fame and I’ll be writing about something else equally potty next time.

Away from the madness there is nuance and thoughtfulness.  The Reframing Impact project from The Maybe (a media collective and consultancy) has an incredible line up of diverse speakers on a range of topics. It aims to offer a counter narrative to the recent AI India Impact Summit. The line up includes people like Audrey Tang, Timnit Gebru, Naomi Klein and Karen Hao and discusses topics like linguistic diversity, AI for Good, accountability, democracy and climate impacts in a way that was sadly lacking at the Indian summit. Just ask Amnesty International who criticised the summit for failing “to rein in destructive practices of governments and technology companies”.

Elsewhere the RSA is currently hosting a series of discussions about AI including a recent webinar that I attended on the True Costs of AI. I was particularly impressed by the work and insight from guest speaker Sophie Falk. Her scientific analysis on the material make up and associated environmental cost of GPU chips and data centers is ground breaking and vital.

Hugging Face have released V2 of their AI Energy Score Leaderboard with updated metrics and methodologies. Among other findings they note that the new range of reasoning models use 30 times more energy per query than none reasoning models and that this increase in energy can be much much higher than that.

Well worth checking out if you are exploring new tools and models.

Another AI platform that’s hit the news this month is the UK Governments AI Skills Hub which has launched to, lets say, mixed reviews. The TechPolicy.press platform noted the poor design and rushed feel of the portal as well as criticising the influence of corporations across the offerings. One Bluesky user documented their testing of the platform. Safe to say they were not impressed.

Finally in a story where big tech monopoly and AI collide. The MIT Technology Review reports a growing QuitGPT movement in protest at ChatGPTs increasingly close ties with the US government in general and ICE in particular.

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