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January 23, 2023: Sarah Lamdan, author, "Data Cartels"

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Today: Sarah Lamdan, author, “Data Cartels”

Sarah Lamdan, is Professor of Law at the City University of New York School of Law and author of “Data Cartels: The Companies That Control and Monopolize Our Information.” LexisNexis and Westlaw used to be known as publishers of academic and legal information. But a few years ago they changed: now they rely on surveillance and analysis, profiting from information that should be publicly available - or not collected in the first place.

• Data Cartels, published by Stanford University Press

• Erinn Acland (Jan 13, 2023): “Starting 2023, four universities are pausing or ending their Elsevier subscription due to exorbitant pricing.

- Elsevier’s subscription was costing them ~10% of their Libraries’ entire budget.

- ‘Elsevier’s prices have increased each year and have outpaced inflation’...this is despite Elsevier having the highest profit margins of virtually any other industry or publisher.”

• Welcome to Hotel Elsevier: you can check-out any time you like … not (by Eiko Fried, May 9, 2022): “One way to make profits is Elsevier’s business as an academic publisher. . . . But in the 2020s—and now we come to the main topic of this piece—there is a second way of making money: selling data. Elsevier’s parent company RELX bills itself as ‘a global provider of information-based analytics and decision tools for professional and business customers.’”

• Comments on YCombinator about the above story.

• Mastodon post (Jan 9, 2023): "Last week, the Social Security Administration made moves to help Login.gov stop relying on data brokers."

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