The closing act of the story concerns the drafting of the final judgment. The final task of judicial bureaucrats is to stitch together the fragmentary instructions received from the judges to create coherent and persuasive texts. Like weaving, the drafting process is all but smooth. Every time the warp meets the weft, loose threads come out which must be ironed out. Likewise, every new paragraph added to the text of a judgment reveals logical leaps, internal inconsistencies, and gaps in the reasoning that must be papered over for the decision to wield its prescriptive and symbolic authority. Despite these difficulties, the final decision – the magical artefact that makes the pride of our lot – is somehow churned out on time. Its seamless fabric, now up for scrutiny by journalists, practitioners, and scholars, carefully conceals the infinite series of choices, confrontations, and hesitations that marked every turn of the proceedings.

This chapter examines the arms race between corporate surveillance and the countermeasures that allow users to defend themselves against advertising, tracking, and profiling. The chapter first explains ad blockers as the most common countermeasure, and shows how the industry is using anti-ad blockers to block ad blocker users. The chapter then discusses specialized blockers for tracking and fingerprinting, as well as countermeasures based on obfuscation and tools that aim to increase user awareness, before closing with a discussion of countermeasures for mobile devices and applications.

In this chapter, we take a closer look at how the strategies of a profit-maximizing two-sided platform affect user participation and usage in a buyer-seller context. First, in Section 6.1, we introduce competition between sellers on the platform and analyze how this affects platform pricing and design; we also assess the impacts of the platform’s decisions on product variety. Next, in Section 6.2, we examine two specific design decisions that affect cross-group network effects: First, we revisit the issue of product variety, which a platform can also manage through its design of rating, reviews, and recommender systems; second, we examine the extent to which an intermediary wants to increase price transparency on the platform. Finally, in Section 6.3, we turn to design decisions that a platform can use to govern the sellers’ pricing strategies; the question here is whether platforms can increase their profit by letting sellers choose from a richer set of pricing strategies – for instance, by providing sellers with buyers’ personal data so as to facilitate differential pricing.