The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation

by Cory Doctorow

Stop thinking about what technology does and start thinking about who technology does it to and who it does it for.

Whenever economists gather to handwave away the rise of Big Tech as a historical inevitability, they will make frequent reference to “network effects.” This is a term of art for products that get more valuable every time they win a new customer: you join Facebook to chat with the people who are already there, and then new users join Facebook because you are there.

Switching costs are all the things you have to give up when you stop using a product or service. Quit Facebook and you lose the family photos you’ve uploaded and access to the friends, family, community and customers you go there to hang out with.

When switching costs are high enough, people will keep using products and services even though they hate those products and services. So long as the pain of staying is less than the pain of leaving, users stay. That means that if companies can raise their switching costs, they can also treat their customers worse—and still keep their business.

In the nineteenth century, American robber barons got together and formed trusts: for example, a group of railroad owners could sell their shares to a “railroad trust” and become beneficiaries of the trust.

A trust was a way of merging all the dominant companies in a single industry (or even multiple related industries, like oil refineries, railroads, pipelines and oil wells) into a single company, while maintaining the fiction that all of these companies were their own businesses.

Any company that didn’t sell to the trust was quickly driven to its knees. For example, if you owned a freight company and wouldn’t sell out to the trust, all the railroads you depended on to carry your freight would charge you more than they’d charge your competitors for carrying the same freight—or they’d refuse to carry your freight at all.

What’s more, any business that supplied a trust would quickly find itself stripped of its profit margins and either bankrupted and absorbed by the trust, or allowed to eke out bare survival. If you supplied coal to the railroad trust, all the railroads would refuse to buy your coal unless you k...

Government “by the people, of the people and for the people” was incompatible with concentrated corporate power from companies so large that they were able to determine how people lived their lives, made their incomes and structured their cities and towns.

Starting a business often involves believing that you know something other people don’t, that you can see something others can’t see. Building that business up into a success only bolsters that view, proving that you possess the intellect, creativity and drive to create something others can’t even conceive of.

According to Bork’s theories, the existing antitrust statutes recognized that most monopolies were a great deal for “consumers,” and that if we only read the statutes carefully enough, and reviewed the transcripts of the legislative debates in fine-enough detail, we’d see that Congress never set out to block companies from gaining enough power to become autocrats of trade—rather, they only wanted the law to step in when the autocrats abused their power to harm “consumers.” This is the “consumer welfare” standard,

But “consumer” is only one of our aspects in society. We are also “workers,” “parents,” “residents” and, not least, “citizens.” If our cheaper products come at the expense of our living wage, or the viability of our neighborhoods, or the democratically accountable authority of our elected representatives, have we really come out ahead?

Monopolies have always had their fans, people who think that business leaders are Great Men of History, singular visionaries who have the power to singlehandedly revolutionize society and make us all better off if we just get out of their way and let them do their thing. That’s why they railed against “wasteful competition.” Competition is wasteful because it wastes the time of these Ayn Rand heroes who could otherwise be focusing on delivering a better future for us all.

Pinochet was supported—financially, morally and militarily—by the democratically elected right-wing leaders and the Chicago School of Economics, who sent a delegation to Chile to help oversee the transformation of the country based on their “ideas lying around.” This global revolution marked the beginning of the neoliberal era, and with it, generations of policy that celebrated the ultra-rich as the ordained leaders of our civilization.

Forty percent of the US federal judiciary graduated from the Manne Seminars, and empirical analysis of their rulings shows that they took Bork’s consumer welfare theories to heart, consistently finding that monopolies were “efficient” and that mergers should be waved through and anticompetitive conduct forgiven.

But all of this comes at a price: the rise of “autocrats of trade”: unelected princelings whose unaccountable whims dictate how we live, work, learn and play. Apple’s moderators decide which apps you can use, and if they decline to list an educational game about sweatshop labor or an app that notifies you when a US drone kills a civilian overseas, well, that’s that.

Facebook decides which news you see—and which news you don’t. If Facebook—or Instagram, or WhatsApp—kicks you off their platform, it can cost you your artistic career, or access to customers for your small business, or contact with your distant family, or the schedule and carpool for your kid’s Little League games.

One company now has the power to wreck its workers’ bodies (in many towns, Amazon is the only major employer); choke our streets with delivery vans; and ruin small businesses by inviting counterfeits or cloning their products. That same company decides which books are sold—either by refusing to carry them, or by ranking them low on search results.

But Amazon is different, as are Google, Apple, Microsoft, Salesforce, Uber, DoorDash, Facebook and the rest of the Big Tech stable. They’re different for two reasons: first, because they control the means of computation. These companies rule our digital world, the place where we find one another, form communities and mobilize in solidarity to take collective action.

Turing’s breakthrough—well, one of Turing’s breakthroughs (well, one of the breakthroughs by Turing and the exiled Polish mathematicians and British boffins at Bletchley Park)—was to conceptualize and refine the universal computer: a gadget that could run any program,

What’s more, as computers got faster and cheaper, the range of problems they could cost-effectively solve expanded. Each improvement in computers added to the pool of people who were using computers and trying to improve them.

Universality created an army of partisans, all fighting for better computers.

Interop means that you can quit your awful Facebook job and create a rival service that plugs into Facebook, providing a nonexploitative alternative for the users you signed on to help.

Walled gardens can only exist when switching costs are high. Tech companies understand that making interoperability-proof computers is a lost cause—like making dry water. Computers work because they are interoperable.

But by October 2021, the FTC had won the right to unseal many of its new documents, and that’s where we learned some of the grimy details of Facebook’s plans to raise switching costs. Over and over again, the FTC found senior Facebook managers and product designers explicitly designing products so that users would suffer if they left Facebook for a rival.

These are the machinations of a company that believes that its most profitable user-retention strategy is to lock its users up. They’re the machinations of a company that is thoroughly uninterested in being better than its competitors—rather, they’re dedicated to ensuring that leaving Facebook behind is so punishing and unpleasant that people stay, even if they hate Facebook.

Many people have observed that Facebook’s customers aren’t the users who socialize on its platform, but the advertisers who pay to reach those users. “If you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product” is often invoked to explain why Facebook treats its users so badly.

Time and again, the company has been caught stealing from advertisers, falsifying its records about who it showed their ads to, and for how long. At least half of the ads that companies pay Facebook to show to its users aren’t actually seen by a human being—but Facebook bills the advertisers for that money anyway.

Below is a two-dimensional grid. The x-axis is “more control-freaky.” That’s how much a company tries to circumscribe what you do and rob you of your technological self-determination. The y-axis is “more surveillant”—how much a company spies on you.

Google: surveillant but not control freaky. Apple not surveillant but more control freaky. Facebook both highly surveillant and control freaky

But the Supreme Court in 1984 cared a lot about its legitimacy. The 2005 court that ruled against Grokster—a decentralized successor to Napster—cared less. It neutered the “substantial non-infringing use” principle of Betamax

This is a classic “substantial non-infringing use”: the vast majority of texts, images, videos and sounds that members of the public put on social media are original to them (such as selfies, or 280-character thoughts, or cute animal videos, or …) but these services are of unimaginable scale, and so even the minority of copyright infringing works that they host constitutes a vast pirate library.

the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), whose Section 512—the “safe harbor”—says that online companies aren’t liable for their users’ copyright infringements, provided that they “expeditiously” remove their users’ materials after receiving a complaint.

Notice-and-takedown has its problems. It’s a rare company that subjects infringement notices to even cursory scrutiny, and this means that bad actors can have virtually anything removed from the internet by writing to the company that hosts it (or the company that hosts that company, or the company that provides its domain name service, or the company that provides its ads, or …) and claiming to hold the copyright to whatever you want deleted.

“reputation management” services working for dictators, rapists and organized crime figures routinely install blog software on their servers and then copy posts that criticize their clients, backdating the posts so that they appear to have been published long before the original posts. Then they send copyright notices to Google and other search tools, claiming that the original is an unauthorized copy (of their own unauthorized copy!) and demand that the original be removed from Google’s search index.

Google—which acquired YouTube in 2006—defended itself by invoking the principles behind Betamax and notice-and-takedown, arguing that it had lived up to its legal obligations and that Betamax established that “inducement” to copyright infringement didn’t create liability for tech companies (recall that Sony had advertised the VCR as a means of violating copyright law by recording Hollywood movies and watching them at your friends’ houses, and the Supreme Court decided it didn’t matter).

It created Content ID, an “audio fingerprinting” tool that was pitched as a way for rightsholders to block, or monetize, the use of their copyrighted works by third parties. YouTube allowed large (at first) rightsholders to upload their catalogs to a blocklist, and then scanned all user uploads to check whether any of their audio matched a “claimed” clip.

Fair use is a “fact intensive” doctrine—that is, the answer to “Is this fair use?” is almost always “It depends, let’s ask a judge.”

Even teaching classical music performance has become a minefield, as painstakingly produced, free online lessons are blocked by Content ID or, if the label is feeling generous, the lessons are left online but the ad revenue they earn is shunted to a giant corporation, stealing the creative wages of a music teacher.

In 2022, the UK government spent £500,000 on an ad campaign to discredit Facebook’s rollout of encryption for WhatsApp. As the Snowden revelations demonstrated, the goal here isn’t to prevent crime, but rather, to structure the tech sector as an arm of government, unburdened by the accountability constraints that governments operate under.

TERREG (and its national equivalents, like Germany’s Netzdg) has all the problems of copyright-based filters, but with far higher stakes. Algorithmic enforcement of “terrorist” content bans leads to the automated deletion of archives of human rights violations that NGOs and survivors have painstakingly assembled for use by future tribunals and prosecutions.

Every time we deputize tech companies with government-like enforcement duties, we make it that much harder to cut them down to size (because they need to be big to fulfill those duties) and that much harder for smaller tech to offer better, more user-centric services (because small tech companies, startups, co-ops, nonprofits and individual tinkerers can’t afford to comply with the regulations that force them to police their users’ conduct).

The IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) and ANSI (American National Standards Institute) are standards bodies or standards development organizations. These are (nominally) nonprofits that provide a forum and a set of institutional processes that allow “stakeholders” (companies, nonprofits, academics, government regulators and interested parties) to agree upon a set of technical specifications, such as the size, shape and power characteristics of an AAA battery.

Beyond cooperative interoperability, there is also indifferent interoperability. That’s when someone makes a new product that plugs into an existing one that was not designed with the new product in mind, but which was also not designed to prevent this from happening.

Your toothbrush works with any toothpaste—and vice versa. Even “smart” toothbrushes! Your pillow takes any pillowcase. There are dozens of companies that will sell you plastic sleeves to protect your ridiculous, odd-sized CDC Covid proof-of-vaccination. Without interoperability, our lives would be far more constrained, in good times and especially in bad times.

VIN-locked devices don’t just validate that all of their parts come from the original manufacturer, they also ensure that these parts were installed by the manufacturer’s official technicians. Before a VIN-locked component can be used by a device, an authorized technician has to enter an unlock code so the device knows that new part was installed by someone who charged for it and passed the payment on to the company and its shareholders.

Rather, the point of adding a lock to a product is to gain the right to invoke Section 1201 of the DMCA.

Section 1201 of the DMCA felonizes removing a digital lock. Thus, the presence of a digital lock constitutes a countermeasure whose legal force is far more powerful than its technical force. Even if you can figure out how to break a digital lock, telling anyone how you did it, or making a tool so they can do it too, becomes a felony.

Today, the US government’s offer to product makers is: “If you add a chip to your gadget at a price of a mere $0.26, and load a digital lock onto that chip that nominally prevents a customer from using the product in a way you don’t like, we, the mighty US government, will lend you our courts, our federal prosecutors, and our prisons so you can terrorize anyone who provides your customer with a lock-removing tool.

“Comcom” is everything “adversarial interoperability” isn’t: short, easy to say, punchy and easy to spell. I’ll use “comcom” interchangeably with “adversarial interoperability.” Not all reverse engineering is adversarial (the plumber who turned your pipes into an MC Escher painting didn’t want to obfuscate their workings, they just wanted to solve a series of immediate problems in locally expedient ways). But all comcom starts with reverse engineering.

In 2017, a new ransomware worm swept across the internet. Dubbed WannaCry, this malicious program used defects in your browser and operating system to install itself on your computer. Then it would laboriously encrypt every file on your hard drive, permanently deleting the unencrypted copies as it went.