The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation

by Cory Doctorow

There’s a reason WannaCry was so powerful: it was a lab leak. The US National Security Agency (NSA)—a secretive federal agency tasked with securing Americans’ computers against foreign adversaries—had discovered defects in Microsoft Windows and then, rather than telling Microsoft about these bugs, kept them secret.

Trademark is often lumped in with copyright and patent as a form of “IP,” but in truth, trademark is a completely different sort of system. Copyright and patent are exclusive rights (over expression, in the case of copyright; and ideas, in the case of patents).

At root, trademark is a system of consumer protection. The purpose of a trademark is to prevent the public from being deceived when they buy a product or service. Trademark is there to make sure that when you walk into a McDonald’s restaurant and order a Big Mac, you’re in a real McD’s and getting a real Big Mac. Trademark empowers companies to act on behalf of their customers: companies are empowered to use the courts to shut down copycats who behave in a deceptive manner

If someone opens a fake McDonald’s restaurant and starts serving fake Big Macs, McDonald’s can use the courts to shut them down with trademark claims, but not to protect McDonald’s —trademark lets them do this to protect you from deception.

Copyright lets rightsholders defend their own economic interests against competitors who misappropriate their works; trademark lets sellers protect their customers’ economic interests against competitors who seek to trick those customers.

Getting rid of independent repair would be great for Apple’s bottom line: for one thing, the company could set the fees for labor and service just below the point where a customer will say, “To hell with it, I’ll just get a different phone.” But more than that, controlling repair lets Apple control the cadence of your replacement of your devices, because it lets Apple decide when a phone can be repaired at all

Once you’re inside the phone’s guts, get a magnifying glass and start checking out the parts. They’re precisely manufactured to extremely fine tolerances—and they are engraved with minuscule (and even microscopic) Apple logos. As noted, almost no one will ever see these—they are not there for human consumption. They exist for the purposes of invoking trademark.

“tarnishment,” by which they mean something weird and circular like: “Apple makes a high-quality product; when that product is refurbished by randos, it might become a low-quality product. Consumers who are burned by this will come to associate the Apple logo—which we engraved in miniature on all those parts—with low-quality goods and will therefore struggle to make accurate assessments of our products in the marketplace.”

Economists call this a “collective action problem” and it’s a specific kind of switching cost: to switch away from Facebook you must either figure out how to convince everyone you talk to on Facebook to switch with you (a high cost) or forfeit your relationship with them (also a high cost).

Your groups—public and private—would have their own areas on the new service and you could read the messages other members posted there, and your replies would be synchronized with Facebook, so the group members who haven’t left Facebook (yet) would be able to see them and reply to them. This is called “federation,”

The Chinese state uses the surveillance data that Apple helps it capture to determine which of Apple’s customers should be imprisoned, which should be tortured and which should be executed. Apple values privacy, but it balances its commitment to privacy against the interests of its shareholders. If Apple failed to comply with Chinese surveillance demands, it would have been kicked out of China.

In the United States, Congress consistently fails to pass comprehensive national privacy legislation in large part thanks to the lobbying of US police and intelligence services, who rely on their ability to subpoena or simply purchase commercial surveillance data as a means of doing an end-run around the legal niceties of search warrants.

These messenger apps are well and truly driven by network effects: if your cousins abroad all use WhatsApp and you use Signal, either you have to convince them to install Signal, or they have to convince you to install WhatsApp.

There is no empirical answer to the question, ‘Which matters more: self, family or society?’ That is a political question, not a technical one. Once you have that answer, though, I can give you the empirical answer to your political directive.” This is how expert regulation and politics intersect.

Maybe you can’t make HP give up its ink-gouging grift, but if the US government announced that no federal department could buy a printer unless it accepted third-party ink, either HP would cave, or one of its rivals would. This has a long and honorable tradition. When Abraham Lincoln sourced rifles for the Union Army, he insisted that they use interoperable tooling and ammo.

Here’s the settlement we should offer them: a special master. A special master is a court-appointed guardian who supervises the conduct of a company or individual as part of a court procedure or settlement. This person would act as adult supervision for cheating tech companies. Before a tech giant could sue or threaten another company, the special master would have to sign off on it,

Feudal security fails badly. If a company decides to betray your trust and invade your privacy, the security experts won’t defend you from their own employers—instead, they’ll turn on interoperators who step in to defend you.

Instead, the baseline for your privacy should be set by democratically accountable regulation. Privacy laws like Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation set out a framework for informed, enthusiastic consent for collecting, storing and handling private data.

If we want to have privacy online all the time—and not just when a techno-feudal warlord decides we deserve it—we must have some force other than companies to make the call about what conduct is and is not permissible.

network effects are the forces that make products and services more valuable based on the number of people who use them.

The engagement-maximizing algorithm has learned from those who came before me that many people can be lured into longer online sessions if they are presented with a list of specific subtopics branching off the general topic they’ve landed on.

Tech monopolies are epiphenomena: they are effects, not causes. They are the effect of an ideology that embraces monopolies and inequality as a natural, even inevitable phenomenon. It’s an ideology that lionizes monopolists as once-in-a-generation geniuses who deserve the power

It’s important to maintain a distinction between “things that we wish people didn’t say” and “things that are crimes.”

NFT stands for “non-fungible token.” It’s an entry in a blockchain—that is, a public ledger designed to be visible to all and alterable by none—that consists of four parts: • a URL for a file somewhere on the internet • an identifier for a seller • an identifier for a buyer • a computer program called a “Smart Contract” (optional)