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.

The reason the tech industry spent generations churning as new companies and systems supplanted the old was that in the olden days, we enforced competition rules that ensured this would happen.

But network effects are merely how Big Tech gets big. Switching costs are how Big Tech stays big.

if companies can raise their switching costs, they can also treat their customers worse—and still keep their business.

Interoperability lowers switching costs. Interoperability allows us, the users of technology, to set the terms on which we use that technology.

Forty years ago, countries all over the world altered the basis on which they enforced their competition laws—often called “antitrust” laws—to be more tolerant of monopolies. Forty years later, we have a lot of monopolies.

A trust is an organization that holds something of value “in trust” for someone else.

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.

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.

Enter the trustbusters, led by Senator John Sherman, author of the 1890 Sherman Act, America’s first antitrust law.

This theory of antitrust is called the “harmful dominance” theory, and it worked.

autocrats-in-waiting were already wealthy, and they bankrolled fringe kooks who had very different ideas about the correct administration of antitrust.

Chief among these was Robert Bork,

What set Bork apart was his conviction that America’s antitrust laws already celebrated monopolies as innately efficient and beneficial.

monopolies were a great deal for “consumers,”

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?

Friedman believed that if the movement could simply keep plugging, eventually a crisis would occur and its ideas would move from the fringes to the center.

The oil crisis of the 1970s was the movement’s opportunity.

a new kind of far-right leader took office; Ronald Reagan in the USA, Margaret Thatcher in the UK, Brian Mulroney in Canada.

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.

There’s a scrappy independent bookselling trade, small stores run by committed booksellers who effectively take a vow of poverty to serve their communities—but they have to buy all their books from a single distributor, Ingram,

Winning tech back isn’t more important than preventing runaway climate change or ending gender-based violence and discrimination, but it’s hard to imagine how we’ll do either—or anything else of significance—without digital infrastructure to hold us together.

Fixing tech isn’t more important than fixing everything else, but unless we fix tech, we can forget about winning any of those other fights.

The fact that all computers are universal, all capable of running every program, meant that there would always be a way to write a Mac program that could read and write Microsoft Office files better than Microsoft Office for Mac could.

simplicity of reading and writing their files with iWork,

we can use interop to make Big Tech a lot smaller, very quickly—we can attack network effects by reducing switching costs.

That is the other way that tech is exceptional. The fight for a free, fair and open digital future isn’t more important than any of those other fights, but it is foundational. Tech is the terrain on which our future fights will be fought. If we can’t seize the means of computation, we will lose the fight before it is even joined.

Enter gopher. Gopher was created in 1991 by a team at the University of Minnesota’s Microcomputer Center—

That’s where gopher came in. The Microcomputer Center’s programmers created intermediate programs that served as a kind of overlay to each of these one-off systems.

IBM chairman John Opel asked a friend who served with him on the board of the United Way if she knew anyone who could provide an OS for his company’s PC. Her name was Mary Gates, and her son, Bill Gates, had a company that fit the bill: Micro-Soft. (They dropped the hyphen later.)

That assumption was backstopped by 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 is ripe for abuse, and many bad actors have exploited its defects.

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.

Extortion-by-copyright-enforcement is a danger to independent creators, not big labels and studios and publishers. Large entertainment companies don’t have to go through the same self-serve,

The looser the matching, the more false positives. This is an especial problem for classical musicians:

As a result, it has become nearly impossible to earn a living off of online classical performance:

That’s where interoperability comes in.

If we force Mark Zuckerberg—and the leaders of Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce and other tech giants—to blast openings into their walled

cooperative interoperability out there.

designed to comply with standards.

Standards may be voluntary (as with your TV remote) or mandatory (as with your home plumbing, which is governed by your town’s safety standards), but they are all cooperative.

Indifferent interoperability is, if anything, even more common than cooperative interoperability.

The pandemic triggered mass shortages in microchips, especially cheap, low-powered chips used for applications like this one.

This was a problem for Epson: its printers were designed to block any ink cartridge unless it had an official Epson-configured chip—and it couldn’t get the chips!

Epson started selling chipless cartridges, along with instructions for bypassing its own security chips.

Medtronic is the largest med-tech company in the world, thanks to a string of anticompetitive mergers that let it gobble up most of its competitors.

The war on repair has many fronts: cars and iPhones, tractors and electric shavers. Medtronic brought the war to ventilators.

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.

This meant that John Deere’s ability to sell upgrades, parts, attachments and repairs was always contingent on the company’s ability to make better products and offer better services than the local mechanic or one of hundreds of small firms that made specialized add-ons.

But the combination of digitization and lax antitrust changed that.