The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation

by Cory Doctorow

There are a lot of things we should do to fix Big Tech: change the rules for mergers, pass comprehensive privacy legislation, ban deceptive “dark patterns” and break up big companies into smaller, competing firms These will take a long time. How long? It took sixty-nine years for the US government to break up AT&T. By contrast, interop is immediate. Make it legal for new technologies to plug into existing ones—that is, make it legal to blast holes in every walled garden—and users (that’s us) get immediate, profound relief: relief from manipulation, high-handed moderation, surveillance, price-gouging, disgusting or misleading algorithmic suggestions … the whole panoply of technology’s sins.

This is a shovel-ready book. It explains, in nontechnical language, how to dismantle Big Tech’s control over our digital lives and devolve control to the people who suffer most under Big Tech’s hegemony: marginalized users, low-level tech workers and the people who live downstream of tech’s exhaust plume: people choking on toxic waste from the tech industry and people living under dictatorships where control is maintained with off-the-shelf cyberweapons used to hunt opposition figures.

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.

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.

Making it easier for technology users—everyone—to leave Big Tech platforms for smaller tech created by co-ops, nonprofits, tinkerers and startups will hasten the day that we can bring Big Tech to heel in other ways. Siphoning off Big Tech’s users means reducing its revenues, which are otherwise fashioned into lobbying tools.

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.

they wanted. What kind of internet was that? Well, though entertainment giants said all they wanted was an internet free from copyright infringement, their actions—and the candid memos released in the Viacom case—make it clear that blocking infringement is a pretext for an internet where the entertainment companies get to decide who can make a new technology and how it will function.

We have to pick one: either we cut tech companies down to size, or we hold them accountable for their users’ actions.

To make tech better, we have to make it smaller—small enough that the bad ideas, carelessness and blind spots of individual tech leaders are their problems, not everyone else’s. We need lots of tech, run by lots of different kinds of people and organizations, and we need to make it as close to costless as possible to switch from one to the other.

In other words, independent repair is a powerful means to transfer value from Apple’s shareholders to Apple’s customers, and that is a problem for Tim Cook, whose job as CEO is to ensure that the value flows to the company’s owners.

Schneier compares the modern internet to feudal Europe, a half-wild place plagued by roving gangs of bandits who prey upon hardworking peasants. The peasants are all but defenseless on their own, but they can still protect themselves by allying themselves with a feudal warlord and moving into his fortress. That fortress—Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android, Meta’s Facebook or Microsoft’s Exchange—is protected by high walls and frowning battlements and an army of skilled mercenaries who patrol them—these being the security experts on Big Tech’s payrolls. In exchange for our loyalty—and a share of the income we earn thanks to their protection—that warlord’s mercenaries will defend us … from the bandits.

If we can’t harassment-proof the platforms, we can at least make them easier to leave.

One thing we know for certain about the Big Tech companies is that they lie all the time: they lie about which data they collect from you; they lie to advertisers about whether you saw an ad; they lie to publishers about whether they collected money for an ad. They lie about their taxes, their labor practices and every other commercially significant subject.

Google made a mistake. So do judges. When judges make mistakes, you have the theoretical possibility of appealing. When Google makes a mistake, you don’t even get that theoretical chance.

If we are to punish people who traffic in child sex abuse materials (and I think we should), those punishments should be meted out by a publicly accountable justice system after a fair trial that adheres to the bedrock principles of due process. It shouldn’t be meted out by unaccountable corporate giants who get to punish you in ways that far exceed any court’s reach.

It’s an established fact that 99.83 percent of all conversations about blockchain are nonconsensual.

In my discussions with blockchain people, I’ve encountered a persistent pattern: first, they assume that if you disagree with them, it must be because you don’t understand them. If you manage to convince a blockchainist that you do understand them and that you still disagree with them, they assume you’re being paid to disagree with them. The only other group I’ve observed this pattern in is Scientologists.