“The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation” by Cory Doctorow, 2023
Doctorow made a stunning appearance on Democracy Now! on Feb 26, 2025, attacking Musk and Oligarchic Tech
in new theoretical flavors and he didn’t repeat the same rhetoric we hear all
the time. By the title you might think he’s some kind of libertarian communist,
but Wikipedia says he’s a member of
DSA. This book is about how to begin to
partly socialize Big Tech – from Amazon to X – using technical and political
tools. In the end he’s really a
proponent of small business entrepreneurship, as he thinks a breakup of the big
monopolies is impossible. He’s not anti-capitalist,
as he does not call for social ownership and control of these oligopolies. He thinks anti-trust law has been fatally bowdlerized,
as every business segment in the U.S. is now dominated by a small
oligarchy of companies.
Capital automatically develops private monopolies and
oligopolies, and that has been proved by its history. Until the system is fundamentally ‘rewired’
they are inevitable. The actually of
these massive companies heralds them as part of a socialist transformation of
society, something Doctorow ignores.
This wonky book is for people who have some familiarity
with computerization and its history, or want to learn about it. Doctorow is a leader of the Electronic
Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Creative Commons, but he writes as a journalist
and public intellectual, not an academic.
The key buzz word here is ‘interoperability’
– which he simplifies to ‘interop,’ or ‘competitive compatibility’ and ‘comcom’
for short. What this means is the
monopoly/oligopoly control of Alphabet/Google, Amazon, Apple, Meta/FB and
Microsoft can be weakened using law and tech to seamlessly open their ‘walled
gardens’ to other vendors. According to Doctorow Apple is the best at
maintaining their walled garden, especially their app store and enforcement
of repair ‘rights.’ This applies
to similar businesses too, from VIN-locking auto companies to the 'smart' home.
This book is mostly concerned with laws, standards,
mandates and contracts to my mind. Big firms use lawyers, bought bourgeois politicians
and captured regulators in place of competition. This involves patents, trademarks
and secrets, copyrights, non-competes, tortious interference claims,
non-disclosure, terms-of-service and other intellectual property (IP) rights. It mentions many of the legal cases that involve
IP – Betamax/Sony re VCRs, Internet Explorer re search engines, Napster re
audio downloads, Apple v Microsoft Office, DOJ v. IBM (IBM won) and the endless
AT&T breakup. The phrase ‘consumer
welfare’ became the legal logic behind monopoly’s alleged benefits, due to
its ability to simplify and cut costs for consumers.
Doctorow uses the image of a big tech firm as a ‘feudal’
castle that will protect its peasants from marauders and thieves, but will not
protect the peasants from the castle’s feudal lord once they are inside the
walls. This relates to the problem of
escaping a tech like Facebook. These “switching costs” are high unless you can
continue to communicate with those left on Facebook. Doctorow says this is the role of
interoperable tech, which would allow you to do just that. Just like leaving an actual castle, unless
the castle wall is opened to let in legitimate princes and outsiders.
Other examples are software ‘repair’ blocks on cars, equipment, tractors, phones and more, which force users to go back to the seller of the product, the ‘dealer’ so to speak, to get anything fixed. The big firms oppose the ‘interoperability’ of others fixing their stuff. No one wants repair blocks, but legal struggles in courts have yet to break down these locks. The U.S. passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act which protects these locks in 1998, Clinton time, so the government backed up the oligarchs. These kind of laws have spread to other countries, with the exception of the EU. On another front, Doctorow exposes the practice of ‘notice and takedown’ regarding alleged on-line IP infringement and ‘fair use’ as rife with censorship, extortion and other problems.
 |
| Interop? |
The EU passed a Digital Markets Act to allow interoperable
technologies, Application Program Interfaces (API), reverse engineering and the
like to achieve tech universality. But
Doctorow says that firms ‘cheat’ and use a barrage of highly-paid lawyers and a
‘thicket’ of other laws to push back. It is part of their business plan. For instance a ‘Right to Repair’ law was passed
in Massachusetts in 2012, but is still held up in court. Even U.S. army procurement is subject to huge
replacement-part costs due to being locked into single suppliers. Doctorow says “We have tried to make Big Tech better for decades. That project has been an abject failure.” This is why he claims he is pushing for the
reforms of technical and legal comcom
as solutions. It seems to me this might take decades too.
Doctorow supports ‘technological self-determination,’ where
a ‘federation’ of services connect and work together to provide a seamless
internet – the early dream of the tech idealists and optimists. This all seems to be possible only through
the abolition of private corporate property in the dominant sectors of the
economy, in this case tech. This would
break their economic, legal and political power.
Doctorow has a short section on Apple providing back-doors
to Chinese (he does not mention the U.S.) surveillance of communications, VPNs
and encryption. He also briefly discusses
all the problems on the internet – surveillance, fraudsters, identity theft,
trolls, harassers, sexual abusers, privacy, algorithms and block-chains in
short sections. His explanations of how
interoperability might help with this are weak. For instance he wants
moderation by the community over a clunky ‘rules-based’ AI approach to
trolling. Is that when we shut down a troll or crude insulter in the comments
or by a site admin?
If you are interested in ways to weaken Big Tech, this book
might appeal. It does show a legal and
technical way to universalize tech, but what is missing is any discussion of
the ultimate role of the profit motive in blocking interoperability.
P.S. - the FTC is currently prosecuting Facebook for being a monopoly over their ownership of WhatsApp and Instagram too. The hearings are going on now. Whether Trump intervenes to try to stop this process is still up in the air.
Prior blogspot reviews on this topic, use blog search box,
upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive using these terms: “technology,”
‘internet,’
May Day has many left books on technology. I got this at the Library!
Red Frog / April 11, 2025
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