The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation by Cory Doctorow
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is an amazingly clear, coherent, and even better, a SHORT examination of the problems and solutions revolving big tech in the internet.

What it is: a deeply detailed and reality-based distillation of decades of conferences and forums trying to combat the enshittification of the internet.

What it isn't: a glorified wah-wah bemoaning our state.

That's right. It's intelligent, no-nonsense, and frankly revolutionary. And this should come as no surprise to ANYONE if you know the author. The same author of Enshittification. Or the great novel Little Brother.


So, what's so big in this nonfiction work? What's so important? I'd invite you to read it yourself, but I'll give you a few examples.

How about Interoperability? Any time a company blocks third-parties from innovating a time-and-money feature as an add-on to an existing product, often burying said product, company, or inventor in legal shit for the purpose to said company's fear of losing their bottom line, that's a direct attack on interoperability.

Remember MS Office not working with ANY other kind of computer or software package in the market until Apple reverse engineered the BS just so people could USE it on their own systems? That is an example of fighting back against monopolies. Of course, when Apple outright prevents Android users from getting messages through to Apple's Iphone users, that's ALSO a monopolistic tactic. Preventing interoperability. And why? For profit. Force people to USE THEIR HARDWARE, or software, or ideological setup, or whatever-the-fuck-reason, despite the fact that computers are inherently INTEROPERABLE.

More examples include printer ink cartridge racket. Bricked cars. Worldwide stifled innovation stuck behind the inherent harassment of EULAS.

Who is it protecting? The company. Not the user. Not the repairman. Not anyone except the monopoly. AT&T is a huge example. But so is Intel, MS, Apple, Meta, Google, Amazon, and all the usual suspects. They are too big to fail. Why? Because the people regulating them are deeply in bed with the ones who run it. There are no third-party regulators. Impartial judges. And let's be real here. It's not a matter of being a subject that is too complicated to understand for laymen.

If that were really the case, then we'd never have laws to protect food or water sources, chemical safety, munitions safety, or child safety in the internet.

The trick is to actually allow third-party judges, or regulators, be able to perform their jobs of separating the wolves from the sheep pens instead of hiring yet more wolves to wring the last drop of blood from all the sheep.

Make it unlawful to lawsuit good-faith innovators, and if necessary, use a third-party commission to see if it IS a harassment suit.

Allow any kind of equipment or software to be repaired on the open market and not held to ransom by the original dealership/monolith/extortioner.

The argument that a company is too big to fail is just a smokescreen for the fact that it has undergone regulatory capture. It has either bought the lawmakers or it has many people over the barrel with really shitty strong-arm tactics.

Sound familiar?

Change the rules. Fight the monopolies by fighting the connective thread. This isn't a strong-arm approach. It's a change of mindset.

We allow Facebook enshittify our lives precisely because of the network effect. We're forced to stick with an abusive company like Amazon because we don't have any good alternatives. But if we de-fang the anti-regulation rules, making it easier to leave, en-masse, without losing all our friends and family members IN the move, then all of a sudden, we're free to use other services that don't sell off all our information or pen us into algorithmic echo chambers. Right, Meta? It's fairly simple, after all. You just need to throw out harassment lawsuits. Let the monopolies lose. I'm not saying let bad-actors run roughshod, either.

I'm talking about having someone with true impartiality JUDGE the cases. You know, in the idealistic, original-use way that courts were DESIGNED upon.

Ahem. If there's a conflict of interest, then REMOVE the conflict of interest.

Of course, this little problem is QUITE a large problem in our reality. And that also can be fixed by a change of mindset. If we all said ENOUGH OF THIS instead of shrugging yet again, and work toward actually making it better, maybe it won't end in pitchforks. But then, I guess the Pitchfork Emporium also dreams of being a monopoly.


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