The Internet Con

July 24, 2023
Journalist and novelist Doctorow (Red Team Blues) details a plan for how to break up Big Tech in this impassioned and perceptive manifesto. Today’s large tech companies are legally able to quash “interoperators” (defined as: “new technologies that plug into their services, systems and platforms”)—a privilege never granted to the likes of IBM in decades past, according to Doctorow. If the industry’s “complex thicket of copyright, patent... and other IP rights” were swept away, Doctorow writes, a healthy market of secondary services would spring up—for instance, a service that could allow a user to message friends on various social media platforms without logging into them directly. Doctorow hypothesizes that legislating in favor of interoperability, and thus righting the market, would be a more direct route to breaking up Big Tech than other forms of antitrust legislation, since it would force big companies to innovate and compete. He also advocates for extralegal, “guerrilla” forms of interoperability. To illustrate his point, Doctorow tours the past several decades of technology history, highlighting such cases as the film industry’s attempts to ban the VCR in the 1980s, Apple’s reverse engineering of Microsoft Office in the 2000s, and several “right to repair” laws passed over the past decade in Massachusetts. Readers may find Doctorow’s analysis too blithe on some points—for example, he is dismissive of the need for the kind of centralized content moderation practiced by giant social media platforms. Still, Doctorow’s sense of urgency is contagious.

September 8, 2023
Doctorow is no fan of Big Tech. In fact, he makes it clear in the first sentences of his book that he holds Big Tech and the people who own and operate it in the deepest contempt, calling them "mediocre idiots" and "donkeys." The source of his ire, he contends, is that Big Tech has been able to establish monopolies in the field and has influenced policies that have prevented new technologies from supplanting their own. He spends several chapters explaining in great detail how this was achieved, why it's a bad thing, and how it can be combatted. He also spends several chapters dealing with issues like privacy, harassment, child sexual abuse material, nonconsensual pornography, and terrorist materials. Doctorow is clearly passionate about his cause and certainly knows his stuff. However, his book is not aimed at the general reader, but for those deeply immersed in information and technology fields.

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