GoKawiilIn his new book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation , author Cory Doctorow presents a strong case for disrupting Big Tech. While the dominance of Internet platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or Amazon is often taken for granted, Doctorow argues that these walled gardens are fenced in by legal structures, not feats of engineering. Doctorow proposes forcing interoperability—any given platform’s ability to interact with another—as a way to break down those walls and to make the Internet freer and more democratic.
IEEE Spectrum contributor Michael Nolan spoke with Doctorow about his new book and how interoperability could break up monopolies both in tech and beyond.
Your new book, The Internet Con, as you write in its acknowledgements, “crystallizes two decades’ worth of advocacy writing about and working on issues in digital human rights.” How did that come to take the form of an argument for interoperability as a way to break up Big Tech monopolies?
Cory Doctorow Jonathan Worth
Cory Doctorow: Over the decades that I’ve been involved in technology, the entities that are on the user’s side have really changed. Sometimes it was tech platforms or companies and sometimes it wasn’t. Sometimes it was governments and sometimes it wasn’t. Having started off defending tech companies that really did have their users’ backs from entertainment companies, I realized that the distinction between them was not that one industry was made up of entertainment executives whose commitment to human rights was very thin and the other was made up of tech executives who had a more good-faith commitment. When a sector is extremely concentrated, the people who are willing to trade the public good and foundational democratic values for incremental increases in their employer’s profitability get a hearing within the company and take over the company’s decision making. When a business doesn’t have to worry about losing its customers due to abusing them, then the people arguing, “We shouldn’t do this because it’s wrong and also it’s bad for business” can only argue, “We shouldn’t do this because it’s wrong.” They have to grudgingly admit that it might be good for business. Any firm in that state eventually becomes a serious hazard to human rights. It’s this “curse of bigness,” as Brandeis called it, that we should really be attuned to and is really pernicious.
That leads to the main proposal of the book, which is that reaffirming interoperability between systems and platforms can break apart these very large companies. Can you define interoperability?
Doctorow: At its root, it’s just the ability to use one thing with something else. Use any ink in your printer with any paper, use any socks with your shoes, anyone’s gasoline in your car, put any lightbulb in your light socket. There’s voluntary, mandatory interoperability, where a group of stakeholders get together and they say, “This is the goal we want all of our products to achieve, and we are going to design a framework so that we can make sure that every lightbulb lights up when you stick it in a light socket.” Then there’s the stuff where they’re indifferent: Car companies don’t stop you from putting a little cigarette-lighter-to-USB adapter into your car.
Companies can grow very quickly because tech has got these great network effects, but they also have, because of interoperability, really low switching costs.—Cory Doctorow
Then there’s the third kind of interop, the kind of chewy, interesting, lots-of-rich-Internet-history interop, which is adversarial interoperability, which in the book we call “comcom,” short for competitive compatibility. It’s the interop that’s done against the wishes of the original equipment manufacturer: scraping, reverse engineering, bots, all of that gnarly stuff done in the face of active hostility. This would be like Apple reverse-engineering Microsoft Office and making the iWork suite—Pages, Numbers, and Keynote—so that anyone with a Mac could read any Windows-based office file without having to buy any software from Microsoft.
There are so many examples of this from technology’s history. It’s really the engine of technology. It’s the reason we’ve had this incredible boom-and-bust cycle within tech companies. Companies can grow very quickly because tech has got these great network effects, but they also have, because of interoperability, really low switching costs. Anytime a platform isn’t suited to you or someone has a better idea for it, they can just make a tool [that] kind of greases the skids for you to leave the last one and to jump to the new one. Because of that interoperability, the companies that grow really big become irresistible targets for other companies that want to come in, tempt their users away, and offer them a very easy path to get from the old place to the new one. I think interoperability being interrupted explains “Why are tech companies bad when they used to be good?” It’s because the users can’t leave. If you can’t leave, they don’t have to treat you well.
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