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Pluralistic: There's one thing EVERY government can do to shrink Big Tech (01 Nov 2025)
Today's links There's one thing EVERY government can do to shrink Big Tech: The path to a post-American internet. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: D2020; Sony rootkit; Public Enemy vs the internet; NYC plute Hallowe'en. Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. There's one thing EVERY government can do to shrink Big Tech (permalink) As the old punchline goes, "If you wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here." It's a gag that's particularly applicable to monopolies: once a company has secured a monopoly, it doesn't just have the power to block new companies from competing with it, it also has the power to capture governments and thwart attempts to regulate it or break it up. 40 years ago, a group of right-wing economists decided that this was a feature, not a bug, and convinced the world's governments to stop enforcing competition law, anti-monopoly law, and antitrust law, deliberately encouraging a global takeover by monopolies, duopolies and cartels. Today, virtually every sector of our economy is dominated by five or fewer firms: https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers These neoliberal economists knew that in order to stop us from getting there ("there" being a world where everyday people have economic and political freedom), they'd have to get us "here" – a world where even the most powerful governments find themselves unable to address concentrated corporate power. They wanted to drag us into a oligarchy, and take away any hope of us escaping to a fairer, more pluralistic world. They succeeded. Today, rich and powerful governments struggle to do anything to rein in Big Tech. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney contemplated levying a 3% tax on America's tax-dodging tech giants…for all of five seconds. All Trump had to do was meaningfully clear his throat and Carney folded: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/06/30/in-tech-tax-cave-trump-and-carney-may-have-both-gotten-what-they-wanted-00433980 Canada also tried forcing payments to Canadian news agencies from tech giants, and failed in the most predictable way imaginable. Facebook simply blocked all Canadian news on its platforms (this being exactly what it had done in every other country where this was tried). Google paid out some money, and the country's largest newspaper killed its long-running investigative series into Big Tech's sins. Then Google slashed its payments. These payments were always a terrible idea. The only beneficial part of how Big Tech relates to the news is in making it easy for people to find and discuss the news. News you're not allowed to find or talk about isn't "news," it's "a secret." The thing that Big Tech steals from the news isn't links, it's money: 30% of every in-app payment is stolen by the mobile duopoly; 51% of every ad dollar is stolen by the ad-tech duopoly; and social media holds news outlets' subscribers hostage and forces news companies to pay to "boost" their content to reach the people who follow them. In other words, extracting payments for links is a form of redistribution, a clawback of some of Big Tech's stolen loot. It isn't predistribution, which would block Big Tech from stealing the loot in the first place. Canada is a wealthy nation, but only 41m people call it home. The EU is also wealthy, and it is home to 500m people. You'd think that the EU could get further than Canada, but, faced with the might of the tech cartel, it has struggled to get anything done. Take the GDPR, Europe's landmark privacy law. In theory, this law bans the kind of commercial surveillance that Big Tech thrives on. In practice, these companies just flew an Irish flag of convenience, which not only let them avoid paying their taxes – it also let them get away with illegal surveillance, by capturing the Irish privacy regulator, who does nothing to defend Europeans' privacy: https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/finnegans-snooze/#dirty-old-town It's hard to overstate just how supine the Irish state is in relation to the American tech giants that pretend to call Dublin their home. The country's latest privacy regulator is an ex-Meta executive! https://www.article19.org/resources/ireland-adopt-new-transparent-process-to-appoint-data-protection-commissioner/ (Perhaps he can hang out with the UK's newly appointed head of competition enforcement, who used to be the head of Amazon UK:) https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/22/autocrats-of-trade/#dingo-babysitter For the EU, Ireland is just part of the problem when it comes to regulating Big Tech. The EU's latest tech regulations are the sweeping, even visionary Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act. If tech companies obeyed these laws, that would go a long way to addressing their monopoly abuses. So of course, they're not obeying the laws. Apple has threatened to leave the EU altogether rather than comply with a modest order requiring it to allow third party payments and app stores: https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/26/empty-threats/#500-million-affluent-consumers And they've buried the EU in complex litigation that could drag on for a decade: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:62025TN0354 And Trump has made it clear that he is Big Tech's puppet, and any attempt to get American tech companies to obey EU law will be met with savage retaliation: https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/05/tech/google-eu-antitrust-fine-adtech When it comes to getting Big Tech to obey the law, if we wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here. But the fact that it's hard to get Big Tech to do the bidding of publicly accountable governments doesn't mean that those governments are powerless. There's one institution a government has total control over: itself. The world's governments have all signed up to "anticircumvention" laws that criminalize reverse-engineering and modifying US tech products. This was done at the insistence of the US Trade Rep, who has spent this entire century using the threat of tariffs to bully every country in the world into signing up to laws that ban their own technologists from directly blocking American Big Tech companies' scams. It's because of anticircumvention laws that a Canadian company can't go into business making an alternative Facebook client that blocks ads but restores the news. It's because of anticircumvention laws that a Canadian company can't go into business with a product that lets media companies bypass the Meta/Google ad-tech duopoly. It's because of anticircumvention laws that a European company can't go into business modifying your phone, car, apps, smart devices and operating system to block all commercial surveillance. If companies can't get your data, they can't violate the GDPR. It's because of anticircumvention laws that a European company can't sell you a hardware dongle that breaks into your iPhone and replaces Apple's ripoff app store with a Made-in-the-EU alternative. Anticircumvention law is the reason Canada's only response to Trump's illegal tariffs is more tariffs, which make everything in Canada more expensive. Get rid of anticircumvention law and Canada could get into the business of shifting billions of dollars from American tech monopolists to Canadian startups and the Canadian people: https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/15/beauty-eh/#its-the-only-war-the-yankees-lost-except-for-vietnam-and-also-the-alamo-and-the-bay-of-ham Anticirumvention law is the reason the EU can't get its data out of the Big Tech silos that Trump controls, which lets Trump shut down any European government agency or official that displeases him: https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/15/freedom-of-movement/#data-dieselgate American monopolists like John Deere have installed killswitches in every tractor in the world – killswitches that can't be removed until we get rid of anticircumvention laws, which will let us create open source firmware for tractors. Until we do that, Trump can shut down all the agriculture in any country that makes him angry: https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/20/post-american-internet/#huawei-with-american-characteristics For a decade, we've been warned that allowing China to supply our telecoms infrastructure was geopolitical suicide, because it would mean that China could monitor and terminate our network traffic. That's the threat that Trump's America now poses for the whole world, as Trump makes it clear that America doesn't have allies or trading partners, only rivals and competitors, and he will stop at nothing to beat them. And if you are worried about China, well, perhaps you should be. The world's incredible rush to solarization has left us with millions of solar installations whose inverters are also subject to arbitrary updates by their (Chinese) manufacturers, including updates that could render them inoperable. The only way around this? Get rid of anticircumvention law and replace all the software in these critical systems with open source, transparent, owner-controlled alternatives: https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/23/our-friend-the-electron/#to-every-man-his-castle Getting Big Tech to do your government's bidding is a big lift. The companies are too big to jail, especially with Trump behind them. That's why each of America's Big Tech CEOs paid $1m out of their own pockets to sit behind him on the dais at the inauguration: https://apnews.com/article/trump-inauguration-tech-billionaires-zuckerberg-musk-wealth-0896bfc3f50d941d62cebc3074267ecd Even America can't bring its tech companies to heel. When Google was convicted of being an illegal monopolist, the judge punished the company by sentencing it to…nothing: https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/03/unpunishing-process/#fucking-shit-goddammit-fuck But ultimately, breakups and fines and interoperabilty mandates are all forms of redistribution – a way to strip the companies of the spoils of their decades-long looting spree. That's a laudable goal, but if we want to get there, we must start with predistribution: halting the companies' ongoing extraction efforts, by getting rid of the laws that prevent other technologists from unfucking their products and halting their cash- and data-ripoffs. Do that long and hard enough and we stand a real chance of draining off so much of their power that we can get moving on those redistributive moves. And getting rid of anticircumvention laws only requires that governments control their own behavior – unlike taxing or fining companies, which only works if governments can control the behavior of companies that have proven, time and again, to be more powerful than any country in the world. (Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified) Hey look at this (permalink) The Forgotten History of Socialism and the Occult https://jacobin.com/2025/10/socialism-occult-mysticism-marxism-history/ Study: AI Models Trained On Clickbait Slop Result In AI ‘Brain Rot,’ ‘Hostility’ https://www.techdirt.com/2025/10/31/study-ai-models-trained-on-clickbait-slop-result-in-ai-brain-rot-hostility/ The Validation Machines https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/10/validation-ai-raffi-krikorian/684764/ The Department of Defense Wants Less Proof its Software Works https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/10/department-defense-wants-less-proof-its-software-works Ireland: Adopt new, transparent process to appoint Data Protection Commissioner https://www.article19.org/resources/ireland-adopt-new-transparent-process-to-appoint-data-protection-commissioner/ Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Sony DRM uses black-hat rootkits https://web.archive.org/web/20051102053346/http://www.sysinternals.com/blog/2005/10/sony-rootkits-and-digital-rights.html #20yrsago Suncomm encourages people to break its DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20051116115847/http://bigpicture.typepad.com/comments/2005/10/drm_crippled_cd.html #20yrsago Public Enemy’s Internet strategy https://web.archive.org/web/20051103053915/https://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,69403,00.html #10yrsago Petition: Rename Stephen Harper to “Calgary International Airport” https://www.change.org/p/rename-stephen-harper-to-calgary-international-airport #10yrsago Hallowe’en with NYC’s super-rich https://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2015/10/29/fashion/halloween-in-manhattans-most-expensive-zip-codes/s/29UESHALLOWEEN-slide-LRGS.html #5yrsago D2020 https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/31/walkies/#probabilistic #5yrsago The Americans https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/31/walkies/#among-us Upcoming appearances (permalink) Virtual: Peoples and Things with danah boyd and Lee Vinsel, Nov 3 https://www.youtube.com/live/WjFvGPLpskk Miami: Enshittification at Books & Books, Nov 5 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1504647263469 Miami: Cloudfest, Nov 6 https://www.cloudfest.com/usa/ Burbank: Burbank Book Festival, Nov 8 https://www.burbankbookfestival.com/ Lisbon: A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet, with Rabble (Web Summit), Nov 12 https://websummit.com/sessions/lis25/92f47bc9-ca60-4997-bef3-006735b1f9c5/a-post-american-enshittification-resistant-internet/ Cardiff: Hay Festival After Hours, Nov 13 https://www.hayfestival.com/c-203-hay-festival-after-hours.aspx Oxford: Enshittification and Extraction: The Internet Sucks Now with Tim Wu (Oxford Internet Institute), Nov 14 https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/events/enshittification-and-extraction-the-internet-sucks-now/ London: Enshittification with Sarah Wynn-Williams and Chris Morris, Nov 15 https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2025/event/cory-doctorow-with-sarah-wynn-williams London: Downstream IRL with Aaron Bastani (Novara Media), Nov 17 https://dice.fm/partner/tickets/event/oen5rr-downstream-irl-aaron-bastani-in-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-17th-nov-earth-london-tickets London: Enshittification with Carole Cadwalladr (Frontline Club), Nov 18 https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/in-conversation-enshittification-tickets-1785553983029 Virtual: Enshittification with Vass Bednar (Vancouver Public Library), Nov 21 https://www.crowdcast.io/@bclibraries-present Seattle: Neuroscience, AI and Society (University of Washington), Dec 4 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/neuroscience-ai-and-society-cory-doctorow-tickets-1735371255139 Madison, CT: Enshittification at RJ Julia, Dec 8 https://rjjulia.com/event/2025-12-08/cory-doctorow-enshittification Recent appearances (permalink) Enshittification and the Rot Economy with Ed Zitron (Clarion West) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tz71pIWbFyc Amanpour & Co (New Yorker Radio Hour) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8l1uSb0LZg Enshittification is Not Inevitable (Team Human) https://www.teamhuman.fm/episodes/339-cory-doctorow-enshittification-is-not-inevitable The Great Enshittening (The Gray Area) https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophypodcasts/comments/1obghu7/the_gray_area_the_great_enshittening_10202025/ Enshittification (Smart Cookies) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BoORwEPlQ0 Latest books (permalink) "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026 "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE AND SUBMITTED. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. 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