The Internet Con

Cory Doctorow is the cooler, more radical version of Douglas Rushkoff. This book is like a shorter, less boring version of the book “Surveillance Capitalism”.
So few people are going to understand these comparisons....

Doctorow is one of the few great technologists who isn't a grifter or an oligarch demon. He understands the power of modern technology and how it is being used for the enrichment of the wealthy rather than the betterment of masses.

The problem is that neoliberal deregulation spearheaded by Reagan, and Thatcher resulted in every industry becoming overly monopolistic, including the tech industry. The tech monopolists achieved their power not because they're smarter or better than their competitors, but because they leveraged the broken system to keep competition down.

The Chicago School of Demons and Ghouls, led by the hellhounds Friedman and Bork, have indoctrinated courts into accepting their crackpot economic ideals, such as that monopolies are actually good, as normal: “Bork's investors consolidated their gains. They sponsored economics chairs and whole economics departments and created the Manne Seminars, an annual junket in Florida, where federal judges were treated to luxury accommodations and ‘continuing education' workshops on Bork's unhinged theories.”

This is what we're supposed to believe qualifies as a “democracy.”

These corporations could never get this big if not for the shift in economic theory spearheaded by the Chicago Ghouls. The corporations then use their power to strengthen regulations that primarily benefit themselves and not the people. The “lovers of free market” will always leverage the arm of the state to protect their corporate interests. This is inevitable under capitalism.

This includes fighting against, say, the right to repair. The power of the state is used to crush you from doing what you want with the product you own. “Apple uses patent to prevent the independent manufacture of some parts; it uses anti-circumvention to prevent the independent installation of other parts; it uses contractual arrangements with recyclers to ensure that most used phones are not broken down for parts; it uses trademark to block the re-importation of parts that have escaped the recyclers' shredders.” All of this behavior should be criminalized. People who care about deflating or breaking up big tech should look precisely at THIS to do so. This is what needs to be deregulated. Yet conservatives never talk about this. Isn't that curious? Like they actually stand on the side of capital and not the people....

Some more fun quotes as a reflection of our “democracy”...

“Regulators can't regulate tech because they're clueless, sure. But why are they clueless? Because the process by which regulators and lawmakers understand issues starts from the presumption that there will be an adversarial process and a neutral referee, and monopolies turn that into a chummy backroom deal between a handful of executives from the industry and a handful of their former colleagues who are temporarily regulating their former colleagues.”

Or look up the story of Mark, who took medical photos of his son's groin to send to his doctor, but that photo was uploaded to the Google Cloud, got marked as CSAM (child sexual abuse material). The cops talked to him, realized this was all a misunderstanding, but not Google...

“Google deleted his account and all his data, including every family photo he'd ever taken. He lost his phone number (he was a Google Fi customer). He lost his phone, too (he was an Android user). He lost his email address. He lost the two-factor authentication he used to log in to accounts, which meant that he lost every other account that relied on either 2FA, a phone number or email to log in. He lost every document he had on Google's cloud.”
What a great thing to have one company have all this power with absolutely zero oversight!

“Today's tech giants have not invented an interop-proof computer. They've invented laws that make interoperability illegal unless they give permission for it. A new, complex thicket of copyright, patent, trade secret, noncompete and other IP rights has conjured up a new offense we can think of as ‘felony contempt of business model'—the right of large firms to dictate how their customers, competitors and even their critics must use their products.”

The book goes into detail as to how to fix the problem.

It's all very interesting stuff. I highly suggest it to anyone who cares about understanding the tech industry.

I've been questioning myself about Big Tech and its impact on our world for some time now. Growing up I was fascinated by antitrust laws and its possibilities. Getting older, I realized slowly how we removed those vital barriers one by one in our societies and how we let enormous monopolies to existence, threatening the fragile equilibrium of our democracies.

Big Tech have been a danger for society for some years now, each year that passes is another step further into having no control over them anymore. This book is an absolute mandatory read if we want to be able to accomplish anything in the coming future.

It’s not a book for people who want to get rid of technology itself. Technology isn’t the problem. Stop thinking about what technology does and start thinking about who technology does it to and who it does it for.

Important and vital work to read and understand. Minor errors in discussion of intellectual property, and lacking an actual set of actions to take. Nevertheless a necessary read for today.

 Pretty good and makes a compelling and important argument about what to do about the direction technology is developing.

My only complaints:
- The tone felt akin to an armchair-expert uncle telling you about something
- It entirely lacked citations. Maybe that's standard for this kind of book, and I doubt he had many/any inaccuracies, but he made a lot of statements about things that happened or how things are that could use references.