[Plura-list] There's one thing EVERY government can do to shrink Big Tech

[Cory Doctorow]

Read today's issue online at: 
https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/01/redistribution-vs-predistribution/

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I'm on a tour with my new book, the international bestseller 
*Enshittification*!

Catch me next in Miami, Burbank and Lisbon!

Full schedule with dates and links at:

https://pluralistic.net/tour

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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.

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👆🏾 There's one thing EVERY government can do to shrink Big Tech

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.


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👆🏾 Hey look at this

* 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/

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👆🏾 Object permanence

#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

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👆🏾 Upcoming appearances

* 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

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👆🏾 Recent appearances

* 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

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👆🏾 Latest books

* "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

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👆🏾 Upcoming books

* "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

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👆🏾 Colophon

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

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