Big Tech maximizes the cost of switching providers and rigs the game. Interoperability is the answer to this problem, according to Cory Doctorow, a science fiction author, activist, and journalist.
“[T]ech is foundational. The questions of tech monopoly aren’t inherently more important than, say, the climate emergency or gender or racial discrimination. But tech – free, fair, open tech – is a precondition for winning those other fights. Winning the fight for better tech extinguishes any hope of winning those more important fights”.[1]
This is a quote by Cory Doctorow. He is a science fiction author, activist, and journalist. The quote contextualizes the struggle for interoperable technology. The fight for interoperability is not technical. It is a legal battle against Big Tech because these companies retain users rather than outperform their competitors. In other words, Big Tech maximizes the cost of switching providers and rigs the game.
Interoperability, however, changes the game insofar as it lowers the switching costs. This is Doctorow’s bargain in his book ‘The Internet Con’ (2023). The depreciation of switching costs challenges tech monopolies. Therefore, he centers interoperability in his user manual for seizing the means of computation.
To reclaim the internet from Big Tech, users need to know:
- What interoperability is
- How interoperability works
- How we can get interoperability
- How we can mitigate interoperability’s problems[2]
Interoperability is at the heart of Doctorow’s vision for a world without Big Tech. More specifically, adversarial interoperability. This is already starting to sound complicated. However, it is not. ‘The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation’ is no technical directory. Rather, it is a collection of well-thought-out arguments for adversarial interoperability, which he names “comcom”.
One very important argument is that Big Tech monopolized universal technology by weaponizing the judicial system. This, Doctorow attests to, by immediately debunking the myth of the technical geniuses and writing:
“Now, the boosters will tell you that these men are good geniuses whose singular vision and leadership transform the world; while the critics will tell you that these are evil geniuses whose singular vision and leadership transformed the world … for the worse”.[3]
Demonstratively, he goes on to refute that “sunspots, water contaminants or gamma rays caused an exceptional generation of business leaders to be conceived all at the same time”, and that “aliens came to Earth and knocked up the future mothers of a new subrace of elite CEOs whose extraterrestrial DNA conferred upon them the power to steer companies to total industrial dominance”.[4]
Doctorow arrives at a more logical conclusion. The leaders of Silicon Valley do not belong to a superior species of technical pioneers, who simply outwitted mere mortals and rose to the top because of their originality. Doctorow concludes that the enforcement of competition laws was altered throughout the neoliberal era. Now, we are stuck with monopolies …
Doctorow provides a cornucopia of reasons to want Big Tech out of the picture. Even so, he also highlights that the agents of Big Tech showed us exactly how and why adversarial interoperability is the solution to the problem that these companies pose. Take, for example, Microsoft:
“Microsoft used network effects to build a winner-take-all system that sucked in new users and shackled them to its platform with high switching costs. If Microsoft’s monopoly had been on some physical product [rather than universal technology] that might have been the end of the story”.[5]
Instead, Apple lowered the switching costs by reverse engineering Microsoft’s files to create iWork, despite Microsoft’s best efforts to prevent it with “a notoriously gnarly hairball of obfuscation and cruft”,[6] better known as Microsoft’s old Office file formats. The rest of the story goes to show that interoperability may rescue users from the, oftentimes, god-awful technology forced on them by Big Tech.
Dangerously Dull
There is a unicorn, apparently, named Marigold Heavenly Nostrils. Doctorow introduces this fictional character from Dana Clare’s ‘Phoebe and her Unicorn’. Marigold projects a shield of boringness to stay out of everyone’s sight. This means that even when someone other than Phoebe notices Marigold, the unicorn looks dull. So dull, in fact, that the person laying eyes on Marigold forgets her instantly.
Big Tech did not get its name from the size of the average software engineer’s brain. Big Tech got big because “competition is for losers”, as Doctorow cites Peter Thiel for saying. The legal departments of Big Tech allowed the companies to grow so big by projecting a shield of boringness over their unlawful monopolization of universal technology, which remains universal despite the cruft.
The “long, tedious, technical and highly abstract” quarrels over what it means to protect users’ rights shields the truth with boringness.[7] At the center of these carefully composed misconceptions about users’ protection against “bandits who roam the [digital] land” and “malicious software”,[8] there is an insultingly paternalist idea of the consumer. This rhetoric criminalizes adversaries and eliminates competition. Without competition, Big Tech grew so big that the paternalist idea became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Now, consumers need protection against Big Tech and its “feudal warlords of the digital age”, [9] who simultaneously violate and vows to defend consumers’ rights.
In this honorable quest to rig the game, Big Tech effectively banned the innovation of universal technology, Doctorow suggests. The centralization of power allowed companies like Microsoft to evade regulation, simply because:
“the process by which regulators and lawmakers understand issues start 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”.[10]
Doctorow has had enough of chummy backroom deals and cruft. Therefore, he unpacks how we get interoperability, and how to mitigate its problems. This potentially involves government procurement, contract law, court-appointed supervision of companies during lawsuits, and legislative shortcuts for interoperators. That is not an easy task. But, in his satiric manner, he gets his point across. We need interoperability. Now.
[1] Page 134 in Doctorow, Cory: ’The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation’, Verso (2023)
[2] Page 3 in Doctorow, Cory: ’The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation’, Verso (2023)
[3] Page 7 in Doctorow, Cory: ’The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation’, Verso (2023)
[4] Page 9 in Doctorow, Cory: ’The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation’, Verso (2023)
[5] Page 22 in Doctorow, Cory: ’The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation’, Verso (2023)
[6] Page 23 in Doctorow, Cory: ’The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation’, Verso (2023)
[7] Page 82 in Doctorow, Cory: ’The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation’, Verso (2023)
[8] Page 110 in Doctorow, Cory: ’The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation’, Verso (2023)
[9] Page 110 in Doctorow, Cory: ’The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation’, Verso (2023)
[10] Page 117 in Doctorow, Cory: ’The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation’, Verso (2023)
