this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
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171
Cory Doctorow: Interoperability Can Save the Open Web (spectrum.ieee.org)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
8 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

How to free users from Big Tech’s walled gardens

The two benefits of competition are that it breaks the [megacorp] cash reserves that are used to enact public policy and it introduces the collective action problem that makes the remaining reserves harder to spend.

How does that virtuous cycle then extend from tech into other sectors?

Doctorow: Think about what happened with the breakup of Standard Oil in the first part of the 20th century. Standard Oil was not the only trust. There were trusts for everything: whiskey, railroads, iron, aluminum, cars. Standard Oil’s dominance made people so hopeless about whether or not they could have an accountable government that the toppling of Standard Oil opened up a floodgate of political will that saw all of those other trusts shattered.

I want to go after tech because it has this characteristic interoperability that makes it a soft target. We start with tech, and that gives us the momentum, the credibility, and the political will to go after everybody else.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

A small wrinkle, industries seem to have little issue with acting collectively to spend cash on enacting policies that benefit those industries. For example, the oil industry has successfully blocked climate change action for decades even after they knew an action was needed. Perhaps they're not as powerful as Standard Oil but they surely are powerful enough to profit maximize at the expense of so much else.

Put differently, if the breakup of monopolistic industries in the first half of last century produced a virtuous cycle, which supposes some durability, why do we find ourselves with virtually the same problem today?

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think the best analogy is to cybersecurity. What’s the point of patching devices when they’re inevitably going to be hacked again in the future? Because they’ll also be patched again afterwards. Security is a dynamic equilibrium, not a static one. Similarly, no fix to corrupt corporate power is permanent. We need constant vigilance.

Also, it’s been a hundred years, and tech is a new sector that didn’t exist 100 years ago. Breaking up Standard Oil isn’t going to help with Apple and Google.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I think the idea is to break up google and apple ;)

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