The Internet Con
2023 work by Cory Doctorow
The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation is a 2023 non-fiction book by journalist and internet activist Cory Doctorow.
The central thesis of The Internet Con is that the Big Tech (several largest technological companies) have been able to become near-monopolists and gather an unsustainable amount of power due to the criminalisation of interoperability. These laws make reverse-engineering a crime and lock their customers within heavily surveiled platforms. Doctorow also provides a comparison between the tech and other industries, attempting to undermine the common argument about "tech geniuses" such as Mark Zuckerberg, who ended up monopolising the internet because of their alleged entrepreneurial and technical prowess.
The book is written for both tech-savvy and non-technical audiences and proposes both market-based and policy-based solutions to the lack of interoperability.
Summary
The Internet Con starts from an outlook of the legal and economic reality in the USA and Europe in 1970—1980, when the antitrust laws were weakened to allow monopolisation of many industries; Doctorow blames Robert Bork and the Chicago school of economics for this change. He provides examples of outsized influence of Big Tech companies on the lives of ordinary people, such as the ability of Google to kill a local business by excluding it from the search results. However, the founding principles of computers include universality, so the current situation is exceptional. Chapters 2—4 include the legal history of many technologies and services in the United States:
Gopher, a predecessor of search engines that connected the internet because of interoperability.
The 20-year-long USA court case against IBM that, according to Doctorow, resulted in the adoption of a third-party operating system for the IBM PC: MS-DOS.
A similar case was started in 2020 by FTC against Facebook's parent company, and revealed a concerted effort by executives and engineers to reduce interoperability.
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