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The Internet con : how to seize the means of computation / Cory Doctorow.

by Doctorow, Cory.

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Internet industry.

Information technology -- Social aspects.

Internetworking (Telecommunication)

9781804291245 (hc.)

184 p. ; 21 cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

"Journalist and novelist Doctorow (Red Team Blues) details a plan for how to break up Big Tech in this impassioned and perceptive manifesto. Today’s large tech companies are legally able to quash 'interoperators' (defined as: 'new technologies that plug into their services, systems and platforms') -- a privilege never granted to the likes of IBM in decades past, according to Doctorow. If the industry's 'complex thicket of copyright, patent... and other IP rights' were swept away, Doctorow writes, a healthy market of secondary services would spring up -- for instance, a service that could allow a user to message friends on various social media platforms without logging into them directly. Doctorow hypothesizes that legislating in favor of interoperability, and thus righting the market, would be a more direct route to breaking up Big Tech than other forms of antitrust legislation, since it would force big companies to innovate and compete. He also advocates for extralegal, 'guerrilla' forms of interoperability. To illustrate his point, Doctorow tours the past several decades of technology history, highlighting such cases as the film industry's attempts to ban the VCR in the 1980s, Apple's reverse engineering of Microsoft Office in the 2000s, and several 'right to repair' laws passed over the past decade in Massachusetts. Readers may find Doctorow's analysis too blithe on some points -- for example, he is dismissive of the need for the kind of centralized content moderation practiced by giant social media platforms. Still, Doctorow's sense of urgency is contagious."--Publishers Weekly.

Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist and journalist. He is the author of many books, fiction and non-fiction, most recently of How Destroy Survillance Capitalism, and coauthor of Checkpoint Capitalism. In 2020, he was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame. In 2022 he was awarded honorary doctor of law from York University's Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies. In addition to working for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, he is an MIT Media Lab Research Affiliate, a Visiting Professorof Computer Science at the Open University, a Visiting Professor of Practice at the University of North Carolina's School of Library and Information Science, and he co-founded the UK Open Rights Group.

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