America’s lashing out at trade partners under the second presidency of Donald Trump could prove the moment to break its tech firms’ power beyond US borders, activist Cory Doctorow told AFP Tuesday.
A 25-year veteran of digital rights campaigning and prolific sci-fi author, Doctorow is riding high on the success of his book ‘Enshittification’, published in October and already through five printings.
In it, he outlines how giant tech platforms such as Facebook, Uber or Amazon end up squeezing both their users and the businesses or workers who trade on them.
The threat of hefty tariffs was used in the past to keep countries in Europe and around the world aligned with American policy that enables such abuses, Doctorow said on the sidelines of the Web Summit tech conference in Lisbon.
‘If the argument is, well, we had to do what they said, what they told us to, or they were going to burn our house down, they have burned your house down,’ he added.
Intellectual property law in particular has been used by tech firms to defend what have become monopoly or near-monopoly positions, Doctorow argues.
IP protection can make it illegal for users and traders to alter or reverse engineer the computer code that governs how they interact with platforms and products, such as how gig drivers or delivery riders are assigned jobs or whether machines will accept replacement parts from other manufacturers.
Overthrowing this barrier ‘produces industrial policy and a consumer surplus, because everyone wants to buy the program that lets you put third-party ink in your printer... because it would be $10 a gallon, not $10,000 a gallon,’ Doctorow said.
‘A small number of countries, perhaps only one, is going to become synonymous with this kind of tool in the same way that Finland was synonymous with mobile phones for the decade of Nokia.
‘And it could launch a (national) tech sector into a stable orbit.’
With its stronger tech regulation, a sense of urgency about technological sovereignty since Trump’s re-election, and entrepreneurs and investors looking for a safe, consistent environment, ‘it could be here’ in Europe, Doctorow said — although he takes nothing for granted.
IP law is just one of the ways the writer describes companies using their lobbying, legal and financial power to undermine four forces that usually check temptations to abuse their position: competition, regulation, interoperability and worker power.
Doctorow added that he still had faith in the desire of rank-and-file tech workers — like many of the attendees at Web Summit — to make their products work for users rather than squeeze the maximum out of them.
Many tech workers ‘had their own horizons radically expanded by access to digital technology. They learn the words to describe who they are, they escaped the milieu that they were born into, they encountered ideas... that changed the way they understood the world,’ he said.
‘Often, they’re motivated by a sense of mission and a desire to bring that... empowerment to a bigger group of people, to users.’