BONUS: How the Internet Got Worse with Cory Doctorow

0:00I'm Hannah Fry, and I'm on a mission to find out about a mysterious day called Q-day, which experts think could be the moment our most precious encrypted data is suddenly at risk. Learn more later in the podcast. Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. This week on the podcast, a special bonus episode. Corey Doctorow has a new book out entitled Inj-tification, all about the decay of digital platforms. I've been reading Corey for a long time, both at Boeing Boeing and elsewhere. I'm a big fan of his takes on technology. I thought this conversation was really intriguing. And I think you will also, with no further ado, my conversation with technology author, Corey Doctorow.

1:07Cory Doctorow, welcome to Bloomberg. Thank you very much, Barry. It's a great pleasure to be here. It's a pleasure to have you. So before we get into the book, I have to just go into a little bit about your background. I think of you as a writer first, but you have such a multifaceted career. How do you describe what you do? Well, you know, it's funny. Before I became a British citizen, when I was living in London, And every time I landed, I had to fill in a landing card with my occupation. It just had this little like three quarter inch blank. And I would eventually just write in writer. But, you know, trying to explain to my grandmother when she was alive what I did for a living was always challenging.

1:43I'm a writer. I'm an activist. I've worked for the Electronic Frontier Foundation for nearly a quarter of a century now. It's a digital rights group that tries to make sure that your human rights apply online and offline. And these days that the Internet isn't taking away your human rights offline. I write science fiction novels. I've written a couple of dozen of those, won a bunch of awards, had New York Times bestsellers. And I'm a blogger. As you say, I edited Boing Boing for 19 years. And these days I have my own blog, pluralistic.net. And I write about tech policy, culture, science fiction, all kinds of stuff.

2:17So let's start with tech culture and EFF. What was the first issue that got you interested in exploring digital rights and just protecting user rights on the Internet? Well, like a lot of EFF supporters, you know, I got started reading about the stuff EFF was doing long before I got involved with them. So, you know, one of the one of the big cases that we got involved with very early on was something called Bernstein. So the NSA had classed encryption as a munition. and they said that civilians should not be able to access working encryption. They had a kind of weak form of encryption they called DES-50.

2:56It was the defense encryption standard with 50 bits of key. And they said DES-50 is good enough for anyone. The mafia won't break it. Our foreign adversaries won't break it. But, you know, the NSA can break it if they need to. And we tried all kinds of things to say this was a bad idea. One of our founders, John Gilmore, actually built a computer called Deep Crack that could brute force all of DES50 in two and a half hours. It cost a quarter of a million bucks. And it's actually in my office now because John got tired of having it in his garage. And no one cared. But then we went to court representing a cryptographer, grad student at Berkeley called Daniel J.

3:32Bernstein, who had made an encryption program that was stronger than DES50, that was as strong as modern encryption. These days, you know, when you take your distraction rectangle out of your pocket and click it, in the instant it takes for that file to land on the mass storage, it's encrypted so well that if every hydrogen atom in the universe were a computer and it did nothing until the end of the universe but try and guess the key, you would run out of universe before you ran out of keys. So he makes working encryption. It's a kind of miraculous modern thing, the thing that protects your bank transactions and the firmware updates for your anti-lock brakes and your pacemaker and all that other stuff that we want to keep secret and secure.

4:09And we argued that he had a First Amendment right to publish his source code, that source code was a form of expressive speech under the First Amendment. We won in the district. We won at the appellate division in the Ninth Circuit. The NSA didn't want to take their chances with the Supreme Court. And ever since then, code has been speech, and we have had the tools to have secure communications. So I recall you being very involved with digital rights management and Napster and Grokster and what was the video version of that? That broadcast flag. Right. Yeah. That's when I first realized, oh, he's more than just a curator.

4:44He's really very much an activist. You started writing about surveillance and monopolies and information asymmetries. I don't know. Is it 20, 25 years ago? Tell us a little bit about that. Well, I'm partly it's because I'm a science fiction writer. And so as a science fiction writer, the thing that I'm most preoccupied with is not what do gadgets do, but who do gadgets do them for and who do gadgets do them to? I think of science fiction as a kind of inverse of this kind of vulgar Thatcherism that says there is no alternative. You know, Margaret Thatcher used to say there is no alternative. So often they called her Tina, there is no alternative.

5:22And what she meant was like, stop trying to think of an alternative, right? And, you know, when you are a technologist, and that's my background, I was a software developer, and when you have that kind of science fiction imagination, you look at the things that you're using, you're thinking, why do we have to take the bad with the good? Why is the product designer here delivering me a pre-feast menu that's full of a bunch of stuff that no one would ever want to eat instead of just the a la carte that has the things that I want? And so I started to wonder why we couldn't seize the means of computation, take the things that we were using and make them work for us, not for someone else.

6:02They sell you a printer that only takes third-party ink, You modify the printer so it takes generic ink. They sell you a phone that only uses their app store. You modify it so it uses anyone's apps. They put you on the web and they start spying on you. Well, you put in a privacy blocker. More than half of all internet users have installed an ad blocker. It's the largest consumer boycott in history. Wow. And it means that whenever a product manager sits down to think about how invasive and obnoxious should our ads be, They kind of have to contend with this possibility that users will take it upon themselves to correct the situation, to make a counteroffer, right?

6:37My offer is I'm going to show you this web page, but I'm going to spy on you and bombard you with ads. Your counteroffer might be how about now, right? And so, you know, that's dangerous because if like making your ads 20 % more obnoxious makes 40 % of your users put in an ad blocker, you don't get money from them anymore. and no one ever goes back to the search engine and types, how do I start seeing ads again? So that's a permanent thing. And one of the big changes and one of the things that I've tracked over this quarter century is the rise and rise of IP rules that prohibit that kind of modification.

7:14So the biggest one being something called anti-circumvention law, which is law that just says you can't modify something that's designed not to be modified. In other words, of the programmer... Despite the fact that you paid for it and you own it. It's yours. You want to do something legal with it. So if the programmer basically, when they're writing the code, does the equivalent of drawing a chalk dotted line around some of the code and says, like, don't look in here or change this, under laws like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, it becomes a felony to change it, even for a lawful purpose.

7:41And so, you know, an app, it's just the web, but it has these technical protection measures that make reverse engineering illegal. So an app is just a website, you know, skinned in the right IP to make it a felony to defend your privacy when you use it. This is why, you know, bosses are so horny to make you use their apps and not their websites, right? Right. So it's interesting because you lived in Europe and in particular in London for so long. It seems like the Europeans have a much more user friendly perspective on privacy rights and digital rights. how far away is the united states from if not the platonic ideal just the way europe does it or or am i giving them too much credit well look i don't think it's necessarily because the europeans are better at regulation than the americans i think it has a lot to do with the fact that the companies that abuse us on the internet are not called nokia oliveti uh ericsson deutsche telecom right it's a lot easier to get the political space to do evidence-based policy when your economy isn't so focused and controlled by a small number of very dominant firms.

8:49That's just the real politique here. I think, though, that something is changing in Europe, and it has changed over the last few years, and it's about to accelerate quite a lot, I believe. So for a long time, the European approach to tech was to try and make them behave themselves. So Mark Zuckerberg has a platform with a lot of abuse and hate speech and harassment. they say, Mark Zuckerberg, you have to prevent that. And what they're saying to him is, the problem isn't that you have the power, the problem is how you wield the power. We would like you to wield your power more responsibly. And in fact, if you need more power to do that, because if you're going to stamp out harassment on a platform, you have to know what every user is doing and have the power to stop them.

9:30So even if you need to arrogate more power to yourself over your users, that's okay, just use the power in the way that we want. It's kind of a constitutional monarchy. He is the absolute ruler, but he suffers himself to be draped in gilded chains held by his courtiers. In the last few years, the European Union has started to regulate as though the problem was the power itself. Not that Mark Zuckerberg was bad at being the social media czar for 4 billion people unelected with an office for life, but rather that that office shouldn't exist. And so they've started to impose things like interoperability requirements that make it so that if you leave a social media platform, when you get somewhere else, Blue Sky, Mastodon, something that doesn't exist because why would you capitalize something when everyone's locked into Facebook or Twitter?

10:15When you get there, you should be able to see the messages posted by the people you left behind. You should be able to have discourse with them, be part of those communities. In the same way that when you switch from Vodafone to T-Mobile, you do some administrative work, and a few seconds later your phone number cuts over. It doesn't seem to work that way. You used to be able to drag either the people you were following or your own followers from Twitter to Blue Sky, those AIs got... Yeah, they made it a lot harder. So it wasn't that you could drag them over, but you could find them, right? And this was all cutting off the...

10:50This is what Musk did when he cut off the API, is he made it much harder to build those migration tools. And so, you know, the EU is like focusing on those migration tools, and they're about to become a lot more focused because of Trump's foreign policy. So for more than 20 years, I have gone around the world, more than 30 countries on behalf of EFF and talked to policymakers about what would make a better internet policy. Things like improved interoperability rules, the right to reverse engineer modified, better privacy rules. And what they've said at every time is that, well, we'd love to do that.

11:21It sounds very sensible, but the U.S. trade representative has made it very clear that if we don't have policies that protect the rent extraction of American firms, they're going to hit us with tariffs. Well, you know, happy Liberation Day, right? If the guy says... Oh, wait, this trade thing is two-sided? Is that what you're suggesting? So if the guy says, do what I tell you, I'm going to burn your house down, you do what he tells you and he burns your house down anyways, you're kind of a sucker if you keep doing what he tells you to do. And not only that, but Trump has made it so clear that what we used to call American trading partners are now America's rivals, and that rivalry will be pursued through the American tech giants.

11:57This is what we were told Huawei was going to do to us. Every accusation is a confession, right? That's exactly right. You know, when the International Criminal Court swore out a complaint against Benjamin Netanyahu for genocide, Trump denounced this. And then Microsoft terminated his online accounts. He lost his email. He lost his address book. He lost his calendar. And he lost the working files of the International Criminal Court. Well, this has lit a fire under Europe, right? They're now pursuing this thing they call Eurostack. There's a lot of money for it. And they want to replicate American tech stacks.

12:29They want to replicate the data centers. They want to replicate the applications, Google Docs, and so on and so on. The problem is no one is ever going to copy and paste a million documents from their government ministry one at a time out of G-docs and into a Eurostack. This sounds very much like Europe has a TikTok problem the way the United States does. Only the issue is American tech companies, not a Chinese social media network. And honestly, I don't think TikTok is doing what they say they're doing. And if they are, the best way to solve that is to just update American privacy law because that's the problem.

13:03You know, the last time we got a new privacy law in America, you may know this, it was 1988. It was when Ronald Reagan signed the Video Privacy Protection Act. It makes it a crime for video store clerks to disclose your VHS rentals. Everything else is fair game, right? Why is TikTok spying on you? That's why TikTok, because we let them, right? But in Europe, when they reach this point where they're not going to be able to migrate from these old American services to these new European services, they're going to have to start reinvigorating their reverse engineering game and make it so that you can run headless phones in the cloud that impersonate users and iterate through the documents and move them over or do scraping or alt-clients, on-device bridging, all this stuff that we used to do all the time.

13:47That was like Ross Perot's business. It was helping people move data between systems. We used to do all the time, as they would say in the Star Wars universe, this elegant weapon from a more civilized age. They're going to have to revive it because right now it's like they've observed a giant housing crisis in East Berlin. And so they built a bunch of houses in West Berlin. And they're not thinking about how the people are going to move in. They're going to have to tear down the wall, right? And so this is, in some ways, one of the most amazing things to happen in digital rights in my whole career.

14:17it's sort of analogous to what happened when Putin invaded Ukraine. You know, there used to be all these structural reasons they couldn't solarize Europe, right? Planning permission, electrical and safety codes and so on. All of a sudden, when you're shivering in the dark, that stuff isn't so important. And now Europe is 10 years ahead of their solar transition plan, right? I think that we're about to get this on a global scale, not least because economically it makes so much sense. You think about the extraction from these locked platforms, right? inkjet ink. Inkjet ink is the most expensive fluid you can buy as a civilian without taking a special license.

14:51It would be cheaper to print your grocery list with the semen of a Kentucky Derby winning stallion. That's unbelievable. And, you know, the only reason we don't have generic ink in our printers is because it's against the law to like make modifications to printer firmware so it doesn't check for generic ink. But you can buy... It just don't work reliably, right? And the printer companies push non-consensual updates to your printer that shuts this down. And they've done all kinds of sleazy things like HP pushed an update in March that was a security update that was like a Manchurian candidate, a sleeper agent.

15:23It sat there until September, didn't do anything, waited for all the parents to go to Costco and buy back to school kits of generic ink. And then it detonated and all that ink was useless. So they're trying to send a message to America's parents, don't buy generic ink ever. You never know when it's going to stop working. They were like maximizing the pain here. Unbelievable. Absolutely unbelievable. So literally had to have a conversation with the powers that be to figure out how to say the title of your book, which ironically has been named the word of the year in two separate major three, three.

16:03I found two in my two dictionaries, but three countries, Three countries. So let's talk about, in shitification, how do you define it in a way that we can broadcast without running afoul of the FCC? Of course. Well, you know, working for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as I have for so long, my job has really been about trying to raise the salience and the urgency of these digital issues that are very abstract, very technical. You know, they eventually become very concrete, but it's when your house is on fire. You kind of want people to get active before then. And so that's a game of coming up with similes and metaphors and framing devices, funny words, parables, and so on.

16:42And the latest of these is this one, inshittification. And inshittification is both observation about how things go bad and also a theory about why they're going bad. And so the observation is quite straightforward. and in the first phase, you have firms that are good to their end users, but find a way to lock those users in. In the second phase, they make things worse for those end users, and they rely on the lock-in to stop those end users from departing, and they make things good for business customers. In the third phase, they lock in those business customers and extract all of their surplus as well.

17:15They leave behind the kind of meanest homeopathic residue needed to keep users locked to the platform, businesses locked to the users, and they extract everything for themselves, and they turn into a pile of crap. That's the kind of observational end of it. But the question I want to interrogate is why is it happening now? Because we didn't invent greed in the middle of the last decade. The people running these companies are often the same people who ran them from day one. Mark Zuckerberg was running Facebook from his Harvard dorm to today, and he owns the majority of the voting shares. Google actually got worse when Sergey Brin came back in terms of its path to platform decay.

17:49So what is it that made these companies bad now? And I think really the way to understand that is to ask the inverse, which is why weren't they worse before? Because obviously firms would like to charge more, deliver less, pay less to their suppliers, pay less to their employees, seek more beneficial terms for themselves. And when you phrase it that way, you know why firms don't do it. Because if you charged infinity and paid nothing, well, maybe you'd be running a scholarly journal. But if you're not running a scholarly journal, no one would do it, right? You would lose your employees, you'd lose your customers.

18:21You have to labor under the discipline of competition, of regulators. And if you're in tech, you had other sources of discipline like interoperability, the ability to make two programs work with each other. So maybe if you had a rent extraction scheme, some would alienate your users from you by coming up with a plug-in that made it possible for them to avoid that rent extraction scheme. And those customers would then discover that there was a better firm out there and they might switch to becoming the customers of them. And you had to worry about your workers because tech workers were so powerful and they often really fought hard for their users.

18:54They cared about their jobs. And so my thesis is that when we dismantled these sources of discipline, we created what you could call the unshittogenic policy environment, right? The environment that rewards the firms that do the worst, that rewards the factions in the firms that advocate for the worst, that rewards the impulses in CEOs that are tempted to do the worst. And then the worst happened. So let's talk about some of these firms because I imagine everybody has experienced the title of your book. Platform decay is the phrase I like to use. I mean, in my experience, and I'm a few years older than you, it began with Microsoft, probably the, you know, sui generis first company that figured out how to lock people in and then abuse the monopoly position they had.

19:45That was followed by, let's go through the list, eBay, Google, Amazon. I would be biased if I didn't include Apple. I think I can also include Starbucks and other entities like that. Yeah. I have a peeve with them because they basically threatened users with their Starbucks points during the pandemic. I thought that was very misguided. And OK, see, that was an easy platform to wait. There was an article in The Wall Street Journal that the Starbucks app, you would load it up with a credit card. Wait, why do I have to give you fifty dollars? just hit my credit card. And it turned out it was a$3 or$4 billion interest-free loan their users were giving them.

20:32It's free cash flow. So that was a little bit of a, oh, and you want to take my points? All right, I'm done with you. Not boycotting them. They just kind of fell off my first choice. But I'm curious. They overcooked their beans, too. Right. Well, if you like strong coffee and don't mind a little bit of bitterness, for sure. But I'm curious, what were your experiences that led to the book? What was the first platforms that you watched decay? Well, let me clarify a little here because there have been lots of platforms that have decayed, but they didn't shamble on. I think that's one of the mysteries that I'm trying to plumb here.

21:10Well, there's a difference between a company like MySpace that just loses out to a superior technology or a better interface or whatever versus something where the entire platform follows the pattern that you've outlined. And then they stay in business, right? That's the thing that I want to interrogate. Profitably, wildly profitable. Yeah. So, you know, let's think about a few examples that you just raised and what happened when they end shitified, right? So Microsoft, you mentioned Apple, and you said you'd be biased if you didn't mention Apple. I was a kind of CIO for hire in the early 2000s.

21:49And every shop that I would work in. Chief info or chief investor? Chief info. Yeah, never chief investor. I invested all my dot-com money wisely in laptops. I'm sure they're going to appreciate someday. No, I was going around helping little SMEs get online. I put up their LAN. I get the file server, everything. And they all had a problem, which is that they'd have a couple of Macs in the shop. and they couldn't reliably read or write Microsoft Office files because Microsoft Office for the Mac was the most cursed piece of software to come out of Redmond. You just wave the floppy disk around the office and files would spontaneously go corrupt.

22:24And so eventually you'd go to the designer and maybe the CEO would have a PowerBook and you'd put a PC on their desk that was just for like Excel, Word, and PowerPoint. And then that was kind of unwieldy. So then you put a big graphics card in there. You'd buy Windows versions of all the programs the graphic designer used, and you throw away the Mac. And so Steve Jobs knew that this was a problem. He didn't just beg Bill Gates to fix Office for the Mac. He reverse-engineered Office for the Mac. He reverse-engineered the Office file formats, and he made iWork, pages, numbers, and keynote, which can perfectly read and write the Microsoft Office file format.

23:01So what he did in economics terms is he reduced the switching cost to zero because you didn't have to leave any of your files behind when you went from Windows to a Mac. And he solved the collective action problem of convincing everyone to move to a Mac because you didn't have to. You could go to the Mac and other people could join you when they were ready. This saved Apple's bacon. I recall the famous Prey cover of Wired in 1998. and my pet theory, or it's not even mine, is that Microsoft cut a deal in order, there was already the antitrust bubbling. So, hey, we have to keep a legitimate operating system to head around otherwise.

23:39Controlled opposition. That's right. Well, yeah, and they ran these switch ads, if you'll recall. Oh, very much so. It's about how easy it was to switch. So this was this incredible moment. Now, what would happen if you did this to Apple, right? We have people locked into the iPhone today. Their apps are there, their data is there, and so on. it's not hard to like make an iPhone emulator that runs on another computer, including like on an Android device, right? And so you could run all those apps, you could access all that data. If you did that to Apple today, if you did unto Apple as Apple had done unto Microsoft, first they'd hit you with Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act for circumvention.

24:14That's a$500 ,000 fine and a five-year prison sentence for a first offense. Then they would call you a tortious interferer with their contract for violating their terms of service. and they might hit you with criminal terms of service violation under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. They would call you a copyright violator. They'd call you a trademark violator, a patent violator. Maybe if you hired some ex-employees, they'd say that you're going after their trade secrets and maybe their ex-employees' nondisclosures. They would basically nuke you until you glowed, right? And so it's true. Platforms went bad all through history, but they had countermaneuvers.

24:47You know, it wasn't just that MySpace was outcompeted by Facebook. it was that when Facebook was trying to lure users over from MySpace, it gave them a bot. And you gave that bot your login and password, and it would go to MySpace several times a day. It would grab everything in your MySpace feed and put it in your Facebook feed so you could reply to it, and it would push it back out again. So again, you didn't have to choose between the people that you loved on MySpace and the superior application that was Facebook, because Facebook's pitch at the time was, don't use MySpace, it's owned by an evil billionaire.