LISBON—The technology-rights activist who put the word “enshittification” into the dictionary introduced Web Summit attendees to a new version of that neologism in a Wednesday talk about how US-backed copyright regimes stymie digital self-help worldwide.
“We used to have an ethos where if something didn’t work on the internet, you would write a plug-in, you would make a mod, you’d do an alt-client, you would scrape it, you would reverse-engineer it, and you’d make it better,” he said.
But that’s changed. “When we enacted IP laws all over the world, what are called anti-circumvention laws that criminalized that kind of reverse-engineering and repair, we created an enshittogenic policy environment.”
Doctorow, who regularly posts essays about the state of tech at Pluralistic, compared web sites to mobile apps. “On the open web, anyone can modify a web site just by changing the way their browser works,” he said, citing ad blockers as an example. He got an indirect endorsement of that openness from Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, who spoke on a panel that closed Web Summit Thursday and said “we need to get that power back.”
Apps, however, get protection from anti-circumvention laws, Doctorow told his onstage interviewer, Rabble Labs founder Evan Henshaw-Plath, and so can’t be improved by their users.
“No one’s ever installed an ad blocker for an app,” he said, describing an app as a site where it’s “illegal to protect your privacy while you use it.” (You can, however, use your phone’s system permissions to block an app from certain types of data, and we strongly recommend doing so.)
The US was early to adopt anti-circumvention laws like the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and it’s since pushed trading partners to enact their own equivalents. As Doctorow put it: “You need to enact your own version of these laws or we’re going to impose tariffs on your country.”
But now the rest of the world has been slapped with President Trump’s chaotic, inflationary tariffs anyway. “Well, happy Liberation Day!” Doctorow said sarcastically, mocking Trump’s April 2 announcement of many of these import fees. “Once the tariffs are there, there’s no reason to keep the law on the books.”
But that’s not all the EU should do, he suggested after reminding the audience of Apple’s history of dubious arguments for the supremacy of its App Store against European regulations requiring it to open up iPhone app installation—followed by exercises in malicious compliance and relentless litigation.
“There’s an industrial-policy opportunity here where European firms can export the tools of liberation from bad American platforms,” he said, adding that this would help Europeans make their own migrations from those systems. Later in the talk, he briefly outlined how new EU laws could work: “Jailbreak the iPhone, and we will immunize you from liability provided you’re not violating labor law, privacy law, or consumer law.”
Doctorow invoked the example of International Criminal Court prosecutor Karim Khan. That lawyer lost access to his Microsoft account after the Trump administration sanctioned the ICC for the arrest warrants it issued for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant over Israel’s invasion of Gaza.
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Microsoft later said that it had not disconnected the entire ICC and would fight future disconnection orders targeting European institutions in court. Last month, the German publication Handelsblatt reported that the ICC would replace its Microsoft software stack with the German-developed software suite Open Desk.
Doctorow endorsed “made-in-Europe, open-source transparent alternatives” and said repealing anti-circumvention laws would ease those migrations and open up business opportunities: “There is a huge export market for the tools that get data out of silos.”
He added that the EU had little to lose domestically, saying those laws only protected such illegitimate applications of digital locks as Volkswagen’s tampering with emissions-control software in the Dieselgate scandal. “If it were legal for anyone to reverse-engineer a Volkswagen informatics system, we would have known about Dieselgate the day they shipped it,” Doctorow argued.
The Toronto-born author also urged his own country to adopt a similar strategy to fight Trump’s tariffs instead of levying its own. “If we’re going to tariff soybeans, we’re just going to punish some poor farmer in a state that begins and ends with a vowel who never did anything bad to Canada,” he said. “Attacking the highest-margin lines of business of American tech monopolists goes straight after those guys who spent $1 million each to sit behind Trump on the dais.”
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Invited by Henshaw-Plath to suggest strategies for tech insurgents to respond to a future bursting of an AI bubble, Doctorow teed off on the current hype for “the word-guessing program,” his preferred put-down for AI models.
“You’ve got a sector that’s spent $700 billion in capex, and by its own incredibly cooked books, says that it’s only booking $60 billion a year in revenue,” he said. “Obviously there’s a collapse coming.”
Imagine the possibilities, he asked, “if you could buy GPUs for 10 cents on the dollar” and the pool of computing talent now had “a ton of applied mathematicians looking for work.”
That sort of sudden change, he said earlier in the talk, should be the kind of technological disruption that people should welcome. “Moving fast and breaking things is in bad odor,” he said. “But it really matters whose things you’re breaking.”
Doctorow offered a twist on that increasingly-resented tech-industry phrase that you just might see at a protest: “I’m totally up for moving fast and breaking kings.”
Disclosure: I moderated three panels at Web Summit, with the conference’s organizers covering my hotel and airfare.
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Rob Pegoraro writes about interesting problems and possibilities in computers, gadgets, apps, services, telecom, and other things that beep or blink. He’s covered such developments as the evolution of the cell phone from 1G to 5G, the fall and rise of Apple, Google’s growth from obscure Yahoo rival to verb status, and the transformation of social media from CompuServe forums to Facebook’s billions of users. Pegoraro has met most of the founders of the internet and once received a single-word email reply from Steve Jobs.
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