1. Lack of competition in the market via mergers and acquisitions

2. Companies change things on the back end (“twiddle their knobs”) to improve their fortunes and have a united, consolidated front to prevent any lawmaking that might constrain them

3. Companies then embrace tech law to prevent new entrants into the market or consumer rights (see: DMCA, etc.)

This is the criteria he has laid out for the "enshitifacation" of the Internet.

This is funny to me because this is the exact pattern of every industry and service in the United States ever. The Internet isn't special, it's just the latest frontier for capitalism.

The danger here is that they make "open" standards so horrendously complex and ever evolving that only the billionaire mega corporations can can realistically keep up with them.

See the web where Google now control it completely by having such an enormous amount of code that even Microsoft couldn't be arsed to keep up, or Office Open XML, where 100% compatibility is limited to exactly one product: The one that made it. I just downloaded the documentation for the standard. It is over 5000 fucking pages long. That was part 1 of 4.

Interoperability is how we “seize the means of computation.”

Good luck with that. If the success of the iPhone has taught me anything it is that the average person loves them some incompatible with anything but itself vertical integration.

I loved the net when you had to have a clue to be there.

Through no intervention or design, the market creates perverse incentives that only benefit a few. So the solution is to fiddle with the incentives?

Ya ever notice that "market reform" schemes always seem like negotiations with an angry god? Sometimes I think that ancient civilizations would be much better understood if we stopped referring to the "priest class" and started calling them economists.

Another way to encourage interoperability is to use the government to hold out a carrot in addition to the stick. Through government procurement laws, governments could require any company providing a product or service to the government to not interfere with interoperability. President Lincoln required standard tooling for bullets and rifles during the Civil War, so there’s a long history of requiring this already. If companies don’t want to play nice, they’ll lose out on some lucrative contracts, “but no one forces a tech company to do business with the federal government.”

That's actually a very interesting idea. This benefits the govt as much as anyone else too. It reduces switching costs for govt tech.

I like Doctorow, and these point are valid. I just don’t see the American government doing anything to benefit the people, regardless of left or right orientation. Most Americans want abortion access and reasonable restrictions on gun sales; I can’t imagine any candidates, local or federal doing little more than making empty promises on these subjects. Even Obama care is a hugely compromised husk of reasonable healthcare for all, and you still have republicans clamoring to dismantle it.

I hate to be pessimistic, but I don’t think any American politician would take on this topic.