Use antitrust to promote interoperability, says Cory Doctorow, an author and tech activist
IT IS hard to find anyone cheering for a world dominated by a few giants. It is even harder to find anyone who thinks that Big Tech stands any chance of being toppled. Both the right and the left clamour for a break-up of the biggest web platforms, notably in America—from the trustbusting manifesto pledge by Elizabeth Warren, a democratic senator, to the followers of Alex Jones, a right-wing commentator, who was recently banned from several social-media sites.
The past 12 months have seen a blizzard of new internet regulations that, ironically, have done more to enshrine Big Tech’s dominance than the decades of lax antitrust enforcement that preceded them. This will have grave consequences for privacy, free expression and safety. Shortly after Europe’s privacy rules went into force, America’s Congress passed legislation called SESTA/FOSTA. Don’t worry about the actual name, the “ST” in both acronyms stands for “sex trafficking”, and the law makes online firms liable if users are engaged in sex-trafficking crimes. Because firms are unable to distinguish between the consensual sex-trade and the deplorable activities the law was designed to stop, virtually every online forum where Americans discussed sex-work has gone dark.
To understand how this plays out, consider the situation last April with France’s cybercrime watchdog. It demanded the removal of more than 15m documents from the servers at the Internet Archive in California. This included the Gutenberg Project's public-domain books and the Internet Archive's legendary collection of Grateful Dead recordings. The Archive was given 24 hours to comply, which would be reduced to just a single hour if the EU’s Terror Regulation is approved .
Over the past 12 months there has been a radical shift in the balance of power on the internet. In the name of taming the platforms, regulators have inadvertently issued them a “Perpetual Internet Domination Licence”, albeit one that requires that they take advice from an aristocracy of elite regulators.
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