Cory Doctorow

Sure.

One would be getting rid of this anti-circumvention law in America, Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and saying that it should be legal to modify things you own to do things that are legal, and that it shouldn't be the purview of the manufacturer to stop you from doing it.

Another one would be to create a muscular federal privacy right with a private right of action so that impact litigators like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as well as aggrieved individuals, could bring cases when their privacy laws were violated.

And I guess the third would be an interoperability mandate specifically for social media.

So it would be a rule – and we've had versions of this.

The Access Act was introduced, I think, three times, various versions.

They're all pretty good.

Mark Warner, I think, was the main senator behind them.

But a thing that just says that –

You should be able to leave a social media network and go to another one and continue to receive the messages people send to you and reply to them the same way you can leave one phone carrier and go to the other.

And there's a lot of technical details about what that standard looks like and how you avoid embedding parochial interests of incumbents and so on.

I don't think they're insurmountable.

And I think that the tradeoffs are more than worth it.

So my first pick is Sarah Wynne Williams' book, Careless People.

And it's a great example of the Streisand effect, that when a company tries to suppress something, it brings it interest.

So Wynne Williams, she was a minor diplomat in the New Zealand diplomatic corps.

She became quite interested in how Facebook could be a player geopolitically.

She started to sort of nudge them to give her a job as like an international governmental relations person.

No one was very interested in it, but she just sort of kept at it until she got her dream job.

And then the dream turned into a nightmare.