Cory Doctorow

And those consequences came in four forms.

They had to worry about competitors, but we let them buy those.

They had to worry about regulators, but when a sector is boiled down to a cartel, they find it very easy to agree on what they're going to do and make their preferences felt because they have a lot of money and because they're not competing with one another and they capture their regulators.

They had to worry about their workers because tech workers were in very scarce supply and they're very valuable.

They often really cared about their users and they could really say, no, I'm not going to un-shitify that thing I missed my mother's funeral to ship on time.

and make it stick because there was no one else to hire if they quit.

And they were bringing a lot of value to the firm.

But of course, tech workers famously thought that they were temporarily embarrassed founders and they didn't unionize.

They didn't think they were workers.

So when the power of scarcity evaporated, they had not replaced it with the power of solidarity.

And so now you have 500,000 tech layoffs in three years and tech workers can't hold the line.

And then finally, there was new market entry.

There were new companies that could exploit something that I think is exceptional about tech.

I'm not a tech exceptionalist broadly, but I'm an exceptionalist about this, which is that every program in your computer that is adverse to your interests can be neutralized with a program that is beneficial to your interests.

And that means that when you create a program that is deliberately bad, you invite new market entrants to make one that's good, right?

If you lock up the printer so it won't take generic ink, you just invite someone to not only get into the generic ink business, but get into the alternative printer firmware business, which eventually could just be the, I'm going to sell you your next printer business.

But what we've done over 20 plus years is monotonically expand IP law until we've made most forms of reverse engineering and modification without manufacturer permission illegal, a felony.

My friend Jay Freeman calls it felony contempt of business model.

And as a result, you don't have to worry about market entry with this incredible, slippery, dynamic character of technology.

And when you unshackle firms from these four forces of discipline—