Cory Doctorow

So if you want to find out what people actually prefer, you have to have a market in which people who disagree with the consensus that people are kind of gut flora for immortal colony organisms we call limited liability corporations, and that they are entitled to dignity and moral consideration as beings unto themselves, those people have to be offering some of the alternatives to find out what they want.

But because under modern IP law, something called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it is a felony to modify the app without permission.

When Meta sent the letter to Apple and Google, they agreed that they would side with Meta.

And because you can't modify those platforms to accept apps that haven't run through the store, that was the end of the road for OGM.

No, I'm not saying there's no capacity to switch.

I'm saying the higher the switching costs are, the lower the likelihood that people will leave.

When we had pop-up ads in our browsers, and real pop-up ads, the Paleolithic pop-up ad that was a whole new browser window that spawned one pixel squared, auto-played audio, ran away from your cursor, the way that we got rid of that was it was legal to modify browsers to have pop-up blockers.

More than 50% of us have installed an ad blocker in our browser.

Doc Searles calls it the largest consumer boycott in human history.

And as a result, there is some moderation upon the invasiveness of what a browser does to you that is in marked contrast with apps because reverse engineering an app because it's not an open platform is illegal under American copyright law.

It violates Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

And so when we talk about how these platforms have competed their way into toxicity, we're excluding a form of competition that we have made illegal.

For example, ad blockers, for example, privacy blockers, for example, things that discard algorithmic suggestions and so on.

Taking those off the table means that the only competitors you get are firms that are capable of doing a sort of holus bolus replacement to convince you that, no, you don't want to use Instagram anymore.

You want to use TikTok instead, as opposed to,

You'd like to use TikTok or Instagram rather, but in a slightly different way that defends your interests against the firm's interests.

And we mustn't ever forget that within digital technology and living memory, we had a mode of competition that we prohibited that often served as a very rapid response to specifically the thing you're worried about here.

I have a friend, Andrea Downing, who has the gene for breast cancer.

And she's part of a breast cancer previvor group that was courted by Facebook in the early 2010s.

And they moved there, and this group is hugely consequential to them.