Cory Doctorow

You know, when Facebook was trying to get users off of MySpace, they didn't say, oh, come to Facebook, read our superior privacy policy, and smug solidarity or solitude until your dumb friends get the message and join you.

They gave them a bot.

And you gave that bot your login and password, and it went to MySpace several times a day, grabbed everything waiting for you, impersonating you, put it in your Facebook feed, and you could reply to it.

That's called interoperability.

And over the last 20 years, we've expanded IP law to make that kind of stuff illegal.

When Mark Zuckerberg did it to Rupert Murdoch, that's progress.

If we do it to Mark Zuckerberg, that's piracy.

With these guys, it's always disruption for thee and never for me.

We could change the policy environment so that we could evacuate the platforms, right?

But if we just shatter the platforms, we shatter all those communities that matter to people.

And they really do matter.

how we get solidarity.

So historically, that's the way it worked, right?

But historically, we had antitrust laws that we enforced, which we did for four years under Biden.

We've stopped doing now, except for companies that Donald Trump doesn't like.

Why do we stop doing now?

Because there's this guy who's decided that he's just going to use it against companies that aren't sufficiently deferential to him and don't give him a little gold trophy that they assemble for him.

Well, that's what they're doing.

These companies, they bought all their competitors.

Google, it's not Willy Wonka's Idea Factory.