Cory Doctorow

And they made an app called OG App.

And the way OG App worked is you gave it your login and password.

It pretended to be you and logged into Instagram.

It grabbed the session key.

It grabbed everything in your Instagram feed.

It discarded the ads.

It discarded the suggestions.

It discarded all of the stuff that wasn't a chronological feed of the people you followed that they posted recently.

Facebook or Meta sent a letter to Apple and Google who obliged them by removing the app because there's honor among thieves.

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.