13 sett 2023 anni - WIRED: Podcast: The case for breaking up Silicon Valley digital giants. How business practices, acquisitions, "walled gardens" and artificial interoperability limitations in the technology took control of our choices online. Makes the case that the silicon valley giants don't invent, but have used access to capital to buy out and kill technology competitors.

Descrizione:

SEP 13, 2023 7:00 AM
ON THIS WEEK’S episode of Have a Nice Future, Gideon Lichfield and Lauren Goode talk to Cory Doctorow, a writer, internet activist, and author of The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation. As the US government takes Google to court in an antitrust case this week, Doctorow explains why he believes monopoly power has made the internet a miserable place and what we can do to get our digital lives back.

===EXCERPT OF TRANSCRIPT===

Lauren: But tell us a little bit about the argument you're making.

Cory: Sure. Well, this is an argument about more than tech. This is an argument about all industries. And, if we say, OK, well, there's something about the leadership of these companies that allowed them to do what their predecessors hadn't done. Then you have to account for how it is that we found this cohort of senior executives across every industry, from professional wrestling to cheerleading to running shoes, who all had this special zhuzh that allowed them to do what no one has ever been able to do since Rockefeller. And if you don't believe that hypothesis, which I think is a stretch to believe, you're left looking to things that happen in the environment.

Lauren: Outside forces.

Cory: Yeah, exogenous forces. And the big one is we used to enforce laws that prevented monopolization.

Lauren: Before we get into an even more specific discussion about this topic, what is wrong with the internet right now? If you could just summarize it—the past 20 years or so.

Cory: Well, you know, Tom Eastman says, I'm old enough to remember a time when the internet wasn't five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four. And I think we all have this sense that, like, the internet kind of sucks, right? The content moderation is terrible, everybody hates it, there's nowhere else you can go because everyone is on the same platform, so if the moderation doesn't suit you, you gotta just gut it out. We're getting spied on. Nothing works. Everything good that we have, they keep shipping updates for that we're not allowed to stop. That causes us to pay for features that we thought we'd already bought. We are just at the pointy end of the most extractive, surveillant, creepy, careless system of electronic connection that we could have imagined.

Lauren: I don't necessarily agree that everyone hates the internet right now, but the sense that I'm getting, and maybe I'm personalizing this a little bit, is that everyone hates feeling so addicted to it. That there are these forces that are actually keeping us in a place we don't necessarily want to be for as long as we are there.

Cory: Well, look, nobody worries about being addicted to coffee, right? People are just like, oh yeah, I get coffee, it tastes good.

Lauren: Speak for yourself. [Laughter]

Cory: Oh, well, fair. OK, but there isn't, like, a widespread sense. It's not like fentanyl, right? There aren't a lot of people going, oh, I drink coffee every day, but I wish I couldn't. You know, if you have a reliable supply of high-quality product priced competitively that is good to drink, then you don't worry about it. I think the reason we feel addicted to the internet is because we don't enjoy it, but we still have to use it. And I think that this is a mistake that some people make—is they think that Big Tech made mind-control rays. And I think that instead, Big Tech just took all the people you love and put them on the other side of a reg wall that you have to go through and create an account for in order to talk to them. And so it's your friends and your job and your education and your prospects of finding a romantic partner that are on the other side of Big Tech. And the reason it feels like we're addicted to it is because opting out of all of that stuff is a lot to ask. And so we keep using services we don't like.

Lauren: And this leads to your greater argument about interoperability, uh, which is really the crux of the book, right? I mean, yes, it's about monopolies, but it's about interoperability. So first, I think it would be helpful to explain to folks, a lot of folks listening to a WIRED podcast are going to know this, some are not: What is the network effect? What is a switching cost? How do you define interoperability?

Cory: Yep. One of the underlying premises of this book is that you can't solve the tech problem without having one foot in policy and one foot in technology. You have to understand both of them in order to make them work. From the econ world, we have network effects. Network effects describe services that get more valuable the more people use them. So you can think of Amazon becoming more valuable the more buyers there are because that attracts more sellers, which then attracts more buyers. Or Facebook gets more valuable the more users there are. You join Facebook to talk with the people who are there. Other people join Facebook to talk to you. Apple gets more valuable every time someone makes an app. And then every time someone makes an app, that's a reason to buy a phone. And then every time someone buys a phone, that's a reason to make an app.

Lauren: And every time someone shames you for having a green bubble.

Cory: That's right. Yes, indeed. Right? So that's network effects, and network effects make tech get big fast. But switching costs are the corollary of them or the inverse of them, which is that the switching cost is everything you have to give up to leave a platform. And so say you've got, as I do, an 11-year-old Prius that isn't starting reliably, right? But you bought a roof rack for it. You've got, like, seat covers for it. You've got a stereo you installed in it. All that stuff won't carry over if I go and buy another car, right? And so that's stuff I have to give up. If you're on Facebook and your family is there and your kids’ Little League games are playing there, and your customers are there...Your photos are there. All of that stuff. Then if you leave Facebook, even if you can extract the data, which Facebook sometimes will let you do in a kind of difficult-to-parse out way, you lose the connections. You lose the people, right? And that's a very high cost to pay....

Lauren: I’m wondering if there's a specific moment or an entity or an app that you look at and you say, that was the moment. That was the moment the walled garden was starting to be built and things were no longer going to be interoperable after this.

Cory: Yeah, it was a gradual process that maybe we can locate like patient zero here with Yahoo, which was a company that took a bunch of money from SoftBank and then used its access to the capital markets to buy and destroy every promising startup in Web 2.0, and that model of acquisition-based growth where firms really just grew so fast. I mean, Apple now buys 90 companies a year.

Lauren: And they're acqui-hiring, too. They're basically buying the talent, they're buying some IP, but the company is no longer really meant to exist.

Cory: That's right. But they're not just acqui-hiring, because look at Google, right? One good search engine. A string of internal failures, right? Whether we're talking about like an RSS reader or like 11 different social media products or, you know, whatever. And then a video platform. All of those failed. They just bought video, mobile, ad tech, server management, document sharing, collaboration, maps, satellite. All of that stuff came from other people. Right? They call themselves Willy Wonka's Idea Factory. They're just rich Uncle Pennybags. They buy other people's companies and take credit for their innovation, when really all they're doing is like operationalizing them, which is great. You know, it's not the same thing as making stuff. They're, they're not a making-things company. They're a buying-things company. And so Yahoo really kicks this off, right? This acquisition-driven growth. And the thing about acquisition-driven growth is it reduces the number of players in the industry. And as it reduces the number of players in the industry, they all start to realize that they're on each other's side more than they're on their user side. And that concentration allows this consensus to emerge that when these tech companies did interoperability, adversarial interoperability, to progress, to grow, to establish a marketplace, that they were doing something legitimate. But that when other people do it to them, that's theft. And they start to sing with one voice.

Lauren: It's so interesting to me that I'm asking you what stopped interoperability, and I was expecting you to say some platform. I mean, you did Yahoo or some app or some policy, but like what you're describing is actually human resources.

Cory: Well, look, firms are disciplined by two forces, right? Competition and regulation. And if there is no competition, then you also don't get regulation. Because once there's no competition, they all get together and they collude to capture the regulators. And so you need, like—one is the necessary but insufficient precondition for the other. We need competition, and we need regulation, and ideally like the most important regulation is ensuring competition. So this is why when we step back from enforcing antitrust law 40 years ago, we set in motion this moment of total regulatory capture where until a few really good enforcers in the Biden administration stepped in, for the most part. It's been foxes guarding henhouses for decades.

Lauren: What I'm hearing you say is that the onus should not really be on the internet consumer to figure all of this out themselves.

Cory: Sure.

Lauren: There needs to be seat belts.

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