I'm coming to COLORADO! Catch me in DENVER on Jan 22 at The Tattered Cover<, and in COLORADO SPRINGS from Jan 23–25 where I'm the Guest of Honor at COSine. Then I'll be in OTTAWA on Jan 28 at Perfect Books and in TORONTO with Tim Wu on Jan 30.
Samantha: This town has a weird smell that you're all probably used to…but I'm not.
Mrs Krabappel: It'll take you about six weeks, dear.
-The Simpsons, "Bart's Friend Falls in Love," S3E23, May 7, 1992
We are living through weird times, and they've persisted for so long that you probably don't even notice it. But these times are not normal.
Now, I realize that this covers a lot of ground, and without detracting from all the other ways in which the world is weird and bad, I want to focus on one specific and pervasive and awful way in which this world is not normal, in part because this abnormality has a defined cause, a precise start date, and an obvious, actionable remedy.
6 years, 5 months and 22 days after Fox aired "Bart's Friend Falls in Love," Bill Clinton signed a new bill into law: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (DMCA).
Under Section 1201 of the DMCA, it's a felony to modify your own property in ways that the manufacturer disapproves of, even if your modifications accomplish some totally innocuous, legal, and socially beneficial goal. Not a little felony, either: DMCA 1201 provides for a five year sentence and a $500,000 fine for a first offense.
Back when the DMCA was being debated, its proponents insisted that their critics were overreacting. They pointed to the legal barriers to invoking DMCA 1201, and insisted that these new restrictions would only apply to a few marginal products in narrow ways that the average person would never even notice.
But that was obvious nonsense, obvious even in 1998, and far more obvious today, more than a quarter-century on. In order for a manufacturer to criminalize modifications to your own property, they have to satisfy two criteria: first, they must sell you a device with a computer in it; and second, they must design that computer with an "access control" that you have to work around in order to make a modification.
For example, say your toaster requires that you scan your bread before it will toast it, to make sure that you're only using a special, expensive kind of bread that kicks back a royalty to the manufacturer. If the embedded computer that does the scanning ships from the factory with a program that is supposed to prevent you from turning off the scanning step, then it is a felony to modify your toaster to work with "unauthorized bread":
If this sounds outlandish, then a) You definitely didn't walk the floor at CES last week, where there were a zillion "cooking robots" that required proprietary feedstock; and b) You haven't really thought hard about your iPhone (which will not allow you to install software of your choosing):
But back in 1998, computers – even the kind of low-powered computers that you'd embed in an appliance – were expensive and relatively rare. No longer! Today, manufacturers source powerful "System on a Chip" (SoC) processors at prices ranging from $0.25 to $8. These are full-fledged computers, easily capable of running an "access control" that satisfies DMCA 1201.
Likewise, in 1998, "access controls" (also called "DRM," "technical protection measures," etc) were a rarity in the field. That was because computer scientists broadly viewed these measures as useless. A determined adversary could always find a way around an access control, and they could package up that break as a software tool and costlessly, instantaneously distribute it over the internet to everyone in the world who wanted to do something that an access control impeded. Access controls were a stupid waste of engineering resources and a source of needless complexity and brittleness:
But – as critics pointed out in 1998 – chips were obviously going to get much cheaper, and if the US Congress made it a felony to bypass an access control, then every kind of manufacturer would be tempted to add some cheap SoCs to their products so they could add access controls and thereby felonize any uses of their products that cut into their profits. Basically, the DMCA offered manufacturers a bargain: add a dollar or two to the bill of materials for your product, and in return, the US government will imprison any competitors who offer your customers a "complementary good" that improves on it.
It's even worse than this: another thing that was obvious in 1998 was that once a manufacturer added a chip to a device, they would probably also figure out a way to connect it to the internet. Once that device is connected to the internet, the manufacturer can push software updates to it at will, which will be installed without user intervention. What's more, by using an access control in connection with that over-the-air update mechanism, the manufacturer can make it a felony to block its updates.
Which means that a manufacturer can sell you a device and then mandatorily update it at a later date to take away its functionality, and then sell that functionality back to you as a "subscription":
Here's what this all means: any manufacturer who devotes a small amount of engineering work and incurs a small hardware expense can extinguish private property rights altogether.
What do I mean by private property? Well, we can look to Blackstone's 1753 treatise:
The right of property; or that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe.
You can't own your iPhone. If you take your iPhone to Apple and they tell you that it is beyond repair, you have to throw it away. If the repair your phone needs involves "parts pairing" (where a new part won't be recognized until an Apple technician "initializes" it through a DMCA-protected access control), then it's a felony to get that phone fixed somewhere else. If Apple tells you your phone is no longer supported because they've updated their OS, then it's a felony to wipe the phone and put a different OS on it (because installing a new OS involves bypassing an "access control" in the phone's bootloader). If Apple tells you that you can't have a piece of software – like ICE Block, an app that warns you if there are nearby ICE killers who might shoot you in the head through your windshield, which Apple has barred from its App Store on the grounds that ICE is a "protected class" – then you can't install it, because installing software that isn't delivered via the App Store involves bypassing an "access control" that checks software to ensure that it's authorized (just like the toaster with its unauthorized bread).
It's not just iPhones: versions of this play out in your medical implants (hearing aid, insulin pump, etc); appliances (stoves, fridges, washing machines); cars and ebikes; set-top boxes and game consoles; ebooks and streaming videos; small appliances (toothbrushes, TVs, speakers), and more.
Increasingly, things that you actually own are the exception, not the rule.
And this is not normal. The end of ownership represents an overturn of a foundation of modern civilization. The fact that the only "people" who can truly own something are the transhuman, immortal colony organisms we call "Limited Liability Corporations" is an absolutely surreal reversal of the normal order of things.
It's a reversal with deep implications: for one thing, it means that you can't protect yourself from raids on your private data or ready cash by adding privacy blockers to your device, which would make it impossible for airlines or ecommerce sites to guess about how rich/desperate you are before quoting you a "personalized price":
It also means you can't stop your device from leaking information about your movements, or even your conversations – Microsoft has announced that it will gather all of your private communications and ship them to its servers for use by "agentic AI":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ANECpNdt-4
Microsoft has also confirmed that it provides US authorities with warrantless, secret access to your data:
This is deeply abnormal. Sure, greedy corporate control freaks weren't invented in the 21st century, but the laws that let those sociopaths put you in prison for failing to arrange your affairs to their benefit – and your own detriment – are.
But because computers got faster and cheaper over decades, the end of ownership has had an incremental rollout, and we've barely noticed that it's happened. Sure, we get irritated when our garage-door opener suddenly requires us to look at seven ads every time we use the app that makes it open or close:
But societally, we haven't connected that incident to this wider phenomenon. It stinks here, but we're all used to it.
It's not normal to buy a book and then not be able to lend it, sell it, or give it away. Lending, selling and giving away books is older than copyright. It's older than publishing. It's older than printing. It's older than paper. It is fucking weird (and also terrible) (obviously) that there's a new kind of very popular book that you can go to prison for lending, selling or giving away.
We're just a few cycles away from a pair of shoes that can figure out which shoelaces you're using, or a dishwasher that can block you from using third-party dishes:
It's not normal, and it has profound implications for our security, our privacy, and our society. It makes us easy pickings for corporate vampires who drain our wallets through the gadgets and tools we rely on. It makes us easy pickings for fascists and authoritarians who ally themselves with corporate vampires by promising them tax breaks in exchange for collusion in the destruction of a free society.
I know that these problems are more important than whether or not we think this is normal. But still. It. Is. Just. Not. Normal.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
if you live outside of canada this will affect probably nothing as a quick saying
you know like. with all the fuckin panic over the canadian Bill C-11. reminder that you can literally just go onto the canadian government website and just read the damn bill. the SECOND. the SECOND THING it says. it doesnt apply to social media.
it will keep freedom of expression intact. ooh. look your free speech is still here!!! it's not going anywhere
(NOTE canada does not and never had "Free speech", only "Freedom of Expression" which i mean in practice is the same thing but legally free expression is actually MORE BROAD)
This act does not exersise control over programs uploaded by a user of the service who is not a provider of the service, or an affiliate. like affiliate is defined to be "in control" of the provider so i think like in the idea of youtube it's not like "partner program" but more like "other youtube employees"
^idk what the fuck this is saying im not up in legal speech shit, full disclosure
what does this bill actually do though.
IT BOOSTS DISABLED, BIPOC AND QUEER VOICES!!!! IT PROVIDES MORE OPPORTUNITIES FOR THEM!!!
Under this bill on streaming services such as netflix you will see more canadian made content, similar to how it already is on TV and on radio, and it will put an emphasis on marginalized communities as well
do you see now why people are lying about this bill in order to make it not pass
HEY SEATTLE! I'm appearing at the Cascade PBS Ideas Festival NEXT SATURDAY (May 31) with the folks from NPR's On The Media!
"Kick 'Em In the Dongle" is the fourth and final episode of "Understood: Who Broke the Internet?", a podcast series I hosted and co-wrote for the CBC. It's quite a finale!
The thesis of the series is the same as the thesis of enshittification: that the internet turned into a pile of shit because named people, in living memory, made policies that were broadly "enshittogenic" because they insulated businesses that tormented their end users and business customers from any consequences for their cheating:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydVmzg_SJLw
Moreover, these people were warned at the time about the certain consequences of their policies, and they ignored and dismissed both expert feedback and public opinion. These people never faced consequences or any accountability for their actions, as tech criticism focused (understandably and deservedly) on the businesses that took advantage of the enshittogenic policies and enshittified, without any understanding that these firms were turning into piles of shit because of policies that reward them for doing so.
Episode one of the series tells the story an enshittification poster-child: Google. We look at the paper-trail that emerged from the Department of Justice's successful monopoly prosecution of Google, and what it reveals about the sorry state of internet search today:
That paper-trail documents an intense power-struggle within Google: in 2019, Google's ad revenue czar went to war against Google's search boss, demanding that search be deliberately worsened. This may sound paradoxical (or even paranoid), but for Google, making search worse made a perverse kind of sense. The company's search revenue growth had stalled, for the obvious reason that Google had a 90% market share in search, which meant that basically everyone was a Google search user, leaving the company with no new potential customers to sign up.
In 2019, Prabhakar Ragahavan – the ex-McKinsey, ex-Yahoo MBA who ran ad revenue for Google – came up with an ingenious solution: just make search worse. If you have to run multiple searches to find what you're looking for, that creates multiple chances to show you an ad:
Ragahavan's nemesis was Ben Gomes, an OG googler who'd overseen the creation of the company's server infrastructure and had been crowned the head of search. Gomes hated Ragahavan's idea, and in the memos, we get a blow-by-blow account of the epic fight inside Google between the enshittifiers and the anti-enshittification resistance, who are ultimately trounced, which is how we get today's sloppified, ad-poisoned, spam-centric Google search.
Ragahavan and his clique are obviously greedy monsters, but that's not the whole story. The real question is, how did we get to the point where Google, a company justly famed for its emphasis on search quality, abandoned its commitment to excellence? That's the question we explore in the next two episodes.
Episode two is "Ctrl-ctrl-ctrl," and it reveals the original sin of tech, the origin of the worst tech policies in the world:
This is the tale of another epic struggle inside another giant institution, only this struggle takes place in government, not Google. We travel back to the Clinton years, when Vice President Al Gore was put in charge of demilitarizing the internet and transforming it into a service that welcomed the public, as well as private firms. Gore's rival in this project was Clinton's copyright czar, the white shoe entertainment lawyer Bruce Lehman.
Lehman wanted Gore to install an "anti-circumvention" policy on the new internet: under Lehman's proposal, copyright law would be rewritten to ban modifying ("circumventing") digital products, services and devices, whether or not those modifications led to anyone's copyrights being violated. Anti-circumvention would let dominant companies conscript the government to punish upstart rivals and tinkerers who dared to improve their products, say, by blocking commercial surveillance, or by turning off checks that blocked generic parts and consumables or independent repair, or by making existing products more accessible to people with disabilities.
Experts like Pam Samuelson hated this proposal and made a huge stink about it. This led to Gore categorically rejecting Lehman's ideas, so Lehman (in his own words) did "an end-run around Congress" and got the UN's World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) to turn "anti-circumvention" into an international treaty obligation. Then he went back to Congress and got them to pass an anti-circumvention law, Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), that went even further than the WIPO treaties demanded.
Almost instantly, the direst predictions of Lehman's opponents came true. A Russian computer scientist named Dmitry Skylarov was arrested by the FBI for giving a technical conference presentation about the weaknesses in Adobe's ebook software, in which he explained how these allowed Adobe customers to do legal things, like transferring their ebooks to a new computer (Adobe's software blocked this).
The chilling effect of DMCA 1201 was deep and far-reaching. It created (in the words of Jay Freeman), a new "felony contempt of business model" system, in which a business could threaten to imprison anyone who tried to disenshittify their products, for example, by making it possible for hospitals to maintain their ventilators without paying a med-tech giant for overpriced, slow service:
Anticircumvention law lets John Deere stop farmers from fixing their own tractors. It stops independent mechanics from fixing your car. It stops you from using cheap third-party inkjet cartridges. It's why Patreon performers lose 30 cents on every in-app subscription dollar, because only Apple can provide iPhone apps, and Apple uses that control to extract a 30% fee on in-app payments. It's why you can't stop apps from spying on you – and why Apple (which does block other companies apps from spying on you) can track every click, message and movement you make in order to target ads to you:
Anticircumvention let the garage-door opener company that bought every one of its rivals block integration with standard home automation tools, forcing you to use an app that makes you look at ads before you can open your garage-door:
Anticircumvention is why there's no such thing as a Tivo for streaming services, letting you record the programs you enjoy so you can watch them later (say, when Prime charges moves Christmas movies into the paid tier between October and January). It's why you can't get a scraper that lets you leave Facebook or Twitter for Mastodon or Bluesky, and continue to interact with your friends who are stuck on zuckermuskian legacy media:
https://www.eff.org/interoperablefacebook
It's why you can't get an alternative Instagram client that blocks spying, ads and "suggestions," just showing you the latest updates from the people you follow:
Of course, companies that abuse this government-granted weapon might still face consequences, if their behavior was so obnoxious that it drove us into the arms of their competitors. But for that to happen, we'd need to have meaningful competition, which brings me to episode three, "In God We Antitrust":
Episode three goes even farther back in time, to the early 1980s, when a racist pig and Nixon co-conspirator named Robert Bork led a successful counterrevolution that destroyed antitrust enforcement in the US, and then around the world. It's thanks to Bork – and his idea that monopolies are "efficient" – that we got what Tom Eastman calls an internet of "five giant websites filled with screenshots of the other four." It's why every sector in our economy is controlled by a cartel, a duopoly or a monopoly:
If Bruce Lehman paved the way for Prabhakar Ragahavan's enshittification of Google, then Robert Bork laid the road that Bruce Lehman traveled to Geneva and the WIPO Internet Treaties. Industry consolidation always leads to regulatory capture, because a handful of gigantic companies can easily collude to present a disciplined message to its regulators and the fact that they don't compete with one another lets them steal so much from us that they have huge warchests they can use to get their policies enacted.
40 years of Bork's pro-monopoly policies has produced…monopolies. The reason a handful of powerful executives have more power than any of the world's governments – the reason the public is thwarted on everything from healthcare to climate, minimum wages to privacy – is that Robert Bork overturned generations of antitrust practice and created pro-oligarch policies that created a modern oligarchy.
The 2020s have seen an impressive and heartening global surge in antitrust activism, motivated by an urge to blunt or even shatter corporate power, bypassing apologetics about "efficiency" that can only be understood through mastering an esoteric mathematics whose own practitioners cheerfully describe as disconnected from any observable reality:
This global, grassroots movement has provoked a massive backlash from our technofeudal overlords, culminating in the 2024 re-election of Donald Trump, which is where we open our the fourth and final episode of "Understood: Who Broke the Internet?" Trump's inauguration stage featured some unusual attendees: the CEOs of the largest tech companies in America, who had personally donated a million bucks each to Trump's inauguration fund. These are some of the richest men in human history, and they were all in on Trump.
Trump lost no time in inflicting misery on the American people, illegally firing the agency personnel most closely associated with the antitrust movement and canceling many of their key policies. But for the rest of the world, the most prominent effect of Trumpism was the imposition of tariffs on every country in the world, including islands without any human inhabitants:
The world is changing before our eyes, and it needn't change for the worse. As Trump transforms America into a hermit kingdom, countries around the world have a chance to consider what their policies might be like if they weren't organized around US priorities. That includes Canada.
Canada could retaliate against Trump's tariffs by legalizing and incubating Canadian companies that find ways to improve America's enshittified products, creating mods, plugins, alternative software and other tools that Canadians – and the world – would snap up. Every customer for these disenshittifying tools would constitute a targeted strike against technofeudalism, against Trumpism, against the companies whose CEOs sat behind Trump on the dais.
More: the Canadian companies that raided America's high-tech giants could use the sky-high rents they extracted through anti-circumvention laws as a kind of disposable rocket stage to boost a new Canadian tech sector into a stable orbit, giving Canada a global tech standing comparable to the power and wealth Finland enjoyed during the Nokia years.
That's something Canada could do, only it can't, because of a 13-year old anti-circumvention law that was crammed onto Canada's statute-books by two ministers in Stephen Harper's government, James Moore and Tony Clement:
Harper charged Moore and Clement with getting an anticircumvention law because the US Trade Representative had made it clear that failing to do so would result in the US imposing tariffs on Canada. But Canadians hated the idea of this law. In 2004, a Liberal MP named Sam Bulte lost her Toronto seat after she attempted to ram an anticirumvention law through Parliament. The Tories tried to pass another anticircuvmention law in 2007, and faced so much pushback that the bill died.
Moore and Clement's tactic for defusing this opposition was to have a public consultation on anticircumvention law, to make it seem like the government was listening to the people. Boy, did that idea backfire: 6,138 Canadians wrote in to oppose the proposal. 54 supported it:
But Moore and Clement pressed on. Moore explained to an International Chamber of Commerce meeting in Toronto that he would be discarding nearly every consultation response he'd received, on the grounds that people who disagreed with him were a "babyish…radical extremists":
The most remarkable thing about Canada's 2012 adoption of anticircumvention law is that it came 14 years after the US passed the DMCA. We already had a thick record of the damage that law had done. We have all the evidence we needed to see how this US law had hurt everyday Americans. But Moore and Clement still tabled their bill, with language that was actually worse than the American law, dispensing with the largely ineffectual safeguards Congress had put in the 1998 DMCA.
More than a decade on, Canada's "digital locks" law has stalled the country's tech sector and left Canadians defenseless against American enshittification. Even the country's pioneering Right to Repair and interoperability laws, passed last year, can't undo this damage, because they only give Canadians the right to fix or improve things if they don't have to break a digital lock to do so, and everything has a digital lock these days, from ebikes to car parts.
Moore actually gave us a comment for the show, once again dismissing his critics by claiming there was no evidence that his law had created a chilling effect that stopped Canadians from making products and services that unrigged the game American big business forced us all to play. It's nice to see that Moore hasn't changed since his days of calling his detractors "babyish radical extremists." The very nature of "chilling effects" is that they can only be observed by looking at what didn't happen: Moore seems to interpret the fact that Canadians haven't shipped a privacy tool for phones, or an alternative app store for Xboxes, or a service that jailbreaks your car so any mechanic can fix it as evidence that Canadians wouldn't want these things (or that Canadian technologists are too stupid to deliver them).
Repealing Canada's anticircumvention laws would mark a turning point in tech regulation. For decades now, countries that are upset with tech companies' greed and cruelty have created policies that demand that Big Tech wield its extraordinary power more wisely. Think of content moderation laws, or laws that try to get tech companies to share some of their monopoly ripoff money with news outlets. These laws don't seek to take away power from tech giants – they just try to turn it to socially beneficial uses. This is a huge mistake. For a tech company to control its users' behavior, it must have power of those users, must observe every action they take and retain the ability to stop them. For a tech company to share its billions with news outlets, it must continue to make billions by ripping us all off:
The only tech regulation that will truly make us all better off is a regulation that shatters tech power – not one that seeks to harness it. That's what getting rid of anticircumvention would do: it would give us – internet users – the right to defend ourselves against exploitation, manipulation and abuse. It would let us decide how the devices, products and services we use work. It wouldn't just make it illegal for tech giants to use our technology to attack us – it would make it impossible for them to do so, because our technology would take orders from us, not them.
Repealing anticircumvention laws in Canada and around the world is the best path forward. Ironically, Donald Trump's "Liberation Day" has created the conditions for every country to liberate itself from America's grotesque tech policies – and to export our tools of technological liberation to our American friends, who were the first victims of US Big Tech.
I'm so pleased with how this show worked out. My collaborators – especially showrunner Acey Rowe and producer Matt Meuse – were stone brilliant as was our sound designer, Julian Uzielli. The whole team has done smashing work getting the word out about the show and making it sound smart and accessible. I couldn't have asked for a better group of colleagues to produce this show, and I couldn't be prouder of how it sounds.
You can subscribe to "Understood: Who Broke the Internet?" on any podcast app, even the enshittified ones, and you can get the RSS here:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
