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mostlysignssomeportents · 6 days ago

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Who broke the internet?

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in PITTSBURGH on May 15 at WHITE WHALE BOOKS, and in PDX on Jun 20 at BARNES AND NOBLE with BUNNIE HUANG. More tour dates (London, Manchester) here.

"Who Broke the Internet?" is a new podcast from CBC Understood that I host and co-wrote – it's a four-part series that explains how the enshitternet came about, and, more importantly, what we can do about it. Episode one is out this week:

https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/1353-the-naked-emperor/episode/16144078-dont-be-evil

The thesis of the series – and indeed, of my life's work – is that the internet didn't turn to shit because of the "great forces of history," or "network effects," or "returns to scale." Rather, the Great Enshittening is the result of specific policy choices, made in living memory, by named individuals, who were warned at the time that this would happen, and they did it anyway. These wreckers are the largely forgotten authors of our misery, and they mingle with impunity in polite society, never fearing that someone might be sizing them up for a pitchfork.

"Who Broke the Internet?" aims to change that. But the series isn't just about holding these named people accountable for their enshittificatory deeds: it's about understanding the policies that created the enshittocene, so that we can dismantle them and build a new, good internet that is fit for purpose, namely, helping us overcome and survive environmental collapse, oligarchic control, fascism and genocide.

The crux of enshittification theory is this: tech bosses made their products and services so much worse in order to extract more rents from end-users and business customers. The reason they did this is because they could. Over 20+ years, our policymakers created an environment of impunity for enshittifying companies, sitting idly by (or even helping out) as tech companies bought or destroyed their competitors; captured their regulators; neutered tech workers' power; and expanded IP laws to ensure that technology could only ever be used to attack us, but never to defend us.

These four forces – competition, regulation, labor power and interoperability – once acted as constraints, because they punished enshittifying gambits. Make your product worse and users, workers and suppliers would defect to a competitor; or a regulator would fine you or even bring criminal charges; or your irreplaceable workers would down tools and refuse to obey your orders; or another technologist would come up with an alternative client, an ad-blocker, a scraper, or compatible spare parts, plugins or mods that would permanently sever your relationship with whomever you were tormenting.

As these constraints fell away, the environment became enshittogenic: rather than punishing enshittification, it rewarded it. Individual enshittifiers within companies triumphed in their factional struggles with corporate rivals, like the Google revenue czar who vanquished the Search czar, deliberately worsening search results so we'd have to repeatedly search to get the answers we seek, creating more opportunities to show us ads:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

An enshittogenic environment meant that individuals within companies who embraced plans to worsen things to juice profits were promoted, displacing workers and managers who felt an ethical or professional obligation to make good and useful things. Top tech bosses – the C-suite – went from being surrounded by "adult supervision" who checked their worst impulses with dire warnings about competition, government punishments, or worker revolt to being encysted in a casing of enthusiastic enshittifiers who competed to see who could come up with the most outrageously enshittificatory gambits.

"Who Broke the Internet?" covers the collapse of all of these constraints, but its main focus is on IP law – specifically, anticircumvention law, which bans technologists from reverse-engineering and modifying the technologies we own and use (AKA "interoperability" or "adversarial interoperability").

Interoperability is at the center of the enshittification story because interop is an unavoidable characteristic of anything built out of computers. Computers are, above all else, flexible. Formally speaking, our computers are "Turing-complete universal von Neumann machines," which is to say that every one of our computers is capable of running every valid program.

That flexibility is why we call computers a "general purpose" technology. The same computer that helps your optometrist analyze your retina can also control your car's anti-lock braking system, and it can also play Doom.

Enshittification runs on that flexibility. It's that flexibility that allows a digital products or service to offer different prices, search rankings, recommendations, and costs to every user, every time they interact with it:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

It's that flexibility that lets tech companies send over-the-air "updates" to your property that takes away functionality you paid for and valued, and then sell it back to you as an "upgrade" or worse, a monthly subscription:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/26/hit-with-a-brick/#graceful-failure

But that flexibility cuts both ways. The fact that every computer can run every valid program means that every enshittificatory app and update, there's a disenshittificatory program you could install that would reverse the damage. For every program that tells your HP printer to reject third-party ink, forcing you to buy HP's own colored water at $10,000/gallon, there's another program that tells your HP printer to enthusiastically accept third-party ink that costs mere pennies:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

In other worse, show me a 10-foot enshittifying wall, and I'll show you an 11-foot disenshittifying ladder.

Interoperability has long been technology's most important disenshittifier. Interop harnesses the rapaciousness of tech bros and puts it in service to making things better. Someone who hacks Instagram to take out the ads and recommendations and just show you posts from people you follow need not be motivated by the desire to make your life better – they can be motivated by the desire to poach Instagram users and build a rival business, and still make life better for you:

https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/the-og-app-instagram-alternative-ad-free/

And if they succeed and then recapitulate the sins of Instagram's bosses, turning the screws on users with ads, suggestions and slop? That just invites more disenshittifying interoperators to do unto them as they did unto Zuck.

That's the way it used to work: the 10-foot piles of shit deployed by tech bosses conjured up 11-foot ladders. This is what disruption is, when it is at its best. There's nothing wrong with moving fast and breaking things – provided the things you're breaking belong to billionaire enshittifiers. Those things need to be broken.

Enter IP law. For the past 25+ years, IP law has been relentlessly expanded in ways that ensure that disruption is always for thee, never me. "IP" has come to mean, "Any law that lets a dominant company reach out and exert control over its critics, competitors and customers":

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

The most pernicious IP law is far and away "anticircumvention." Under anticircumvention, it is illegal to "break a digital lock" that controls access to a copyrighted work, including software (and digital locks are software, so any digital lock automatically gets this protection).

This is mind-bending, particularly because it's one of those things that's so unreasonable, so very, very stupid that it's easy to think you're misunderstanding it, because surely it can't be that stupid.

But oh, it is.

One of the best ways to grasp this point is to start with what you might do in a world without digital locks. Take your printer: if HP raises the price of ink, you might start to refill your cartridges or buy third-party cartridges. Obviously, this is not a copyright violation. Ink is not a copyrighted work. But once HP puts a digital lock on the printer that checks to see if you've done an end-run around the HP ink ripoff, then refilling your cartridge becomes illegal, because you have to break that digital lock to get your printer to use the ink you've chosen.

Or think about cars: taking your car to your mechanic does not violate anyone's copyright. If your car, you decide who fixes it. But all car makers use digital locks to prevent mechanics from reading out the diagnostic information they need to access to fix your car. If a mechanic wants to know why your check engine light has turned on, they have to buy a tool – spending 5-figure sums every year for every manufacturer – in order to decode that error. Now, it's your car, and error messages aren't copyrighted works, but bypassing the lock that prevents independent diagnosis is a crime, thanks to anticircumvention law.

Then there's app stores. You bought your console. You bought your phone. These devices are your property. If I want to sell you some software I've written so you can run it on your device, that's not a copyright violations. It is the literal opposite of a copyright violation: an author selling their copyrighted works to a customer who gets to enjoy those works using their own property. But the digital lock on your iPhone, Xbox, Playstation and Switch all prevent your device from running software unless it is delivered by the manufacturer's app store, which takes 30 cents out of every dollar you spend. Installing software without going through the manufacturer's app store requires that you break the device's digital lock, and that's a crime, which means that buying a copyrighted work from its author becomes a copyright violation!

This is what Jay Freeman calls "felony contempt of business model." We created laws – again, in living memory, thanks to known individuals – that had the foreseeable, explicit intent of making it illegal to disenshittify the products and services you rely on. We created this enshittogenic environment, and we got the enshittocene.

That's where "Who Broke the Internet?" comes in. We tell the story of Bruce Lehman, who was Bill Clinton's IP czar. Anticircumvention was really Lehman's brainchild, and he had a plan to make it the law of the land. When Al Gore was overseeing the demilitarization of the internet (the "Information Superhighway" proceedings), Lehman pitched this idea to him as the new rules of the road for the internet. To Gore's eternal credit, he flatly rejected Lehman's proposal as the batshit nonsense it plainly was.

So Lehman scuttled to Switzerland, where a UN agency, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) was crafting a pair of new treaties to create a global system of internet regulation. Lehman lobbied the national delegations to WIPO to put anticircumvention in their treaties, and he succeeded – partially. WIPO is a very bad agency, since the majority of delegations that are sent to Geneva by the world's nations come from poor countries in the global south, and they're made up of experts in things like water, agriculture and child health. The vast majority of national reps at WIPO are not experts in IP, and they are often easy prey for fast-talking lobbyists from US-based media, pharma and tech companies, as well as the US government reps who carry their water.

But even at WIPO, Lehman's proposal was viewed as far too extreme. In the end, the anticircumvention rules embedded in the WIPO treaties are much more reasonable than Lehman's demands. Under the WIPO treaty, signatories must pass laws that make copyright infringement extra illegal if you have to break a digital lock on the way. But if you break a lock and you don't infringe copyright (say, because you refilled a printer cartridge, took your car to an independent mechanic, or got some software without using an app store), then you're fine.

Lehman's next move was to convince Congress that they needed to pass a version of the anticircumvention rule that went far beyond the obligations in the WIPO treaties. In this, he was joined by powerful, deep-pocketed lobbyists from Big Content, and later, Big Tech. They successfully pressured Congress into passing Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 1998 – a law that protects digital locks, at the expense of copyright and the creative workers whom copyright is said to serve.

Lehman has repeatedly, publicly described this maneuver as "doing an end-run around Congress." Once America adopted this extreme anticircumvention rule, the US Trade Representative made it America's top priority to ram identical laws through the legislatures of all of America's trading partners, under the explicit or tacit threat of tariffs on any country that refused (the information minister of a Central American country once told me that the USTR threatened them, saying that if they didn't accept anticircumvention as a clause in the Central American Free Trade Agreement – CAFTA – they would lose their ability to export soybeans to America).

Canada took more than a decade to enact its own version of the anticircumvention rule, which was the source of public outrage by the USTR and US industry lobbyists. These neocolonialists found plenty of Parliamentary sellouts willing to introduce laws on their behalf, but every time this happened, the Canadian people reacted with a kind of mass outrage that had never been seen in response to highly technical proposals for internet regulation. For example, the Liberal MP Sam Bulte was challenged on her support of the rule by her Parkdale constituents at a public meeting, and had a screeching meltdown, screaming that she would not be "bullied by user-rights zealots and EFF members." Voters put "User-Rights Zealot" signs on their lawns and voted her out of office.

Anticircumvention remained a priority for the US, and they found new MPs to do their dirty work. Stephen Harper's Conservatives made multiple tries at this. After Jim Prentice utterly failed to get the rule through Parliament, the brief was picked up by Heritage Minister James Moore (who liked to call himself "the iPad Minister") and now-disgraced Industry minister Tony Clement. Clement and Moore tried to diffuse the opposition to the proposal by conducting a public consultation on it.

This backfired horribly. Over 6,000 Canadians wrote into the consultation with individual, detailed, personal critiques of anticircumvention, explaining how the rule would hurt them at work and at home. Only 53 submissions supported the rule. Moore threw away these 6,130 negative responses, justifying it by publicly calling them the "babyish" views of "radical extremists":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/15/radical-extremists/#sex-pest

Named individuals created policies in living memory. They were warned about the foreseeable outcomes of those proposals. They passed them anyway – and then no one held them accountable.

Until now.

The point of remembering where these policies came from isn't (merely) to ensure that these people are forever remembered as the monsters they showed themselves to be. Rather, it is to recover the true history of enshittification, the choices we made that led to enshittification, so that we can reverse those policies, disenshittify our tech, and give rise to a new, good internet that's fit for the purpose of being the global digital nervous system for a species facing a polycrisis of climate catastrophe, oligarchy, fascism and genocide.

There's never been a more urgent moment to reconsider those enshittificatory policies – and there's never been a more auspicious moment, either. After all, Canada's anticircumvention law exists because it was supposed to guarantee tariff-free access to American markets. That promise has been shattered, permanently. It's time to get rid of that law, and make it legal for Canadian technologists to give the Canadian public the tools they need to escape from America's Big Tech bullies, who pick our pockets with junk-fees and lock-in, and who attack our social, legal and civil lives with social media walled gardens:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/15/beauty-eh/#its-the-only-war-the-yankees-lost-except-for-vietnam-and-also-the-alamo-and-the-bay-of-ham

"Understood: Who Broke the Internet" is streaming now. We've got three more episodes to go – part two drops on Monday (and it's a banger). You can subscribe to it wherever you get your podcasts, and here's the RSS feed:

https://www.cbc.ca/podcasting/includes/nakedemperor.xml

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:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/08/who-broke-the-internet/#bruce-lehman

#pluralistic #cbc #podcasts #enshittification #audio #mp3s #canada #cancon #bruce lehman #anticircumvention #dmca 1201 #understood

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