How to free users from Big Tech’s walled gardens
The two benefits of competition are that it breaks the [megacorp] cash reserves that are used to enact public policy and it introduces the collective action problem that makes the remaining reserves harder to spend.
How does that virtuous cycle then extend from tech into other sectors?
Doctorow: Think about what happened with the breakup of Standard Oil in the first part of the 20th century. Standard Oil was not the only trust. There were trusts for everything: whiskey, railroads, iron, aluminum, cars. Standard Oil’s dominance made people so hopeless about whether or not they could have an accountable government that the toppling of Standard Oil opened up a floodgate of political will that saw all of those other trusts shattered.
I want to go after tech because it has this characteristic interoperability that makes it a soft target. We start with tech, and that gives us the momentum, the credibility, and the political will to go after everybody else.
People are choosing to sit in apple’s garden though. They like the seamlessness of their products even if they are being gouged paying for them. Apple enforces their walls with things like, for instance, not letting android phones communicate using their messaging app so kids using android phones are the odd man out in their groups and are pressured to switch to iphones.
Standards are great as long as development isn’t blocked at the same time. Backwards compatibility becomes an anchor that drags behind you after a while. Industries will generally agree on a standard (like shipping containers) when they realize that a lack of one is holding their industry back as a whole and they know that everyone will use it (no cheating!).
