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The Post-American Internet

• pu_pe 10mo ago
  > If the EU repeals Article 6 of the Copyright Directive, some smart geeks in Finland could reverse-engineer Apple's bootloaders and make a hardware dongle that jailbreaks phones so that they can use alternative app stores Apple could easily block this, and in the situation described here of a complete rupture with the US, they would no longer operate and sell phones in the EU. If Google decided to do the same, that essentially leaves Europeans without smartphones. Microsoft could "brick" the rest of the EU's digital infrastructure overnight if they so wished, or were compelled to do so. This makes the transition described in the article much more difficult. Although likely more urgent, from an European perspective.
  • sschueller 10mo ago
    ASML could also "brick" their machines running in the US.
    • tonyhart7 10mo ago
      no
      • dxdm 10mo ago
        Explain?
        • ggm 10mo ago
          It's a joint venture with US companies. We talk about it as purely European, but it's not.
          • ben_w 10mo ago
            Given this thread, imagine a complete rupture of relations between US and EU such that US orders US companies to stop supplying hardware or services to EU. In this scenario, I don't think it is correct to consider normal business relations, rather "is it *materially* possible?"
            • lostlogin 10mo ago
              > Given this thread, imagine a complete rupture of relations between US and EU A Greenland invasion might lead to that. It’s such ridiculous thing to suggest as a trigger, but here we are.
              • amarcheschi 10mo ago
                >It’s such ridiculous thing to suggest as a trigger Not anymore, unfortunately
                • ben_w 10mo ago
                  In fairness, we all ridiculing Trump for choosing this hill to die on. (Along with several other ridiculous hills simultaneously, stretching the metaphor to breaking point).
        • tonyhart7 10mo ago
          there is a reason why US can force ASML to stop selling its machine to China learn EUV technology history first, it originated from US department of energy research program, because of cost Gov decided to halt it but multiple private company take over the development but US Gov still hold a patent/license from that technology
          • sschueller 10mo ago
            > patent/license Which are enforced by international agreements. At some point those don't matter anymore either and is also the point of the article. Also Zeiss a Germany company is the only one that can make the optics required.
            • deleted 10mo ago
              [deleted]
            • tonyhart7 10mo ago
              "Which are enforced by international agreements. At some point those don't matter anymore either" and whose in charge of international agreements between US and Netherlands ??? I think you mix up between who in power here also stop acting like ASML netherland produce the EUV machine, its not lol ASML US branch actually produce more parts, so if EU want to cut off the US then they also self sabotage themselves since 50%+ machine for Giant EUV is happening at US soil
          • evrenesat 10mo ago
            If putin, then trump and their people agreed on that we are no longer living in a rule based world, patents, licences etc. would hold little value. Realpolitik of the globe will kick everyone's ass.
            • tonyhart7 10mo ago
              US let Russia take a chunk of ukraine and China and Russia to certain extend let US control its own hemisphere just eat up that some major power always playing geo-politic war games that exert its influences they maybe have a friction and want to mess with each other but the domain of influence is always there and they generally dont want to cross the line for it
        • PeterStuer 10mo ago
          ASML is considered 'strategic' and its freedom to operate is significantly constrained by international politics, specifically US-led efforts to limit China's access to advanced semiconductor technology. The Dutch government, under pressure from the United States, has implemented and tightened export license requirements for various ASML products destined for China, including both advanced EUV and some older-generation DUV machines. These controls are tied to US export administration regulations, as some components and underlying technology in ASML machines are of US origin, giving the US jurisdiction. The company must comply with US law, which has led to actions such as rejecting job applications from nationals of sanctioned countries. Besides this, do you really think ASML's major shareholders, Capital Research and Management Company, Blackrock, Vanguard, would support a board that would consider 'bricking' US machines?
    • tick_tock_tick 10mo ago
      The USA basically owns ASML since they invented the tech it's why they have to ask the USA congress permission to do stuff.
      • Cthulhu_ 10mo ago
        ? EUV lithography was an international undertaking, some US research projects sure, but also Japanese (Hiroo Kinoshita, 80's), Russian (Georgiy Vaschenko, who is on all the patents for the 13.5 nm laser used (https://patents.google.com/?inventor=Georgiy+Vaschenko https://patents.google.com/?inventor=Georgiy+Vaschenko)), Dutch (of course), etc. It's kind of ironic to think of a company as state controlled by the US given how anti-state-controlled the US can be when it comes to companies. ASML has majority shareholders in US companies like Intel and co, but that doesn't mean the US government has a say in it. I mean they do because of international politics - just like the Dutch government has a say in things - but still.
  • yuchtman 10mo ago
    The idea of Apple and/or Google just stop selling phones in the EU seems ... unlikely. A quick search tells me something between a fourth and a third of Apple revenue is in the EU, you really think they'd just stop selling in the EU? Gotta also remember, that even if the EU would allow this, your average phone user would not use it. Just like your average phone user doesn't root their android smartphone or installs Lineage/Graphene/eOS/whatever. Even if it were made easier (or possible) for more phones, the vast majority would not use it and Apple and Google would still make a lot of money.
    • jryb 10mo ago
      But in the proposed scenario, there wouldn’t be any technical hurdles or effort required by the phone’s owner - you could have this be a service offered by businesses. Maybe even the place that sells the phone would pre-jailbreak it for you.
  • scotty79 10mo ago
    > Apple could easily block this, and in the situation described here of a complete rupture with the US, they would no longer operate and sell phones in the EU. If Google decided to do the same, that essentially leaves Europeans without smartphones. Microsoft could "brick" the rest of the EU's digital infrastructure overnight if they so wished, or were compelled to do so. All the more reasons to go scorched earth on American companies. There's a point in every blackmail where the only way forward is through.
    • flumpcakes 10mo ago
      I think this is partly why the EU is trying to invest in native semiconductor technologies/companies Which is strange, because usually the EU doesn't make strategic moves like this (compare it to China, where nearly every thing it does is strategic).
  • dleeftink 10mo ago
    In case bricks will be thrown, the response from the receiving party will likely skew to the argument presented here--circumvention of technical locks. You'd catch the brick, sand it and repurpose so it'll fit your home.
  • atherton94027 10mo ago
    Sure this could happen but that seems like a very last resort. The only reason the US economy is still competitive is tech stocks so cutting off ~35% of your income seem like it would cause a lot of downstream effects
  • nottorp 10mo ago
    > that essentially leaves Europeans without smartphones ... for about 20 minutes before China steps in. Or Samsung with de Googled Android models.
    • delis-thumbs-7e 10mo ago
      Or maybe… Finland? There is linux phones already, so perhaps Apple and Google f-king off might not be a bad thing.
      • nottorp 10mo ago
        The new Nokias are Android with Google services afaik. It may take a bit to de google them and take out all the non open source parts out of the OS.
        • delis-thumbs-7e 10mo ago
          I was refering to Jolla and Sailfish OS. They have a new phone coming up, or already did.
        • eloisant 10mo ago
          That would be Jolla, a Finnish phone company that I think was founded by ex-Nokia employees.
    • bigfishrunning 10mo ago
      Lol thank God there are so many companies outside of Europe producing technology
  • spiritplumber 10mo ago
    The EU is a bigger market than the US when it comes to smartphones. So Apple would block this about as much as they would block moving over to USB-C.
  • ben_w 10mo ago
    Microsoft, yes and that would be catastrophic. For security quality reasons, I hope Apple have made that suggestion impossible, but for law enforcement reasons I doubt it and anticipate a backdoor exists. Google wouldn't block enough of Android to matter: Core is open source, EU forks/alternatives are likely already under development, and even if not a complete rupture with the US also likely means rapidly getting comfortable with China despite everything, and China already have Android forks. However, Google docs/sheets/etc are a common business alternative to Microsoft, and therefore such a transatlantic rupture also cuts that. FWIW, I've never encountered a business using LibreOffice etc.
    • boudin 10mo ago
      Security is a fallacy here because, being a US company, it is technically not secured by default as it has backdoors (or one has to assume it has backdoors and those cannot even be audited). Then it is just about the sense of security which is based on the threat model you consider threatening to you. You do not chose who you are the enemy of though and in fascist countries with no regards to the rule of law like the USA, this becomes a fairly important threat model to take into account. Libreoffice is used quite a bit in administrations across EU. I would expect more stickiness to microsoft caused by legacy applications that requires windows to run rather than office.
  • flumpcakes 10mo ago
    What I think most US people don't realise, is this would overnight start the slow but complete collapse of the US and it's economy. Europe can make alternatives to US tech, and with it's track record it will probably be more open with more legitimate options and less predatory monopolies. Once that is established with a home grown market of 450m people it will start competing with US in all the other markets. Let's not forgot how many EU people work for US tech.
    • silvestrov 10mo ago
      The easy part of a smartphone to create for EU is the part that is done in the US. The difficult part is the hardware. That is also why the iPhone is produced in Asia. Replacing TSMC is much more difficult than the software.
      • blell 10mo ago
        Creating good smartphone software is not easy. Only Apple has achieved it. Google is close. The rest are so far behind in the race they think they are leading.
        • lxgr 10mo ago
          Because there was arguably no need for a third option. The current duopoly only exists because it was seen as risk-free, and propping up an alternative was seen as uneconomical. > Creating good smartphone software is not easy. Yes, but it's not rocket science either (and even if it were, the EU has both rocket scientists and a space port). Maybe it's been too long for people to even imagine it, but European companies were fully capable of developing a smartphone OS and running an app certification platform (there were no app stores yet, as the industry was very fragmented) less than two decades ago.
        • VorpalWay 10mo ago
          Android is open source (decreasingly, but still). A reasonable starting point would be forking it and adding replacements for the proprietary Google Play services, app store etc. Gobally Android also has a much larger market share than Apple. (Yes the US is the opposite, it is an outlier.)
  • deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  • TrackerFF 10mo ago
    Well, two issues here: 1) The moment US decides to completely exit EU and brick their devices, China will step in and provide the alternatives. Or it will trigger some tech arms race inside Europe, and we will see European providers rise up. 2) US Tech companies can't afford to pull out. They might do some short-lived performative black-outs to show European customers how dependent they are, and they will for sure run to the government, who in turn will start trade wars. But in the end they simply can't afford to just pull out completely. As others have mentioned, not only is it a danger to their own revenue, but the US stock market is being carried by these tech companies. The US has always profited the most from providing products / services which are better and cheaper to Europe, to such a degree that organic growth has been naturally suppressed. Necessity is the mother of invention.
    • general1465 10mo ago
      > 2) US Tech companies can't afford to pull out. They might do some short-lived performative black-outs to show European customers how dependent they are, and they will for sure run to the government, who in turn will start trade wars. But in the end they simply can't afford to just pull out completely. Yep, case and point is current situation in Russia, where US companies "pulled" out due to sanctions, but not really.
  • Cthulhu_ 10mo ago
    Not only that, but also... only a small percentage of people actually wants this and / or would do this, the vast majority of consumers doesn't mess with their stuff even if they could. Same with the alternative app store support, it reminds me of when the EU mandated Microsoft to offer a Windows without Media Player. It didn't sell, because consumers don't actually care much - Media Player wasn't obnoxiously in the way.
• ulamel 10mo ago
  [flagged]
  • petterroea 10mo ago
    the whole thesis of the talk is that the mishandling of trade deals by the current administration, lead by donald trump and caused by his tendency to be haphazard, is opening real political possibility.
  • sschueller 10mo ago
    Trump just kidnapped a foreign leader which violates international AND US law. He is also threatening to do the same in Cuba, Mexico and Columbia as well as just taking Greenland. At what point is it then necessary? The whole talk is about getting away from this.
  • Peteragain 10mo ago
    The point is the opportunity created by trump's tariff policy. Saying do what I want or I'll burn your house down, and then burning your house down - you no longer need to do what is demanded. An opportunity has appeared.
  • scotty79 10mo ago
    It's weird seeing people still having soft spot for trump. Although it's more and more of a "leave the mad grandpa alone! he's ours!".
    • Quarrelsome 10mo ago
      having a soft spot for politicians period. You're not supposed to like them. You're allowed a "he's ok", or "that was funny" but adoration? ewww.
    • blell 10mo ago
      [flagged]
      • aebtebeten 10mo ago
• Quothling 10mo ago
  I've spent a couple of decades in the Danish public sector of digitalisation and in the private sector for global green energy. 10 years ago people would've laughed if you talked about leaving Microsoft and iOS in enterprise. Now we all have contingency plans for just that, and a lot of organisations are already actually doing it. So I would argue that there is more of a crack, but I'm not sure the post-american internet is going to be all that great. Because unlike the open source and decentralised platforms which are taking the place of US tech, the EU is going to regulate the internet. There is a saying about how us citizens trust companies but not their government, and how Europeans trust their governments but not their companies. Which obviously doesn't apply to everyone, but it's how you can view the EU. With one hand they do so much to protect consumer rights for us citizens, but with the other hand they build a survailance state. Of course that is how democracy works. You'll have multiple factions working toward their own goals with very different ideologies, and the EU has a lot of that. For the most part what comes out is great, because compromise is how you get things done when there aren't just two sides. For survailance, however, there are really just two sides and the wrong one of them is winning.
  • anigbrowl 10mo ago
    With one hand they do so much to protect consumer rights for us citizens, but with the other hand they build a survailance state. The US is doing that too, and has been pretty open about it for years.
    • rockskon 10mo ago
      Europe wants so very much worse in many cases.
      • zwnow 10mo ago
        [flagged]
        • notarobot123 10mo ago
          You don't like the song so you changed the words but you're still singing along to the same tune.
• zwnow 10mo ago
  Cory's new book is also a pretty cool read, glad I found his work. Shows the enshittification processes big tech went through really well. Also touches on the post-american internet.
• ryandrake 10mo ago
  I'm not sure what benefit any country outside of the USA gets for honoring trade agreements that bind them to enforce US anti-circumvention, US copyright, and US DRM. A fortune awaits any country who has the guts to say "you know what, USA, we're going to allow blatantly copying your shit--what are you going to do, tariff us? Oh, wait, you already are!"
  • lelanthran 10mo ago
    > I'm not sure what benefit any country outside of the USA gets for honoring trade agreements that bind them to enforce US anti-circumvention, US copyright, and US DRM. Sanctions? > ircumvention, US copyright, and US DRM. A fortune awaits any country who has the guts to say "you know what, USA, we're going to allow blatantly copying your shit--what are you going to do, tariff us? Oh, wait, you already are!" What does the target country do if Microsoft and Apple stop sales and support with immediate effect? That's the effect of sanctions. Overnight their systems are all bricked. The petrodollar may not be relevant anymore, but almost all governments in the 1st world have to bend the knee for Microsoft. On one hand, I kinda think they deserve it, having ignored competing systems that are both cheaper and better. Any government threatening the US can be easily cut off at the knees overnight at the behest of the US government.
    • nurettin 10mo ago
      EU fines of up to 100s of millions of USD haven't stopped these companies from operating overseas. It is unlikely that they would exit a trillion dollar market because of some self-imposed security laws. Rather the opposite, the hardware would have to be free of whatever invasive security measure there is if EU wanted it. But they are rather xenophobic, so the incentives align.
      • ben_w 10mo ago
        The companies would choose to operate in the EU if they could. The US government is throwing its weight around, appeares to be preparing to illegally annex bits of non-EU land in an EU member state, to sow propaganda to fracture the EU itself, and has already sanctioned EU judges for doing their jobs when their job is against US interests. Non-zero chance they will not have any choice in this. Gut feeling says we're still a long way short of 50:50, but it's just gut feeling.
• phendrenad2 10mo ago
  "Freedom exists in the tension between equals" - TFM (one of those "self-described libertarians" this article speaks of). Simply by being powerful, the US became the weapon of choice by the worst people to censor and block anyone they didn't like (socialists, libertarians). Now that there is a multipolar world, with competing principles and goals, it's a lot more work to evict your enemies from the entire internet.
• ares623 10mo ago
  Maybe countries need to seriously consider stockpiling old hardware. Rather than sending ewaste to Southeast Asia for “recycling”, old laptops and smartphones could be the only things usable in a future fractured world.
  • Towaway69 10mo ago
    I got three old laptops flying around, I’m prepared for the golden future of dialup EU internet. Plus old nokia and ericisson phones! Need some rotary phones to be really safe. /s
  • Thlom 10mo ago
    They can just buy new hardware from China.
    • apples_oranges 10mo ago
      Until China decides they don't want to sell to them that is.
• a-v-berezkin 10mo ago
  Recent incidents with Grok creating sexualized pics is yet another example of "enshittification", IMO. This is also the result of too permissive laws + monopolies, which only erodes trust.
  • ACCount37 10mo ago
    How are those "recent incidents" relevant in any way?
• Barathkanna 10mo ago
  This post highlights Enshittification, which in genera; is the process where platforms start out serving users, then shift to exploiting users to benefit business customers, and finally hollow everything out to extract maximum profit for themselves.
• jeroenhd 10mo ago
  > If the EU repeals Article 6 of the Copyright Directive, some smart geeks in Finland could reverse-engineer Apple's bootloaders and make a hardware dongle that jailbreaks phones so that they can use alternative app stores, and sell the dongle – along with the infrastructure to operate an app store – to anyone in the world who wants to go into business competing with Apple for users and app vendors. I have twoo problems with this idea. 1. Users are extremely lazy and anything that doesn't work out of the box doesn't gain any commercial traction. See: Epic Games Store, Amazon App Store, F-Droid to some extent. 2. Apple already allows alternative app stores inside of Finland (the entire EU, actually). There's the issue of Apple's bullshit installation fees, of course, but with Epic covering those so far, cost doesn't seem to be a problem when it comes to the proliferation of app stores. While I'm all for an iPhone running free code, commercial interests for alternative app stores won't be what will bring forth these improvements.
  • boudin 10mo ago
    Allowing people to own their devices and modify them can first foster creativity and competition, which can lead to the creation of standards, alternatives and businesses around that. The current situation makes it impossible to create a business from modifying an existing product, you need to start from blank slates, making it hard to crack a walled-garden.
  • darkwater 10mo ago
    If it's legal to jailbreak an iPhone (assuming it's technically possible) there will be an ecosystem of companies that make the UX friction as low as possible for casual users. What would worry me is that the US would probably start a big scale digital warfare operation against EU citizens as soon as technically possible.
  • ACCount37 10mo ago
    The first problem is technical. Jailbreaks aren't stopped by being ostensibly illegal to do. They're stopped by being a nigh-impossible attack conducted against an adversary that keeps hardening the systems against it. Which is why the fight for unlocked bootloaders and software freedom is such an important fight. It's theoretically possible to create an "unbreakable lock" and forbid the users from having any control over the software forever. Which is why user freedom must be legally mandated, and engineered into the hardware on the ground floor. You can't rely on being able to "hack the freedom in after the fact".
• rdevsrex 10mo ago
  Why not go all the way and establish your own publicly owned central bank and establish an alternative to the dollar? Oh, yeah, the US will send the CIA or the military in and take you out and make you take on IMF debt to ensure your future compliance. Clearly, there are limits to what tech alone can accomplish.
  • calgoo 10mo ago
    You mean like the EU central bank and the Euro? That's already been in place for 20+ years in the majority of EU countries.
  • immibis 10mo ago
    Like Cory says, the USA is now carrying out its threats regardless of what you do or don't do, so there's no need to care about them any more. There's nothing a country can do to influence whether the USA invades it or not, so it might as well do what it wants instead of what the USA wants.
• Havoc 10mo ago
  It does seem like something will need to be done. Not just on this but other world order matters too. The US centric version is no longer viable
  • drstewart 10mo ago
    Agree, privacy lovers can flock to EU and China where surveillance never happens
    • Havoc 10mo ago
      Misguided as EU rules often are on implementation I do still have more faith in that then the American system where rule of law seems to be fundamentally breaking down
      • flumpcakes 10mo ago
        At least the European laws are debated, and more often than not will then be voted down. America has the similar laws for the state, they're just secret and do not help the average person. It is also getting harder to argue against descriptive laws on communications when Grok is churning out child pornography and X thinks that's just "the user's fault". I wonder how hard it would be to get seat belts enshrined in law in the modern day if they never existed. Europe is already throwing out a bunch of safety standards because King Trump wants unsafe American vehicles to be sold in the EU. How about the US stops making crap cars? Oh sorry, that's the "ungrateful" European in me. Trump really is throwing out 80 years of shared progress and proving the anti-US stance that all of it's allies are just vassals.
• mschwaig 10mo ago
  I think outright shortening copyright terms could be a beneficial policy along similar lines.
• flanked-evergl 10mo ago
  European countries are de facto vassals of the US. Not because they have to be, not because it benefits them, but because this is what the politicians and their voters want. Instead of taking care of Ukraine themselves, and providing security guarantees to Ukraine themselves, they expect the US to do it. Instead of supplying Ukraine itself, they need the US to do it. And all of this against an opponent, Russia, that is on paper almost entirely insignificant. As things stand today, European countries cannot survive independently with US support, making them effectively vassals. And what is worse is, most of the political elite in Europe hate the Americans that they have made themselves completely dependent on. I don't really like this status quo, as a European I think this is pathetic and embarrassing that we are entirely dependent on US without any need for us being dependent on them. But I don't get the elites that complain about the status quo on one hand, and on the other hand refuse to do anything to change it.
  • flumpcakes 10mo ago
    > entirely dependent on US It's more of a co-dependence. When it comes to military we have fallen behind significantly, but the EU member states also doesn't want to spend a trillion euros a year on it. It may seem one sided, but the EU has a lot more to gain if there was a hard split between them and the US. It will be significantly more painful for the EU, for a long time, but ultimately it would be the undoing of the US as hegemon. Unfortunately Russia would take advantage and begin an invasion into the EU, so an EU/US split is unfavourable. Ultimately it is the security of NATO that the EU really needs the US for. And that is what it pays for in the dependency it has on the US.
    • flanked-evergl 10mo ago
      I'm very conservative and in principle really aligned with Republicans in the US, but this is rotten deal. The end result is in practice worse for everyone, because the American voters do not understand why they should be underwriting out security, and their security underwriting in practice is not very reliable or good from our point of view. It has not deterred Russia, it has not countered China, and I don't think it's going to last, because American voters don't understand what they are getting for it, and neither do I. Europe will be much better off if we can guarantee our own security. I'm not suggesting for something dumb like withdrawing from NATO without first having the next thing in place, but we need to be in a position where Putin (and his eventual successor) does not feel like they can push us around as much as the Americans will tolerate, which is precisely what Putin thinks. We can and should be in a position where we push Russia around as much as China and India allows, and we dictate terms to them instead of cowering while they dictate terms to us. We should be in a position where if we say we are going to incorporate Ukraine into a defensive alliance that the Russians praise us and bow out of fear that we will take more of their things, instead of the reverse.
• OGEnthusiast 10mo ago
  Europe is in a tough spot these days, trying to unwind decades of economic partnership with the USA while simultaneously trying to fend off Russia from Ukraine.
  • aebtebeten 10mo ago
    Optimists practise speaking Cantonese, pessimists— speaking Russian, realists— stripping and reassembling rifles?
    • dagenleg 10mo ago
      Why Cantonese?
      • aebtebeten 10mo ago
        Optimists believe the new economic order will be mostly like the old, only perhaps involving a bit more trade[0] with cities like Guangzhou, Hong Kong, and Shenzhen, and a bit less trade with cities like Houston, LA, and NYC. (for Singapore, Mandarin would be better, but there English works, lah. Shanghai would need Mandarin, but we have our own financial centres) [0] if the Don were serious about hemispheres, this might work. In practice[1], I believe there could potentially be issues running trade through chokepoints owned by USEUCOM (Gibraltar), USCENTCOM (Suez, Aden), and USINDOPACOM (Malacca). https://www.war.gov/About/Combatant-Commands/ https://www.war.gov/About/Combatant-Commands/ Anyone know of any good minesweeping technologies? [1] did "The Empire Strikes Back" not teach us that Sith always reserve the right to alter the deal? Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpE_xMRiCLE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpE_xMRiCLE
        • gsf_emergency_6 10mo ago
          Pedantry: most foreigners don't speak Cantonese in HQB https://youtu.be/RTftU-8tkJc?t=16m34s https://youtu.be/RTftU-8tkJc?t=16m34s
          • 10mo ago
• JuniperMesos 10mo ago
  Personally, I think it would be great if various foreign countries reacted to the Trump tariffs by repealing laws compelling them to defend various intellectual property claims that primarily but not exclusively benefit large American companies. I think this is extremely unlikely to happen, in large part because this issue just has very little to do with US tariffs at all, and affects business relationships in non-US countries as well, and is clearly just Cory Doctorow's long-standing hobbyhorse that he cared about decades ago when the world and US political landscape looked very different. But I largely agree with him on this point, so sure, whatever. I also think it would largely be good if European institutions used more free software hosted directly by the people who use it, rather than relying on software platforms ultimately run by American companies subject to American law. Like Doctorow, I thought the same thing 15 or 20 years ago as well. There's also the important caveat that American free speech law is the best in the world, and in particular other anglophone countries, not to mention European countries in general, routinely arrest and charge people for political speech on social media that would be unambiguously protected speech in the US. Yeah, it's bad that Larry Bushart was jailed because the local sheriff's department interpreted his joke about the Charlie Kirk assassination as a terroristic threat, but this was ultimately one local sheriff and prosecutor being basically individually corrupt - charges were dropped because there is no legal basis in the US for making jokes about people getting politically assassinated on social media to be a crime, and he's apparently suing the sheriff's department over this. I hope he wins. Lucy Connolly in the UK spent a year in prison for her social media tweets and the prime minister of the UK defended the conduct of the UK criminal justice system. I do not think that a social media platform run by a company directly subject to UK speech law (or the laws of most other countries around the world) would be dramatically better than the status quo. > And speaking of ICE thugs, there are plenty of qualified technologists who have fled the US this year, one step ahead of an ICE platoon looking to put them and their children into a camp. Those skilled hackers are now living all over the world, joined by investors who'd like to back a business whose success will be determined by how awesome its products are, and not how many $TRUMP coins they buy. This is wishful thinking - the average person actively evading ICE right now is a low-wage laborer from a 3rd world country who either snuck over the US border or overstayed a visa years ago because they judged that living illegally in the US was better than staying in their shitty 3rd world country. Any person who is actually a qualified technologist probably has some better options than illegally immigrating to the US with their minor children. Also any children that an illegal immigrant has on US soil are legally natural-born US citizens by the 14th amendment. ICE has no power to deport them, and indeed those anchor babies can potentially use their legal status as a way to get other members of their family including the illegal-immigrant parents who bore them some kind of legal status in the US. > Rich, powerful people are, at root, solipsists. The only way to amass a billion dollars is to inflict misery and privation on whole populations. The only way to look yourself in the mirror after you've done that, is to convince yourself that those people don't matter, that, in some important sense, they aren't real. This is simply not true. The way to amass a billion dollars is to either be a local elite in a 3rd world country taking advantage of oil resources, or to be a founder or extremely early investor in a company that gets world-changingly big. Misery and privation is the default state of humanity, humanity has only conquered that to the extent we have so far by technological innovation, and a lot of important technological innovations come from companies that got to be huge by selling stuff that people find valuable and pay money for. This is the exact opposite of inflicting misery and privation on people. > Think of Elon Musk calling everyone who disagrees with him an "NPC,” or all those "Effective Altruists," who claimed the moral high ground by claiming to care about 53 trillion imaginary artificial humans who will come into existence in 10,000 years at the expense of extending moral consideration to people alive today. Elon Musk calling people who disagree with him NPCs is him acting exactly the same way as an edgy, extremely-online, pseudonymous shitposter. Which is frankly novel for someone with his immense level of wealth, and makes him more akin to the average internet shitposter than most billionaires. Bill Gates wasn't doing this kind of thing when he was the richest person on earth. Effective altruists who buy into extreme longtermist moral theories that put a lot of weight on trillions of sentient beings who might exist in the far-future are certainly weird from the perspective of the average person; but moral philosophies that have unintuitive consequences are nothing new, and have more to do with very smart, high-openness academic nerds than the ultra-wealthy. I think that bringing up extreme-longtermist EAs in this section of the essay betrays an important lack of understanding on Doctorow's part. He's trying to argue that the software products produced by well-known American corporations are bad because they allow those companies to control what their users can do, and wield this control towards earning more money from ads - sure, fair enough, this is a reasonable criticism. He then pivots towards attacking AI on the grounds that it will let these companies replace their programmers and produce more bad code - this is, I think, failing to really think about the promises and risks of this fairly-new set of technologies, but okay, yeah, in principle someone could use AI to generate code that is bad for some purpose. Then he starts talking about tech company CEOs he dislikes and throws in this jab at effective altruists in general - and this clearly has nothing at all to do with his actual argument. Doctorow is basically free-associating about people he dislikes, and some bay area tech company CEOs are vaguely socially-adjacent to some bay area tech effective altruists and some effective altruists think that extreme-longterm visions of humanity's future imply that there will be astronomically more sentient beings existing then than exist now, and this has unintuitive moral consequences. Not all Effective Altruists are extreme-longtermists in this way - the modal EA cause is trying to reduce human suffering and death in Africa today by making anti-malarial bednets more widely available - and there's certainly plenty of reasonable moral-philosophical debate to be had about exactly what various visions of the long-term future of humanity imply about how we ought to act now. Doctorow doesn't care about this, he isn't even thinking about it, he's tossing off a throwaway line in an essay because he wants to complain about a group of people he thinks are obviously bad. This is lazy and unprincipled writing.
• aucisson_masque 10mo ago
  That’s a long speech but it’s interesting. I recommend to read it, it brings interesting point. Although experience tell me none of them will become true.
• goldenarm 10mo ago
  I've noticed some OSS orgs have been shifting their center of gravity to europe recently. Notably the Eclipse, Linux Foundations, and soon WikiMedia. VCs and politicians forgot that Silicon Valley did not appear out of thin air, it was the product of public research and open-source ecosystems that made the internet revolution possible. If the US betrays these ecosystems too much, they could migrate and make another tech industry flourish somewhere else.
• wt__ 10mo ago
  There's a lot of interesting stuff in here – e.g. the Polish trains and the ventilators. Though I wish he'd tone it down a little occasionally. (This is why I'm not an activist.) It's interesting as for the first time I've found myself mildly encumbered by DRM, notably some old Apple FairPlay files I bought prior to 2007 (or 2009) - which I can't play in non-Apple software. But these are minor inconveniences compared to servicing costs of trains, tractors and so on, which get passed on to the rest of us indirectly. I'm not sure if "disenshittificatory" will ever catch on. I'd propose d17n for disenshittification, except there's already a d18n for a project that masks sensitive fields in databases..
• _zagj 10mo ago
  The irony of this talk is that the prospect of the US having its own de facto "Great Firewall," albeit one imposed from without rather than from within, doesn't sound that bad to any American old enough to remember what the Internet was like before its successive waves of global Septemberings: https://old.reddit.com/r/Infographics/comments/1l5bhfo/total_internet_users_by_nationality_19972018/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Infographics/comments/1l5bhfo/total... The Twitter/X location experiment/debacle laid this bare, showing how much low-effort, divisive, often racially or religiously antagonistic content directed at Americans was actually foreign (e.g., the Indians LARPing as white nationalists with classical statue avatars).
• budududuroiu 10mo ago
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  • ACCount37 10mo ago
    No. I've already had enough of all the fucktards trying to build their own "national internets". One LaLiga is one too many.
• globalnode 10mo ago
  halfway through reading it and while i like this guys attitude and agree wholeheartedly with what hes saying, if any country does what hes suggesting they'll be sanctioned, have their leaders kidnapped or get nuked... who's gonna go for that? best you can do right now is step quietly and try to build your nations strength for the coming conflict.
• yyyk 10mo ago
  Obvious problem is anticircumvention laws are just as much an interest of the EU and others. These laws pass power from the individual, and the EU (its corps and govs) are just as interested in exercising power over the individual.
• stevenally 10mo ago
  Crappification is a better word.
  • mpalmer 10mo ago
    You're a bit late
• KingOfCoders 10mo ago
  With the incoming invasion of Greenland this will massively accelerate.
• ta9000 10mo ago
  Americans aren’t your enemy. We’re just as upset by these idiots running our government as you are.
  • Cthulhu_ 10mo ago
    It's not an either / or though; enough Americans are in support of the government, that's how democracy works. Nobody can speak for everyone.
  • monooso 10mo ago
    I don't think there's any suggestion that Americans are the enemy. Indeed, the article makes it clear that (a) the issue is not individuals, and (b) the desired changes would be good for most (non-billionaire) Americans.
  • BadBadJellyBean 10mo ago
    Possibly. But the people who matter the most in this discussion lost their trustworthiness. The government and the tech giants are working together to be a bad partner. It unfortunately doesn't matter if the average Joe is not with them unless they do something about the state of things. And not trying to get too political: the GOP and Trump did win the electorate and the popular vote. So the USA kinda wanted this.
  • kergonath 10mo ago
    I have a lot of sympathy for the American people, and many personal American friends. Still, in a democracy everyone is collectively responsible for the government. "It’s not us, it’s our government" only work for so long.
    • deleted 10mo ago
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    • 0_gravitas 10mo ago
      It's not a democracy (by definition)
• 627467 10mo ago
  I like the initial emphasis on the trade treaties of his talk. IMO the scope and amount of these treaties have been unacceptable and the only reason they passed were due to the framing of thia magical thinking that any increased trade is always great "enlarging the pie" and everyone ignores the fact that it creates a huge monoculture that is unable to accommodate people's with vastly different needs. These treaties alienate people in the same same supranational orgs like EU does. The framing of "rules" based order masks the fact that its "rules set mostly by the hegemon in its favour"
  • aebtebeten 10mo ago
    > [trade] creates a huge monoculture that is unable to accommodate people's with vastly different needs How so? Cash on the barrelhead doesn't care which cultures are on either side. During the Cold War, capitalists and communists traded with each other. I myself have traded with people whose language and culture I hadn't the foggiest of. Monoculture is problematic, yes, but its roots must be in something other than trade.
• 4bpp 10mo ago
  Unfortunately, all it will take is an appropriate choice of story about "Nazis"/"child predators"/"pirates"/"terrorists"/"Russian bots" sideloading unregulated apps or disabling the GPS trackers on their cars, and every prospective member of Doctorow's great new coalition (including most everyone in attendance when the talk was given) can be peeled away with ease.
• sarmike31 10mo ago
  This is powerful stuff, I think these trends will grow rapidly and it’s bound to become a hot topic
• viktorcode 10mo ago
  > We wouldn't tolerate secrecy in the calculations used to keep our buildings upright, and we shouldn't tolerate opacity in the software that keeps our tractors, hearing aids, ventilators, pacemakers, trains, games consoles, phones, CCTVs, door locks, and government ministries working. Construction industry if full of privately owned technologies and closed source software, from architectural drawing board up to the last glass panel in a window. Building are staying upright not because of openness, but because of the enforced standards for construction. Same can be applied to software orders. Want to prevent a government office suite to be bricked remotely? Put forth requirements for autonomous work, self hosting, multiyear coverage for critical patches and ability to export the data at any moment in the format of your preference. Whoever provides this will get the contract. This seems to me far more realistic aim than trying to enforce global legal straight jacket to be universally applied to all software and hardware products available for purchase in your country
  • piyuv 10mo ago
    He wrote “calculations”
  • Attrecomet 10mo ago
    Legal straight jacket? Doctorow is arguing for abandoning the legal straight jacket, not creating one. It seems you severley misread the article.
• kardianos 10mo ago
  > That's where Trump came from: a coalition of billionaires, white nationalists, Christian bigots, authoritarians, conspiratorialists, imperialists, Uh, no. I've been told my entire life it is good for me to ship jobs overseas and for the country I live in, to be a "service" industry. I thought it was crazy then, as I do now. The Trump coalition is the ONLY administration who has meaningfully reversed policies that push jobs away from my own country.
  • twixfel 10mo ago
    Those jobs are never coming back, meanwhile they're torching the entire world order that was built purely to your benefit, betraying all allies, embarking on imperialist adventures abroad and making huge amounts of money for themselves and their families in the process. Art of the Deal.
• pentagrama 10mo ago
  Reading this from South America, there is another layer that often gets lost in US-centric discussions like this. For many people here, the move away from US platforms is not primarily about surveillance, product quality, or even conscious digital sovereignty in the European sense. It is more visceral and historical. There is a long-standing anti-US sentiment rooted in decades of interventionism in Latin America. For some users, avoiding US tech products is simply a symbolic refusal to participate in systems that come from a country associated with coups, economic pressure, and political interference in the region. This is not necessarily about whether European alternatives are better. Often they are chosen precisely because they are not American. That conversation has been present for years, but it intensified during the Trump era, especially as his international posture became more openly aggressive, erratic, and performative. The image projected abroad is less diplomatic and more about asserting power at any cost. The recent capture of Nicolás Maduro brought this sentiment back to the surface. This is not about defending Maduro or denying authoritarianism in Venezuela. It is about the methods. The way the US exercises power, bypasses norms, and frames these actions as demonstrations of dominance reinforces long-held distrust, regardless of who the target is. From this side of the world, it often looks like a superpower acting out of anxiety. A fear of losing its central position as China, Russia, and other actors gain influence. That fear translates into unilateral actions and a public discourse that feels unhinged compared to the more restrained, protocol-driven communication of previous administrations. So when people here talk about abandoning US platforms, it is not always a tech debate. Sometimes it is a political and emotional one, shaped by memory, history, and how power is experienced from the outside rather than from the center. Disclaimer: this comment was written in Spanish and translated and edited with the assistance of ChatGPT, which is, admittedly, a US-based tool.
  • nwhnwh 10mo ago
    > Reading this from South America... From a lot of other places too.
  • pwdisswordfishy 10mo ago
    So, not so much digital sovereignty, but sovereignty full stop. > Disclaimer: this comment was written in Spanish and translated and edited with the assistance of ChatGPT, which is, admittedly, a US-based tool. DeepL is based in Europe, just so you know…
• deleted 10mo ago
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• dzonga 10mo ago
  > That's why they're so fucking horny to have chatbots shit out software at superhuman speeds. That's why they think it's good that they've got a chatbot that "produces a thousand times more code than a human programmer." Then when you think with some certain people saying yeah use A.I to write your code .... we will become forever renters. if you can't write code by hand & have to depend on A.I what happens when the providers raise prices ? same thing with cloud computing ? a certain crowd - SF people - VCs etc want people to be technoserfs
  • Cthulhu_ 10mo ago
    That's exactly what they want, or what all companies want in the end.
  • flumpcakes 10mo ago
    It is the American way. I have a feeling a lot of Americans would be happier living with European attitudes. The billionaires wouldn't. I think all the talk of 'freedom' really has blinded a lot of US citizens. Europe is a lot freer, in a lot of ways, and it also tries to stop the average joe from getting mugged by mega-corporations.
• deleted 10mo ago
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• gordian-mind 10mo ago
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  • rakoo 10mo ago
    > Western-style billionaires do the former, as their wealth is created by providing services to people I'm sorry but this is just not based on reality. Wealth has always been formed by taking away from those who produce value. No one asked for 1000 new phone models every year, no one asked for 1000 new car models every year, no one asked for a million new kind of clothes every year. Services aren't provided, they are forced on people who just are not allowed to function without them and must work with and in those services, while billionaires don't produce anything, don't do anything yet get all the money.
    • theturtlemoves 10mo ago
      Wealth is formed by honest people trading amongst each other. Most people are like that.
      • rakoo 10mo ago
        I'm sorry but this is just too naive. There is no honesty in most people working for a wage that is barely enough to survive, while capital owners don't actually do anything and still receive an inconsiderate amount of money. There is no trading here, just a good old theft of all the produced value with just enough redistribution to buy back the stolen value. No billionaire ever became billionaire by trading anything only by stealing other's work.
        • gordian-mind 10mo ago
          What are we doing here? Are you going around calling people naive for not believing in Marxian economics? None of what you describe applies broadly to today's diverse forms of wealths. Your Germinal view of capitalism is not a groundbreaking discovery, if I may.
• EGreg 10mo ago
  It's not clear that the EU can force Apple to write code that opens up the iOS platform for alternative app stores and payment methods, but there is one thing that the EU can absolutely do with 100% reliability, any time they want: the EU can decide not to let Apple use Europe's courts to shut down European companies that defend European merchants, performers, makers, news outlets, game devs and creative workers, from Apple's ripoff, by jailbreaking phones. This is my approach to far-reaching private property in general, not just IP: just have courts decline to enforce it. That is less violence and more libertarian than anarcho-capitalists. Imagine having the courts vigorously defend your personal property rights and your first 3 homes, but gradually less guarantees for your 10th and 100th house. It would be hard for, say, Blackrock to buy up all those houses or Bill Gates to buy up all that farmland. This is philosophically in step with the Lockian proviso, and just closer to natural law in general. A lion, no matter how strong or clever, can’t defend and enforce his rules on a swath of land past a certain point. Humans just came up with these systems due to abstract concepts like property ownership, corporations, countries etc. having no limits. PS: This guy is onto something. Repealing or relaxing laws benefiting others is exactly the way you get back at them. Tariffs are not.
• zlax 10mo ago
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• PoignardAzur 10mo ago
  > Think of [...] all those "Effective Altruists," who claimed the moral high ground by claiming to care about 53 trillion imaginary artificial humans who will come into existence in 10,000 years at the expense of extending moral consideration to people alive today. That's not an accurate summary of what most Effective Altruists preach or do. The stereotypical EA interventions are "direct cash transfer to super-poor communities", "buying mosquito nets to fight malaria" and "lobbying for animal welfare", long-termism is much much more niche.
  • juliob 10mo ago
    If so, it may be time to re-brand because the niche is what most people now assume.
• deleted 10mo ago
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• notepad0x90 10mo ago
  > A post-American Internet that is possible because Trump has mobilized new coalition partners to join the fight on our side. I'm sorry, was the pre-trump era more pro-privacy or respectful of European's sovereignty? Is Snowden forgotten now? What about the State department cable leaks? I didn't know people relied on governments being friendly for internet security so much. > In politics, coalitions are everything.....That's where Trump came from: a coalition of billionaires, white nationalists, Christian bigots, authoritarians, conspiratorialists, imperialists, and self-described "libertarians" who've got such a scorching case of low-tax brain worms that they'd vote for Mussolini if he'd promise to lower their taxes by a nickel. Ok, inflammatory wording aside, this isn't wrong, but the item over which a coalition is built is important. Building a coalition because of some group membership will always result in toxic cesspools in my opinion. But coalitions build around policy can be productive. quid-pro-quo coalitions of "I'll support you on X if you support me on Y" is also how political parties start and they result in terrible results for regular people. A lot of anti-privacy law these days is also coming out of Europe (recent one: Chat control). I think current politics and trump are good recruitment tools, but they're not effective in terms of getting things done. For example, I disagree on just about everything with trumpers, but I guarantee you can build a coalition that includes many trumpers/MAGAts when it comes to stopping things like chat control. Point being, if you have a goal, stick to it. Build coalitions and policies around it. Thinking like this does more harm than good, now it is a social/cultural/national warfare. If I didn't know better, I would feel like I should oppose this person simply as a result of being an American myself. How can you talk about coalitions and make a point about excluding people from your coalition. Your coalition in other words is built not around policy, or enacting change but around opposing groups of people. It's worded and crafted as if supporters of this cause must view it as a means to opposing other people, instead of making changes. Even something as simple as "let's stop using Microsoft office" makes sense, we can then talk about funding something that can compete with it. But if you worded it as "let's oppose america" umm..ok, I guess people that don't really care about america either way probably don't have a place in your coalition? That's one thing I'm disliking heavily, the nationalization of open source and privacy related things.
• neves 10mo ago
  As always a nice article that make us think. But the greatest pillar is his alliance is governments. They must fund these projects.
• O1111OOO 10mo ago
  Verbose, meandering and hopeful all spelled out in over 8,000 words. My own conclusion.... the cowardly countries of the world will do nothing to upset the US, they will not even consider uniting as a coalition because they don't trust each other enough. It's a dog eat dog world now. They will do less to empower their own people. In fact, empowering people seem to be on the bottom of the list for most countries. If we keep believing hopeful dribble like this, we get nowhere. There was nothing actionable here, no call to arms, no organization, no solutions. You can't undo 25 years of a well engineered, intertwined logistical nightmare maintain by trillions of dollars and millions of people... by the "possible" action of a single country that may possibly, hopefully, maybe... repeal a thing. It's this kind of hopeful rhetoric that keeps the current system humming happily and the billionaire class drinking champagne. The world has changed. There is a new world order coalescing and gaining strength. It is the one that entered a sovereign country and stole their oil. There is a true ruling class emerging and the rest of us that will serve them.
• classified 10mo ago
  This anticircumvention law is criminally stupid and scandalous. It has to go.
• rajnathani 10mo ago
  I thought this article would have to do with the transfer of ICANN's power from the US government to a general non-profit thing in 2016.