While I would be apt to agree with his conclusion I have trouble with his arguments, which I find sloppy. Thesis: the high level problem is that general purpos

While I would be apt to agree with his conclusion I have trouble with his arguments, which I find sloppy. Thesis: the high level problem is that general purpose computing (and general purpose manufacturing, like 3d printing) dramatically lowers production and distribution costs in the face of established and ingrained financial and societal structure. This expresses itself in multiple ways in the real world. The author tries to grapple with these but is always so far into specific cases that the root causes remain hidden. 1.) Cost of production and distribution is lowered below profitable margins for several large industries including entertainment and news media. 2.) Regulation of the means of manufacturing chains has been a useful tool for the governance of products, consumers and society (guns, drugs, chemicals). 3.) Lowered costs, where they can be gathered instead of passed to consumers, means high margin profit businesses (Microsoft's business model). 4.) With lower communication costs, 'services' are an emerging (and now very established) model to replace or pair with the 'restricted machine' model. The problem is that pockets of accumulated Capital, established market leaders (and often entire industries), and conventional mechanisms of regulation are all trying to resist the giant transformational changes that the digital front could represent. They have succeeded for a full generation now and the new generation doesn't understand the terms of the issue. This is not to say that this is a purely bad thing. These transformations completely upend the world. The US government (or whichever) needs to cope with these dramatic changes - either by softening them or by undergoing radical transformations itself. For example, one might think it's a good thing that guns don't cost $8, can be produced by anyone, or lack serial numbers and other forensic signatures. To welcome the utopic world that Cory Doctorow (and I) espouse we need to figure out a way to structure society so that $8 anonymous guns don't represent a serious problem. Until there are solutions to that problem it is inevitable that legislation will do everything it can to balance the benefits of general purpose manufacturing with artificially raised costs and barriers to criminalized enterprises. Doctorow recognizes that the 'balanced' solution - 'services' and 'pseudo-general purpose machines' - are a bad deal. But he does not yet recognize that without answers to some difficult societal questions so are the others.