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.
A small wrinkle, industries seem to have little issue with acting collectively to spend cash on enacting policies that benefit those industries. For example, the oil industry has successfully blocked climate change action for decades even after they knew an action was needed. Perhaps they’re not as powerful as Standard Oil but they surely are powerful enough to profit maximize at the expense of so much else.
Put differently, if the breakup of monopolistic industries in the first half of last century produced a virtuous cycle, which supposes some durability, why do we find ourselves with virtually the same problem today?
The rich have class consciousness, and own the media companies, ensuring that the poor never risk coming close to developing it for themselves.
We have tools both new and old to work collectively against megacorp consolidation and we can do it directly in the market. Here’s what I would love to see more of:
Equity crowdfunding: Let’s have users/communities/customer bases finance new companies at the seed stage instead of relying almost exclusively on venture/investment banking-backed startups. I believe this greatly reduces the misalignment of stakeholder interests in finance/business even if they otherwise operate as conventional hierarchies. When customers own the business profit is no longer the fixation. It has to be self-sustaining but beyond that the focus can be on the ethical, sustained production and distribution of the good or service itself.
Buying collectives: Let’s leverage our buying power to receive lower prices and have more say in the ethics of supply chains. This can happen at the individual level and amongst cooperative/independent/small chain retailers. This combined with equity crowdfunding implies an opportunity to work our way up (and down) the supply chain from consumer to retailer to distributors to manufacturer to collaborate with it when necessary compete with incumbents.
Open Source R&D via Invective Prizes: Ever heard of the X-Prize? Imagine a crowdfunding platform where the crowd determines the goals for projects and contributes to the purse and people/teams compete to solve it. The winning submission open sources their result in exchange for the prize. This gives the crowd an alternative to corporate-funded IP held behind walled gardens purely to extract profit.
Open, interoperable web infrastructure: Most features of social media platforms could be baked into protocols and made readable by any 3rd party software that chooses to integrate it. The fediverse we’re posting on right now is a great example. We have to have free, open digital communications to have agency as free peoples.
All these options reside naturally in a market-based economy and IMO empower political action while not inherently relying on it. It’s a powerful “yes, and”.
I think the best analogy is to cybersecurity. What’s the point of patching devices when they’re inevitably going to be hacked again in the future? Because they’ll also be patched again afterwards. Security is a dynamic equilibrium, not a static one. Similarly, no fix to corrupt corporate power is permanent. We need constant vigilance.
Also, it’s been a hundred years, and tech is a new sector that didn’t exist 100 years ago. Breaking up Standard Oil isn’t going to help with Apple and Google.
I think the idea is to break up google and apple ;)
Isn’t that essentially the same wrinkle that was mentioned in the article with the Napster reference and the movie and music industries banding together?
Yeah, and I don’t buy the argument. It only works if the players haven’t figured out they have conmon goals and that they have to pool resources to achieve them. That’s not a hard thing to figure out. The tendency to cartelization demonstrates this. But cartelization only demonstrates that people can figure out they need to pool resources. They don’t need a cartel to pool money and funnel them into politicians pockets. All they need is industry lobbying associations and think tanks. Wouldn’t you know it, we have both and they’re working splendidly to further the regulatory interests of the corporations funding them. That competing parties won’t be able to do this seems like wishful thinking to me. That tech couldn’t do it during the Napster days I think is rather circumstantial and evidence for the people running those companies not having their shit together. Which makes sense given their age at the time.