Factually! with Adam Conover - Chokepoint Capitalism with Cory Doctorow

Episode Date: March 8, 2023

How can creative workers and individuals defend ourselves against the largest monopolies in the US? This week author and activist Cory Doctorow joins Adam to discuss how chokepoint capitalism causes the enshittification of everything we love and how we can fight back. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the truth. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's alright. Yeah, that's okay. I don't know anything. Hello and welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me once again as I talk to an incredible expert about all the amazing stuff that they know that I don't know and that you might not know. Both of our minds are going to get blown together and we are going to have so much fun doing it.

Now before we get going, I want to remind you that I am going back on tour this year doing a brand new hour of stand-up for anyone, anywhere who will care to listen to me. If you're in Austin, Texas, I'll be there from March 23rd through 25th. If you're in San Francisco, I'll be there from May 5th through May 6th. If you're in San Antonio, I'll be there from May 11th through May 13th. And if you're in Batavia, Illinois, just outside Chicago, I'll be there from June 8th through June 10th. Head to adamconover.net for tickets, and I'm going to be posting a lot more tour dates there soon. Oh, and by the way, if you want to support this show, you can do so on Patreon.

Head to patreon.com slash adamconover for every episode of this podcast ad-free. You can join our community Discord. We even do a live community book club over Zoom. It's so much fun. I hope to see you there. If you saw my video that came out just a few weeks ago on YouTube, you will know that America is plagued by mergers of all kinds with disastrous results for our

democracy. When larger companies buy smaller ones and dominate entire industries, that doesn't just raise prices for consumers and lower wages for workers. It is bad for everybody. It's bad for everybody that just a handful of companies control 90% of the beer market, and that the four largest airlines control two-thirds of industry revenue. In fact, a study a few years ago looked at 893 industries and found that two-thirds of them had gotten more concentrated in the decade after 2007. If it's felt like monopolies are all around us, yeah, it's because they are. And I want to be clear, this is a problem for the entire economy, but it's felt like monopolies are all around us, yeah, it's because they are. And I want to be clear,

this is a problem for the entire economy, but it's an especially big problem for the industry I work in, the media industry. Sure, it's all well and good to have a First Amendment that protects you from interference by the government, but if there's just one or two companies that control what art gets distributed to which people, that controls what artists get to say, that forces artists to work in a certain way to meet their mandates, and that's the only way that their message can get out there? Well, what use is free speech to begin with

if we live under a society like that? You know, YouTube, I think, was the canary in the coal mine for this problem, right? Because as soon as YouTube arose, it became the only place online to watch videos. People don't go to NBC.com to watch SNL clips anymore. They go to YouTube. And that means that anyone who wants to distribute video over the internet, like I'm doing right now, has to play by YouTube's rules. You have to feed the algorithm. You got to make the kind of

thumbnail that YouTube likes. You have to make sure you don't swear in the first 15 seconds or you'll get demonetized. YouTube exerts control over everybody's speech in society, even though they're a private company that is not answerable to the public at large. And that is simply undemocratic, period. And of course it's not just internet video. In live music, Ticketmaster and Live Nation dominate the entire industry, controlling who gets to play at what venue. In book publishing, there's just a few gigantic publishers and one really big distributor

called Amazon. TV and film companies keep buying each other up, resulting in less platforms for artists like me to put our work on. And in news, both print, digital, and broadcast, there are fewer options than ever. Things are simply getting more consolidated and therefore worse. So, what the hell do we do about it? Well, on the show today, we have one of the very best writers and thinkers on this issue. His name is Cory Doctorow, and he has been working on and evangelizing about this problem for literal decades.

This is the second time on the show, and my last interview with him was one of my very favorites, and I know you're gonna love this one. Please welcome to the show, Corey Doctorow. Corey, thank you so much for coming back on the show. Oh, thank you, Adam. I am so delighted to be back. So I just, look, I just had this video come out about mergers, media mergers, consolidation in America.

Good video. Oh, you enjoyed it? I enjoyed it, I just had this video come out about mergers, media mergers, consolidation in America. Good video. Oh, you enjoyed it. I enjoyed it. I watched it in Australia. I really – as a reader of you for so long, it's my goal to make you happy and proud of me. But it really – I actually – as I was writing the video, I was referring to the advanced copy you sent me of your new book, Chokepoint Capitalism, which is about many of the same topics. I love that phrase. What does chokepoint capitalism mean? Yeah. So the thing I want to, that we're always at pains to describe is how

chokepoint capitalism is different from other forms of like intermediation, right? We're not just talking about a record label or a publisher or whatever. They can be abusive too. I mean, the Beatles used to split one penny four ways after their label took 15% out for breakage, and then they paid 10% to their manager, right? It can be very bad even in those circumstances. But chokepoint capitalism describes the circumstance usually built around digital platforms in which you have a company that's able to corral an audience. They can use digital rights management so you can only use their devices for your media. They can pre-sell you a year's shipping the way Prime does. They can lock you

in by using predatory pricing to stop everybody else from entering the market. And so anyway, you end up with this audience that either doesn't want to leave or can't leave or some combination of both. And so then you have suppliers who really need to reach that audience. And there's a choke point in between. And that choke point allows large firms to relieve those suppliers of anything they have on the way to the audience. And this kind of resolves this conundrum, which is how is it that we made copyright last longer, cover more works, have higher penalties, make it easier to prove infringement and get those penalties, made the industry larger and more profitable, and yet the share of income going to creative workers has declined. It's because, like, giving people more copyright when there's, you know, five publishers and four studios and three labels and two ad tech companies and one company that does all the e-books and the audio books, it's like giving your bullied kid extra lunch money.

It's like not an amount of lunch money that will get them fed. Actually, if you just keep giving them lunch money, the bullies have enough money left over to do like a national advertising campaign. Think of the hungry schoolchildren of America. Give them more lunch money. They're not going to get any of it. And so Chokepoint Capitalism is about this market structure, an hourglass-shaped market with a firm squatting in between customers on one side, suppliers on the other. Yeah. And there's so many metaphors that can work. Choke point is a really good one. You said bully. I think of like the mafia asking for protection money. It's or a troll across a bridge

demanding a toll. It's like this. It becomes this middle person who is not just demanding rent from everybody in order for the artist to meet the audience, but also defining the terms under which that entire interaction happens. Like even here on, you know, this video podcast that we're doing is gonna go on YouTube, and I have very little power over how many people see it, even though I have close to half a million subscribers now on the channel. That doesn't mean those half a million people

are going to even be shown the video, unless the video plays with, you plays with YouTube's algorithm properly, unless I give it just the right thumbnail, unless I do all these things that are just designed to make YouTube happy. I can't swear in the first 15 seconds now because it'll be demonetized. I have to make sure if I want to monetize the video, play right with... There's all these things that are actually shaping the work, and there's only one company in the entire country that provides this service. There's only one platform.

Yeah. I mean, you're describing something that is, like, very distinct to platform economics, digital platform economics. You have these firms. They're really, like, undisciplined by their regulation or competition. They can buy all their competitors.

Remember, YouTube wasn't a Google company. Google had a video company that failed, and so they bought the one that succeeded. I completely forgot that. That's true. Everything Google has done except for search and their Hotmail clone, they bought from someone else. Everything they built in-house failed. Right. Right?

They mobile stack. They ad stack. Server management stack. You know, video calendar docs. All of it are acquisitions. Yeah. Right. They're a buying things company, not an inventing things company. Yeah. And they like to think that they're Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. But really, they've just got access to the capital market. Remember when they were like, oh, we're going to cure death. Yeah. All the moonshots. Yeah. Yeah. But they've never invented anything at all. Smart cities, Wi-Fi balloons.

You know, not all of them were terrible ideas. There was some cool stuff in Google+. Not all of it, but there was some cool stuff in Google+. They can't, if they make a good product, they can't make it succeed. Yeah. Right? They just have this kind of bad culture, this bad innovation culture that they call the world's leading innovation culture. So in platform dynamics, you have these companies that they call the world's leading innovation culture.

So in platform dynamics, you have these companies that have some surplus, right? They've got investor capital or they're making profit because they're cross-subsidizing. They've got an ad business they're subsidizing some other business with. And they take that surplus and first they hand it to customers, right? So you sign up for Facebook when Facebook first goes public. You know, their pitch to you is we are the privacy-forward alternative to MySpace. Unlike the crepulent Australian billionaire who owns MySpace, we're not going to spy on you. And all they show you is stuff that people you care about, that you told them you cared about, have to say. And then once they get all those people locked in, because there's this problem, right? Once you and all your friends are on Facebook, you can't leave Facebook. Like you

can't even agree on where to go for dinner. How are you going to agree on like when to leave Facebook? Right. Yeah. And so it's happening now with Twitter. People keep trying to leave Twitter. Okay. Let's all go. Everyone. We're going. All right. Cars started. Everyone get in the car. We're leaving Twitter. And like looking around, I'm like, I have a Mastodon account, but I'm like, not everybody got in the Mastodon car. Like I still got to go back to Twitter sometimes. I don't have a choice. Yeah.

I mean, you watch all two and a half hours of Fiddler on the Roof and it's just two and a half hours of these poor bastards getting the shit beaten out of them by Cossacks and not leaving. Right. And when they finally get kicked out, they're like, well, what are we going to do next? Right. And it's, well, I'm going to New York and you're going to Chicago. He's going to Krakow. And they lose each other. Yeah. And, you know, we matter a do next? Right. And it's, well, I'm going to New York and you're going to Chicago. He's going to Krakow and they, they lose each other. And you know, the, the, the, we matter a lot to each other. And so we stay. So you, so once the audience is locked in, then they start

reallocating those surpluses to business customers. They start spying on users, right? So they're taking a surplus from users and they start handing it to advertisers. They tell publishers, Hey, you come and you show us, uh, like three sentences of your article and a link, and we're just going to stuff it down a million people's eyeballs, turn on the traffic flood. And so the publishers start to get very acclimated to it. And then at a certain point, they take that surplus away from the publishers and the advertisers, and they hand it to themselves. So the Facebook ad market is full of fraud. They colluded with Google on an illegal program called Jedi Blue to rig the ad market. They colluded with Google on an illegal program called Jedi Blue to rig the ad market.

Publishers, they never show you – they won't show you the things that you subscribe to unless the publisher puts the full text of the article and no link. So they can't get any of their own native advertising, only the share that Facebook deigns to give them. You as the user, your feed is just full of stuff you never asked to see. The more Facebook shows you stuff you asked to see, the less room there is to show you stuff that someone's paid payola for, right? Advertising or stuff that someone's paid to boost, right?

I call this the enshitification cycle. And one of the things about enshitification that makes it... I have to say, you coined this term maybe a month ago.

You did a couple threads in an article about it. And I have seen this word enshitification all over the internet since you have coined a technical term. I feel like this is going to be in academic papers now. And yet shit is in the middle of it. And I really salute you for that. Well, thank you. Thank you. I do my best to work the swears in. Not in the first 15 seconds, obviously, otherwise we'd be demonetized. So this shitification cycle, like one of the things that

makes it possible is it's really easy to twiddle the knobs on the back end of these services and change how those surpluses get allocated. Right? If you're running a grocery store and you want to price gouge on eggs, as they all are right now, you've got to like send teenagers out with pricing guns. Right? It's hard to like do A-B tests when you've got to pay teenagers with pricing guns to run your A-B test. like do A-B tests when you've got to pay teenagers with pricing guns to run your A-B test. When you're just like the sound guy at Laser Floyd with 10 million sliders, right? And you can just like twiddle the knobs all day long. So, you know, you talk about this platform Kremlinology you do where you're like,

the thumbnail has to be like this and I can't do that or whatever. These are like reverse engineered rules, right? Google is like, and all the other platforms, they're bosses who dock your pay with every paycheck for breaking rules, but won't tell you what rules you broke because they told you what rules you broke. Then you'd know how to break the rules without them finding it. So you're just like trying to reverse engineer what your bad boss wants. And it may be that what they want from minute to minute changes for reasons that are completely opaque to you. So, you know, if you're on TikTok, TikTok, the one thing everyone agrees about,

critics and fans, is they had an amazing recommendation algorithm that was using surveillance data to pick videos for you. And it just came out in this amazing article in Forbes that they have this thing they call the heating tool. And it's just a knob they turn, and then they just non-consensually shove your video down a million people's eyeballs.

Pick and choose videos. They're like, this video we're deciding is going to go wide. Yeah, you know you go to the county fair and by 10am there's some guy in the midway with a giant teddy bear that he got by throwing three balls in the peach basket. He didn't throw three balls in the peach basket. The carny just didn't work the scissor thing

in the bottom that knocks the balls out. Or he said, oh, you got one ball in. Do it again and I'll let you trade the key chain you won for the giant teddy bear. The point is to have someone walking around with a giant teddy bear all day, right? They're not in the business of giving out free teddy bears. They're in the business of getting $5 and not giving out free teddy bears. And this is, by the way, I need to make an entire YouTube video about this. But people are always saying like, oh, all these kids are getting rich on TikTok. You can get so rich on TikTok.

No one's getting rich on TikTok. Like one guy is. Right, right. One gal is. He's the guy with the giant teddy bear. Joe Rogan and his $100 million Spotify payout has got the biggest teddy bear of all. Yeah. Right?

But no one else is making money on Spotify. I'm not making millions on TikTok. No, no, no. And if they give you that traffic, they're also going to take it away. Because what they want you to do is retool so that your production is TikTok forward. It's got that vertical video format. There's a whole bunch of other like conventions that make it very TikTok-y, hard to put it on YouTube or Instagram, even though they've got lookalike products. And so once you

do that, they're like, you know, there's only so much surplus our viewers have, right? They're not going to sit here and watch TikTok for 20 hours. So we want to take back some of that surplus. Maybe we want sports bros to start doing TikToks. We're going to take them away from the Adams of the world, and we're going to give them to the morning zoo guys of the world to get them to lock in. And then someday they're going to come back to you and do what Facebook and all the other platforms have done. They say, oh, you want to reach the audience who explicitly subscribed to you and said, I want to see what Adam has to say? Pay to boost. Yeah. Right?

And so this is like endemic to platform economics. And again, you can see how like this is completely unrelated to the tool that we give creators to manage their bargaining leverage with intermediaries, copyright, like more copyright, less copyright, doesn't matter, right? Like all of this stuff is independent of it. And, you know, maybe we'll talk about Spotify later. One of the things that happens when you do give creators copyright that firms can expropriate as the creators head out to market is it gives these firms these very long-lived arsenals of regulated monopolies, copyrights,

that they can use to structure the future of the market, which is how Spotify ended up giving giant shares of equity to the three companies that own 70% of all the music recordings in the world, Sony, Warner, and Universal, which means that they are now running the future of the music industry because they were its past. Okay, let's get to that point in a second. I just want to talk about digital media platforms a little bit more. That thing where they finally say you need to pay in order to reach your audience. I mean, I remember when Facebook made that shift, and that's why I don't, Facebook is the one platform I don't participate in at all. I'm a Zucker vegan. Yeah. I don't do it. I fully deleted my account partially because they had a really great export tool. I was able to export my entire Facebook

account. I can go read all my old messages from 2011. Right. Um, but I'm not on there at all because I was like, I'm not going to build a platform on Facebook where once I've got X many followers on my page I then need to pay to reach them but unfortunately TikTok has been that way

from the get go I have 1.2 million followers on TikTok but if I post and if I do my normal sort of like hey guys here's a horrible fact

about the world that gets pushed out very nicely but if I say hey guys I'm going on tour please come see me in Bo Like literally 10,000 people see it. And if I put it, none of them are in Boise, none of them are in Boise. And if I put it at the end of the video, Hey, here's like, I'll, I have to do this crazy dance where I go to a city and I'm like, Hey, here I'm in

Boise. Here's a weird fact about Boise, by the way, here I I'm, I'm here and you can come see me. And I say that at the end, that does a little better. That'll get 70K or something. A couple more people will see it. But the point is, the followers are meaningless because the 1.2 million people, if I post something, 1.2 million people don't see it. So what is a follower? And so we've gone from an internet where, you know, it's like, hey, I'll just post whatever I like and people will email it to each other. They'll see it. It'll spread widely, et cetera, to if I don't make the exact thing that the platform is demanding that I make, which is a silent invisible mandate. I don't know what it is.

Well, actually, sometimes it's silent invisible. Sometimes they tell you directly. If you look at Twitch or YouTube, they'll be like, enter our creator bootcamp where we tell you exactly what to make, and then if you make that exactly right, you might get paid a little bit. For 10 minutes, right, until they change the rules. Yeah.

Too many sliders. Yeah, but this is work for me to do this, for me to like, this is not dissimilar to, if I wanna make a television show for Apple TV or for NBC, they say, hey, here's what we're looking for this month. And then I go in and I've done this, right? I go in and pitch exactly what they're looking for. And that's the way you get the show on the air. And that feels reasonable because there are people who have a bunch of money and presumably they're going to pay me if I do it right.

They're going to pay me if I do it right. But, you know, the promise of the Internet was this place where we wouldn't have to go through those gatekeepers, where we'd get to just make whatever we wanted and people would see it. And guess what? We still have gatekeepers. We have just as few of them as we did in the 70s. ABC, NBC, CBS, right? If you want to get on TV in the 70s, that's who you have to go to. Now you have to go to YouTube, TikTok, Instagram,

and, you know, the other platforms. Five giant companies that turn the internet into five giant websites filled with screenshots of text of the other four. Yeah, exactly. And they don't pay. And so, you know, the promise, if you were going to erect a defense for these companies, it would be, well, hey, they're allowing so many people who didn't have voices in the media to get the word out there. And that's true to an extent, except that they do tell you what you can say, because if you don't say exactly what they want you to, nobody sees it. So this is the thing where the right wing weirdos who are pissed off about shadow banning, they're not wrong about the part where we've allowed our competition policy to fall asleep for 40 years so that the internet is controlled by a small number of gatekeepers. And those gatekeepers do exercise editorial judgment. The answer isn't to like prohibit people who provide speech forms from having editorial judgment.

Yeah. Right? that like the no politics at the dinner table cafe is going to be legally allowed to take hedge fund money, buy every restaurant in town, and then use most favored nation deals with all the restaurant suppliers to keep anyone else from owning a restaurant. If we said, okay, well, the answer is that we're going to have to regulate restaurants so that they can't say no politics at the dinner table where they have to allow certain kinds of speech within certain things. That's a crazy remedy, right? A much better remedy is like, why don't to allow certain kinds of speech within certain things. That's a crazy remedy, right? A much better remedy is like,

why don't we just have lots of speech forums, right? Why don't we just have lots more places where we can go? So again, maybe we're getting ahead of ourselves here, but people who read the first half of this book get very angry. There's this... I read it and I was like, I'm already angry about this stuff,

but this is some good extra context. You know the finance term, Migo, my eyes glaze over, right? These like super complicated scams, like the scammer the investment is, the thicker the prospectus, because they want you to think that like a pile of shit this big must have a pony underneath it. So we're doing, you know, what you do all the time,

or what John Oliver does, we're just kind of unpicking these for the first half. And, you know, you open the matryoshka, there's a smaller doll, there's a smaller doll, and then the middle is just like cholera, right? Like there's never anything good in the middle. So, you know, that's the first half. And people are like, by the end of the first half, I've got this high-pitched noise in my head, and I think it's a rage aneurysm. But the second half of the book addresses itself to systemic interventions, really detailed shovel ready technical proposals that aren't just like vote harder or shop better, right? These kind of individualized consumer

solutions that are really about like, hey, you know, anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop. There have been like these punctuated crises in the internet and creative economies for 40 years. Every time we reach this crisis point, we just do the same thing again, but harder. Why don't we like establish, socialize, kind of get into our heads some bigger, broader, more effective solutions so that the next time the European Union, as they did in 2019, says, what do we do about copyright infringement online? We don't say, let's make it mandatory to install a hundred million dollar copyright filter like YouTube has.

That means that only YouTube and Facebook are going to be able to provide online speech forums. We can do something that actually will make money for artists. Yeah. Well, uh, you know what? Let's take a really quick break. We'll be right back with more Cory Doctorow. Okay. We're back with Cory Doctorow.

We were just talking about digital platforms like YouTube. And I often think about the crazy thing about YouTube is it almost started as a monopoly. Like as soon as it appeared, it was the only place that you could post video. There was never really a competing challenger, even Vimeo and things like that. And to me, in many ways, it was sort of the canary in the coal mine of the death of the open internet, because before that, you could post anything anywhere. And YouTube offered this solution to the difficult technical problem of video hosting that immediately became dominant and has been for the 15 years since. So I think that's a little bit of an odd case.

But a lot of the cases you're talking about in the book are from companies aggressively moving into areas that were decentralized and centralizing them, like Ticketmaster, like Tyson Chicken, both of which I talked about in my video. You actually describe Ticketmaster as Tyson Chicken-ifying the live event business. So tell me a little bit about those types of companies that create a choke point aggressively on purpose in order to fuck over everybody. Yeah. So you know the Tyson Chicken story in Purdue and the other chicken companies. You can summarize again. Sure. There's a term out of labor economics to describe it.

It's called chickenization. Right? economics to describe it. It's called chickenization, right? And it's the three big poultry companies, they divided up America like the Pope dividing up the new world such that each farmer gets one poultry processor and you can't go to anyone else. And then they tell you what birds you have to use. They tell you what to feed them. They tell you when to feed them. They tell you how much. They tell you what vet to use, what medicine. They tell you what kind of coop you have to build, when the lights go on, when the lights go off, everything except how much they're going to pay you. Wow. Right?

And they use this to do things like A-B testing, right? They're twiddling the knobs. They're like, hey, how about if we ask this farmer to give his chicken less feed? And, like, you don't know that you're in the experimental arm, right? It's like being on the B-Arc in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, right? It's like, why are my chickens dying? Oh, I'm in the experimental arm. Yeah. Right? So then you take your birds to market.

And they've got a bird's eye view of the whole market. And they know how much to give you. So you've got just enough to roll your loans over and not enough to get ahead. And so that's what they do. And you have nowhere else to go. I mean, something I got very close to explaining in my video, but I thought it was a little bit too technical, is the concept of a monopsony. Where we're familiar with the concept of a monopoly where there's only one place to buy things from, and that means that company can jack the prices up. We've all experienced that with a cable company or anything else.

A monopsony is when there's only one place you can sell things to. And that means that if you're the person selling your labor to an employer, like I am as a writer, and there's fewer platforms than ever, or if you're a chicken farmer trying to sell chickens, well, there's nowhere to compete that'll give you a higher price. You literally have to take whatever price they offer you. And that's honestly almost more inimical than a monopoly. You know, buyer power is actually much easier to distort markets than seller power. Markets where a buyer controls 10% of the market often end up tipping towards that buyer having all the power in the market. So, you know, when Amazon launched a thing called Project Gazelle, where Jeff Bezos ordered his executives to find small

presses who were weak and could be forced into unsustainable discounts, like picking out the weak gazelles as a cheetah chasing the flock. Wow. The only thing the lawyers objected to about this was naming it Project Gazelle. So there was one press, Melville House, that said, oh, we're not going to do this. And at that time, there were only 10% of Melville House's sales. Yeah. But when they took the buy button off of every Melville House title, Melville House stopped being economically viable.

Wow. There are very few firms that can sustain a 10% instantaneous drop in sales volume, right? And so they caved, and they went back to Amazon and gave them these terms. Super predatory. So this is endemic to wherever you have all this buyer power. And one of the things that happens whenever you have a monopoly is it usually becomes a monopsony as well. So here we are in Burbank. Almost every medical facility within about 10 miles of here is owned by Providence. And the way that that happened is first we allowed the pharma companies to monopolize. And the pharma companies started jacking up prices that they charged hospitals.

And so the hospitals got together and they formed regional monopolies, like the Providence regional monopoly, where they said to the pharma companies, you're not going to be able to sell your cancer drugs to anyone who lives in Burbank unless you give us a more competitive price, right? To fight the buyer power, to fight the seller power, they had to make buyer power. Then they turned around to the insurance companies and said, guess what? It's going to cost 10x what it used to cost for a hospital bed. So the insurance companies also form regional monopolies. Here we are with like three or four insurers. And this is part of what happens uh i feel like i've seen that in the book publishing industry where the book publishers say we need to get together in order to fight back against amazon

against the other company but at the same time and there might be some truth in that like they're not wrong like in general i'm like book publishers i'm kind of on their side i knowatory in many ways, but like, hey, they're just trying to make fucking books. Someone needs to make them. Right. Amazon's squeezing them. Okay, maybe that's the right thing to do, except that publishers are also the buyers of authors. That's right. And so this is the thing about if we go back to health care, there's two groups of people who never form a monopoly.

Health care workers who now get worse wages and worse working conditions and patients who now pay more for worse outcomes. So when we allow this monopolization in the supply chain, it's like there's never just one ant. Once there's one monopoly, they all become monopolized because they do it defensively. And eventually you just get workers and customers who are at either end of the supply chain who just get squeezed. And whatever else these different players in the supply chain disagree about, Random House and Amazon or pharmacy benefit managers and pharmacies, whatever they disagree on, the one thing they all agree on is that we should pay as much as possible and get as little as possible. That's the kind of the class solidarity among the market concentrating classes.

And you just described a great motivation for forming a union or any other sort of collective organization. And consumer unions and so on. But again, like how do you – how is it that our union rights have been so eroded over 40 years? We allowed monopolies to concentrate, to extract monopoly rents. And then when a company is down – a sector is down to five companies, they can all agree on what they want from their policy outcomes. Right. If there's 100 companies in the sector, then when there's like a regulatory proceeding or a law going forward, some of them it'll be good for and some of them it'll be bad for. Like net neutrality. Right. If we had a lot of different ISPs, some of them would be like sign up with Adams ISP. We're the fiber loop that gives you all the packets you ask for as quickly as you can.

And then there'd be like, sign up for the Warner ISP. We give you a discount on Warner stuff and we slow down everything else. And, you know, they would show up at the FCC and say, you know, Madam Chairman, if we are forced to give people all the data they ask for, we'll have network management problems. And you'll show up and you go, you know, I've got a million customers. It's not true, right? So you get these facts and evidence.

When there's like three companies in a sector, two, one, you never get that. And so you get this regulatory capture that isn't like inevitable. It's an epiphenomenon. It's downstream of market concentration. They never have to sit around a table and agree on their lobbying priorities. All you need is for people who work at this firm to jump over to that firm, people who work from that firm to jump over to this firm, for all of them to be godparents to each other's kids, to be the executors of each other's estates, to have their kids play on the same little league teams. Yeah. And they just converge on a single culture and a single set of lobbying priorities.

culture and a single set of lobbying priorities. It also seems like, correct me if I'm wrong, it might be a little bit more stable if you're trying to build a choke point company to do this. It's a little bit more stable to have two that don't compete with each other rather than one. Like if you compare Ticketmaster, which I'd love to get in your version of the Ticketmaster story, but Live Nation Ticketmaster is a true monopoly. They're the only game in town. AEG, their biggest competitor, is like 10% the size or something like that.

And Ticketmaster has come under a lot of scrutiny over the last month. We'll see how that plays out. But if you look at, say, the cable monopolies, where what do you actually have? Three or four large companies that have divvied up the country between themselves. So in essence, here in California or my neighborhood, there is a true monopoly of only one company, but my friends in Ohio have a different motherfucker

that they hate. And so those companies can sort of like work the FCC separately yet together and say, well there's more than one of us. There isn't just one giant thing like in the days of AT&T. Well, look, I just think that the mistake that we make, especially with big tech, but also with other big firms, is we think of them as like evil geniuses. Right? They're just ordinary mediocrities.

Yes. Right? Unconstrained by the things that constrain their predecessors. The thing that stopped AltaVista from becoming Google isn't that Google was formed by people who were smarter or more wicked. AltaVista from becoming Google isn't that Google was formed by people who were smarter or more wicked. It's that AltaVista was functioning in the last gasp days of antitrust scrutiny, where out-of-control mergers were not available to it, and the capital markets wouldn't hand you a blank check to buy every potential competitor, right? And so that's what constrained them. The thing is that these guys are ordinary mediocrities, which means that eventually, they kind of trip over their own feet, right? They

overreach, right? Like, think of how easy it would have been for Ticketmaster to have a year's notice that Taylor Swift was going to do her first concert. The names and email addresses of everyone entitled to buy tickets in the initial sale, right? A whole year's notice, and to have gone

out and just like even just paid one of those scumbags like Deloitte to build them a system for it, right? They could have just tooled up the servers for this one thing, right? So that it wouldn't collapse. It's like being the crooked

construction company who gets hired to build the podium for the mayor's acceptance speech and you build it out of chewing gum because you can't be bothered to pay for screws, right? Yeah. Like you just end up eating your pay for screws, right? Yeah.

You just end up eating your own seed corn, right? If you're disciplined, like even in the smallest way by competition, right? If you have people within the firm who view the outside opinion, negative publicity, competition, any of these things as a potential threat rather than as is usually the case in these large firms. The biggest competitor that any executive has is another executive at the same firm. Oh, yeah. And they're all trying to hate each other. Yeah. Stabbing each other in the back.

I mean, who have worked in big studio companies. Oh, yeah. That's the way it works. That's the way it works, right? The president of my network was decapitated by a rival executive. There was a power struggle that was lost. And as a result, the network I worked for, everybody was laid off. Do you remember the 15-year period where Yahoo bought every successful Web 2.0 company and then different princelings within Yahoo destroyed them? Machiavelli was an optimist. And so often these firms, undisciplined in any way, overreach in this

way that is just beyond the pale, no longer deniable, it would have been so easy just not to screw over Taylor Swift. Do anything you want to anyone, just not Taylor Swift. And then they would have had plausible deniability. But instead they have the biggest draw in the nation making a statement denouncing the monopoly. Yeah, apologizing for having to use the monopoly.

And then they get congressional hearings and they get made to look like assholes in front of the whole country and like Katie Porter gets out her whiteboard. They were in the fucking State of the Union address. Like basically. That was like a whole applause line from the president.

I want to ask, I just want to jump back to something you said. Do you not give, you know, Google's rise. Like I do remember when Google came out and was like, holy shit, this is much better. They were better. Yeah, 100%. And the PageRank algorithm and all that, there was that sort of big bang moment of that company. Do you not

give that any credit for their monopoly? Oh, no, it was great. But all of these companies had great ideas when they started. They're not unique to that. I worked for Silicon Graphics for a while, for an OEM, building big pre-ress systems. They had totally kick-ass weird Unix workstations.

They had one great idea. They made a bunch of money from it. A lot of people got to do amazing things with it. And then someone else had a better idea. Yeah. Right? That's fine. Right now, I think a lot of our emphasis on these platforms is on making them better on like sort of prolonging their senescence.

Right. So that they so that they that people who rely on them aren't aren't injured. Like that's kind of the best faith interpretation as we're trying to say. That's like people on YouTube complaining like the algorithm should stop shadow banning me and everything will be fine. Right. And, you know, like it's not it that's, it's not wrong to prioritize the individuals who depend on these services, right? When people say, oh, well, like I'm, I'm worried about losing Twitter because it is the most effective way for cities to warn the people who live in them about

hurricanes. That's not wrong, right? I think that is wrong. There are places where it happens, right? There are places where if there's an ongoing emergency, there's a flood and you want to know what streets are open or whatever, city management is on Twitter posting updates. Yes, that's true. And that is like a very common thing. So, you know, we've put a lot of energy into sort of prolonging these services. What we could do is switch to making sure that they fail gracefully, right? So we could enshrine, on the one hand, a right to exit.

So the only reason you can't send messages to Twitter when you're not on Twitter, when you're on Mastodon, is because Twitter blocks interoperability. Interoperability is latent in computers. You only know how to build one computer. It's the universal, Turing-complete, von Neumann machine. It runs every program we know how to write. So Twitter has to do extra effort to stop you from sending messages to Twitter from Mastodon, right? So we could just say, like, look, we had this old idea called the end-to-end principle where anyone who wanted to speak and anyone who wanted to hear them would get their packets delivered.

We put it in at the network level. Now let's put it into the service level. You know, it's a very easy to administer remedy. We could say to companies like Amazon, if I search for a product and you have that product, that should be at the top of the search results. They have a $31 billion ad market that's not ads. It's just payola. It's making people who sell the products you're trying to find bid against people who sell the products you're not trying to find.

Which is why the first five screens of Amazon results in an average search are 50% ads. The whole first screen is ads. And then of the remainder, a significant fraction are products that Amazon has cloned from its vendors. And this is such a striking example of enshitification. Oh, yeah. Because Amazon used to be the, and I'm sorry that I cut you off.

No, no, no, go. Please go back to your original point before I finish this parenthesis. But like Amazon was originally the ultimate customer satisfaction company. This was like, I bought things on Amazon so happily for over a decade. Cause like,

well, it's faster, it's cheaper. It always has the thing that I want. They take returns. They take returns. Yeah, exactly. They've like streamlined all of retail into this beautiful degree. And now I've, I've, I have sworn off Amazon partially because, you know, for moral reasons, I don't want to support the company. I own a Kindle. I occasionally will buy a book, but I don't, I try to avoid. I own a Kindle. I occasionally will buy a book, but I try to avoid buying anything shipped there. Also, because I literally don't trust what I buy on Amazon anymore.

If I go on, and if somebody from Amazon is listening, send this email to Jeff Bezos, because everybody feels this way, and I don't know if they're tracking the fact that people, when they go on Amazon, you search for something, you no longer trust that you're going to get the thing that you ordered. So what they're doing now is they're using that as a pretext to extract higher rents from those third-party sellers.

So what they say is you've got to fulfill by Amazon. You've got to put it in our system. You've got to pay us fees for it. You've got to pay fees for verification, validation, whatever. So more than 50% now of the revenues from Amazon marketplace go to Amazon in junk fees. And they have a most favored nation deal, which means that you can't buy direct more cheaply from the vendor. So the vendor raises the price on Amazon and everywhere else, which is why the DC attorney general is suing Amazon because the prices at target are higher because Amazon

is taking 50% of every sale in junk fees. Wow. So this is crazy. So anyway, back to this point. If we had end-to-end and right-of-exit, then if you're trying to run a mailing list, you mentioned email before. Email these days, it's run by three or four giant companies. What part of email is run by three or four companies? The largest number of accounts.

So most businesses are using Outlook as their backend, even if it's got like an at company name.com address, that's it's Outlook on the backend or it's Gmail. So these three or four companies, they block independently hosted servers in the name of fighting spam. But there is no way for you as a Gmail user to mark something that has been put in your spam folder as this sender

is not spam. This person is someone who I want to hear from. There's no technical challenge to Google having a rule that says if the user explicitly says, I want to hear what this person has to say, never put it in my spam folder again. There's no technical challenge to implementing that. But if you use one of the big mailing list providers like MailChimp or whatever, they have back channels into Google. And so this is an opportunity for Google to further consolidate. So we could concentrate on making sure that willing speakers and willing listeners could hear each other. And that people who wanted to leave a platform could leave the platform. That you could take your Kindle books with you.

If you put Kindle or your Audible books with you. So Audible, every book sold on Audible has mandatory digital rights management. That means that it's locked to Amazon's platform forever. It's a felony to remove digital rights management encryption, punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine. I got to say, I'm a felon if that's the case. I mean, not convicted, but please don't prosecute me. More formally, it's a felony to provide you with that tool. So whoever gave you the tool. Oh, okay, got it.

All right. But somebody else is a felon because they gave me a tool. I, as the rights holder of an Audible audiobook, cannot give you the tool to remove the DRM so that if I quit Amazon, you can follow me somewhere else. Right. Only Amazon can. It is possible, and this is a very weird sentence, to violate copyright law without infringing anyone's copyright.

And the statutory damages are higher than for an actual bona fide copyright infringement. Wow. Right? So Amazon does all of this. And you mentioned their great returns. They have this platform, ACX, the Audible Content Exchange. Audible is 90% of the audiobook market in most genres. Audible Content Exchange is what independent producers, the weakest, lowest bargaining power producers use.

They used to have very bad terms until the scandal I'm about to tell you about. If you self-finance your own audio book, they would make it exclusive on the platform for seven years, and they would lock every copy you sold with DRM that no one could ever remove legally. And so they, you know this great returns policy? If you were an Audible subscriber

and you got your one credit every month, they would implore you to do a return. They would just like – there would be pop-up notices. There would be emails. Hey, that book you bought a whole year ago that you listened to three times, which they know because they can spy on everything you do because that's their ecosystem. If you're unsatisfied with it for any reason, we're such good-natured slobs. Why don't you return it and we'll give you a credit back. And what they weren't saying is that to make that subscription more valuable and keep you locked in, the way that they were financing it is they would claw the royalty back from the author who produced the audiobook that you returned. Wow.

They didn't tell the authors either. The authors got net accounting. So what they would see is you sold five copies this week. And what you didn't know was it was 25 copies. And Amazon convinced 20 of your customers to return their books even though they liked them. Jesus. And they thought that they were just taking advantage of Uncle Jeff's relentless focus on customer service, right, not getting ripped off. So one of the people they ripped off, an ACX author, is a woman named Susan May, who's a retired forensic accountant who now writes crime thrillers.

And she went through this when the scandal broke because they dumped three weeks. Oh, sorry, that's Colleen Cross. Susan May was the author who discovered it, and Colleen Cross was her colleague. So they dumped three weeks. Oh, sorry, that's Colleen Cross. Susan May was the author who discovered it and Colleen Cross was her colleague. So they dumped three weeks worth of return data in one go. And all these authors who had been getting ripped off this way looked at their royalty statements

and they were like, how did I sell minus 11 copies last week? That doesn't seem like it should be possible. So Cross goes and starts auditing this because again, there's never just one ant. And she's like, oh, you know what? When you get a return, they then hold another royalty back in reserve because now you're the kind of author who gets returns. So it's two returns, sometimes three returns.

Not only that, but this whole thing about how they're calculating royalties is just a lie. Hundreds of millions of dollars in wage theft from ACX authors. Wow. Right? So this was called the Audiblegate scandal. It's still ongoing. royalties is just a lie. Hundreds of millions of dollars in wage theft from ACX authors. Wow. Right? So this was called the Audiblegate scandal. It's still ongoing. One of the amazing things about it is that although these authors were completely screwed, they'd all had to click through a binding arbitration waiver that prohibited them from suing or joining a class action to sell on the platform. Just the moral outrage was enough to get Amazon to do full accounting with like a full P&L and also to end this seven-year exclusivity deal.

But they still had the DRM deal. And, you know, back to our point about Google, Amazon didn't start Audible. Audible was a competitor of Amazon's that Amazon bought because it had unlimited access to the capital markets. And then it linked it to its ecosystem of services so that it's almost impossible to sell audiobooks anywhere else, which is why they now control the whole sector. There's a couple. I just bought an audiobook on Libro.fm. Is there some connection to this? Yeah, so there's some independent ones.

Okay. And I love Libro. I'm a massive Libro stan. Libro, sponsor this podcast if you are watching. Mark Pearson, if you are out there. I saw Mark yesterday at the American Booksellers Association in Seattle. He is a very hoopy fruit. So –

Oh, sorry. Just the 14-year-old nerd inside of me. Well, I'm a science fiction writer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Libro, if you've ever bought a thing from Libro, you know that they have this weird workflow where you have to go on the web to buy the book. Right. And you go on the app to download it. I just did this. I was like, I was listening to a podcast and they were talking about a new book and I was

like, this book's not going to be available on my library because it just came out. I have to read it. I want to download it right now. Right. And I went to the Libro app and I searched for the book and it said, we have this book, but you can't buy it through the app. You have to go to the website and buy it and then come back to the app later. And I literally had to put a note in my to-do list because I was like walking to the bus stop to like go home and open my laptop and buy the book.

And then I was finally able to download it. And the reason for that is all of mobile is controlled by two companies. Oh, we're talking about a different choke point. It's a new choke point. It's a new choke point, right? All mobile is controlled by two companies and they extract a 30% fee for all transactions within their platforms. And so Libro's net margin – because I self-publish my own audio books because I won't go on Audible. So my publishers are nice this way. They let me retain my rights. I do Kickstarters for them. And then I put them on

all the platforms that aren't Audible. Their margin to me is 20%. So if they're paying 30%, Apple, they lose money on every sale. Now, you may have noticed that Apple has a competitor to Libro, as does Google. Right. Apple Books. Google Books. Apple Books was, and I think still is, a front end for Audible. So there's joint venture with Amazon. Is it really?

I didn't know that because I bought an Apple audiobook or two, and that's actually, I'm buying from Audible. That's why all the Audible exclusives are available on Apple Books. Wow. Okay. So, you know, the market is sewn up, right? You can't enter the market. That's not competition at all. Yeah. So, you know, like, this is a bit like, so Amazon at one point,

there was a company that decided they were going to try and move into one of the big consumer packaged goods categories that Amazon had started to take control over, and they were called Diapers.com. Oh, we told this story on Adam Ruins everything years ago, but please tell us again. So, they're selling diapers, pretty straightforward business. That subscription, they'll send them to you.

I remember when my kid was in diapers, it would have been useful. Amazon, surprised to buy them, they won't sell. So Amazon lost $100 million in a month giving away diapers basically for free and drove them out of business. And that might sound like a lot to just take over like one category in consumer packaged goods. But it was a message to anyone who might capitalize a rival to Amazon, right? Like abandon hope all ye who enter here. Like we have an unlimited budget to destroy your company if you ever try to cooperate or compete with us, which is why venture capitalists call all the adjacent lines of business to all the major platforms the zone, because you can't compete in those zones, right? And so- Just like a Jeff Bezos turret, like alerts and just- Yeah, that's right. They just, they're like, buy them out, boys, like that Simpsons line, right?

You know, so this is the shape of this market. And so again, getting back to the thesis of this book, that like giving creators more copyright as against this market structure problem is of no use. Yeah. And it doesn't matter whether the market is being structured by entertainment companies or tech companies because they're not especially evil or especially virtuous. You know, it is true that like the Napster era, one of its beneficial effects was that there was suddenly a competitor to the big three labels, the big seven or eight labels back then. And so they started to offer better terms. The royalties got higher. Everything got better for musicians.

But eventually there was a consolidation on the tech side too. So you have YouTube, which is a major music platform, that gives a terrible deal to musicians. Then you have its major competitor, Spotify. Spotify, as I mentioned before, is significantly owned by the big three labels, Warner Universal and Sony. They wouldn't license their catalog to Spotify unless Spotify gave them equity stakes. So now they're in this conflict of interest, right? Because on the one hand, if they earn a dollar in royalties because they're charging for streams, that's a dollar they have to

share with the artist. If they earn a dollar as a dividend because they're shareholders, that's a dollar they get to distribute as they see fit, right? Every dollar they take as a royalty is a dollar that is not available for a dividend. And it's also a barrier to the cost structure of the firm

that is, after all, steaming towards an IPO, which will make those pre-IPO shares they have blow up into billions of dollars, right? And so they negotiate these rock-bottom deals for the streams. Now, they also negotiate a monthly minimum payment, a guarantee, which is unattributable royalties, which they get to distribute as they choose. They can give a performer a giant teddy bear and make the whole arrangement seem really good.

They can spend it for development, which turns out to be hiring a bunch of their buddies. They can give it to their shareholders. They can put it for development, which turns out to be hiring a bunch of their buddies. They can give it to their shareholders. They can put it in their mattress, whatever they want to do, right? And they have most favored nation. So if you're in the 30% of labels or independent artists who aren't owned by Sony, Universal, and Warner, the ceiling on your earnings has been set by those three companies. But you don't get free advertising. You don't get minimum monthlies. And you don't have an equity stake in the company.

Wow. And then we get to this point where they're about to have their IPO. And if you're like a neoclassical economist who likes building models, who thinks of the whole like economic world as like a perfectly spherical cow of uniform density on a frictionless plane,

you know, this is the moment where you go, okay, well, the IPO is coming up. The deal is about to expire. They have to negotiate a new deal before the IPO. Spotify has to negotiate a new deal with – With all their labels. Okay. Right.

So this is – Who currently have equity stakes. Three of whom – yeah, the three biggest have equity stakes. So you think that if you're the big three, this is the moment at which you're like, all right, we want a lot more per stream. Like so much that basically you would have to fail or you're at the brink of failure because otherwise you can't have your IPO. Like we have you over a barrel. But remember, they're stakeholders, right? They're shareholders. And so they negotiate a lower rate on the eve of the IPO, which is then forced on the 30% of artists who are not signed to them. So you have longer copyrights, right? These copyrights last

for 90 years. That's effectively forever. There's no one who listens to 91-year-old recordings except for a few weirdos with, you know, shellac discs and, you know, wax cylinders out there. So you have an effectively perpetual copyright. You have 70% of the catalog. They didn't invest in that catalog.

They just bought out other companies because there was no merger scrutiny because we put antitrust in a coma for 40 years, right? And so they have this stuff that they bought. They didn't make it. And so they have this stuff that they bought, they didn't make it, and they are able to use that to structure the whole future of the industry in such a way that it is detrimental to artists and accrues advantage to shareholders, right?

And this tells you that it's not just that giving longer copyrights to artists that they immediately surrender to intermediaries is is not good at getting the money it's actually bad at getting the money yeah that you end up handing these durable advantages to the intermediaries that are stealing from them it really is as you say if you oh we want to help artists okay let's give the artists some kind of benefits some kind of legal protection etc well if the market power of the person that the artist is selling to or the organization that is the company is so massive that they have to sell it away,

then it's no protection to begin with. And, you know, so there are rights that work. And so we're getting now maybe into the second half of the book and the solutions. Yeah, let's take a quick break and then we'll get into that. We'll be right back with more Cory Doctorow. And then we'll get into that. We'll be right back with more Cory Doctorow.

Okay, we're back with Cory Doctorow. Let me just ask really quickly, how the hell do you rattle all this stuff? I thought I could rattle off stats and facts and figures and things that I learned and connect them. But how are you able to, 30% of the blah, blah, blah, blah. I've been in the copyright wars for 20 years. Yeah. Right? And also, I've been in the copyright wars for 20 years, right? And also, I've been touring this book since last September.

Of course, you just wrote the book. So it just becomes rote, right? And also, you know, I'm an activist, so my mouth runs ahead of my brain sometimes. And I co-wrote this with a brilliant lawyer, Rebecca Giblin, who's at the University of Melbourne, who's done all kinds of great empirical work on this. She runs a thing called the Author's Interest Project. And I have often in my activist career worked with lawyers because we make a good team, right? Like we're always sort of checking each other. And so she would kick me under the table every time I'd forget that the mandatory termination right was originally 25 years and

not 20, right? She would hear my mistake coming up and I'd see her winding up for the kick and I'd be like, oh yeah, right. So we got good at it. We got good at polishing each other's rhetoric, making sure each other were bang on accurate. And that's a great combination. Rebecca was an incredible co-author. She's the lead author on this book and her work is important. And it's an incredible book. But I want to ask about this second word, capitalism, before we get into the solutions. Because something that struck me as I was doing my own research for the video

is how much when you look at this, you say, well, maybe some of the tenets that I learned about capitalism in school when I was in 10th grade or whatever, some of them seem to actually be true, that you need competition. That's the capitalist maxim, and I don't call myself a capitalist,

but I look at this and I'm like, well, it sure seems true that competition is necessary, and yet, when you look at every single case study in this book or any other book, you see that capitalism breeds a lack of competition. It seems to lead directly to this monopoly, which almost makes me sound like I'm, I've not read Marx thoroughly, but it sounds like the sort of thing that Marx would say that there's an inherent contradiction in the soul of capitalism

where it relies on competition in order to be successful. Because let's be clear, when you have a choke point like this, it's bad for capitalism. It's bad for the economy. It's bad for other businesses. It's bad for other businesses. It's only good for a couple of people, which makes the whole system work less well. And yet the system itself seems to lead to this type of concentration because we see it in almost every market under the sun. Well, so Marx coined the term capitalism, right? Okay. So he was an authority on it.

If you read the Communist Manifesto, second chapter of it is just like all the amazing things that capitalism can do. And then he attends to its problems. Just as a sidebar, China Mayville wrote an incredible book from Haymarket that is called A Specter Haunting, which is his modern take on the Communist Manifesto. So that's neither here nor there. But it's a great book if you want to know more about it. I read the Communist Manifesto sophomore year of college. You know what? I should dive back in. Read what China has to write about it

because he's really trying to synthesize 300 years of commentary and critique of the Manifesto. It's great. So it's true that capitalists themselves don't like capitalism very much, right? And one of the things that the state has always done is intervened as the kind of referee

to save capitalists from themselves. And so today, we've kind of abandoned that doctrine. I think you talked about Robert Bork in your video. Is that right? So, you know, Bork, he had this idea, not just that the way that we did competition law was wrong and like we should have different laws. He actually had this, what amounts to a conspiracy theory that we were reading the laws wrong, right? That the Sherman Act from 1890 and the Clayton Act and the FTC Act, that all of these laws, Wright-Patman, that their legislative intent was to preserve monopolies except where they were harmful to consumers. This is very clearly not the case. This is a bananas thing to assert. But it worked. I mean, he convinced the entire legal

profession that this is what the laws meant. This is how they should be interpreted. And the judges have done that ever since. And that's why when, you know, the Justice Department is unable to block the AT&T-Time Warner merger, it's based on Bork's reasoning. Yeah, yeah. And so 40% of the federal judiciary at one point had attended these man seminars in Florida. I think you talked about those, these junketsets where you were just schooled in this theory. So that's how we got here.

And it's how we get, you know, the cuddly billionaire Warren Buffett, you know, with his rock hard persistent erection over sustainable moats around the businesses that he invests in. You know, Peter Thiel out there saying, you know, competition is for losers. He said that directly, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, the doctrine of the self-described kind of super genius capitalist is that competition just makes me waste my time attending to what lesser people have to say. And that is what the robber barons of the early 20th, late 19th century said as well. They were, capitalism is, sorry, competition is inefficient and it's wasteful. And like, look at how efficient it would be if I just run all the railroads myself, I can schedule them so efficiently, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. And you know, so no matter whether you're a skeptic of capitalism or whether you're its biggest stand, you should want competition. Like if I'm a, I am also a skeptic of, of capitalism, Adam, you and I, and, uh, you know, I think that, um, one of the things that a lack of competition does is it, uh, you and I. And, you know, I think that one of the things

that a lack of competition does is it means that all the people who hate workers don't have to fight each other and they can just fight workers, right? And so like one of the things that competition does is it opens space for workers to fight back because it prevents the capital class from unifying behind a single set of firms.

They're always trying to seek advantage over one another. And it creates, it sows division that allows worker power to push back. And so that's the reason I want competition. But you know what, if you're like sitting there with your copy of Atlas Shrugged with the pages all stuck together, you should still want competition.

You know, like you were on the same side on this one, right? So we won't dwell on why the pages are stuck together. Just keep going. You dropped them in the bathtub while you were making pancakes in it or something. Okay, that's much more wholesome than what I was thinking. Didn't everyone mix their pancake batter in the bath? Anyway, so, you know, the thing about copyrights and about rights for creators and rights for workers is that they do sometimes work. And one of the things we go through the book on is some case studies of times when it's worked. And oftentimes those are collective rights that don't belong to one creator but belong to all creators.

So, for example, once you've recorded any song, anyone else can record it. Every musician has the collective right to record every other musician's music. And that's because since time immemorial, musicians have performed each other's music. And, you know, that's part of like a current in music that especially has come back in the last 20 years of an understanding that music is a collective endeavor, right, that, you know, Brahms's ninth was,

or Brahms's first was Beethoven's 10th, right? Like he was basically a Beethoven tribute act, right? And that, you know, jazz solos where you're blowing a horn and you drop in a couple of bars of someone else's song, that's not like a copyright violation. It's just part of how music is made, right? And so we've had this in that kind of creative commons. Everything is a remix stuff.

But we still have mostly focused on giving creators individual rights. Now, we have this collective right to record any song. It turns out to be really good even for powerful individuals. So Taylor Swift, you will know, her bad ex-boyfriend and his private equity weirdo friends own her masters and were rubbing their hands together and thinking about how they could kind of keep her in indenture for the rest of her career. She switched to Universal. She was able to record new versions of her song, not because she owned the rights,

but because she didn't. Because everyone has the right to record a Taylor Swift cover, including Taylor Swift. Wow. Right? So this is a collective right. I didn't realize that that was

what that right was based on. I assumed it was her songwriting right or something like that. No, she has, well, that's right. So the publishing rights are owned, right? But she has the right to record anything and pay money to the composer or whoever the composer's,

whoever holds the composer's copyrights. She doesn't hold the publishing rights. I don't know if she holds the publishing rights or not, but it doesn't matter. Whether or not, she can make new master recordings. She can make new masters, right? Sid Vicious didn't have to get Paul Anka's permission to record My Way, right?

You could record My Way, I can record My Way. Everyone can record My Way because this is a collectively held right. Now with samples, and this is one of the stories we tell in the book, with samples, originally people just assumed that there was no copyright clearance necessary, that it was like doing a couple of bars in your solo, not like, say, licensing a song for sync rights to put in your YouTube video, say. And you had albums like It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back by Public Enemy, Paul's Boutique by the Beastie Boys, the most successful albums of their day. If they'd had to clear those samples, they would have had to charge $150 per copy to turn a profit on them.

So then we create a proprietary right in sampling. And that proprietary right, originally there's this brief moment where a few heritage acts that had gotten a very bad deal get some money from it. But immediately the labels say, you're going to have to license samples in order to use them. We are not going to license to you unless you're signed to one of the big three labels. And when you do sign to the big three labels, you have to sign away your sampling rights. So they immediately get a stranglehold on sampling. So, you know, Tugoy the Dove just died from De La Soul, this incredibly important hip hop band. None of their music is available for streaming. The first album is going up for streaming in March. They didn't live long enough to hear it because they could never clear

their samples. Now, we could have done a whole bunch of things with samples. We could have said, it is not a copyrightable subject matter. It's not a copy. It's not a use subject to licensing. Go ahead and do it. If we didn't like that, if we wanted to make sure that people got paid, we could have created collective licensing. Right. We could have we did the same thing we do with everything, which is we created an exclusive right, we gave it to the creator, and we pretended that the creator was an entrepreneur of the portfolio, right? You are like, even though we've abandoned the idea that creators create on their own, we say they go to market on their own, that they are like a 1099 independent contractor, small business person, bargaining with another business, B2B, you and Sony Music, doing the deal, just like another business, B2B, you and Sony Music, doing the deal, just like Uber drivers are supposed to be doing individual deals as small businesses with everyone else. This is the kind of rise and grind, you know, everyone should be an

LLC mindset. And of course, when you have a tiny little business and a great big giant business, and the tiny little business tries to bargain, they lose. And so De La Soul lost, right? So there are lots of ways that we can think about rights for creators that don't fall into this trap of rise and grind, LLC, everyone's a corporation, you know, Neil Stevenson dystopia. And so I assume this is one of your solutions is that if we were able to enshrine into law a couple more collective rights. A collective license. Yeah.

We have some other things too, like, you know, if you have a royalty bearing contract, because you write or you make games or you make podcasts or music or whatever, you typically have the right to audit your studio or your label or your publisher. It's really easy to cheat on royalty statements. And when you do, and we cite a company here in LA that has done tens of thousands of audits over 30 years of record contracts, you will often find a discrepancy. And for reasons that I cannot possibly begin to explain, in every instance except one, those discrepancies favored the label and not the artist. That's a funny calculator that always does the math wrong, but only in one direction. Yeah, I think it's a really vexing localized probability storm that makes it very hard for

the CPAs at the labels, right? And so when you find that discrepancy, and we talked to one person off the books, off the record rather, who had a six-figure discrepancy in his favor that he discovered this way. When you discover these discrepancies and you go, I'd like my money now that you stole from me, they say, you artists are adorable, but you really can't do math. We don't owe you any money. But because we don't owe you any money, but because we don't want any bad blood, we'll give you a settlement, a share of what you think you're owed. All you have to do is sign this non-disclosure agreement. Can't tell anyone else where we hid the money we stole from them. And your accountant has to promise that they'll never audit us again. This is like the accused murderer being like, hey, forensics team, dig anywhere you

like in my back garden. Just not that one corner. I'm very sentimental about it. This is something that our union, the Writers Guild, does constantly with the studios and the networks is auditing the residuals and literally, it was in the news, there was a big the Guild got back

$40 million or so that Netflix was underpaying screenwriting residuals. And they were just like, no, it's 1%, not 2%. And they had to go, we had to go get the money. But the thing is, that's a powerful union that represents 10,000 writers. And we tell the story of the Writers Guild and their 22-month strike as an example of one of the most powerful. I belong to the Animators Guild.

They're less powerful. The agency. The agent strike. Yeah. We talked to David Goodman about that and he's great. And we should talk about that too. But to put a button on this royalty stuff, all of these contracts are settled in four states, Washington, California, New York, and Tennessee because Nashville, right?

That's the nature of monopoly. Contract law is state law. State law is easier to amend than federal law regulation. So contract law is state law. State law is easier to amend than federal law regulation. If we amend state contract codes to say that as a matter of public policy, non-disclosures can't be enforced where they pertain to material misstatements or omissions in royalty statements that were down to the detriment of creative workers, at the stroke of a pen, you put more money in the pockets of more artists than 40 years of copyright term extension combined. Wow. put more money in the pockets of more artists than 40 years of copyright term extension combined. Right. If copyright extension is the right to be angry at your audience for reading your books the wrong way, this is the right to put braces on your kid's teeth, a roof over their head and, and, you know, groceries on the table. Right. This is like, you know, back to Marx, this is

materialism, right? This is about making material changes in the distributional outcomes of the artistic markets so that the pie, the share of the pie that goes to artists is bigger. And, you know, Robert Bork, one of the pieces of his doctrine is that we shouldn't measure who gets what share of the pie. All we should care about is that the pie gets bigger, which is an insane thing to think. Okay, but let's get back to power, though, because, okay, let's say I love your, this is sort of a technical law-based

uh intervention right and i love interventions like that you make a little tweak no one no one else really knows about it you tweak it and you create a legal mechanism by which a lot of creators can get more money back so say i um try to go advance this in uh the california state legislature which is an incredibly dysfunctional and, you know, corrupt in many ways, as many state houses are. But I try to get it through. I get some of the creative unions together or whatever. I, you know, I get musicians on my side and I start to advance it.

And then hold on a second. The legal departments at Disney. I know, sure. They get very angry. They get very angry and they go call their favorite legislators and they kick my fucking ass, right? No, no, no. So you've got it backwards. So this is more like,

what happens when Ticketmaster screws Taylor Swift and it's in the State of the Union address and people say something must be done, right? Then you want to have the shovel-ready idea right there because the reality is that we are, they're going to lurch from crisis to crisis forever i mean do you remember disney must pay pay the writer the alan dean foster thing so our friends down the road here at the buena vista studio uh they had bought lucasfilm uh lucasfilm

had made a very important movie called star wars and when they were making star wars before they'd done all of the principal photography they asked a writer named Alan Dean Foster to write a novelization. And it was so good that they changed the movie to match it. And that novelization has sold lots and lots of copies. Alan Dean Foster has done lots of work for Lucas and for Sony and Fox. And he's now a sick old man. His wife is sick. And Disney took the position that when they bought Lucas, they bought its assets and not its liabilities. And they stopped paying him royalties. bought Lucas, they bought its assets and not its liabilities. And they stopped paying him royalties. They said, we bought the right to publish your book but not the obligation to pay you for it.

Wow. Which is a bananas thing to say. That's crazy. Right? And it became a huge scandal. And they wouldn't talk to him without a nondisclosure. And he refused to talk to them. And so their position was, oh, we'll talk to Alan Dean Foster whenever he wants. Yeah, sure, so long as he can't

tell anyone what you say, right? This is that moment. If we had had this proposal kind of in the ether then, and you had the creator guilds, and you had state lawmakers, you have federal lawmakers, you have people, you know, the whole fan community up in arms about this guy just getting robbed, that would have been a moment where we could have said, what we demand, if the, say the state AG investigates Disney, and they enter into a settlement with them, which they will always do because they never want to go to trial. They never want to litigate. They want to spend 15 years in court. When they offer them a settlement, that settlement shouldn't be a cash settlement.

It should be a binding covenant never to use a nondisclosure in settlements related to royalties. That's the kind of thing where you've got them between a rock and a hard place. What we need are well-developed proposals for the crises, right? Like, I know this makes me sound paranoid. The Patriot Act is like 400 pages long. And it was introduced like two weeks after 9-11. I don't think anyone wrote that in two weeks, right? People had their wishlist ready.

I think there was a wishlist. I think someone had said, someday I'm charged with the safety and wellbeing of my fellow Americans. Someday millions of them will be in enormous distress and that will be the moment at which I can cram through my evil agenda, right? I think that's actually like a much scarier conspiracy

than anything in loose change, right? That like there are people out there sort of, you know, authoritarians out there, like just writing these like furious, like crazy overreaching laws against the day. Like that's how they prepare for disaster. They don't prepare for disaster by like, where are we going to stockpile the water and the bandages? They're like, what laws can we cram through when the crisis arises, right? How much, how much can we enshrine Bitcoin as a legal currency the next time something really bad happens, right? So I think that this is our version, right? This is the progressive shock doctrine that we prepare these ideas, we socialize these ideas, we make

them part of our discourse, we explain how they would make material changes in the distribution of the creative economy and in other economies. And then when the crisis arises, when there is an outrage, when there's something that can't go on forever so it eventually stops, that's when we are prepared to all go in. And because we all understand it, it's not a new idea at that point. It's a thing that we've been talking about for a long time. Know that this is unsatisfying. It doesn't look like a novel plot. And as a novelist, I'm keenly aware of how you write a novel.

I want to go break up Ticketmaster. That's what I want to do. It took 69 years to break up AT&T. We should totally break up Ticketmaster. But while we're trying, we should have a bunch of things that we can do today to help the performers, the club owners, and so on. I see the FTC going, hey, we're going to end the use of non-compete agreements in hiring. And I'm like, is that a big deal? But it sounds like you're saying that kind of thing can be a big deal.

It is a big deal. So that big deal is prompted by a bunch of crises in the labor market, the great resignation, all this other stuff. People are saying something must be done. Well, here's Lena Kahn, who is like a genius and a titan and an amazing person that we should all be thankful for who says, hey, you know, I've been reading this thing called the FTC Act, and it turns out Section 5 gives me broad authority to do rulemaking to prohibit any deceptive or anti-competitive or unfair conduct, right? Which, like, no one's used Section 5 in 40 years. It's right there. It's right there. It's like the fifth thing down. That's why it's Section 5.

You know what? This is an unfair practice, right? Making the cashier at the Wendy's stay at Wendy's and not go to Burger King and get 25 cents an hour more because the majority of non-competes are low-waged workers, many in the food service industry. That's indenture, right? And the idea that they're going to steal the trade secrets of the Wendy's cash register when they go to Burger King. Yeah. And it turns Wendy into a monopsony.

If you can't go work for any competitor, then there's only one person you can work for. They can pay you less. And then it's Hotel California, right? Workers check in, but they can't check out. Right? And so this is the kind of thing that the FTC has brought authority to do. It's the kind of thing that AGs have brought authority to do.

And then it's also the thing that DOJ, AGs and and FTC have brought authority to do as part of settlements, because a lot of these cases never go to trial or the trial never goes to judgment. Instead, the firm says, we don't want to spend 20 years in court. How about we just settle with you? Right. And and, you know, I want to like like, defend, like, long court trials. Like, they're worth doing, too. You know, Microsoft got off the hook, right, after a seven-year thing. But the deposition of Bill Gates, which, if you've never seen it, is a banger. It was, like, the first viral video.

It went viral on VHS cassette. Wow. And it's just Bill Gates in full glory as this, mean, petty, thin-skinned, like long before the cardigans, right? Like this is Bill Gates and like a fully operational battle station, Bill Gates. And he comes off so badly and was so personally humiliated by it that when Google came along, they didn't do to Google what they did to Netscape because no one wanted to see Bill deposed again. And like in 2019, he told Kara Swisher when she said, why didn't you buy Android? He said, oh, we were so distracted by the antitrust stuff. The Android sale was eight years after the antitrust stuff ended.

It stopped Microsoft's sort of monopolistic tendencies. Even though they won the case and were not broken up, it chastened them. The process is the punishment, right? AT&T wriggled off the hook after 12 years, but they understood that one thing the DOJ really didn't like,

oh, and it's hard to overstate like just how crazy the AT&T or that IBM case was. Did I say AT&T before? You did. So IBM got off the hook after 12 years. They called it

antitrust Vietnam because the IBM outspent the entire Department of Justice antitrust division on outside counsel every year for 12 consecutive years. And then eventually got off the hook. But the one thing they knew was that the DOJ really didn't like tying software to hardware and they didn't like commanding your whole hardware supply chain. So when they built a PC, they built it out of commodity components. They didn't go after Tom Jennings, who lives around here, who's the guy who reverse engineered the ROM and made the clone ROM for Phoenix that Phoenix then sold to Gateway and Dell and Compaq. And they didn't make their own operating system.

They hired Bill Gates and Paul Allen to take someone else's operating system, put their name on it, and sell it to them. And it created a decentralized ecosystem of the IBM compatible. That's right. And so that's how we got all this kind of innovation and all this consumer benefit. And sell it to them. And it created a decentralized ecosystem of the IBM compatible. That's right. And so that's how we got all this kind of innovation and all this consumer benefit. And so it's okay to do long antitrust. But we have to have something in between.

So is there a way to – let's go back to talking about the internet. Because I remember when Twitter first got started around 2007, 2008, it felt like an open time on the internet. Everyone was talking about APIs, and there's going to be different software that plugs into different, oh, you can make a bot, and you can make like a, remember when like map mashups were like a big thing? Where it was like, I got Google Maps, I'm going to plug in data I got from somewhere else.

And there was like a whole thing on the internet about this. And that was like the culture. It was the culture of the internet. Twitter was building their site for interoperability. And so were most of the other ones, you know, in large ways you could see. And, you know, fast forward to, you know, barely a decade later, and they're all doing the opposite. And in fact, they're trying to create choke points like you describe here. Twitter's only, you's only less successful than the others because they failed to do it in many ways. Yeah. So how, I can ask about how do we change the culture? How do we enforce these things more? Except that we did enforce antitrust with great success against Microsoft. We did have a culture

of openness in technology, and it all collapsed because of the overwhelming power of monopolists who wanted to grow bigger and the fact that they wanted to create choke points. So how do we stop this from happening again even after we unwind this latest batch? So there's a story about Gen Xers like you and me who got on the internet early.

Don't call me. Are you a millennial? I don't believe in these things, but yes, technically I'm a millennial. Okay. Elder millennials and younger Gen Xers who got on the internet early. There's this story about us, which is that we saw the power of the internet to connect everyone. And we completely failed to appreciate the power of the internet to harm people. And that we just sort of blithely pushed on with this kind of universal connection mandate. And I think that that's not true.

Like nobody starts the Electronic Frontier Foundation because they think everything is going to be fine. And they just want a front row seat. Like people are very alive to the potential harms of surveillance and control and so on. But I think what we all missed collectively was that antitrust had been shot in the guts and it was bleeding out. Because like for me, I was born in 1971. And so we got our first Apple II Plus in 1979. It was part of a foment that was possible because of what had been done to IBM during that 12-year period. They were in year eight of their antitrust enforcement.

Then a couple of years later, we got a modem and there were BBSs everywhere because AT&T had just been broken up and they couldn't block modems anymore. And then along came the PC and suddenly there were PC clones everywhere and computers were cheaper than they'd ever been. They had all kinds of crazy, amazing new features. And then like Microsoft became super dominant, but they got smacked down and we got Google. And I think we can be forgiven for failing to understand that these were like vestigial actions, right? That this was like, this were like the last people at the DOJ who cared about this stuff using the last of their political capital. It's hard to know where you are in history.

Like there's so many, there's so many stories I've done where it's like, we thought it always was this way, but we were living in a blip. Yeah. Or we thought that this thing in the past was how it was always going to be, but that was the blip. And this is the default reality. It's hard to know.

Like democracy, maybe, right? Yeah, exactly. This is the thing that a lot of us are worried about. So, you know, I think that the causal links between that led to this monopolization, they're not hard to identify, right? Like we used to put down rat poison. We didn't have rats. We stopped putting down rat poison. And a bunch of apologists are like, you know, the great forces of history bore down upon this moment to create a plague of

rats. It had nothing to do with us no longer putting out rat poison. Right. And so that, you know, like, what do we do? Well, you know, we, we passed the digital name copyright act in 1998 and made it a crime to reverse engineer tools to make interoperable ones. Right. Do you remember, like, I was... Which is how... Which is what the guy did to IBM PCs. That's what IBM... That became illegal.

I was a CIO in 2000, like, working for little SMEs, little small companies, like, wiring up their offices for networks and getting their PCs together and their Macs and stuff. And we had this problem that, like, most of the network would be PCs.

There'd be a couple of Macs. It'd be, like, a designer or maybe the CEO had a PowerBook. And the tool that they used to connect to each other was Microsoft Office. And there was Microsoft Office for the Mac, but it was like the most cursed piece of software Microsoft ever made.

You just waved the install floppy around a computer and all the files on it would be immediately corrupted. And, you know, we like, the way we dealt with that is like, first we gave the designer a PC to sit next to their Mac that they would use to talk to all of their colleagues. And that became so unwieldy that we put a big graphics card in the PC, threw away the Mac, and got, you know, Adobe and Quark for the PC. Steve Jobs saw that that was happening.

He understood. He didn't ask Bill Gates nicely to make a better version of Office. He got some of his technical staff to reverse engineer the Office file formats, and they made the iWork suite, pages, numbers, and keynote, which read and write all of those file formats perfectly. Now, if you did that to iOS today and made your own runtime for iOS that could run all of the iOS apps and play back all the media that you bought from Apple's verticals, they would reduce you to radioactive rubble. They'd say you reverse engineering, which is a DMCA violation. You violated terms of service, which is a CFAA violation. It was tortious interference

with contract. You violated their trade secrets. Maybe you hired one of their engineers. They've also created incredible technical barriers to doing anything like that. I mean, you know,

everything on Apple devices is so incredibly locked down to like retina scans that like it's all encrypted. But even if you could bypass it, because I think they want you to think that this is impossible to bypass. And there's definitely some real technical challenges.

But I think the major challenge, the thing that keeps them from doing it, is the legal challenge. Yeah. And the same is true for plugging in an overlay to Facebook that just shows you the stuff from your friends. There was an Instagram thing like this, the OG app, that it threw up a WebKit browser,

which is the inbuilt browser on iOS. Every browser on iOS is Safari with a different skin, because they won't let you put a different browser engine on. So it pops up the WebKit browser, tries to log in Instagram. Instagram, of course, queries you for your login and password. You type that in. It barfs up

a session key. They steal the session key, put it in the app, and then they go to Instagram. They get all the waiting messages for you, throw away the ads, throw away everything from anyone you don't follow, and put the rest in reverse chronological order. Apple kicked them out of the app store in less than 12 hours. They said that section 522 of their developer agreement prohibits violating any other firm's terms of service. Google kicked them out too. So they're just gone. They basically don't exist. I don't know what they're doing now. I'm sure they're trying to pivot.

But, you know, as a technical matter, we can do all kinds of things to these platforms. They want us to think that they can win the guerrilla war. The reality is that when it comes to interoperability, these companies really don't want to fight guerrilla wars because there's an attacker's advantage, right? For them to stop you from making an interoperable product, they have to make no mistakes. For you to make an interoperable product, they have to make no mistakes.

For you to make an interoperable product, you have to find one error and slide in. And so what they would much rather do, you know, if you think about what they did to OG App or what Facebook did to another thing called Power Ventures or what Apple did to Cydia or the other third-party app stores at the run times,

like, you're Tim Cook and you walk out of your office there in Cupertino, and on the left there's a building full of engineers, and on the right there's a building full of lawyers. You don't go into the building full of engineers and say, stop these guys. You go into the building full of lawyers and you say, make an example out of them. Because if your engineers are engaged in guerrilla warfare, it presents this kind of unquantifiable risk.

You never know when there's like a lurking defect that one of your rivals is going to exploit to open up your platform. Your technical staff have better things to do. And if it turns out that like something works that you didn't plan for, like something works that wasn't like on the roadmap and your quarterly earnings don't meet street expectations, well, we saw what happened to Facebook first quarter last year, $280 billion lopped off their share price in one day. And who holds most of those stocks? Like whose portfolios are most heavily weighted towards Facebook? Facebook executives and program managers who make the decision to block interoperability. So if you want to hit them where it hurts, you give them the choice between playing nice and

guerrilla warfare. Or actually, I've got another book that Verso's coming out with in September called The Internet Con, How to Seize the Means of Computation. You're the most productive guy I've ever met. I write when I'm anxious. I have seven books in production. So, yeah. That's the secret. That's the secret. Yeah, just channel your anxiety.

Don't go to therapy. Just start writing. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, exactly. So, yeah. So this is a way to make – to structure a remedy. We've got a chapter on this too, Radical Interoperability. remedy. We've got a chapter on this too, radical interoperability, how to structure a remedy so that the firms want to make interoperable interfaces because the alternative is that

they have to fight guerrilla war with new market entrants who've got nothing to lose and everything to gain. And so that's a powerful idea. And what it does is it unleashes the people of goodwill, right? The people who want to make things better for their users. And it pits them against the people who just want to do maximum extraction. And it does so in a way that is regulatable because you can say, rather than right now, like whenever Facebook blocks an interoperator, so there's a thing out of NYU engineering school called Ad Observer. So they, in their settlement after the 2016 elections, they said, we're not going to allow paid disinformation anymore, paid political disinformation. And so you're not allowed to buy a political ad if it's got disinformation. And I think they just relaxed that policy. But this was part of their settlement.

And so they had their own ad trovery who go and inspect the ads, and it was really incomplete. So Ad Observer, the NYU engineering school, made a browser plugin that you could voluntarily install that would take every ad that you were shown and upload it to a repository called the Ad Observatory. And Facebook blocked it and threatened to sue them because they said it would potentially violate user privacy. So it's very funny to have Facebook electing themselves, you know, the Lord High Executioners for user privacy. You know, the Lord High Executioners for user privacy. But, you know, the question is, like, if Facebook shouldn't be the ones who make the determination about when someone who's doing scraping or something else violates user policy or user privacy, who should it be? It should be a federal privacy law.

And that federal privacy law could bind Facebook and interoperators. And so rather than just saying, like, Facebook, you've got – it's your call. Or even Apple. You know, Apple talks a big game about privacy. They gave you that one click so you could block Facebook tracking. 96% of users click that one trick. It's so much for like Facebook and like people don't mind ads. They like targeted ads, whatever, you know, 96%, presumably the other 4% were confused or work for Facebook, right? But Apple secretly was gathering all the same data as Facebook, even if you opted out and using it for their own ad targeting. So you can't leave these companies in charge.

It's fine for them to set the floor under which privacy abuses can happen, but they can't set the ceiling. And so there's a means by which we could open up these platforms for new kinds of creators, creators who could leave the platform, keep reaching their audience, using interoperability, have a single publish once, reach everywhere. There's a thing from the indie web movement called post-owned site share everywhere, Posse, where it's what I do with my pluralistic newsletter, where you've got your own permanent link, adamconover.com, but everything you post just automatically sort of flows out to all the different platforms. You could do that with third-party tools, scraping, autopilot, all this other stuff. And then if it turned out that your tool was like doing something shady, like gathering invasive information about everyone who watched a video, then the Federal Trade Commission could come after you or the Attorney General, because we could have a law, a privacy

law, rather than saying to Facebook, if you prohibit something in your terms of service, then it's prohibited. Otherwise, it's fine. And if you carve out something for yourself, Apple, then it's fine too. Do you feel like any optimism that we're going to move towards this? Because, again, we are seeing the changes at the FTC, at the DOJ. We'll see how durable those are the next time we have an election. But we are sort of – both parties ripped into Ticketmaster because they've made themselves no friends anywhere. Is the culture politically changing enough

that we can actually put some of this in place? There are some very good signs. It's not just the US. So Canada's got one of the worst competition laws in the world, and they've just opened hearings into revising it because it's so bad. The UK Competition and Markets Authority has this huge digital markets unit, 70 full-time engineers.

The Chinese cyberspace regulation is full of competition stuff. One of the things you hear from Facebook apologists like Nick Clegg, who used to be the deputy prime minister of the UK, sold us all out and then went to work for Facebook of of 4 million a year to sell Facebook to other governments. He says, if we don't keep Facebook intact, European cyberspace will be owned by the Chinese because they have these national champions. And China doesn't think that its tech companies are working for China, right? And no more than Facebook is working for America. Facebook is working for Facebook. The European Union has got the New Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act,

these very far-reaching tech regulations that include interoperability mandates. So there's a current all over the world. And you use the word optimism. I hate the word optimism because it's just fatalism. Optimism is the idea that things get better and pessimism is the idea that things get worse. But both of them presume that nothing we do matters. Right. And instead, I brief for hope, which is the idea that even if you don't know how to get from A to Z, because life's not a novel. When I write a novel, I know how to get from A to Z. In real life, I don't know how to get from A to Z.

All I need to do is materially improve my circumstances in some way. All I need to do is materially improve my circumstances in some way. And after I do that, I might be able to see some other course of action that will allow me to materially improve my circumstances even further. And the fact that the terrain can't be mapped because it's too complicated doesn't mean that there's no route through it. It just means that we are better served by following a heuristic that goes towards the world we want than by assuring ourselves beforehand that we're taking the shortest path. I don't care which path we take. I don't care if we have to double back sometimes. I just want us always to be moving towards that goal of a more pluralistic, more humane world that's sustainable, where artists get their fair share, where audiences and artists understand that they're class allies, where firms are tamed. Because you know what? The people who go to work for

big entertainment companies, they don't hate creators, right? And they're in the same bind as us. If you work in publishing, there's five companies that can give you a job. You don't think that suppresses wages and lowers working conditions? If you work in music, there's three labels that can give you a job, right?

If you work in mobile platforms, there's two companies that can give you a job. If you want to serve eBooks, there's one company of any size that can give you a job. That acts on them too. We are class allies with those workers, not with their bosses, but with those workers. And so I want that world. I want that world where like those companies are cut down to size, do what they should do.

There's nothing wrong with intermediaries. You shouldn't have to be your own video server, right? It's fine. When I was a kid growing up in Toronto, we had this author, Crad Calodny, who was this like character. He would publish his own books, bind them himself, stand on a street corner with a sign around his neck that said, very famous Canadian author, buy my books. He also had a sign that just said, Margaret Atwood, which was very funny. I love Crad. He was great. He wrote weird arts, outsider fiction. It was awesome. There are lots of people with things to say that I love Crad. He was great. He wrote weird arts outsider fiction. It was awesome. There are

lots of people with things to say that I want to read. You do not want to buy their own books. Yeah. They're not qualified. They're not going to stand on a frozen Toronto street corner after the bars get out. He used to secretly record his conversations with drunks and then sell the cassette tapes. Like, you know, there are lots of people that's not their jam. It's fine, right? I want there to be lots and lots of intermediaries who are helpmeets and who don't just get too big for their britches and think that the point of a publisher is the publisher and not the writers and the books, or the point of a bookstore is Jeff Bezos and not the books that they sell. I love what you say about just taking the steps that move us towards

that world on a daily basis. That's the way. I should stop asking this optimism question because I believe you don't need to have optimism to continue moving forward. I'm low all the time, right? Like, don't get me wrong, right? Like, it's crazy out there. And, you know, if you spend a lot of time with the news, it's hard not to feel scared and sad and whatever. And what I channel that into

is not fatalism, but hope, right? Like, what can I do that will make it a little bit better today so that maybe tomorrow I'll see something else? I don't know if we have,

I know we're short on time. Can I tell you one anecdote about my friend? Ada Palmer is this incredible person. She's a great science fiction writer. She's a librettist and a singer. She wrote an opera about the Icelandic mythos. She's a great science fiction writer. She's a librettist and a singer. She wrote an opera about the Icelandic mythos. She's just wild.

She's also a tenured professor of Renaissance history at the University of Chicago, where she studies Renaissance, Florence, and the Inquisitions, and specifically heterodox information, banned information, pornography, witchcraft, heresy, whatever. I like this person already.

She's amazing. And every year, she does a four-week-long LARP on campus where her undergraduates reenact the election of the Medici's pope. And she gives each of them the name and character and kind of background of a real cardinal or great family that's in the running. They spend four weeks horse trading, backstabbing, and then they go into this fake Gothic cathedral on campus at UChicago, and she's got an alert out for a Google alert for theater companies selling costumes, and she dresses them all up in Renaissance

drag, and then they elect the Pope. And every year of the final four in the running, two of them are the same people because there is the forces of history bearing down on that moment. There are important families that are always going to have a chance to get in the lead. And then there's two other people who have never been the same because there is always room for human agency.

Yeah. Right? We are not foreordained by history. We can maneuver. And, you know, to the extent that our maneuvers are constrained by this historically contingent moment, it's because of People with Disabilities under Copyright. And when we were writing it, it was run by this guy called James Love, who's like an old Naderite. And we were in Geneva, and we were in the basement of Medecins Sans Frontieres early on a Sunday morning before a plenary session of the World Intellectual Property Organization. We were all there for that meeting, all these different NGOs. And someone said to him, like, Jamie, what are we doing here?

How are we ever going to make a difference in the world when there's so much power arrayed against us? He said, you know, here we are in Geneva, right, just like a couple of kilometers from the Palais de Nations. And a few years ago, people no better than us met in a room within spitting distance of here and wrote the WTO treaties, right? They weren't smarter than us. They weren't better than us. And if they could do it, we could do it. And we never got the full access to knowledge agenda, but we got the Marrakesh treaty and it's huge. And it's got multiple signatories all over the world. And it is making big material differences in the way that people with disabilities access copyrighted works. Incredible. If we did that, we can do it again. Amen to that, Corey. Thank you so much for coming here. The book is called Chokepoint Capitalism.

For some reason, I almost forgot what it was. I was like, wait, we talk about it all day. The book is called Chokepoint Capitalism. Where else can people find your work? So I write a daily newsletter at pluralistic.net. It's mirrored on Twitter, Mastodon, Tumblr, Medium. There's an RSS feed. You can get it as a surveillance-free text-based newsletter. My books are available everywhere. Anywhere you buy books.

Cory Doctorow. I write science fiction novels, books for young people, a picture book for little kids. I've got a middle grades graphic novel about to come out. I also write nonfiction. So that's everywhere there are bookstores. And then I work for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, EFF.org.

And they're the kind of OG civil digital liberties organization that has been caring about your human rights online since 1992. They're incredible. They're great. Well, if you want to pick up one of Corey's books, you can head to factuallypod.com slash books. Corey, thank you so much for being here. It's been incredible. I really

enjoyed it. Well, thank you once again to Corey Doctorow for coming on the show. I know you loved that interview. If you want to pick up a copy of his book, you can get it at factuallypod.com slash books and when you do, you'll be supporting not just this show, but your local bookstore as

well. I want to thank our producer Sam R Roudman, our engineer, Kyle McGraw, and everybody who supports this show at the $15 a month level on Patreon. I'm going to read a couple names. We've got Yet Another Mike, we've got Pat, we've got Hayden Matthews, and we've got Smith... uh... Snickerdigable... Smith... Smindigable... You've got to put down a pronounceable name. Smindigadigable. If you want to join them, head to patreon.com slash adamconover

and put a name that you think would be fun for me to try to read on the show. And when you do, you'll be supporting this show, and I'll thank you for it. Once again, if you want to find my tour dates, head to adamconover.net. Please come see me live. I'd love to see you and give you a hug at the meet and greet after the show. And until next week, I'll see you next time on Factually. Thank you so much for listening.