Upstream - The Big Tech Con w/ Cory Doctorow

Episode Date: May 21, 2024

Every wonder why it feels like almost every single tech product you use is actively trying to screw you? Why it is that your printer requires you to subscribe to ink cartridges that, ounce for ounce, cost more than gold? Why you can’t read websites anymore because of all the moving, deceptive advertisements clogging up the screen? Why you’re paying substantially more for an entire suite of buggy streaming services than your parents ever were for cable TV? Why your BlueTooth enabled electric toothbrush keeps breaking? Why airplanes are falling apart mid-flight?  Well, it might not seem like it at first glance, but all of these phenomena are related. They have a single cause: deregulation. Specifically, deregulation driven by big tech monopolies that have found all sorts of creative and coercive ways to use the legal system to screw over not just their customers, but increasingly their employees, clients, vendors, advertisers—basically everybody but a handful of shareholders and C-suite decision-makers who are growing filthy rich off of our impoverishment and immiseration. In this conversation, we’re talking big tech—how we got where we are and how we can fix things—with Cory Doctorow. Cory is an activist, journalist, and author. His two latest books are the science fiction novel The Bezzle and the nonfiction book, which we’ill be talking about today, The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation, published by Verso. In this conversation we explore the history of trusts and anti-trust laws originating in the late 1800s, and we discuss how deregulation, copyright, digital locks, IP law, and monopoly-friendly legislation have all led to a process of enclosure in multiple tech industries—from the internet to airplanes—resulting in a landscape fully devoid of anything resembling the promise of technology that has been whispered into ours ears since the dawn of the digital age. Further resources: Cory Doctorow The Internet Con:How to Seize the Means of Computation, by Cory Doctorow The Bezzle, by Cory Doctorow Related episodes: Upstream: NFTs with Nathan Schneider and Cory Doctorow Intermission music by Embrace.  Episode artwork by Berwyn Mure. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com/upstreampodcast or please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at  upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

Ah The little cartridge that you get your ink on from HP or whoever, it's got a system on a chip in it that is like a full-fledged printer. It's got like a network stack in it. It's running Linux, you know, like it is a whole ass computer. And so that software is totally copyrightable. And so what that means is that if HP wants to lock you out of your printer and make sure that you have to use your printer in the way that benefits them and not you, they can use

these software locks and no one is allowed to unlock the locks except them. And so now you have these travesties like HP's new printers, you don't even own, you have to rent them every month, you have to give them a credit card number, because it's not your printer, it's theirs. And if your printer is not reachable over the internet for a certain number of days, they find you and extract charges from your credit card. They also are data mining the documents

you print to figure out how to target advertising to you and get other business intelligence about you. And you have to subscribe to ink. And so you have to pay for the ink in advance. And if you don't print enough pages, you still pay for the ink. And you can't use third-party ink cartridges. Right? So this is like the most abusive possible version of a printer. You are listening to Upstream. Upstream.

Upstream. Upstream. A podcast of documentaries and conversations that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. I'm Della Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond. Ever wonder why it feels like almost every single tech product you use is actively trying to screw you? Why it is that

your printer requires you to subscribe to ink cartridges that ounce for ounce cost more than gold? Why you can't read websites anymore because of all the moving deceptive advertisements clogging up the screen? Why you're paying substantially more for an entire suite of buggy streaming services than your parents ever did for cable TV? Why your Bluetooth-enabled electric toothbrush keeps breaking? Why airplanes are falling apart mid-flight? Well, it may not seem like it at first glance, but all of these phenomena are related. They all have a single cause.

Deregulation. Specifically, deregulation driven by big tech monopolies that have found all sorts of creative and coercive ways to use the legal system to screw over not just their customers, but increasingly their employees, clients, vendors, advertisers, basically everybody but a handful of shareholders and C-suite decision makers who are growing filthy rich off of our impoverishment and immiseration. In this conversation, we're talking big tech, how we got where we are and how we can fix things, with Cory Doctorow. Cory is an activist, journalist, and author. His latest two books are the science fiction novel, The Bezel, and the nonfiction book which we'll be talking about today, The Internet Con, How to Seize the Means of Computation,

published by Verso. In this conversation, we explore the history of trust and antitrust laws originating in the late 1800s. We discuss how deregulation, copyright, digital locks, IP law, and monopoly-friendly legislation have all led to a process of enclosure in multiple tech industries from the internet to airplanes, resulting in a landscape fully devoid of anything resembling the promise of technology that has been whispered into our ears since the dawn

of the digital age. And before we get started, Upstream is almost entirely listener funded. We couldn't keep this project going without your support. There are a number of ways that you can support us financially. You can sign up to be a Patreon subscriber, which will give you access to bonus episodes, at least one a month, but usually more, along with our entire backlog of Patreon episodes at patreon.com forward slash upstream podcast. And you can also make a tax deductible recurring or one-time donation on our website upstreampodcast.org forward slash support.

Through your support, you'll be helping keep upstream sustainable and helping keep this whole project going. Socialist political education podcasts are not easy to fund so thank you in advance for the crucial support. And now here's Robert in conversation with Corey Doctorow. Corey, it's great to have you back on. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be back on. I'm wondering if for folks who might have missed your first appearance on our show when we talked about NFTs, which feels like another lifetime at this point. I'm wondering if you can introduce yourself for folks who might have missed that conversation.

Of course. I'm Cory Doctorow. I write science fiction novels, lots and lots of them, but also books for young adults, also books for middle grades readers, also picture books. I also write fairly serious books about technology and politics. I've worked with the Electronic Frontier Foundation for 23 years now. They're a non-profit that does digital human rights. I was formerly their European director. I have some academic appointments at MIT and the University of North Carolina and UNC in library science and computer science. here in North Carolina and UNC in library science and computer science. And there's probably other stuff I do too. Oh, I write a daily newsletter called pluralistic.net. Awesome.

And yeah, so we are going to be talking about one of your more serious books for the most part today, although I do want to talk to you about your latest novel as well. Sure. But just to start, I'm wondering, yeah, if you can maybe just tell us what inspired you or like what you wanted to really get across with your latest nonfiction book, the Internet con. Just sold another one, trying to explain exactly how it is. All of our technology has gotten so bad and how it victimizes different kinds of people in the supply chain of technology, including technology users, but also advertisers, publishers, and people to one side of things, like people who may not even have Facebook accounts, but have their data sucked up

by Facebook and see themselves being served targeted ads that are based on those profiles on platforms that source their ads from Facebook. I think most people listening to this will certainly relate to the fact that everything about the technology that dictates our lives right now has become unbearably terrible. And I don't know if this is all related, but it really just seems to span every single form of technology from getting spam texts to not being able to read websites

because of all the ads that are moving around constantly to paying more and more for what feels like less and less. We have airplanes literally falling apart mid flight. And so, that's a wide range of different things from like devices in our hands to airplanes in the sky. But I'm wondering, are all of these things somehow related? Yeah, I just watched a great interview this morning as we record this of the

Federal Trade Commission chair, Lena Kahn, on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. And I'm a big Lena Kahn fan. And she's always saying smart things. But she said something especially smart this morning, or I guess whenever she appeared on the show that I saw this morning, which was that it's, it can be hard to know like exactly whether a company has a monopoly or how much market power it has or what have you, but one thing that we can all spot is when a company acts, like it doesn't care if we hate its products. She called it being too big to care. Right?

So we've all heard of too big to fail. If you've been paying attention, maybe you've heard of too big to jail. I think the third piece of this is too big to fail. If you've been paying attention, maybe you've heard of too big to jail. I think the third piece of this is too big to care. They don't care if their workers hate their jobs because they don't think their workers can find a job somewhere else. They don't care if their users hate their platform because they don't think the users are going to be able to leave the platform. And you know, here's the thing that I think a lot of people miss. They say things like, oh, if you're not paying for the product, you're the product, Facebook only cares about advertisers. Facebook's really bad to advertisers, right? Like we're seeing a lot of garbage ads, but one of the things that's happening is that the

advertisers themselves are having to bid against the garbage ads for non-garbage ads. You know, Amazon has this business, they call it an advertising business. It's worth $38 billion a year, but it's not really advertising. It's pay for placement and search results. If you click the first box on an Amazon search results page, the first item there in the buy box, on average, you pay 29% more than you would if you found the best deal on Amazon. And if you click anything in that first row, on average, you're paying a 25% premium. premium and on average you have to go 17 items down to get to a good deal on Amazon and Amazon a fair deal.

The results screens for an Amazon search are filled with things that clearly paid to be there because otherwise they wouldn't qualify because they're not good or they're expensive or both. And you have to be perfectly attentive. You have to look at each one of those. So you type in, you know, Duracell battery. And you click on the first link. It might not be a Duracell battery, but even if it is, it might be the most expensive Duracell batteries on the website. Right? So someone is like buying Duracell batteries, wholesaling them on Amazon, charging extra. So maybe they're charging 30% extra and they're splitting the difference of that 30% margin to give 15% of it to Amazon for quote unquote advertising. So Amazon sort of splitting the bribe with a seller to help fleece you. Uh, this is actually at the center of chair cons case against Amazon that that has just been

brought by the federal trade commission that we're all getting ripped off by Amazon. There's a good paper about this called Amazon's pricing paradox, which tries to understand how it is that you can have good deals on Amazon, but never get the good deals. So like Amazon can tell the truth and say, oh yeah, we're offering some of the best prices that a consumer could ever want, but also none of our consumers pay those prices. They all pay grossly inflated prices. And on the back end, to return to this motif that this is not like it's being good for merchants and bad for

to return to this motif that this is not like it's being good for merchants and bad for buyers or vice versa. The merchants on Amazon pay about 51 cents out of every dollar they bring in in junk fees to Amazon. And so that's like a 50% monopoly tax that we're paying because no one's got a 51% margin. There's no one who sells a thing for twice what they pay for it, net of all of their expenses. So the way that they make up the difference is by charging more on Amazon. And then the way that Amazon stops you from shopping somewhere else is they say, look, if you want to reach Amazon customers, the majority of US households have Prime. The majority of people who have Prime start their search on Amazon.

90% of the people who start their search on Amazon who have prime, if they find something that matches, they don't even look anywhere else. So they say to business customers, the people who want to sell on Amazon, if you want to reach those customers, you have to give 51 cents out of every dollar to us, and you have to promise us that we will have the lowest price of any of the places where you can buy your product. And so a merchant who sells at target and on Amazon and raises their price by 50% on Amazon to pay the Amazon tax has to also raise their prices by 50%

at target or Amazon will kick them off the platform. So everywhere you shop, you are paying an Amazon tax. Amazon has figured out how to tax people who shop direct from the manufacturer. There's like a mom and pop person who makes Dungeons and Dragons dice in their own little resin lab at home, and they're selling them on Amazon. They're charging a 50% premium in order to break even on Amazon, and if you buy them from them directly,

they have to charge you the same 50% premium or Amazon will drop them to result one million or just kick them straight off the platform altogether. And you cover the breadth of this phenomenon in the book. For example, you talk about how certain military contractors have monopolies with their contracts with the military. And it again results in like this theme of the book, which is when there's a lack of competition in the marketplace, you have sort of this race to the bottom and you don't, these companies

don't really have to put the same amount of time and effort and concern into things that aren't really directly related to profits. Yeah, so I like to think of this as being related to the way that constraints act on businesses. So, you know, I don't think that like the people who run these businesses suddenly got worse, right? Or that even that their shareholders suddenly started putting more pressure on them. You know, there's people who say, oh, well, it's the end of the zero interest rate policy, right? Back when governments were effectively giving free

money to businesses. And now that they've stopped, you know, the music has stopped and now they have to, everyone has to pay the piper or they say, Oh, you know, these tech companies, they were run by like visionary geniuses who cared about product quality like Steve jobs, but then they died or moved on. And so now it's Tim Cook or Andy Jassy or Sundar Pichai

who have all come to run these companies. And the fact is like these companies started in shitifying before the end of zero interest rate policy. And in some of these companies, the founders have come back like Google's founders came back to Google because they had a panic attack about AI and were convinced that AI was going to, you know, run the world and they had to retool Google around AI. Google got worse, right? When the original founders came back. So I think the way to understand what's going on is like, companies are run by people who are not necessarily any better or any worse than you or me.

who are not necessarily any better or any worse than you or me, and they are capable of rationalizing themselves into doing things that are bad for their various stakeholders, their customers, their workers, wider society, the suppliers who they rely on. And so they are always capable of rationalizing themselves into it, but sometimes something stops them, right? Sometimes if they try to do something bad to you, they have to worry about competition. So, you know, if you remember Lily Tomlin used to do these bits on Saturday Night Live where she would pretend to be a telephone operator doing ads for the phone company, and every one of those ads would end with her turning to the camera and saying, we don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company. Right. And when Google has 90% search market and when they're spending

like literally enough to buy Twitter every year and not Twitter as it is today, but Twitter as it was when Musk bought it, they're spending enough to buy Twitter every year, bribing other platforms so that every search box goes to Google and not to any other search engine, which means that nobody funds new search engines, right? Because like, why would you bother if nobody can try it? If you remember when Google started, you know, we were all using whatever Alta Vista and it was bad, right? And then we tried Google and we were like, oh, this is good, right?

And we just changed. So Google could make sure that nobody does that with another search engine by making sure they have the best search engine. But they've clearly done the math and they've decided the cheapest way to make sure nobody tries another search engine and says, oh, this is better than Google is not to make sure that Google is the best, but to make sure nobody ever tries another search engine. And so that's what they're that's what they're spending their investor capital on. So they're not constrained by competition anymore. spending their investor capital on. So they're not constrained by competition anymore. And that's because the previous chairs of the federal trade commission and the people who ran the department of justice, antitrust division, remarkably tolerant

of monopoly formation for like 40 years since the Reagan administration. We just said, oh yeah, companies are allowed to buy their major competitors or scoop up smaller companies before they can turn into competitors. They're allowed to do predatory pricing where they sell things below cost in order to keep a new market entrance from getting a foothold. They're allowed to force preferential discounts out of key suppliers, you know, sort of the way Walmart did. Really, these are just the apotheosis of the Walmart business plan. They're allowed to do a bunch of stuff that

they wouldn't have been allowed to do. So they don't worry about competition anymore. And when you don't have to worry about competition, you also don't have to worry about regulation. Because like when an industry is just five companies, they're they all are able to gather around one table, and speak with one voice and tell regulators one thing and they always get their way. And so they don't have to worry about privacy or consumer protection or labor law. And then they also don't have to worry about other technology

companies or individuals or tinkerers or co-ops figuring out how to change the technology that they make. So like at one point, the thing that stopped companies like HP from jacking up the price of printer ink was the fear of someone making a refillable cartridge or a third party in cartridge. But these tech monopolists, they've managed to not only operate without the law being applied to them. They've also been able to make sure that the law applies in the most ferocious way possible to

their would be competitors. And so particularly this is about IP law where refilling an ink cartridge or bypassing its security chip has become a felony, right? They've sort of cooked up new interpretations of policies and gotten new policies enacted that make acting in ways that make their shareholders unhappy illegal. You know, anyone can add an ad blocker to a web browser because you don't have to reverse engineer it in order to do so. But because there's a kind of a software lock around an app,

the first step of making an ad blocker for an app is removing that software lock. So you can alter the app and alter it how it functions. And removing that software lock is a felony under section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine, which is why more than half of all web users have installed an ad blocker and no one in the history of apps has got an ad blocker for their apps.

And it's why companies want you to use their apps and not their websites because an app is just a webpage wrapped in enough IP to make it a crime to use it in the way that benefits you instead of the manufacturer. And then the final constraint of these tech companies historically was their workers, who cared about their users. They had been motivated in large part with appeals to their sense of duty and mission. These were very powerful workers. They could get a job across the street anytime they wanted, and yet they showed up for work

and worked 80-hour weeks and talked themselves into thinking that the reason they got free laundry and massages and gourmet cafeterias was because their bosses love them and not because they were working like government mules. And you know, the downside for bosses of that is that those powerful workers did in fact feel a sense of mission and duty. And they often refuse to insidify the products their bosses wanted to extract more revenue from. And, you know, now that we've seen mass layoffs in tech, those workers are also not stepping up to defend their users because they just get fired if they do.

You know, Google fired 12,000 tech workers last year, just months after doing an $80 billion stock buyback that would have paid their wages for 27 years. So you know, the answer to I order you to make this worse so that we make more money isn't like, no, that's bullshit. I'm quitting. It's like, yes, boss, whatever you say, boss, do you need me to do that by tonight, boss? And so all of these services are getting worse. And to go back to your example about government contractors, primary aerospace and military

contractors, under the Obama administration, there was this, it was called the shotgun wedding, right? Where the Obama administration ordered the primary military contractors to merge into just three or four companies because they were finding it too fragmented to deal with. And as a result, these companies now have these big monopolies and the secondary aerospace contractors who are the ones who supply them with components, had another wave of consolidation driven by private equity people who went around and they said, let's find all the companies that are single source suppliers to the primary aerospace contractors. So there's like a widget in a jet. And the only person who makes that widget is this

company because they have a patent on the widget. So we're going to buy that company. And then we are paradoxically going to lower the price of that widget to zero. We might even subsidize the widget. You might even get a bonus, a rebate if you're Boeing or if you're Northrop Grumman or whoever. If you're one of these big aerospace companies, if you incorporate this part into a jet that you make for the Air Force or the Navy or whoever and then when the Air Force or the Navy or whoever needs to order another one of

those parts the cost is at a 30,000 percent markup. Now in theory Uncle Sam could just go out and say fine we'll just buy it from someone else but IP law says that no one else can make this part and so these companies have figured out how to mobilize IP law and the monopolies that come with it to gouge the American public on these parts. And they use the money to buy more single source suppliers and offer even bigger incentives to primary military contractors to incorporate more of these booby trap parts into the material that the American war machine buys. First of all, I just want to really appreciate the term in shitify. And I also I want to ask you more about the printer ink example in a bit. I'm going to try to remember to do that as we as we move through, because that example of printers and printer ink really hit home for me because my partner and I have like had nightmare scenarios with our printer.

And when I was reading the pages about how that all works in terms of the microchips and the printer ink and stuff, I was just like fuming. And then there's some other stuff that I wanna definitely get to from what you just shared. But I think just to go back a little bit, I want to sort of explore like the context out of which this current crisis has sort of emerged. And you spend a good amount of time in the first part of the book talking about sort of the undoing. sort of the undoing, well, you talk about the history of anti-trust laws and trusts, and you start pretty early on, and I think like in the 19th century, and you bring us up to the present,

and throughout you introduce a character named Robert Bork, who was pretty seminal in doing a lot of the undoing of these anti-trust laws that originally emerged centuries ago. And so I'm wondering if maybe you can just give us a little bit of a context, the legal context of, you know, trusts and antitrusts and bring us to the like 70s and 80s when those laws were undone and deregulation, like, you know, like neoliberal deregulation began. Yeah, that term antitrust, it trips people up because they're like, is this about me not trusting a company or something? The trusts were these artifacts of the 19th century where people who ran companies, like say all the people who ran whiskey distilleries, there was a whiskey trust. And what they would do is they would start a new business called a trust, like, you know, like you have land that's owned by a trust or whatever, like you might've been to like a park

that was owned and managed by a trust, or there might be a historic building in your town owned by a trust. So they would create one of these things called a trust. And then the trust would buy all of the whiskey distilleries in America. And it would give shares in the trust to the original owners of the whiskey

distilleries proportional to their market share. And so if you had the whiskey distillery with 15% of the American market share, you now got 15% of the whiskey trust. And then the whiskey trust would elect a single board and that board would run all of those businesses, which, you know, on the face of them seemed all to be different businesses. There were still different whiskey distillers, but they would all run as a single business. And so they would coordinate to raise prices, to pay farmers less for the grains they used, to suppress the market for skilled distillery workers. So, you know, the master distiller who

leaves one company and goes to another wouldn't be able to get a job or the trust would ensure that all master distillers were paid the same rate. So even if you hop jobs, you would get the same price. So you couldn't negotiate a higher salary and that salary would go down as would the prices being paid to suppliers. So farmers were getting worse and worse and so on. And so the trusts were really hated. There were railroad trusts, coal trusts, steel trusts, electricity trusts. There were trusts for every part of the American economy. And the small number of very rich people got much, much richer.

And you often had individuals that were involved with all of these trusts, or several of them. So you'd have a coal baron who was also a steel baron who was also a rail baron. And the American people started to look at these trusts and say, these trusts are acting like royalty. This is how things worked before the revolution, where the king would decide who could have which industry and what they would charge and what the suppliers would make.

And they would just sort of pick winners and losers based on King's own priorities and based on the priorities of their cronies and so on. And so in 1890, John Sherman, the brother of Tecumseh Sherman, who was a Senator, he passed the first antitrust act, it was called the Sherman Act. And he said, if we would not tolerate a king, we should not tolerate an autocrat of trade, that these people were effectively just like kings and this is not what we fought the American Revolution for. And so that law was passed. It wasn't enforced immediately. There was a little bit of enforcement around the edges about things like grain silos, but

it really came into its own in the 1910s with the fight against John D Rockefeller and the oil trust, the Standard Oil Company. And people were so fed up with this by then. They had been, so many people have been harmed in so many ways that we got the political will to do something about it. And from then on, the point of American competition law and the actions that it took were focused on ensuring

that there was a competitive market, not just because competition is good or it's the American way, but also because there was this understanding that companies that didn't face competition were able to amass political power and that the power would be used against the American people, that they would usurp the power of our elected lawmakers in our democratic system. Did they become too big to fail, too big to jail? And as Chair Kahn says, too big to care. And then comes the Reagan administration.

Well, really it starts with the Carter administration, where there had been these freaks at the University of Chicago, who had looked at the whole post-war New Deal prosperity where just like millions of Americans had been lifted out of poverty. Their kids were going to university, they own their own homes, they were in unions,

they had savings, they got weekends, they could retire. And there were people who were critics of this system who were not at the University of Chicago, right? Like there were black liberationists, indigenous liberationists, there were people who cared about women's rights of Chicago, right? Like there were black liberationists, indigenous liberationists. There were people who cared about women's rights who said, this didn't go far enough, those people were right. The new deal was incomplete, but the Chicago school were like, no, this went too far.

Right. The problem is that we need to like reverse, not extend all of these things. And you know, one of their theorists was this jurist, a judge called Robert Bork, who was a scumbag. He was Richard Nixon's Solicitor General. He was a virulent racist who had gone on record over and over again, saying things that even by the standards of the 1950s and 60s were just disgustingly racist. And Bork, no surprise, was beloved of Ronald Reagan. And Ronald Reagan tried to put him on the Supreme Court, whereupon all of this stuff came out

and he lost his confirmation hearing. If you've ever said that something that's really screwed up is totally Borked, that's where that term comes from. It comes from his terrible performance at his Senate confirmation hearing. Now Bork was not just a scumbag, he was a crank. He had kind of written an alternate history of antitrust law. He said that if you like go back

and you like do a kind of Q and on reading of the antitrust laws and the debates that attended their passage, that you would find that actually Congress loved monopolies. They viewed monopolies as presumptively efficient. If you wake up one day and you discover there's only one store in town and everyone shops there and buys the same thing, what you've discovered is that some business genius has invented the best store in the world that sells the best product.

And the last thing the U S government should want to do at that point is step in and punish that company for pleasing so many Americans. And so he said, monopolies are good. Now he admitted that it was like technically possible that some punish that company for pleasing so many Americans. And so he said, monopolies are good. Now he admitted that it was like technically possible that some monopoly somewhere might harm the American public by raising prices. And that was the only harm he admitted to.

He didn't think we should worry about political corruption or suppressing wages. He just, she's just worried about things getting more expensive. And he said, when that happens and only when that happens, does Congress intend for us to act to shut down a monopoly. Now, this is just like, it's, it's a bad economic theory, right? It's just, it's wrong. Like we're living 40 years into the experiment where we listen to what he has to say, and we see that these companies are extremely harmful in lots of ways and

figure out how to raise prices in ways that the law can't reach to if that's, that's your only standard. But it was also like a bad historical theory, right? Like it's, you just like, you go back and you see John Sherman stocking the floor of the Senate in 1890, declaiming, you know, if we would not tolerate a king over the affairs of man, we should not tolerate an autocrat of trade. And you're like, this is not a guy who thought monopolies were good, but you're just wrong. And yet, you know, it's impossible to explain something to someone when their dividend depends on them not understanding it.

And so Ronald Reagan and his millionaire backers, they all like this theory and they gradually replace the federal bench with judges who embraced it. The judges who were already on the bench, they retrained. There were these things called the Man Seminars, M-A-N-N-E, that were funded by these billionaire charities where they would do free continuing education courses for judges, which were basically they'd fly a judge to a luxury resort in Florida for like a week long sort of resort vacation with these lectures that were just people saying Robert Bork is right. And these judges, like they just didn't know a whole lot about antitrust law anyways, because it was a very specialized area of law. And they just became

very convinced that that all of this was fine. And so, you know, foundationally, until the Carter administration, we had a system where we had this thing that like reliably kept the rat population down. We basically, we had rat poison and we used to put the rat poison down and we didn't have a rat problem. And then Robert Bork was like, actually rat poison is the problem, not rats. And so we stopped putting out rat poison and now rats are eating our faces off. And the people who are like Robert Bork aficionados are like, God, I don't know where the

fuck all these rats are coming from. That's so weird. Right. And whenever anyone says, well, maybe we could put down rat poison. They're like, are you kidding me? That's so old fashioned. No one's used rat poison since the Reagan

administration. Why would we do that? And so when cheer con and Jonathan Cantor who runs the Department of Justice, Antitrust Division, and a few other top appointees in the Biden administration, mostly sort of protegees of or favorites of the Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders wing of the party who got to choose some of these appointees after

Biden was elected. When these folks came into office and actually started to enforce the law as it was written, people lost their shit. The Wall Street Journal has run a hundred editorials about how Lena Kahn is a hipster antitrust, you know, child, because she's the youngest chair in the history of the commission and that she can't get anything done. She's just wasting her time. I promise you this, Rupert Murdoch, who owns the Wall Street Journal, does not pay his editorial board to write a hundred editorials about someone who's in getting anything done.

It's just no way. So we're living through an unprecedented, or at least a generationally unprecedented, reorientation of antitrust priorities. We're starting to get real competition law again. The people doing it are the subject of sustained attacks. And if you know anything about them, chances are what you've heard is that they're just like idiots who are wasting everyone's time. And, you know, one thing that you can do is just like not believe the disinformation and tell your friends, tell your friends that this is bullshit. You're listening to an Upstream Conversation with Corey Doctorow.

We'll be right back. I can truly say I don't give a fuck about your money. Because it means so much to you and all of your money Why does it mean so much to you? You cite the land of greed And I'm talking about a world of need Money has nothing to do with the value of life But that's just common sense You call me up and you tell me about money You call me up and you tell me about money

You call me up and you tell me about money You caught me off, and you talk about money But I don't wanna hear anymore about money But what people do, is try to get their money To buy the fantasy based on the book or the movie Fortified cares and modified principles Confinance is the name of the game Self-indulgence is the rule There are no winners, we all lose Fight for nothing, you call me up and it's not about money You call me up, and it's not about money

You call me up, and it's not about money You call me up, and it's not about money You call me up, and it's not about money You call me up, and it's not about money You call me up and it's not about money You call me up and it's not about money I don't want anymore about money You put yourself

You put yourself You put yourself Love for self You put yourself You put yourself You put yourself Love for self You put yourself in love for sale You put yourself in love for sale

You put yourself in love for sale You put yourself in love for sale You put yourself in love for sale You put yourself in love for sale, you put it down. Love for sale, you put it down. Love for sale, you put it down. That was Money by Embrace. Now back to our conversation with Cory Doctorow. One example, I guess, that you run through in the book that really helped drive a lot of this home of this broader move towards deregulation and the impacts

that it has had on the technology that we all use, and also how it's related to copyright, IP, all of that kind of stuff, and the broader enclosing of technology, I thought was really interesting. Maybe if you could trace the history of Betamax, and for some of our younger listeners, you may never have even heard that term before, or depending on how young you are, you may not even know about Napster.

So I'm wondering if you can maybe talk about that sort of saga and like the lead up to what you call the notice and take down or stay down laws and content ID with YouTube and how these laws only really benefit the rich and powerful at the expense of all of the rest of us. Yeah. So I talked before about IP law and the relationship that it plays putting constraints on firms and how exceptions to IP that allow other companies to step in and do things that a powerful company might not like, but that we as the public might enjoy, how that can actually give us all a better life, right? Whether that's refilling printer

cartridges or making phones that can play apps from different vendors or what have you. And so in the 1980s there was a really important copyright case. Sony had made this device called the Beta Max. It was the precursor to the VHS and their pitch for the public who might go out and buy one of these devices, which were the time quite expensive, was that you could record videos at home when they were played on the television, and you could watch them later, or you could bring them over to your friend's house

and watch them. And Hollywood lost its shit. The studios led by Universal sued Sony, and it went through the courts for eight years, and in 1984, it landed in the Supreme Court, Universal v. Sony, the Betamax case. And the Supreme Court said that so long as a technology was capable of sustaining a substantial non-infringing use,

which is to say so long as you can use it in a way that is legal, then the device is legal, even if you can use it in illegal ways. So, you know, if the test for whether a device is lawful is whether it can only be used lawfully, then like we can't have pencils because you can infringe a copyright by copying out a book with a pencil.

And so this is a very common sense ruling, right? Betamax. And so that was the law of the land. And it was really important. The studios adapted to it. They figured out how to rent movies and through video stores that turned into a really big business for them. They created direct to video subsidiaries. It was fine, right? Like it turned out the studios were wrong when they said they wanted to bend the VCR and not just wrong

because it was bad for us, but wrong because it was bad for them. VCRs are good. Home taping is not killing videos. So the studios at the time were much more fragmented. They had themselves been the subject of some antitrust action in the 40s and 50s that caused them to kind of split up and didn't allow them to consolidate vertically. So they weren't allowed to own movie theaters, for example, which meant that they had to retain some competition there

because the movie theaters were a competitive field that were open for different firms. It wasn't like a winner take all thing. There were too many different movie theater companies for one studio to capture them all. So it was a really, really good moment for movies. It produced a good moment for the entertainment industry. But again, this

was like 1984 when Betamax came down. And so this is just as the breaks are being taken off of mergers and consolidation. And so you get massive consolidation in the entertainment industry, music, publishing, movies. Today, it's really bad. We have five publishers, four studios, three labels, two companies that do all the ad tech and one company that does all the audio books and ebooks. And as they grew more consolidated, it was easier for them to win policy fights. So along comes Napster. And Napster is part of a long tradition in how the American entertainment industry works,

which is that you have pirates who become admirals, and then complain that the people who came after them were pirates, right? When we did its progress, when you do it, it's theft. So like the first music tech in the world in America was the phonogram. And so before the phonogram came along, the music industry was sheet music, because to be an industry, you have to like have

an industrial process. Printing is an industrial process. Playing the piano in a concert hall is like a craft, it's not an industry. And so the industry was the sheet music, the craft was the performance. And along comes the phonogram and they turn performance into industry, right? So you could record a record and then you could sell the record. So suddenly you have a new industry that pops up and the sheep music people went batshit. John Philip Sousa, the American composer, he went to Congress in 1909 and he said if these infernal talking machines are allowed

to continue we'll lose our voice boxes as we lost our tails when we came down out of the trees, right? So we ended up legalizing records. Congress, uh, came out with this thing called the compulsory license where once a song has been recorded, once anyone can rerecord it so long as they pay a set fee. So this is like what Taylor Swift is doing. You know, Taylor Swift lost control of her masters to this, uh, this scumbag private equity guy who bought her

masters because he hates her and she hates him. And he wanted her to know that every time someone listened to a Taylor Swift record, he was going to get richer. And so she went and she re-recorded her own masters, which she can do because anyone can do it. Right? It wasn't like the reason she could do that as it wasn't because she was Taylor Swift. You could re-record Taylor Swift's masters too.

And so could I. I don't think they'd sell as well as the Taylor's versions, but anyone can do it. And so that's how Congress legalized it. So then you got like the record industry, right? So now you have these people, used to be craft people, they're now an industry, and along comes radio.

And radio comes along and says, oh, we're gonna put the records on the radio. And they say, wait a second. When we were taking sheet music and putting it on records, that was progress. When you take the records and play them on the radio, that is piracy. Fuck you. No way. And so lots of litigation congressional action.

Finally, the thing that breaks it is, um, competition, right? So there's this, this, the collective rights society that controlled all the phonograms was called ASCAP. And they only let white artists in who played music for middle-class people. So specifically they would not allow what was then called colored music and actually even had a worse name than that

that I'm not gonna say. And they also didn't allow country and Western music which was sometimes called hillbilly music. So nothing that poor white people or black people listen to. Could be in the ASCAP family. So another collecting society called BMI kicked off and they represented so called race music and hillbilly music. And they were like, fine, you can put our music on the radio.

And so for a while, the only music on the radio in America was race music and hillbilly music. And all these people who made respectable music for wealthy white people were like, what is going on? Like we are being eclipsed by these people that we don't even think of as fully human. And so they demanded that ASCAP break the deadlock and there's something created called the consent decree.

That was congressional action that allowed as Cap BMI and other collecting societies to, to license all the music ever recorded for radio play. So when the DJ drops the needle, they don't have to check whether or not they're allowed to play a song. They pay a set fee to a collecting society. They can play all the music ever recorded. There are some radio stations that don't opt into this because they play a very small subset. Like there's a radio station in Florida called Parrot Head

Radio that just plays Jimmy Buffett music and they just have a deal with Jimmy Buffett. They don't need a deal to play all the music. But for the most part, like all the music you hear on the radio is under this consent decree. So let's recap. You have the sheet music people who call the phonogram people pirates, then the phonogram people call the radio people pirates, and so then the broadcasters, it's their turn. So you get these things called community antenna television, where the first broadcast TV signals wouldn't reach small towns. You needed a giant antenna to pull in the big city TV. And so the TV salespeople were like,

how can we sell televisions to people who can't get TV? So they television salesmen pooled their money and they built gigantic antennas in the middle of town and then ran cables to people's houses. This is the first cable television. And so they just sucked down the broadcast signals and they sold them to people so they could watch them in their houses on TV. So the broadcasters who had been called pirates

by the record people but said no no no technology progress marches on they turned around and they called the cable TV people pirates. So then along comes the VCR, right? Oh, and I should say that cable TV was legalized by another consent decree. Any cable operator can play any broadcast channel provided they pay a set fee too, right? So then along comes the VCR and the cable operators turn around and they call the VCR people pirates, right?

And so now you have the phonogram people being attacked by the sheet music people, you have the radio people attacking the phonogram people, you have the cable operators attacking the VCR people, and then along comes Napster. And so you would think that the way Napster would work out is that they would make music available on the internet in a way that was much more efficient, that pleased people. It was the most fastest adopted technology in the history of the world from zero to 52 million users in 18 months. There were enough Napster users in the United States that if they had all voted for either candidate

in the election that year, the Napster candidate would have won. And Napster had venture backers who said, just tell us how much you want for a blanket license, just like the radio stations have for this music. And we'll just like pay you the way Spotify does. And they said, no, we're suing. And it went to the Supreme Court, not Napster itself, but one of its lookalikes, a company called Grokster went to the Supreme Court. And this time around, the entertainment industry was so much more consolidated, and it was

consolidated with VCRs and cable and so on. They were just like, it was a handful of companies that owned all of these different technologies. One of them was Sony, right? Which had bought Columbia. So the company that fought the Betamax case switched sides here. That the court in Grokster said, actually, substantial non-infringing use is not enough. Technologies that are like sufficiently bad for the business model of incumbents are illegal. And that was the end of Napster.

And so you can see how our policy outcomes change as the result of consolidation. And how what had been a pretty smooth series of progressive outcomes where new technologies came along and were, you know, sort of good for artists and good for the public, that that was interrupted and we just ended up with this small number of companies controlling more and more of it. And that meant that when YouTube kicked off, you had a much more extreme theory of how copyright should work. So the regime for copyright on the internet was already very generous.

There's something that was included in the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act called Notice and Take Down, where if you think that something infringes your copyright, you can swear on penalty of perjury that you believe that this is the case and then the platform has to take it down. You don't have to have proof

and you don't have to be right. So, you know, like I was a bookseller and if someone walked into a store and said, that book infringes my copyright, I wasn't obliged to take it off the shelf. My answer would have been, go tell it to a judge, get an injunction and then I take it off the shelf. That's not how it worked on the internet.

Now, for the entertainment companies who were super consolidated, this wasn't enough. Because what would happen is they would get something removed from YouTube or some other platform, and then someone else would upload it. And so they said, okay, well, what we want is we want the platforms to do something called notice and stay down, where after we identify a work as ours, the platform has to monitor everything that gets uploaded, and anything that appears to match that has to be blocked from going live. And there was a big lawsuit Viacom brought against YouTube based on this theory. And although YouTube won, they immediately rolled out this thing called Content ID that does just that. And so you can upload stuff that you claim belongs to you.

And if anyone else tries to upload anything that seems like it matches, YouTube will block it even if it's fair use and even if it's not yours. So you can lie and there's basically no penalties. There have been people who have gone after YouTubers who've got big accounts and said, I have filed two fraudulent copy strikes against you. You know that YouTube will terminate your account and you'll lose all your subscribers.

If I file a third one, you need to pay me to go away or I'll file that third fraudulent account. It's become impossible to play classical music on YouTube because Sony owns the rights to all the canonical recordings of classical music and the content ID can't tell the difference between, you know, Anton Quirty or some other famous pianist playing Beethoven or a music teacher playing Beethoven in a free,

here's how to play Beethoven YouTube video. And so all of that stuff either gets demonetized or taken down entirely. And you can see that this is a thing that is bad for artists. It drives artists to become Sony artists and take whatever deal Sony is offering and it's a very bad deal. The record contracts have gotten worse, not better through consolidation. And you can see how it harms us, the public, right? It harms us because we can't hear other people playing Beethoven, that's our right.

But it also harms us because YouTube is only incidentally used as an entertainment medium. And a thing that gets like three days worth of video every minute is not full of entertainment content, it's full of everything, political content and, you know, heartfelt messages and school projects and whatever else. And all of that on this monopoly platform is now subordinated to the priorities

of these monopoly entertainment companies. Another interesting impact of these laws that I thought was really fascinating was how they're sort of abused. I mean, yeah, like you said, there's so many problems for everybody involved, but there's also the way that they can be abused, such as in reputation building companies. Do you think you could maybe just share that anecdote a little bit? Because that was fascinating to me. Yeah, they're reputation management companies, not reputation building companies.

Right, right. So what they do is they, if you're like a dictator or a murderer or an embezzler and there's news articles about you on the internet that are the first things that come up when people search, well, this makes it hard for you to go off and like, I don't know, get a job as a babysitter or run for office or whatever. And so these scummy reputation management companies will put up like a WordPress blog and they will publish articles that are identical to the articles that explain all the crimes their clients committed and they will backdate them so that it looks like the person who's

doing the copying here is the journalist who reported on the wrongdoing. And then they send takedown notices to Google and they say, we require that you remove this infringing article about our client from the search results. And so, you know, the New York Times story about the dictator who killed a thousand people gets taken down and the WordPress blog version stays up and Then of course once the New York Times version is down Then the WordPress version goes down too, and then it's just not in Google's index anymore I like literally had to put the book down and like take a break and walk around for a minute

Was just like Jesus fucking Christ It's pretty bad walk around for a minute when I read that, I was just like, Jesus fucking Christ. It's pretty bad. So, okay, interoperability is a huge theme in the book and I'm wondering if you can talk about the struggle around interoperability, what it is, how big tech is fighting it, and whatever example that you wanna use, but I did think that maybe

the printer example and digital locks might be a good way to sort of illustrate how that all works. Yeah, of course. So look, a lot of the mischief that tech platforms get up to has to do with the fact that digital tools are super flexible, right? So digital tools can like change the way a business works from minute to minute. Like if you're, you know, a grocer and you want to do like price gouging on eggs and you want to change that reprice your eggs like, you know, every 10 minutes or whatever, you'll need like an army of children on roller skates with pricing guns to do that repricing. But you know, if you're Jeff Bezos running Amazon Fresh, or if you've got one of these new digital shelf tags, you can just click

a link and change the prices. And so you end up with lots and lots of bad things happening on platforms as a result of this digital flexibility. But it cuts both ways. Because if you're a user of a digital system, then you can use that same digital flexibility to unfuck whatever it is the company is fucking. So if you're a printer owner and the company that makes the printer cartridge decides to add to it a little security chip that has a little cryptographic co-processor in it, so that when you put it in the printer, the printer does a little security check and they say, hey, I've just thought of this random number, sign it with your secret cryptographic key so that I know that you're an unofficial manufacturer's printed cartridge. This is

sometimes called parts pairing or VIN locking. Then you as the user can figure out how to like clone that chip, right? Or you know, you can buy it from someone who's figured out how to clone that chip. And then that means that the company has to consider the possibility that there will be some interoperable product that comes along later that undoes whatever mischief they've done. And that also like in an important way, like severs their relationship with the customer. So once I'm buying my printer cartridges from someone else, right, the business is no longer connected to me, right, and they can't raise the price, they can't try and sell me accessories, I might end up buying my next printer from the people who are selling me the printer

cartridge. So you know I might have an E printer, but I might be buying Brother printer cartridges and I might decide that I like Brother so much that my next printer is Brother. So this kind of, back to constraint, this constrains these companies. It makes them act better in order to retain your business. So along comes this law, section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

And the Digital Millenniumium copyright act makes it a crime to bypass these digital locks. Now the digital locks have to rise to a certain level in order to be covered by the law. They have to be like real software. There was an early case about this where Lexmark, which was then the printer division of IBM, sued a Taiwanese company called Static Controls that was reverse engineering its little chips and its printer toner cartridges so that you could refill the toner cartridge and it would register as full. The original Lexmark cartridges had a chip in them that once the cartridge went dry it would flip the I am full message to I am empty and then even if you put more more black

powder in it more carbon it would still say I am empty and the printer wouldn't use it. So they figured out how to reset that message and say, I am full again. And Lexmark took Static to court over this. And they said, this is violating the DMCA. We have this copyrighted work and it's protected by this access control system.

And Static has bypassed it. And therefore that's a felony under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. And the court said, we don't know what copyrighted work you mean. Surely it's not the powdered carbon in the cartridge. And they said, no, no, no, it's the program. It's the program that tells you

whether or not the cartridge is full or empty. And they said, well, that's only like 60 bytes long, right? That's not even a haiku, right? So although software can be copyrighted, this is not or empty. And they said, well, that's only like 60 bytes long, right? That's not even a haiku, right? So although software can be copyrighted, this is not copyrighted. This is too short. It's too functional. Well, today, the little cartridge that you get your ink on from HP or whoever, it's got a system on a chip in it. It's got like a 26 cent chip that is like a full-fledged printer. It's got like a network stack in it. It's running Linux, you know, like it is a whole ass computer. And so that software is totally copyrightable. And so what that means is that if HP wants to lock you out of your printer and make sure that you

have to use your printer in the way that benefits them and not you, they can use these software locks and no one is allowed to unlock the locks except them. And so now you have these travesties like HP's new printers you don't even own. You have to rent them every month. You have to give them a credit card number because it's not your printer, it's theirs. And if your printer is not reachable over the internet for a certain number of days, they fine you and extract charges from your credit card. They also are data mining the documents you print to figure out how to target advertising to you and get other business intelligence

about you. And you have to subscribe to ink. And so you have to pay for the ink in advance. And if you don't print enough pages, you still pay for the ink and you can't use third party ink cartridges. Right? So this is like the most abusive possible version of a printer. And it all starts with the fact that you can't make an interoperable cartridge or make your own software for it. This is the same thing that's stopping people from fixing cars independently. Manufacturers of cars now encrypt the messages

that describe what's wrong with the car, the diagnostic messages, and they will not sell independent mechanics, the decryption tool. And anyone independent mechanics, the decryption tool. And anyone else who makes a decryption tool violates section 12.1 of the DMCA. And so effectively, they've just banned independent mechanics for modern cars. And this is why you're seeing state right to repair bills. One of the most important things those state right to repair bills are doing is because

they can't repeal the DMCA because it's a federal law and these are state legislatures, they just ban companies from putting software locks onto their diagnostic messages or doing this parts pairing thing where it checks to see whether it's an original part that's been authorized by the manufacturer before it recognizes the part. One of the ways that I was thinking about this when I was reading the book is how absurd a lot of these laws would sound like if they were taken out of the realm of digital technology. Like I was thinking of how absurd it would be if, for example, a hammer company, a business that manufactures hammers, had in law the right to only allow customers to use their own patented nails with those hammers, right?

Like when you start to think about this stuff outside of purely the digital realm, it just becomes that much more absurd to think about because it's really starting to, these laws are really starting to undo the standards of like relationships that we've had with the products and services that we purchase, the relationship that has been standardized over centuries and centuries. One thing that you write in the book, you write, quote, this represents a seismic shift in our relationship to the products and services we buy. Historically, something you bought made it yours to use as you saw fit."

And, yeah, another quote I think that really was a great summation of the response that you just shared. You write, quote, today, the US government's offer to product makers is if you add a chip to your gadget at a mere price of 26 cents and load a digital lock onto that chip that nominally prevents a customer from using the product in a way you don't like, we, the mighty US government, will lend you our courts, our federal prosecutors, and our prisons so you can terrorize anyone who provides your customer with a lock removing tool. It doesn't matter if anyone's copyright is violated. It doesn't matter if any right is violated. The mere act of providing a tool to remove the lock,

no matter how benign and beneficial the purpose, triggers criminal and civil liability for your commercial rivals. And of course, this isn't just with printer ink, like you mentioned. This happens with all sorts of different products. For example, in the book, again, you write, quote, Apple uses patent to prevent the independent manufacture of some parts. It uses anti-circumvention to prevent the independent

installation of other parts. It uses contractual arrangements with recyclers to ensure that most used phones are not broken down for parts. It uses trademark to block the re-importation of parts that have escaped the recycler's shredders." And so that's just skimming the surface of the ways that these laws are used. And I think we've done a pretty thorough job of really demonstrating how fucked up the tech industry is and how these, all of these different laws that stem from the sort of anti trust

deregulation in the the 70s and 80s have sort of manifested into all of these different horrors and if anybody wants to get like more into those details and read some really interesting stories of how this phenomenon is manifesting in different sort of sub industries in the tech industry, I definitely recommend checking out the book. There's a lot of really rich stuff in there. But to close out, I think maybe it would be helpful to talk a little bit about some of the solutions that you do present in the book to a lot of these problems that we've been talking about today. So yeah, maybe if you could just talk a little bit about, you know, what we can do, what can be done

to help ensure interoperability and to undo some of the harm that the tech industry has created over the last few decades. Well, so, you know, I think that like, we all want to solve these problems the way that we've been conditioned to solve them for the last 40 years, which is to think of ourselves as consumers and to vote with our wallets.

The problem is that voting with your wallet is never very good, but it's especially very bad under conditions of monopoly. This is an election where the people with the thickest wallets get the most votes, and so the monopoly party always ends up winning. You're not going to shop your way out of the monopoly. And so we need policy answers. We need legislative reform. So Senator Ron Wyden is mooting reintroducing a law that requires the US government to only buy products that conform to standards and are interoperable.

And that would mean that like any car in a government motor pool or any email server or anything else that the government buys from a third party supplier would have to be standards based so that anyone could make a new thing that plugs into it. And of course, the companies really want to sell their flagship products to the government. And so they're going to, there's a strong impetus here to make the products universally interoperable. The state right to repair legislation that's going around is making a huge inroad here. The new bill that just passed in Oregon is the first one

that bans parts pairing, that bans this form of lock-in. We're seeing even action in the prison sector. So my new novel, The Bezel is about prison tech. And it's specifically about the fact that prison tech companies like Securus give free tablets to prison systems. And then they bribe the prison operators to get rid of in-person visits, parcels, libraries, and phone calls. And then they deliver it all over the tablets

at extremely high markups. And then when they change vendors, all of that data goes away. So you're working in a prison workshop for a dollar a day and you're buying music or paying to have the birthday cards that your family sent to you scanned with that money where it's like five bucks to scan a card. So it's five days wages and then it just disappears. And so in Minneapolis, they've just banned this, or Minnesota rather, they've just banned this. So there's some legislative action there. In the European Union, the new digital markets act requires tech companies to have interoperable gateways so that you can leave, say, iMessage and go to WhatsApp or vice versa, or go to Signal even

and continue to send messages to the people you left behind, the same way you can switch phone carriers and do it. So we're seeing a lot of action on interoperability, both like mandates and rules that make it easier for companies to interoperate. I think that's a huge piece of it. And oftentimes the like, well, this is a policy question, not an individual question. There's nothing you can do as an individual is very disheartening because how do you get lawmakers to even care about this? But right now lawmakers really care about it, right? The Federal Trade Commission is really doing important stuff about this.

The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau has a new rule that requires your bank to let you switch to any other bank through interoperable software with one click and have all of your data move over. So all your account history, all your payees, all your regularly scheduled payments, everything moves over with one click. And they're also going after the bank and credit

card review sites. So you may have gone to one of these where you go to this credit card review site and you say like, this is the balance I carry. This is how much I spend every month, whatever. And they're like, oh, this is the best credit card for you. If you read the fine print on all of those sites,

they're pay for play. And so the recommendation is not the best credit card, it's the card that paid them the most money. And so you end up paying significantly more if you use those rating systems. So the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, in addition to making it so that you can change banks with one click, is rolling out a public option

for comparing products. And so they're using their power to compel the banks to give them data, to force the banks to give them continuous real-time data about all of their fees and charges, which they are flowing into a public website where you can go in and give that same information and it will give you an unbiased figure

and an unbiased recommendation about which bank will give you the highest interest rate and charge you the lowest fees given your own, the financial products that you use. And then with one click, this interoperability rule will mean that you can move from one to the other as easily as you change phone carriers. So there's so much stuff going on in the policy sphere right now. I'm not the world's biggest Joe Biden fan, especially not now given his complicity in genocide, but there's no denying that the people that were appointed to important administrative roles as a result of the deals brokered between the Warren Sanders

wing of the party and the neoliberal sort of mansion cinematic universe, part of the party, are really making big material differences in the lives of the American public that will have an enduring effect. You've been listening to an Upstream conversation with Cory Doctorow, an activist, journalist, and author. His latest two books are the science fiction novel The Bezel and the Internet con How to Seize the Means of Computation, published by Verso. Please check the show notes for links to any of the resources mentioned in this episode. Thank you to Embrace for the intermission music, and to Berwyn Muir for the cover art. Upstream theme music was composed by Robert. Upstream is almost entirely listener funded. We couldn't keep this project going without

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