Enshittification of our digital experience: the pathology is clear, but is there a cure?

𝗖𝗼𝗿𝘆 𝗗𝗼𝗰𝘁𝗼𝗿𝗼𝘄 (the “Renaissance man” author and activist) has a 𝗻𝗲𝘄 𝗯𝗼𝗼𝗸 on “𝗘𝗻𝘀𝗵𝗶𝘁𝘁𝗶𝗳𝗶𝗰𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻” 𝗼𝗳 𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗼𝗻𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗲 𝗲𝘅𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲. We discuss the 𝗺𝗲𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗶𝘀𝗺𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗽𝗮𝘁𝗵𝗼𝗹𝗼𝗴𝗶𝗲𝘀, but above all: 𝗶𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝗮 𝗰𝘂𝗿𝗲?  Cory traces the collapse of our online experience (from the “good old internet” to the current “enshitternet”) to 𝗹𝗼𝘀𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗲𝘁𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 & 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗰𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝘄𝗵𝗶𝗰𝗵 𝗱𝗶𝘀𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗱𝗶𝘀𝗰𝗶𝗽𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗳𝘂𝗻𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗼𝗳 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗺𝗲𝗱𝗶𝗮𝗿𝗶𝗲𝘀 which in turn allowed entrenchment of surveillance models based on wanton exploitation of our data. What forces could restore discipline on tech firms? Cory is a believer in competition and regulation (together with adversarial interoperability and tech worker power). He is still optimistic about antitrust enforcement and regulation surging across the globe, and praises Europe’s “muscular” enforcement…I am not there:  in the wake of the “nothing burger” Google Search remedies in the US, of the FTC’s loss of the Meta case, in the week where US trade officials fly to Brussels to put the dilemma starkly: “𝗗𝗠𝗔 𝗼𝗿 𝗰𝗮𝗿𝘀?” “𝗗𝗠𝗔 𝗼𝗿 𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗲𝗹?”,  antitrust and regulation are not the name of the game at this point.  Cory remains optimistic – I think it’s build or bust. Always super fun with him!

ESCAPE FORWARD Ep. 5, 26 Nov 2025

“Enshittification of our digital experience: the pathology is clear, but is there a cure?” w Cory Doctorow

Science Fiction author, activist and journalist. Author of “Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It” (Macmillan, October 2025)

CC: Hello everyone. I’m Cristina Caffarra and this is Escape Forward – a new episode of the podcast where I’m fortunate to spend time with some of my favorite people, discussing topics I think are salient and important in policy terms. Today I am particularly excited to be face-to-face with my guest, rather than online, and he is one of my favorite people ever. Welcome Cory Doctorow. Cory really needs no introduction: as Brian Merchant said in his own podcast with Cory, if you spent any time at all online in the 21st Century then you’ve encountered Cory’s work, his ideas and his words. So no introduction needed, but still here goes in a compressed form: he’s a science fiction author, activist, journalist with a long list of books, articles, blogs, Twitter threads that read in themselves more like essays, always a must read, and many accolades, awards and honorary doctorates and fellowships, more or less everywhere. For my purposes, he was twice a star guest at my conference in Brussels, where he wowed the audience. But I also remember a soiree we did here in London, where we gathered the defense antitrust bubble, and he regaled them with an early version of his “enshitification” narrative about how their clients were fundamentally just terrible people – which created consternation and fun all round.

Cory is in Europe, in the UK in particular, on a tour promoting his latest book: Enshitification. Why everything suddenly got worse and what to do about it? This is a long-form version of your analysis of the digital world: “enshittify”, which you’ve used for some time, is an evocative word, it’s of course a bit crude but also very totally to the point, and also lends itself to this wonderful set of new words, neologisms, that come up in the book at various point: the “enshittocene” era, the “enshinternet” as you call it… there are various declinations and neologisms…

CD: …”enshittogenic” policy environment…

CC: So the book has four parts, first a series of case studies on the platforms, then what you call the pathology, then what you call the epidemiology and finally the cure. I want to spend more time on the cure, because to me it is the most interesting. But I want to talk also briefly about the pathology and the epidemiology, which is your analysis of the situation. So at the origin of much of the problem as you describe it in the book is the move away from what you call the “good old internet”, which was decentralized, enabling self-expression, preventing concentration of power, as a result of a business decision, a deliberate one, to adopt surveillance as a business model, with a collection of data to be monetized; but also you put a lot of emphasis on the loss of the disciplining function of this body of intermediaries in a world in which there were competing alternatives that could drive away the bad and keep the good. So tell us a bit more in your own words about the mechanisms for enshittification.

CD: I would reverse those two phenomena. I would say that the decision to spy on us is downstream of market concentration. Concentration gives rise to regulatory capture, which gives rise to the policy space to spy on people, right? Companies spy on you for the same reason your dog licks its balls – because they can and if we don’t let them, they won’t. Payment processors don’t take your money and keep it: they actually like do the thing that they’re supposed to do, because there are regulatory and market consequences for stealing your money. There are no regulatory or market consequences for stealing your data. So they do it, and whether they do it or not is a policy choice. If we want to understand where the origin of the surveillance business model lies, it comes from a highly concentrated commercial surveillance industry that is in many ways connected to the public safety and intelligence function of government in the United States. So the rise of the data brokerages comes after the Church Commission, which is when the state curbed the power of spying agencies to conduct domestic surveillance, but then it created a market for private surveillance that would go out and sell off data to cops and the FBI and spy agencies and so on. And that kind of public/private partnership in surveillance is one of the reasons we’ve seen regulatory capture of privacy law in America.

The last time we saw a new privacy law in America was in 1988 when Ronald Reagan signed the Video Privacy Protection Act, which is a prohibition on video store clerks disclosing your VHS rentals. And a little antitrust note here: it was because Robert Bork’s video rentals were disclosed during his confirmation hearings, and Congress got really pissed off that video rental histories were being weaponized in the political sphere. They were worried about their own video rental history being disclosed, and so that’s the last time we saw a privacy law. So you have market concentration, and you have a combination of concentrated market and state power that leads to paralysis of regulation, which leads to surveillance. So there’s no discipline when it comes to surveillance, you can spy and you can use that data for virtually any purpose, except for telling people about video rentals. Everything else is fair game.

In America the nurses are preferentially hired by staffing apps now, not staffing agencies and not put on the payroll. And those four national staffing apps, they all bill themselves as Uber for nurses, and they all use the unlicensed data brokerage world to buy in nurses’ recent credit card debt history before offering shifts, and they lower the wage based on the amount of credit card debt. It’s a desperation premium. And obviously this is a disgusting, terrible thing to do, and no one wants their catheter inserted by a nurse who stayed up till midnight the night before driving Uber, because they’re being penalized for having credit card debt. Or skip breakfast this morning so they could make rent. But the reason that’s happening is because we don’t curb commercial surveillance.

CC: And the book insists on the loss of intermediaries’ disciplining role, which ultimately creates the space for these business models to essentially expand and become the dominant ones.

CD: We’re very interested in disintermediation at the dawn of the internet, and it was because a collection of intermediaries, particularly in media, but also in other sectors, had become very powerful. They’d cease to be helpers, and they’d become gatekeepers. There’s nothing wrong with intermediation per se, very few of us are capable of writing our own web server, hosting it on a computer we build ourselves, pulling our own fiber. We need intermediaries. And the problem of an intermediary is because they operate in this utility function behind the scenes, and they are intermediating between different groups of people who are otherwise unconnected, they can play them off against each other. It can be very hard to know whether your intermediary is being honest or not. You know, the reason that the mafia always gets into being like royalty collectors is because any time you have that system where you’ve got two groups of people and an intermediary in between, if the intermediary wants to take advantage, they can.

We have in tech some really special technical characteristics that do discipline intermediaries, the biggest one being the flexibility of computers themselves, which means that if you suspect your intermediary is abusing you, if you don’t like the way you’re being treated, you can always write a program that either curbs the conduct of the intermediary – for example an ad blocker or a privacy blocker. The App Store with a jailbreak that lets you install it on your phone, but also it allows you to curb their behavior, it allows you to escape, so you can export your data, you can scrape it out, you can do all these other things. And so historically, intermediaries had to play fair because they would risk the departure of customers. Twenty years of IP law expansion has made most of that kind of guerrilla tactic, this this adversarial interoperability. It’s made it effectively unlawful. Jay Freeman calls it “felony contempt of business model” where it’s just become illegal to alter things that you own so that they defend your economic and privacy interests against the manufacturer.

CC: That’s an assessment of the causes. Let’s talk a little bit about the manifestation, epidemiology. You talked about the example of the nurses. And there are multiple examples which would help understand how you view the phenomenon of enshittification. We are in a world in which, effectively, people face incredibly anomalous discrimination – see the nurses’ case, the pharmacists, independent groceries, ride sharing, online subscription model that capture you, the whole area of repairs, and this hits not just consumers, but also workers. The podcast you did with Brian Merchant talked at length about the effect on tech workers and the implications of that. We are also going into an AI era with a lot of questions about how enshittification will actually manifest itself, or will it in some way progress into that era. Do you want to talk about that?

CD: I think AI is a collection of fairly interesting utilities. It’s the era of an investment bubble. It’s not an era of new or revolutionary technology. I think the most salient thing we should be worrying about when it comes to AI is $700 billion in capex today, gross annual revenues worldwide of $60 billion for the sector, if you believe their numbers, which are incredibly cooked.

I’ve written a book about it. It’s coming out in June: Reverse Centaurs: Guide to Life After AI. Their revenue is hilariously cooked. So for example, of that $60 billion at least 10%, or $10 billion, is the money that open AI gets from Microsoft and gives back to Microsoft. This is like, you’re walking down the street and there’s someone outside of the Starbucks who gives you a voucher for a latte, and you go in and you redeem it, and Starbucks books that is $7 revenue. That’s not how revenue works, right? Actually Starbucks has had a net loss, not a net gain, because it has real capital and operational expenditures associated with delivering the latte. And they’re poorer, not richer. So you have these ridiculously cooked numbers, you have seven companies that are a third of the stock market passing around the same 100 billion dollar IOUs over and over again, each of them booking them as revenue. You have the actual capital assets of these GPUs, which they’re depreciating on a five-year time scale, but which burn out in two to three years partly because of like problems with the system itself, but also because they sweat the assets really hard.

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There’s a kind of equilibrium they’re shooting for, where the energy consumption costs associated with cooling them and giving them rest times are weighed against the rapid depreciation of the asset. And so, is it cheaper to replace the GPU than it is to cool it? You don’t need to replace it.But they’re burning out these assets at the rate of knots. The whole thing just doesn’t work out. The only way it could possibly work out is if they can replace about $3 trillion worth of labor with AI. And that’s just not a thing that you can do, AI can’t do your job, even if your boss can be convinced to fire you or replace you with an AI that can’t do your job.

AI is a productivity tool when workers get to decide how to use it, and when they can find the areas in their workday where AI can improve their production. But when you just fire workers, and usually your most expensive and therefore most entitled and therefore most hated workers, if you’re the boss and you replace them with juniors who are AI babysitters, they’re not capable of spotting the errors the AI makes, because they tend to be very subtle, because what AI is doing is making statistical inferences. And so when they make an error, it’s as close to not an error as statistically possible. So you really have to have a subtle, deep knowledge of the field to spot the AI errors. You just end up with a kind of asbestos in the walls, where we fire workers who know how to do their job, we replace them with workers who don’t know how to do the job, who are AI babysitters and can’t spot their errors. And then we’re going to reach this point where the models are not economical to keep on, and the big foundation models are mostly, if not all, going to be shut off.

CC: So this is another sort of form of enshittification in some dimension. Is it inevitable that, in your view, we’ll see a bursting of the bubble?

CD: Oh the bubble bursting is inevitable. Enshittification is about the lack of discipline for monopolies. And this isn’t a separate epiphenomenon of monopolization, reality is that markets love growth firms, and the price-to-earnings ratio of a growth firm is very high. Mature firms, even if they have the same cash basis, have a much lower P/E ratio. And if you have a high P/E ratio, your shares are super liquid. You can buy rival firms. You can buy out your supply chain. You can buy labor using shares which you manufacture on the premises by typing zeros into a spreadsheet; whereas if you’re a mature firm, all of those transactions require cash, which you only get if you can convince a creditor or customer to give you some. If you imagine a bidding war between a mature firm and a growth firm, both of whom have the same cash basis: the growth firm always wins because they just manufacture material to bid with, effectively costlessly. And so the corollary is that when you stop being a growth firm and you become mature, when you attain your monopoly,  when you have no more headroom, when you’re Google with a 90% search market share, you have to either move into another market or convince investors you’re moving into another market or face a real downgrading of your shares – a collapse in your share price.

This is why, when Facebook announced that they had slower-than-anticipated growth in US users in 2022 they had a quarter billion dollar 24-hour sell off. Because everyone was like, we know Facebook is eventually going to saturate the market, and when they do, everyone else who’s holding a Facebook share is going to sell it, so I’d better sell mine first. AI is just the latest expression of a series of effectively “pump and dump” swindles You had Facebook doing the pivot to video. You had Google doing Google Plus. You had cryptocurrency, Metaverse, Web3, AR, VR, XR, AI, and now super intelligence. And these are all just hypothetical markets into which firms go that are in fact mature, they’re not growing anymore. The growth through enshittification has been growth by shifting value, not by growing the market, but by shifting value from market participants charging more and paying less. But eventually you can’t charge infinity and pay zero, unless you’re an academic publisher then you do in fact charge infinity and pay zero, but everyone else has to pay something, right? Eventually you need another market to move into. So that’s what AI is. It’s related because it’s both. It’s another monopoly phenomenon. It’s another dysfunction of monopoly, but it’s not the same thing.

CC: We digressed a little around AI. I want to take us back to the main topic of platform enshittification. Before we get to the cure, which is the bulk of what I want to discuss, there is a question: given the conditions and the factors in play, is enshittification inevitable for platforms? And I’m saying this because one of your possibly least favorite people, an economist, I don’t know if you’ve seen this, has published a piece on Competition Policy International on your book, agreeing with much of what you say, but also saying, well, as an economists I think enshittification is interesting, but it’s not inevitable. It will happen in some circumstances, not in others. It depends on how the rent is shifted between the various cohorts. And it’s not an inevitable phenomenon. That makes me smile, because is a very funny piece in your book about how you experience economists, which I won’t elaborate on. But of course, there is a body of people, economists, of which I’m one, whose job is to be paid to actually question whether “ultimately, is it really that way, and can we model it, and is it always the case, and under what conditions and what kind of equation can I put forward?”  What is your view: is it inevitable that for these platforms, given their business model, we were careering towards enshittification and there was no alternative?

CD: No, I don’t think it’s inevitable. When people describe or call a phenomenon inevitable they’re ascribing it tacitly to great economic forces, or great historical forces, instead of policy choices. And one of the ways in which that works very productively for people who benefit from dysfunctional policy environment is if it’s not the result of policy choices. But you know, this is vulgar Thatcherism. TINA: “there is no alternative”. If there’s no way it could have been but this way, then it’s not your fault, and we can’t do anything about it, because history has conspired to bring us to this juncture. But think about how tech firms historically faced consequences when they materially worsened, how they operated, either for suppliers or for customers or both. We can identify forces that disciplined them. We can see how they were dismantled.

We had, for example, competition, and competition didn’t disappear because there are returns to scale. It disappeared because we didn’t enforce competition law. If you think about, for example, Mark Zuckerberg buying Instagram, even the most hardened consumer welfare person will say we should not allow a merger that is intended to reduce competition. But of course, that’s kind of a dead letter, because how do you know what the intention of an acquirer is? You have to peer into their soul, unless that person is Mark Zuckerberg, in which case, he just writes down his intention and emails it to someone. So on the eve of buying Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg writes to the CFO and says, I know you’re curious about why I want to give a billion dollars to a startup with 12 employees. Well, let me tell you, it’s because people like them more than they like Facebook. And if they leave Facebook and they go to Instagram, we can recapture those users, right? This is like, Hey, Bob, you know that guy we were talking about killing, just so you know, is definitely a murder, and I’m premeditating it.

But the Obama administration waved it through. So it’s not a mystery. We just let these obviously anticompetitive, explicitly anticompetitive, mergers occur. And when the market gets reduced, you have regulatory capture. It’s just much easier for a group of five firms to tell their regulators what they want, and because they’re dividing up the market because they don’t compete. They have tons of cash. You have Google paying apple $20 billion a year not to enter the search market. Apple’s accepting the payment and Google’s making the payment because on net, it’s more than either of them would get if they eroded their margins by competing directly, right? So they just have all this money they can spend to get what they want.

But tech has got these other sources of discipline that we can also trace the dismantling of. One is its workforce. So tech workers historically very scarce and very productive. There’s an NBER paper that says that the average Silicon Valley engineer was making a million dollars a year for their boss, and this is why tech bosses treat their workers so well.  Because if the worker walks out the door, a million dollars leaves with them. That’s the free kombucha and the massages and the surgeon will freeze your eggs so you can work through your fertile years. It’s not because they’re sentimental about tech workers, right? Tech workers often have this journey into tech that involves a kind of transformative experience. Experiencing this wider world through technology gives them words to describe their life circumstances, gives them access to a destiny other than the one that they were born into, expands their horizons, and they want to give that to other people. We’ve all met people who are into tech and just want us to use the tech and get a better life from it, and that’s a lot of the tech sector. And so they wanted to fight for their users, and they were empowered to do it. But we had no unions in tech. Scarcity eventually goes away when supply catches up with demand. We had 500,000 tech layoffs in the US in the last three years. October was the worst month for tech layoffs since 2000 and so obviously that power goes out the window.

And then finally, there was the power of new market entry and interoperability, where, because computers are flexible, anything that you did to worsen the experience could be countered with someone who made a new technology that improved the experience again and alienated the affections of the customers and suppliers whom you were screwing. And so if you make the ads more invasive on your website, you invite someone to make an ad blocker, and your users then install the ad blocker, and then they never see another ad again, because it’s not like they ever uninstall the ad blocker. And this should check their worst impulses to charge more, pay less, deliver less value.  But the growth of IP law over 20 years has banned that kind of reverse engineering. So now we are in this regime. It’s called the anticircumvention regime, a set of laws that the US Trade Representative militated for and all of America’s trading partners around the world, including the EU, effectively prohibit any active technology modification, provided that that technology modification requires what’s called circumvention, which just means it’s been designed not to let you change it. It’s like the programmerhas drawn a chalk dotted line around part of the code, and they’ve written next to it don’t change this code. And then if you go in and change the code, even if it’s in a device you own, even if it’s for a lawful purpose, it becomes unlawful. And so why wouldn’t you make things as invasive and as extractive as possible? Apps are just websites that make it illegal to defend your privacy while you use them, which is why everyone wants you to use their app and not their website, and so we lose that final source of discipline. And then that’s what makes it inevitable. If you say to firms, you can pay less deliver less value and retain those surpluses for yourself, of course they’re going to do it. And if they don’t, the executives who are managing the firm will be fired and replaced with ones who will. Because all the fairness side can say is, I would feel bad about myself if we were more extractive. And the other side gets to say, money talks and bullshit walks, right?

I’m sure you followed the Google antitrust trial on search. We know in 2019 that Google had tapped out its growth at 90% search market share. They weren’t going to grow into more search users, unless they raised a billion humans to maturity, which was Google Classroom. But it takes a while, right? And so they needed a source of growth, and they thought they had this one faction that said, why don’t we squeeze users? We will reduce the quality of search results. So you have to search more than once. Every time you search, you’ll see more ads. We’ll just take out the things like spell checking, context awareness, looking to the day’s news for search queries. So someone throws a sandwich at a National Guardsman in Washington DC. We’re not going to show you that article. When you search for sandwich Washington DC, we’ll start with restaurants in Washington DC. You’re going to have to go back and type, oh no, sandwich National Guard Washington DC. And so that’s two shots at showing you ads, right? They can just turn that off.

And there’s this collection of memos published by the DOJ during the antitrust trial, where you have the one faction that’s saying, that’s terrible. If we do that, we’ll make the product worse. I gave so much of myself to deliver this product. This would be awful. And then the other side is saying, well, we’ll just make a lot of money, and they won. And if the other side had been able to say, this will be awful and will be poorer, because we’ll have new market entry, because we’ll have more ad blockers, because our regulators will punish us, our workers will walk out on mass. If they had that source of discipline, then they could have carried the day. So that’s what makes it inevitable, right? The enshittogenic policy environment makes it inevitable.

CC: I was more than just watching the Google Search matter, I’ve been involved in it for years. But this is a key point for me and want to pick some of this apart. In the book the mechanisms that can provide this kind of control effectively or containment of these bad outcomes are, as you said, tech worker power, interoperability, but also competition and regulation. Leave aside tech workers and we’ll talk about interoperability later. I want to dive straight into competition and regulation, because that’s my original domain. In the book, you have a whole big discussion of the resurgence of antitrust under Biden and you have a great description of what the set of Biden enforcers did, from Lina to Jonathan to Rohit and so on. And that, as I view it, was a special moment in which even seen from here what you had from in the US was a vision, a return to a progressive antitrust vision that ultimately emanated from something I find very profound that we don’t have in Europe. When you hear Lina talking about the original motivation for antitrust, and she says it’s “freedom for all men”, it is incredibly affecting, an extremely affecting statement, which we don’t quite have in Europe, here we are much more technocratic in the way we think about antitrust. Now that era is somewhat over, we are in a Trump administration which has preserved some of the actions against Big Tech, Google in particular – while  other things are floating or dying.

I’m interested in your take on this, because mine is that aside from this luminous period where LLina and Jonathan and the Progressives gave us some hope, the antitrust piece seen from Europe is not bright. It hasn’t delivered. I know you are talking in the book at various points about a “muscular approach” that Europe has adopted. You use this word repeatedly about antitrust under Vestager – I’ve been there since 2010 and while intentions were good, Cory, I don’t dispute that, where we are and the difficulty we are faced with is that it hasn’t delivered a damn thing, not a thing. It has moved nothing on the ground. The EC was at it since 2010 – it had a case on Google Search, one on Ad Tech. I was involved in cases against Amazon, Apple for them, but they were dumb cases that went nowhere, cases against Microsoft. We are now in 2025 and Europe started this, was a pioneer in 2017 and I could come to Washington and say, What are you doing? You’re doing nothing, but look at us, we’re doing enforcement! And yet, seven years later, we are nowhere. We have done nothing.

And finally, your book ends just before the final decision of Judge Mehta on remedies in Google Search that was a complete nothing burger, and we’re waiting for brink of Ad Tech, but I’m not hopeful at this stage that antitrust can do anything.

CD: So okay, let me start with a good part, the part that I think is very inspiring and hopeful. So, as you say, stuff started to happen in Europe – it kicked off in 2017, the signs were pointing to something very big. And it wasn’t just in Europe, also in the UK after Brexit, in a period of absolutely shambolic governance, where Prime Ministers were a head of lettuce, you had the Competition and Markets Authority and their digital markets unit doing the best work of their history. And there was trans channel collaboration where the CMA issues big reports on ad tech in Europe then being transposed into South Korean and Japanese cases that are extracting big settlements. What’s interesting for me about this as a political science matter is that a bedrock of political science is that the priorities of economic elites are absolutely dispositive in policy outcomes. That if you go and look at 1000s of policy outcomes and you compare them to the preferences of economic elites, you find out that what billionaires want happens and what billionaires don’t want doesn’t happen. And there isn’t a lot of billionaires out there militating for more antitrust enforcement. There’s some – Daniel Ek from Spotify saying I’m a billionaire, and I hate the trillionaires – so billionaire on trillionaire violence, right? But not much.

Yet here something has changed, and it wasn’t just in South Korea and Japan and Singapore and the UK and Europe and America. And it started under Trump 1 in America. Also Australia, also EU, Member States, Germany, France, Spain, Canada. You know, our competition regulator was the weakest in the world. The Canadian Competition Bureau had brought three merger challenges in its whole history and had never succeeded. And in 2024 Justin Trudeau, who was an institutionalist and loved big corporations and worked hand in glove with them, nevertheless whipped his caucus to deliver an expansion of powers for the Competition Bureau that exceed the competition and regulatory powers of any other regulator. They haven’t started to use yet, but they have a budget now. In China, you have the cyberspace directive, which cracks down on Chinese tech firms, because no matter what Nick Clegg said, Chinese tech firms are not an arm of the Chinese state. They’re competitive. Or the Chinese state, and the Chinese state was quite resentful and jealous of them.

So something happened in the world that reversed the law of political gravity, right? Political pigs started to fly. Political water started to flow uphill. It is remarkable. I don’t think anyone knows where it came from. I don’t pretend to know where it came from, but something really big happened. There is a tail wind blowing. It has not yet taken us anywhere, right? It’s just blowing but the Sherman Act was in 1890 and they didn’t break up Standard Oil till 1912, it was a 22 year shift to get to the point where you had the combination of labor and small businesses and politicians, both regional and national and transnational, it took a quarter of a century to go from a law and the first stirrings of enforcement to the golden era of ending the Gilded Age.

So I wouldn’t mark it off as dead yet. And you know, as an activist my view is that you just got to look for the levers that you have to change things you know. I lament Judge Mehta’s failure and the failure of these enforcement actions in Europe. And I think that you’re right, that we can really say, after the last several years that it is hard to impossible for the European Commission and for Member States to make American tech giants do anything right. They have an infinite arsenal of delaying tactics and ways to challenge things, but I’ll tell you what the EU has 100% control over and can do at will, which is it can control its own behavior. So one of the most powerful anticompetitive tactics that American tech firms have is anticircumvention law and Article Six of the copyright directive is not something Apple controls. It’s not something Google controls. It is something Brussels controls. And so if we were to say, we will withdraw Article Six of the copyright directive, we will simply withdraw from Apple the right to use the European apparatus of state to attack European firms that add new app stores, that reverse engineer their devices, that gives you the ability to go the Carrefour checkout and there’s a 99 cent dongle you plug into your phone that jail breaks and installs an app store.

CC: Yes, but come on the European Commission is currently lying on the floor because, is it DMA or cars? And it is not even close. So let me look at some of the things that you’ve said. I agree with you emphatically that there was a period after 2019, when I stood on the steps of the Supreme Court with the state AGs starting a complete reversal of the trend in the US, which had been under permafrost for 20 years. There’s been a wave across the world, but at the moment you want to be optimistic but the CMA is dead.

CD: Yeah, Doug Gurr is not going to be a muscular Enforcer.

CC: The current CEO says the greatest gaslighting thing, “I’ve always wanted to do things this way”. No, you didn’t, and the Chief Economist has resigned because there is nothing for him to do.

CD: Yeah they fired the Chair and replaced him with the head of Amazon UK, just to be clear for people who don’t follow this.

CC: Yes. So the UK CMA is doing vet clinics, which are very interesting, doing petty little mergers, but they are under very clear instructions not to touch Big Tech, not to do anything about it. The era that you described during Brexit was when the government was preoccupied with Brexit and let the CMA run amok. Then the City of London sat on them and said, No more, no more of that fancy stuff. In Brussels look at what happened with the Ad Tech case. Just over two months ago, the Competition Commissioner was to announce that the decision was taken, she comes out but is pulled back at the last minute because the President and the Trade Commissioner say, Don’t upset Donald Trump. They then come up a week later, after having negotiated for a week as between Google, the White House and the Commission, with something that says, Well, we’ll fine you something like 1.9 bn Euros, which is less than a day’s revenue or a day and a half for Google, change down the back of the sofa, and you must come back with your own suggestions on remedies. You’ve been at this for five years and you couldn’t think of remedies? The case snuck up on you? And the defendant needs to come up with the punishment! In a world in which we’re worried about tariffs on cars, the DMA is expendable.

CD: I get it. So let me tell you why I think we’re not out of moves, right? It’s I’m not saying we’re going to win. I’m saying we’re not out of moves here. I think broadly if there’s a group of people who have been trying to change something for a long time, and haven’t succeeded, and then things starts to change, it’s rarely because they’ve invented a cool new tactic. Mostly it’s because they built a new coalition. They found people who care about the same inequities as they do, maybe for totally different reasons, who’ve joined in. And I think that on independence from American tech, there is quite a coalition brewing. And it needn’t be something that originates in Europe. There’s a potential for a global race to see who can provide the tooling for independence from American Big Tech first, with enormous spoils to the winner, because there’s an industrial policy aspect to this.

So let me walk you through that. The industrial policy aspect of this is that you have huge rents being collected by American firms because they can block circumvention, because they can just unilaterally design things. There are some European firms that do this too. So Mercedes, for example, they rent you your accelerator, right? You have to pay a monthly subscription to get the full acceleration out of your accelerator pedal and your new Mercedes. And that’s only possible because you can’t just take it to a mechanic and say, my accelerator is broken, because that is the definition of a broken accelerator. My accelerator is broken. Fix my accelerator. The mechanic could do it: someone could provide the mechanic with the software to do that. That’s not hard. It’s just illegal under the copyright directive. And we have the copyright directive because the US threatened Europe with tariffs in 2000 if they didn’t adopt the copyright directive, and so we now have the tariffs.

So there’s a strong case for Europe getting rid of this, even if it’s going to upset Mercedes, because no one in Europe likes the fact that Mercedes is renting them their accelerator. No one in Europe likes the fact that Medtronic, which is the big Irish med tech company, forces you to use their technicians to fix ventilators. There was a catastrophe during the lockdowns when everyone’s ventilators were breaking and you couldn’t fix your own ventilator. No one likes it. So there’s this industrial policy opportunity, because if you are the country or the block that says we’re going to legalize reverse engineering and modification, we’re going to make the tooling for app stores. We’re going to make the tooling for printer cartridges. We’re going to make the tooling for privacy blockers. We’re going to make the tooling for turning, taking all the Tesla features that you subscribe to and just unlocking them at the mechanic, at any mechanic, and you don’t give any money to Elon Musk. There’s no monthly subscription. Just get all the subscription features for one price. We’re going to do that and every other country in the world wants to buy those tools. And investors will want to capture that.

Jeff Bezos, when he started Amazon, he said to the publishers, your margin is my opportunity. Well, Jeff Bezos now is a very big margin. It’s someone’s opportunity. We have missed that opportunity because we were worried about tariffs. Now we have tariffs. If someone says, Do as I tell you, or I’m going to burn your house down, and then they burn your house down anyway, you don’t have to keep doing what they say. You’re a mug if you do.

And then there’s the digital sovereignty aspect. Donald Trump has made it very clear that he does not view America as having trading partners or allies. It has rivals, and the rivalry is pursued through tech platforms. So this is what we were warned Huawei was going to do if we let them get into our telecoms infrastructure, that they would use that to achieve geopolitical action. And so you have Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, he issues a genocide warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump denounces him, and Microsoft obliges Trump by terminating Kareem Khan’s Outlook and he loses all the working documents of the International Criminal Court, his calendar, his address book, his email archives. That could happen to any government, industry, any firm that America competes with. And it doesn’t stop there. You remember when Putin’s thugs looted these tractors in Ukraine and they showed up in Crimea because you can always find the tractors wherever they are in the world and John Deere was able to press a button, and those tractors were permanently immobilized. And we all thought that was very cool, right? It was cool, but Donald Trump can coerce John Deere into shutting down the agriculture in any country he doesn’t like. So there’s this strong national security case for legalizing jailbreaking, and it cuts both ways, because we should worry about China having control over batteries and inverters in Europe and electric busses and all these other things that are manufactured with it. You have cloud connected Chinese technology. We should worry about it because geopolitically, it’s a tool, and why wouldn’t they use that tool if it, if it makes sense to do it.

CC: But this is exactly the point I wanted to end with, which is the sovereignty point. I mean, what you describe about Kareem Kahn is very live in Europe. People are very aware of it at every level. It is one of the most discussed issues, and it is the wake up call, amongst other things, that is leading to this enormous discussion about digital sovereignty, which for me is a much, much more hopeful one than regulation and competition, because regulation and competition are about “we tame them”, somehow “we clip their wings” because they’re bad actors, they do bad things. Okay, I get it, but when I used to work in industry as a consultant, I remember clients at the time saying to me, why are Europeans not doing their own stuff instead of fixating on just regulating us? And that always stayed with me, because, of course, the American ethos of building, building, building is one that we don’t have. In Europe we have funneled all energy in the last five years into regulation, all public discourse around platforms has been about regulating them. And the question is, but how does that create a European industry that has agency on its own? Where is a European cloud? Where is European software? Where is European stuff?

CD: But that is because Europe agreed not to only innovate de novo, to build a whole new thing. Olivetti would have never shipped a typewriter if they weren’t allowed to use Qwerty, right? If the Italian minister had said to the Americans, we promise that we will use our courts to destroy any company that lays out a QWERTY keyboard, Olivetti would have never shipped a typewriter. Nokia would have never shipped a phone if it only worked with other Nokia phones, and if it didn’t interconnect to the global telsephone network. And the global telephone network’s interconnection has to do not just with the ITU setting standards for phones, but also the rescinding of exclusivity privileges extended by governments to telcos, particularly ATT. And there is this incredible dynamic in interoperability, where monocultures are actually dangerous to monopolists, because they invite market entry. So, ATT argued that new market entrants could not make accessories to plug into the Bell System. And once they lost those cases, you had this flood of devices. And the reason you had a flood of devices is that ATT had enforced a rule where every telephone was the same shape, which meant that if you made a thing that clipped onto a telephone, it fit every telephone in America, right? So if you made a thing that exported data from two mobile operating systems, you would capture every mobile phone. If you made a thing that exported from three Office suites, you would capture all Office documents in the world, right? This is a big opportunity,

CC: I completely agree that interoperability is central to this, but we’re not thinking that you have to reinvent the wheel. And if we were able to enforce interoperability broadly, that would be amazing.

CD: Not just enforce permit, right? It’s not just about enforcing. Enforcing is great. Setting standards is important, but often standards emerge in the same way that labor law does. Labor law emerges after labor wars, and labor law is always a bid for labor peace by bosses seeking to tame workers through the power of the state, to bring them to the table. Where did we get standardized documents from? The DocX, XlsX, PowerPoint X, that allows us to copy and paste between Pages and Numbers and Keynote and Word and Excel and PowerPoint into Google Docs, office, 365…. It was because first, Apple aggressively reversed engineered Microsoft’s document formats, and they played this game of cat and mouse where Microsoft would update the formats to break compatibility. Apple would break it. Microsoft was spending more and more money. They were like the Soviets during the Cold War, where they just had to keep buying nukes, right? And then they sued for peace, so then the ISO standardized the doc format. But it didn’t happen when Microsoft was sitting fat and pretty at the top of things. It happened when Microsoft was facing technological and market competition that posed unquantifiable risks on its engineering efforts.

CC: But let me just again as someone who is ultimately the mother of Eurostack in Europe: consider the predicament which is specific to Europe. We have focused on regulating apps and services, the e-commerce store and Google search and the App store. And below that, the platforms have said: okay, you play along, enjoy yourself with us. But in fact, in the meantime, the whole infrastructure on which these apps and services rest, the cloud, the compute, the connectivity, the software, has been occupied. 80 to 90% of European cloud use is not European. It is an amazing number. There’s a point about economic productivity, linked to the presence of your own assets on your Continent, a diffusion, an adoption capability, which has driven American productivity to be what it is relative to Europe. The reason we are laggards is because our adoption has been lagging. So unless we have assets here that we effectively build to counter this colonization from non European assets, we are just going to shrink and shrink.

CD: I think we’re in agreement. But I would suggest one of the reasons that there’s under investment in European alternatives, both in terms of the hardware to run it on, and the software stack that sits on top of the hardware, is because, without ready means of moving data out of the American silos, why would you build it, right? Why build housing in West Berlin for homeless people in East Berlin? You need to tear down the wall before it makes anyone’s going to invest in this stuff. We could build full replicas of office 365 Google Docs, Apple stack, but no one’s going to copy and paste a million documents out of their government ministry, one at a time into Eurostack. And the path to that runs through anti circumvention. You have to get rid of anticircumvention. Then you can do things like virtualize a mobile device in the cloud and automatically iterate through all the documents and check the privilege. You can scrape things as they’re emerging here and put them over there and do synchronization. And then you create the conditions by which firms sue for peace, right? Then they standardize, and they agree to be regulated. They agree to an interindustry agreement, or to follow a standard set by ISO or the ITU or whatever. They only do that when it beats the alternative, which is the chaos of all-out war.

In information security we have this idea that there’s an attacker’s advantage, right? If you want to maintain the status quo, you have to make sure that there are no mistakes that can be exploited. If you want to reverse the status quo or undermine the status quo, you don’t have to be perfect. You just have to find one mistake your adversary has made. And so under these circumstances, if it’s a purely technological battle, then the tech platforms are going to lose. If it’s a legal battle, they’re going to win.

Mark Zuckerberg gets angry about this: there was an app last year called OG app that logged in as you to Instagram, grabbed everything waiting for you in the Instagram queue, threw away the suggestions, threw away the boosted posts, threw away the ads, threw away the click bait that had been bubbled up from three months ago and then just showed you the things from the people you followed in reverse chronological order. It was the top app, or was in the top 10 apps on both app stores within a day. And then that night, Meta sent a letter to Apple and Google, and they shut it down. So Mark Zuckerberg, he walked out of his office, and he like, if he turns right, there’s a building full of lawyers, and if he turns left, there’s a building full of engineers. He didn’t go to the building full of engineers and say, change Instagram to make this impossible. He walked into the building full of lawyers, and he said, Send one letter to Google and one letter to Apple, and that’ll make this go away, right.

And here’s one more thing that I think is very, very good. In this moment, there are any number of people who have quite a bullish American attitude towards technology, who are European, who have been living in America. They’re investors in tech. Donald Trump has chased them out of the country. There are a lot of engineers who used to live in America who know where the bodies are buried, who know how fat the margins are, and who aren’t going to be working for the Big Yech giants anymore or have no hope of working for them. And there’s a lot of capital that would like to invest in a business whose success factor isn’t determined by how many Trump coins you buy, and it is repatriating to other territories. Now, Europe doesn’t need to do this. It could be Canada, right? Canada’s response to the Trump tariffs has been retaliatory tariffs, just making the things we buy more expensive. It’s like punching yourself in the face really hard and hoping the downstairs neighbor says, ouch, right? We don’t have to do that. Tariffing soybeans. What is the point of that? You’re hurting some farmer in a state that begins and ends with a vowel who never did anything bad to Canada.

Jailbreaking directly attacks the nine CEOs who paid a million dollars each to sit behind Trump on the dais at the inauguration. Right? It is a frontal assault on the fattest lines of business of the most profitable companies. So this is like a real muscular response, and if Canada does it, well, we’ll never get another Research In Motion, but we might get a thing like Research In Motion, except all it sells is the tooling to allow people to make app stores for iPhones, which means you get all the profits of Research In Motion and none of the capital expenditures. Apple has to do the capex, you get to collect the rents. That is an amazing business to be in. Europe will get the consumer surplus from it, because European firms that want to run app stores will be able to buy that tooling from Canada, but Canada is going to be the one exporting it. So some country could do it could be Mexico, could be Ghana, it could be Nigeria, but it could be Europe.

CC: Indeed, at the moment the upswell of enthusiasm and resurgence of this spirit is big in Europe. As you mentioned. There is interest from capital. People are saying that there are opportunities here in Europe, huge opportunities for capital to actually be very productive. And honestly, I want to end on a positive note. I agree with you that maybe competition and regulation will come into its own, and maybe this current phase is just a phase, and there will be another runway, but this gives me more hope. Building something that then holds platforms and their power to account is the way. I don’t see another way.

CD: I agree, but I also think to create the space for regulation, you have to weaken the platforms. I always tell my libertarian friends this. If you think that the only thing the government should do is enforce contracts, they still have to be able to enforce the contracts. And they have to be more powerful than the parties to the contract. Otherwise, what will happen is they’ll say, no, no, no, you cheated the contract, and the more powerful party will say, I think you’ll find I didn’t, and that’ll be the end of the story. So the smallest government you can have is determined by the largest corporation you’re willing to tolerate. I don’t think there’s any intrinsic good in making governments extremely large. They should be as large as they need to be, and no larger. And one of the ways that we can leave more space for sort of pluralism, civil society, SMEs, cooperatives, and not just have the state run everything is by making firms smaller. So we can make states smaller as well. And if we can make firms smaller by withdrawing the power of the state from them, withdrawing the access to the tools of the state to punish market entry through IP law, then they we can cut them down to size, we can turn the cartel back into a rabble.

Remember where we started with this, with Tim Wu and his paper, when Tech was a rabble of 200 SMEs and media was seven giant concentrated companies, which is now five giant concentrated companies. Tech got its ass kicked, even though they were two orders of magnitude larger than media, because they had a collective action problem, and they were eroding one another’s margins through competition, because workers could command a higher wage and consumers could command a lower price because they competed, and so subject them to competition, not because competition is a good unto itself, but because competition makes firms, it shatters the solidarity the ruling class subject them to competition, shatter their solidarity, make them bid against each other, and then we can do some of those other regulations. We can break them up. We can bring them to the table and make them agree to standards and interoperability mandates and so on. All of that stuff is good, but it’s hard to do when you have giant monopolists. In Eastern Canada there’s this joke whose punch line is, if you wanted to get there, I wouldn’t start from here. That is where we are, right? This is not where we should be starting from, but it is where we are.

CC: In Europe in particular, we have been infantilized to the extent that we expect governments to do everything for us. But there is a great deal of, again, resurgence of spirit from the private sector that is saying we’re not waiting for someone from Brussels to do things for us, regulation or whatever it is, got to be done as a grassroot initiative that I am most hopeful for. And I don’t think it ends in Europe, because I hear the sovereignty voices in other places, in very strong in Canada, very strong in other parts. So I think that’s a very promising line.

CD: Do you remember when the UK legalized unlocking phones from carriers? So there was this moment where some tooling companies got together and they made the tools to unlock phones. But the face of it was a man with a card table at the back of my dry cleaner near Old Street roundabout, and he was paying 25 quid a week for access to the latest updates that would unlock every model of every phone as the new software was being pushed out over the air to the phones. So he could always do that. So that’s what the value chain looks like.  That we, when we think about this, and we think about like, ink jet, ink refilling, we’re like, Okay, well, that’s a low margin business. You know, sure, it’s the kind of business that the kind of manic entrepreneur who’s selling vapes and has a Bitcoin ATM and will take your dry cleaning and also accept your parcels for Amazon. They’ll get into that business, but someone needs to supply them with the tools. And there are a lot of people who want to be in that business who will buy that tool, and it has to be a subscription, because it’s adversarial, which means that you buy the tool once, and the manufacturer updates their side, and the tool stops working, so it has to be kept up to date. So there’s a case for a recurring revenue, a recurring payment and recurring revenue. It’s the kind of business that capitalists in the last 20 years have loved. Lots of customers, all of them willing to pay a subscription. If they stop paying the subscription, the product stops working. It’s delivering value to their customers. They make money from it. This is a very good business. And we look at inkjet ink: four companies make all the inkjet ink and make all the inkjet printers, they force you to use their OEM ink. OEM ink is now the most expensive fluid you can buy as a civilian without a license. It’s $10,000 a gallon, which means it’ll be cheaper to print your grocery list with the semen of a Kentucky Derby winning stallion. That’s a gigantic market opportunity. It’s a penny a gallon in bill of materials. It’s $10,000 a gallon at the at the retail level, somewhere in the middle is a very good business.

CC: I think we are at time, you have to run and catch a train, but I’m enormously grateful and would love to talk to you for hours. I’m sure that people will enjoy it as much as I did. Thank you again for being here.

CD: Thank you for inviting me. It’s great to see you again.