How to Reclaim the Internet from Big Tech

The internet has evolved a lot since the early days. And questions of internet freedom and Big Tech monopolies go way over most of our heads as average consumers. But activists are still thinking about them, and working towards ways we can create conscious change and reclaim the internet.

See Reclaiming the Internet with Cory Doctorow for a complete transcript of the Easy Prey podcast episode.

Cory Doctorow is a science fiction novelist, journalist, and activist. He has written over thirty books, including adult and young adult novels, graphic novels, non-fiction books, and short story collections. He has also worked with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) for over twenty-three years as an activist, mostly working on digital rights management and related issues like competition and anti-trust. Additionally, he writes the Pluralistic newsletter at pluralistic.net, and may be best known for coining the term “enshittification.”

Starting Internet Freedom Activism

Cory’s father was a computer scientist, which meant he grew up along with computer technology. When he was a child, he took a school trip to The Merrill Collection, the world’s largest public science fiction reference collection, donated by author Judith Merrill. On that school trip, she offered to critique students’ stories. It was like Wayne Gretzky offering to help a ten-year-old work on their slapshot. But Cory took her up on that offer and she mentored him through his writing journey.

Later on, Cory realized that the tech sector would take anyone who knew even a little about computers and would pay more than he made working at a bookstore. After dropping out of his fourth undergraduate program, he became a web developer and freelance CIO helping small businesses get online. He also co-founded a software company and moved to San Francisco, where he got involved with EFF. Eventually, he quit the company he helped found and started working for EFF as their European director.

Both of Cory’s parents were involved in politics. His dad was a labor activist and anti-nuclear proliferation activist. His mom was also a labor activist and involved in the fight to legalize abortion in Canada. So with the combination of computers, science fiction, and the politics he grew up with, ending up as an internet freedom activist makes perfect sense to Cory.

We Need a New Internet

Cory’s use of the internet has changed enormously over his life. His first connection was a modem card in an Apple II Plus slot – for which he had to sacrifice the expansion card that let the computer type lowercase letters. He still remembers the day that he dialed up the bulletin board system and discovered the available feeds had gone from 50 to 50,000. Today, he has his distraction rectangle just like everybody else, and he’s watched the internet become what Tom Eastman called five giant websites filled with screenshots of the other four.

I am as worried about the internet as I am excited about its potential.

Cory Doctorow

Cory is mournful of the loss of the good old internet we had, but doesn’t want this to be the end. We need a new good internet. This not-great phase needs to be the transition between the old good internet and a new good internet. The path there is through internet freedom and self-determination. We need to be able to modify and improve the services, devices, and code we use to serve us instead of the people who operate them.

What worries Cory most about the internet is what worried him most all along – that computing, sensing, and tech would become the single path to interact with others civilly, politically, and socially. It’s become a powerful tool of surveillance and control. There’s a revisionist history of EFF and the movement it’s part of that says they just couldn’t conceive of a world where everyone having internet access wasn’t a good thing. But no one starts an organization like EFF thinking it’s going to be automatically great. You have to be both excited about what could happen and frightened of what could go wrong.

The Path to Internet Freedom

There’s not just one path forward. That’s the difference between writing a novel and activism. A novelist can plot a smooth ascent with rising tension to a climax where everything gets resolved and the book ends. When working to change society, there’s no clear path. We end up doing what coders call a hill climbing algorithm. Ascend a little bit by one path, then reassess what paths are available. The way to the very top is obscured when you’re at the bottom, so you have to do it bit by bit. Cory never knows how we’re going to get from here to the future he wants to see. All he does know is some next steps.

I never know how we’re going to get from here to the future I want, but I do know some next steps we can take.

Cory Doctorow

Cory spent a lot of his time abroad working in tech policy. The most significant force he had to contend with wasn’t big companies, it was U.S. trade representatives. They twisted the arm of every country in the world to add laws to make it a crime to reverse engineer or modify American tech. So if you’re Canadian and write an iPhone app, and Cory is Canadian and wants to use it, the only legal way is to put it on the app store. Every dollar he gives you as a customer gets routed through Apple and comes back thirty cents lighter. It’s a giant private tax on the world. Printer ink is another example – under international law, modifying your printer so it doesn’t check if it’s an OEM cartridge or if it’s been refilled is a crime. All of these monopolies are challenges to internet freedom.

Tariff Changes and Tech Changes

All over the world, laws protect Big Tech. Want to modify your Facebook app to block ads and surveillance? That’s a felony. Want to modify your hospital ventilator so your on-site technicians can fix it instead of having to wait for a company technician to come out and pay for the trouble? That’s a felony. John Deere can threaten farmers with prison for fixing their own tractors. Countries signed these laws because they couldn’t get tariff-free access to American markets without it. Access to sell their goods to America was conditional on these laws.

With Trump’s tariff changes, access to American markets is now off the table, and it’s not coming back. Our system of global trade has gone through an unscheduled midair disassembly. But there may be some internet freedom benefits we can salvage from it. If the only reason other countries were letting their economies get looted by American multinationals is tariff-free exports, no longer having that option means there’s no reason to keep the laws. And countries that get rid of them have the potential to become export powerhouses.

Once that happens, it’s going to leak into America. There’s no way to stop Americans from downloading and using jailbreaks from other countries. This aspect of internet freedom could become a lot better. Right now you can get printers very cheap because the companies charge so much for ink. When the ink is unlocked and you can refill it or get a cheaper third-party cartridge, printers may get expensive. The transition will be interesting. The natural number of printer companies isn’t five – that’s due to lack of anti-trust enforcement.

The only thing that’s made things expensive is letting companies create monopolies where they can fix prices.

Cory Doctorow

Optimism About the Internet

We’re in a moment where we could see a real set of changes in support of internet freedom. Cory thinks we’re closer to those changes than we have been in his whole career.

Milton Friedman was Reagan’s top economist. He defined neoliberalism and had a whole set of policies that included dismantling the post-war prosperity and going back to the Gilded Age. People told him that nobody wanted that and it was going to be hard to convince people to become plebs again. He would say that in times of crisis, ideas move from the periphery to the center in an instant, and our job is to keep good ideas laying around until the crisis. His political ideas were terrible, but his theory of change was right.

For Friedman, it was the oil crisis. For us now, it’s a Trump crisis – it’s reordering how the world works, and how everything will stand when the dust settles isn’t set. Things are up for grabs. We can run around and freak out, or we can be tactical. Trump is knocking things down and leaving rubble. We can go through and figure out what we can stand up. There’s a lot of opportunity in the current chaos.

What to Do as a Consumer

There’s not much you can do as a consumer about these issues. You have to do them as a citizen. You can’t shop your way out of monopolies any more than you can recycle your way out of climate change. By all means, wash your plastics and put them in the blue bin, but they’re mostly going to the landfill or incinerator. Almost everything at the grocery store is made by either Unilever or Proctor & Gamble. When you choose the low-packaging, environmentally conscious option, you’re not changing corporate behavior – they’re just expanding their options to accommodate you. We’re not going to fix this with shopping. We’re going to fix it with politics.

Shopping your way out of monopolies is like recycling your way out of the climate emergency.

Cory Doctorow

EFF has a national network of affiliate groups across America called the Electronic Frontier Alliance. EFA groups are local and autonomous, with paid EFF activists that help organize, share information, and keep them coordinated. Joining your local EFA is one way to get involved. There are also lots of other ways. More political groups are kicking off right now. Find ones that matter to you and do what you can to make a fairer world. A fairer world is going to make other stuff easier.

Getting rid of tech monopolies requires taking on corporate power. We saw the election corporate power gave us. And there’s different ways to fight it. We can work on different aspects of fighting corporate power, and we’re all in the same fight. Together, we’ll save internet freedom.

You don’t have to fight tech monopolies to get rid of tech monopolies. You have to fight corporate power to get rid of tech monopolies.

Cory Doctorow

Leaving the Apps

Some people think the best way to shatter platforms’ power and reclaim internet freedom is just to leave the apps. But the only real way to do that is by legalizing jailbreaking apps and mandating APIs so you can leave but still communicate with people on the app. It’s like convincing everyone you love toe leave Facebook or Twitter and go to Bluesky. People are starting to get there a little, but it’s slow.

In the play “Fiddler on the Roof,” every fifteen minutes Cossacks ride through this little Jewish town and beat everybody. People just take it. At the end of the movie, the Czar kicks the Jews out of the town, and we find out they stayed because the only thing worse than staying was leaving – they wouldn’t be able to stay together if they left, and they loved each other more than they hated the Czar. That’s why people are on these apps. They’re on Facebook because there’s a group of people with the same disease, or that’s where the kids’ carpool gets organized, or because they’re immigrants and that’s how they stay in touch with loved ones at home.

Economists call this a collective action problem. Facebook solved this when competing with MySpace by creating a bot – you gave it your MySpace login information and it would put everything from your MySpace inbox into Facebook, and when you replied it would send it back to MySpace. If you did that with Facebook today, you’d be violating several laws. We have to get rid of these laws so people can get off the platforms.

Science Fiction and Reality

Cory writes when he’s anxious. During lockdowns, he wrote nine books. When you write that much in a few years, you get weird ideas – one of which was what it would be like to write the final volume in a long-running series without writing the rest of the series. So he wrote Red Team Blues, where a forensic accountant who had been in Silicon Valley busting tech scams since the 1980s takes on one last job, a crypto heist. His editor loved the book and bought two more. Since that was the last adventure, Cory decided to write the earlier books in the series, but out of order. The third one, Picks & Shovels, just came out and is the origin story of the protagonist, complete with a computer-based Ponzi scheme and a rival company championing tech and internet freedom. Several readers have told him it’s the best novel in the series so far, and since you can read them in any order, you can start there if you want.

Art is the process of taking a big feeling in the artist and infusing it into the medium of art in hopes that when an audience member encounters it, some of that feeling materializes in them. All of Cory’s big feelings relate to his fears and hopes around technology – that’s what his art is about.

Find Cory Doctorow online with his open-access newsletter Pluralistic at pluralistic.net. He writes an essay there 4-5 days a week. You can have it sent to your email, with no tracking, ads, or read receipts, read it as a full-text RSS feed, or subscribe to it on Mastodon, Twitter, Tumblr, or Medium.