- The discussion is about the concept of adversarial interoperability in the tech industry.
- Adversarial interoperability refers to the ability to plug something into a product without permission, even if the manufacturer doesn't like it, in order to gain customers.
- Examples of adversarial interoperability include Samba, which replicated Microsoft's proprietary networking protocol, and Apple's iWork suite, which reverse engineered Microsoft's file formats.
- Legal tools have been created to prevent adversarial interoperability, making it difficult for smaller companies to compete with dominant firms.
- The discussion explores the potential consequences for Y Combinator (YC) founders who use illegal or borderline illegal tools, suggesting they may be forced to sell their companies earlier to avoid legal issues.
- The current situation of a web dominated by a few giant platforms is not sustainable, and there may be a crisis in these firms due to their inability to address certain issues.
- The world is regulated by four forces: code, markets, law, and norms.

- The possibility of technological advancements, profitability, legality, and social norms all influence what happens in society.
- Jeffrey Epstein's social unacceptability despite his wealth highlights the importance of norms.
- Businesses that are legally risky but popular can create a constituency for a shift in norms and fund legal efforts for change.
- Change without market support can be chaotic, while firms aligned with new norms can benefit from legislative changes.
- The importance lies in creating something new after the downfall of existing entities like Facebook.
- The application of copyright rules to non-industrial contexts is problematic.
- The internet relies on copying, making it difficult to apply traditional copyright laws.
- Using copyright as a framework for regulating various aspects of life is misplaced.
- Simplifying copyright for non-industry individuals would either lead to constant legal issues or render it ineffective.
- People outside the entertainment industry should not be burdened with copyright concerns.
- Industrial use, such as publishing a book, is different from cultural use, such as remixing and republishing.

- Not all industries are for profit, such as writing a book for the Church of Scientology without charging money
- Fanfic shared on a blog or Google classroom is non-industrial
- Corner cases exist and are difficult to define, requiring judges to apply principles
- Most corner cases have low stakes and are not heavily adjudicated
- Rules for industrial use should prioritize free expression
- The Supreme Court ruled in favor of fair use for an unauthorized sequel to Gone with the Wind
- A combination of enumerated exceptions and principles could future-proof fair use
- Judges and lawmakers should address fair use questions as technology evolves
- Deepfakes present both artistic and risky opportunities, requiring principles to determine their legitimacy
- Adversarial interoperability has been a recurring issue with monopolistic tech companies
- Tech companies are seeking to become state monopolies and resist being broken up
- Fixing tech and fixing tech companies are mutually exclusive options

- The author argues that imposing regulations on tech companies to police hate speech, copyright infringement, and terrorism would only benefit large companies who can afford the necessary moderators.
- The author suggests that giving tech companies 10 years without competition would make them more stubborn and harder to break up.
- The author discusses the difficulties faced by anti-adversarial interoperability laws and the risk-averse nature of investors and counsel.
- Facebook is losing users and the author proposes a tool that allows users to access their messages without Facebook's surveillance.
- The author explains the potential of creating alternative platforms for specific communities, such as medical support groups, to avoid Facebook's privacy issues.
- The author highlights the limitations of Facebook as a persuasion engine and dismisses claims of mind control.
- The author questions why people are vulnerable to conspiracy theories and suggests that a world with many conspiracies makes it difficult to discern the truth.

- Putin's head of media strategy admits that some opposition groups to Putin are secretly funded by him, but doesn't reveal which ones.
- The rise in conspiracies is due to market concentration and industry collusion with regulators.
- The collective action problem becomes insoluble when there are too many people involved in the conspiracy.
- The current epistemological crisis is a result of not knowing how to determine what is true.
- The rule of law is replaced by the rule of man when trust in the process of determining truth is lost.
- Conspiracy theories have actually decreased over time, but this may be due to editorial changes in what letters are published.

- The way people communicate conspiracy theories has changed, with letters to the editor becoming less common.
- The belief in the flat earth has become more central, despite evidence disproving it.
- Conspiracy theories often blend real conspiracies with theories based on real conspiracies.
- The credibility of the system has been eroded through market concentration and corruption.
- Science fiction can create and influence the future, providing insight into hopes and fears about technology.
- The YC community should use science fiction as part of the idea generating process.
- The world is at a tipping point for understanding climate risk, and indifference can lead to debt and eventual crisis.
- Platforms allow people to find others who share similar beliefs, which can be both beneficial and dangerous.

- The piece discusses the potential for new ideas outside of the mainstream to find support and build communities.
- It suggests that founders should look for areas where there is a high pressure differential and indifference to find startup ideas.
- The author mentions the potential for startups to address the issue of concentrated industries and wealth concentration contributing to climate change.
- They argue that building for resilience and recovery in the face of disaster is not only kind but also a good market strategy.
- The author highlights a court case in the Ninth Circuit where a judge ruled that scraping websites for data is a pro-competitive activity, suggesting potential opportunities for startups in this area.
- They mention that investors may be hesitant due to their investments in companies that rely on monopolies, but there is still a market opportunity for scraping startups.

- The discussion focuses on adversarial interoperability in the tech industry, which refers to the ability to plug something into a product without permission to gain customers.
- Legal tools have been created to prevent adversarial interoperability, making it difficult for smaller companies to compete with dominant firms.
- Y Combinator (YC) founders who use illegal or borderline illegal tools may be forced to sell their companies earlier to avoid legal issues.
- The current dominance of a few giant platforms in the web industry is not sustainable and may lead to a crisis.
- The world is regulated by four forces: code, markets, law, and norms, which influence what happens in society.
- Norms are important, as seen in the case of Jeffrey Epstein, and can create a constituency for change.
- Simplifying copyright for non-industry individuals is problematic and may burden them unnecessarily.
- Industrial use and cultural use of copyright have different implications.
- Fair use and principles should be applied to determine the legitimacy of deepfakes and other technological advancements.
- Adversarial interoperability has been an issue with monopolistic tech companies seeking to resist being broken up.
- Imposing regulations on tech companies may benefit large companies and hinder competition.
- Alternative platforms can be created to address privacy issues and provide specific communities with better options.
- The rise in conspiracy theories is due to market concentration and collusion with regulators.
- The current epistemological crisis is a result of not knowing how to determine what is true.
- Science fiction can provide insights into hopes and fears about technology and should be used in the idea generation process.
- Platforms can allow people to find others with similar beliefs, which can be both beneficial and dangerous.
- Founders should look for areas with high pressure differential and indifference to find startup ideas.
- Startups can address concentrated industries and wealth concentration contributing to climate change.
- Scraping websites for data has been ruled as a pro-competitive activity, presenting opportunities for scraping startups.
- While investors may be hesitant due to investments in monopolies, there is still a market opportunity for scraping startups.

- The speaker emphasizes the need for legislative and legal clarity regarding scraping and advocates for a better public understanding of its legitimacy.
- The speaker recalls a conversation at a university event where a student asked about convincing friends to leave Facebook, and the speaker suggests using technical solutions, like writing a small shell script, to communicate outside of the platform.
- The speaker gives an example of cable TV as a product of adversarial interoperability, where the industry was disrupted by a new entrant that allowed people to have a foot in both fields while transitioning.
- The speaker expresses a desire to see more of this hacker spirit and encourages the YC community to embrace it.
- The speaker mentions their personal website, podcast, and ownership of the website boingboing.net.

- The speaker emphasizes the need for legislative clarity on scraping and advocates for public understanding.
- They suggest using technical solutions to communicate outside of platforms like Facebook.
- The speaker gives an example of adversarial interoperability disrupting the cable TV industry.
- They encourage the hacker spirit and mention their personal website and podcast.

Cory Doctorow is a blogger, journalist, and science fiction author. He’s also the co-editor of Boing Boing.

https://twitter.com/doctorow
https://boingboing.net/

Joe Betts-Lacroix is the CTO of VIUM and an Expert at YC.

https://twitter.com/bettslacroix
https://www.vium.com/

Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200), twice a year.

Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/ 

Topics

00:07 - Adversarial interoperability

7:30 - So what should founders do?

13:30 - Copyright

19:30 - Remixing

26:35 - AT&T

29:25 - Firms and state-like duties

31:00 - Medium-term suggestions for founders

39:00 - Conspiracy theories

51:25 - Science fiction and predictions

56:30 - Peak indifference model

So today we have Corey Doctorow and Joe Betz-Lacroix.

So Corey, when I saw your talk at Burning Man this last time, and I heard you mention adversarial interoperability, my sort of nerd buzzer went off and I thought, wow, this is gonna be a really cool concept for the founders at Y Combinator to think about.

Yeah, so I think most people are familiar with the idea of interoperability per se, you know, 1 thing plugs into another thing and we've all encountered a kind of indifferent interoperability where, you know, people who make your fridge don't care what kind of magnets you put on the door.

We've encountered like cooperative interoperability where the people who make your car actually go and adhere to a standard for the 12 volt lighter receptacle to make sure that when you go to the gas station and pay 50 cents for that USB charger thing that it always fits and works every time.

And those are great and they're important and they're kind of how we build systems.

But there's another kind of interoperable interoperability that's really important to the history of tech which is adversarial interoperability.

And that's when I plug something into something you made without your permission even if you don't like it and maybe especially if you would prefer that I didn't in order to make your customer my customer and You can understand why companies that are very established don't like adversarial interoperability But people who are trying to start a company that's kind of where you'd want to start.

If you remember there was the, there were a couple of moments in say Mac OS's history where adversarial interoperability was totally pivotal.

At 1 point Microsoft had not just dominance in the operating system market and the applications market, but it was establishing dominance in the local networking market, intranets.

They had a product called SMB that was a proprietary networking protocol.

And although they made clients for SMB for other platforms, they were deliberately very poor so that those systems would always be second class citizens on the office network.

It was really bad for GNU, Linux and other Unixes.

And it really sold the hell of a lot of Microsoft systems.

And so very slowly but surely everything that wasn't a Microsoft OS was being squeezed out of the office land.

And this Australian grad student used a protocol analyzer to capture enough SMB traffic that he was able to replicate SMB.

He released it as free open source software.

He called it Samba and attracted a developer community and was, became kind of a gold standard, where now it's bundled in with, with everything you use.

It's just part of the standard Linux distro and it's in Mac OS and even in mobile platforms.

They did that even though Microsoft didn't want them to.

Apple then internally produced another set of adversarial interoperable tools that were really important in the mid 2000s when Microsoft's dominance of the office market of the office suite market was really threatening max ability to collaborate within those environments.

Microsoft's versions for the Mac always lagged the Microsoft versions and so the documents weren't really compatible.

So Apple reverse engineered Microsoft's file formats and they cloned them and they made a new suite called the iWork suite and they did this again without Microsoft's cooperation and in defiance of Microsoft's marketing strategy and in so doing they were able to make max first-class citizens on the on the land and in the office environment so in both cases they were able to do this because there were very few legal recourses available to dominant firms that had taken over their field software patents were rare and thin the computer fraud and abuse act which is this 1986 anti hacking law that Ronald Reagan signed into law in a panic after he watched Matthew Broderick and War Games, I'm not making that up, had not yet been extended to cover terms of service violations as it would be eventually thanks to legal action by Blizzard and Facebook where they were able to effectively say that violating terms of service was hacking and potentially a felony.

We didn't yet have theories of tortious interference for inducing users to break terms of service to break contracts.

The Digital Millennium Copyright act and its prohibition on reverse engineering hadn't become widely applied yet.

So today if you were to try and do this, like say you were to try and make android devices first class citizens in an iOS environment and in order to do so you wanted to reverse engineer iOS and allow yourself to sideload in apps into iOS and also to support the iOS API under Android.

You would find yourself running up against software patents, Digital Millennium Copyright Act claims for circumvention.

You'd find yourself running up against terms of service violations and probably tortious interference claims.

This thicket has grown up around adversarial interoperability.

Like every pirate wants to be an admiral, everyone who goes up the ladder wants to pull the ladder up behind them.

And it's not unusual that they wanted to do that.

I mean, IBM wanted to do that when they were dominating the mainframe market, the difference is that we didn't let them we didn't equip them with these legal tools.

And in the year since we have created these legal tools that allow firms not just to dominate, but to maintain their dominance, not by making better products, but by establishing a kill zone around their products where it becomes so legally fraught to make compatible products that nobody even tries.

we have at YC this group of the little people who are striking out and wanting to create these huge companies rather than letting the big companies do everything.

And 1 of our flagship publications or forums is hacker news.

There's this ethos of we are hackers and we can get there by hacking.

So I would like to think that we can still hack and not get our heads hacked off.

So a friend of mine, Aaron Patser created something called mint, and ended up taking a bunch of eyeballs from big banks and other financial companies by hacking, essentially, going, doing adversarial interoperability with their websites by scraping, which was sort of marginally legal.

Was it through like a virtual browser that he would just like take your password information and log you

the passwords from the users voluntarily.

And then everything just magically works in the background.

And that allowed him to build a big startup that got sold for gazillions of dollars by 1 of those giants, financial corporations, which is now in 1 of these monopolies that is trying to keep other people from doing similar things He also sold a bit early like it wasn't a billion-dollar company yet And do you think that if YC founders are using some of these tools that are kind of illegal-ish or strictly illegal right now, that they're going to be forced into selling earlier because otherwise they won't be able to defend themselves?

So let me answer it with a kind of theory of change because I don't think that the thicket is sustainable.

I think that nobody really likes having a web that's just 5 giant websites filled with screenshots from the other 4.

And you know, you see it in the rhetoric of the big platforms when they describe their own failings, they say, well, what do you expect from us?

So Zuckerberg's so-called free speech talk this week.

You know, 1 of the things that he said was, well, how can we possibly make speech adjudications in 100 languages for 2.3 billion people in hundreds of countries?

You know, once you build a thing on the scale of Facebook, you're going to end up with some, you know, unfortunate ethnic cleansings, but you know, you can't make an omelet with a without breaking eggs.

And you know, there is an obvious answer to this, which is, well, if you can't do it at that scale, maybe you need a smaller scale.

And given that we have gone from these big platforms and their inability to provide for use cases that are at their peripheries, like women who are harassed by terrible men or whatever is intimidating and promotes inequality and makes people's lives miserable to these platforms and their inability to address these corner cases result in in acts of genocide.

You might imagine that we are headed for some kind of crisis in these firms.

So Lawrence Lessig, the cyber lawyer who is the special master in the Microsoft antitrust case and co-founded Creative Commons and so on.

He says that the world is regulated by 4 forces 1 you're definitely familiar with, it's code.

Things that are technologically possible happen sometimes, things that are technologically impossible never happen but obviously right there's markets right things that are profitable happen more often and there's law things that are lawful are more likely to occur than things that are illegal and then there's norms things that are socially acceptable are easier to do than things that are socially beyond the pale.

You know, the, the question of whether or not someone like Jeffrey Epstein is welcoming your community has become 1 of enormous moment, right?

And you know, you can see that even though Jeffrey Epstein had billions at his disposal the fact that he was normatively beyond the pale really irked him right this this sociopathic monster of a man made it his life's work not just to pursue the terrible acts that he pursued with vulnerable young women, but also to do so while not being socially unacceptable.

His whole goal in life was to be in company of wonderful people and you know you sometimes meet founders who cash out big businesses and decide they don't want to pay taxes and they give up their citizenship and they move to the Grand Caymans or whatever.

And they discover after months or years that hanging out with like substance addicted sociopaths on yachts for every hour that God sends is a bit tedious and that eventually you want to put down your daiquiri, get on a plane, go back to a place where the action is happening.

And so what I would say is that if you have a business that is doing something that is legally fraught, but that business is doing something that people love, that you are creating a constituency for a normative shift in how we think about this stuff and that you are also creating surplus capital that can be used to fund legal adventures to make this stuff more legal.

And that in the absence of such a constituency, that change is going to be longer in coming and also much more chaotic when it arrives, right?

Change that occurs without any kind of market constituency where it's just it's purely normative generally involves like guillotines right firms when their interests are aligned with a new normative view in the world can ride a wave right they can they can be part of a legislative change that is also incredibly profitable for them and that they support for self-serving reasons but that has broad popular support because it is doing away with something that was manifestly unfair.

Now they may find themselves on the wrong side of it later, right?

And that's that's often the cycle the pirates become the admirals, you know that the the people who made radio and who played phonograms on the air and who faced down the collecting societies who said no music should ever be played on the radio that's piracy they were on the right side of history but when they sued cable operators 30 years later for putting broadcasts on a wire they were on the wrong side of history But you can be on the right side of history if you were involved in this kind of firm.

And you know, the big, big upsides are not creating another Facebook because there won't be another Facebook.

The big, big upside is creating the thing that happens once Facebook has been torn down.

And you know, there is no future in mimicking the past.

So I'd be interested in talking about specific examples like Airbnb, like writing a change.

But I'm also interested in talking about this as it pertains to your career.

So as a creator copyright becomes really important for your livelihood.

So how have your thoughts changed over the course of your life as a creator who sells their content?

Yeah, So I should mention I'm a science fiction novelist.

I'm a reasonably successful 1, 20 something books, New York times bestseller, 6 figure advances, all of that stuff.

So I'm definitely in the 1% of literary creators.

And I like the idea of copyright in as much as I like the idea of being in an industry that has a framework that describes how stuff works right what's what's saleable under what terms what is unconscionable what are our enforcement mechanisms what are our remedies you know all that stuff having rules of the road is really important in an industry the specific rules that we've created I'm very skeptical of not least because we keep trying to apply them to non-industrial contexts so every every industrial rule has to figure out who's in the industry and who isn't right if you create finance rules again something that I am broadly in favor of and you say things that are bank like need to account for themselves with the SEC or with the FTC or with some other regulator to make sure that bad things aren't happening and we say you are doing something bank like when at least a million dollars changes hands, and then you need to fill in some paperwork, that might be a reasonable test of whether you are bank-like or not.

But if then we have hyperinflation and a burger costs a million dollars, buying lunch for a friend does not make you a bank.

Well, I mean, flip it around and be like, if you have a million dollars in net worth, something flips in your brain and now you are an accredited investor and can make investments.

But imagine that suddenly a million dollars is worth a fraction of what it was.

Something that used to only happen every now and again is now happening a million

And so not only are you a bank, but when you give your kid allowance, he's a bank too.

So now we're, now we have to say, okay, well this regulation, whether or not the regulation was good the test that we're using to figure out whether you're in the regulation or outside of it needs to be revised with copyright the test that we used to find out whether or not you were in the entertainment industry is whether you were making or handling a copy of a work that involved creative labour and that made sense when every book had a printing press in its history and it made sense when every record came from a record press and every movie went through a film lab and there would be some edge cases that it would capture that weren't actually part of the entertainment industry and sometimes those would go to court or they would just have a gentleman's agreement to ignore it or whatever but the main body, the first couple 3 sigmas was all people in the entertainment industry And if you can afford a printing press, you can afford a lawyer to make sure that you're using your printing press well.

But the internet only works by making copies.

You know, we have this like polite fiction that there's this way of getting data without copying it called streaming.

Like the internet is made out of like a cunning network of cardboard tubes with mirrors at the end that somehow get the picture from here to there.

Not only that, it's with like 10 million concurrence.

Streaming is just downloading without a save button.

Streaming is I'm letting you download this thing and I think the client you're using doesn't have a say

yeah Yeah, you don't know how to hack 1 in right so Everything we do on the internet involves copying and you copy a million times before breakfast You know, yeah, that doesn't make you part of the entertainment industry.

And the idea that we're going to take copyright law, which is foundationally about regulating entities in the supply chain of the entertainment industry, and use it as our first line of regulatory coherence for people's romantic lives, and people's family lives, and people's employment lives, and people's education, and their civic and political discourse, right?

That when someone uses a song in a political ad that our first question is not a question about elections and election law, but about entertainment law.

We've clearly put the horse before the cart.

Not only that, when we ask our fans to use copyright law to navigate their interactions with each other and with us, We create the circumstance under which either our fans are always going to be on the wrong side of the law, or the law will have to be so simplified and streamlined so that fans whose job is not to be in the entertainment industry can understand it, that it will cease to be functional as like the technical framework for our work.

So you know, I live in Burbank, California.

I can walk from my house to Universal, Warner, and Disney.

And there's a very good Harry Potter theme park at Universal studios that was made by licensing a bunch of IP from Warner.

I also live on a block with a bunch of kids who go to middle school with my kid and some of them write Harry Potter fan fiction.

When the lawyer at Universal called the lawyer at Warner and said, what are the terms on which we are going to conduct this extremely technical multi-million dollar high-stakes deal, They did not have to use a framework that was so comprehensible that the 11 year old on my block writing Harry Potter fanfic could make sure that she was on the right side of it.

And if they had to, it would have been a nonsense.

And so there are a bunch of rules that I would like for copyright.

But the most important copyright reform, the thing that gets lost whenever we talk about copyright reform, is that we should just stop asking people who aren't in the entertainment industry to give a shit about copyright.

If you have to be a copyright lawyer to read a book, then either no 1 will read books or everyone who reads books will be wrong.

And so how do you think about remixing and republishing?

Yeah, I think that when it's cultural, it's 1 thing, and when it's industrial, it's something else.

So what I was going to say is that some industrial use is very obviously industrial.

Like if I write a book and publish it, it's obviously industrial.

So if I write a book and publish it for the Church of Scientology and don't charge any money for it, it still might be industrial.

On the other end of the scale, if you're writing fanfic and sharing it on your classrooms blog or Google classroom site, that's clearly non-industrial.

And then there's some corner cases and crisply defining those as, as it's the work of years and you would still miss stuff.

So that's why we have judges who apply principles when, when the corner cases matter.

Most corner cases like, oh, well that guy's doing something.

Maybe it's industrial, but it's like if if if there's a loss to me, it's measured in fractional sense.

And if there's a game to him, it's measured in fractional sense.

People who have blogs that have ads from ad brokers who have a few hundred readers a day.

No 1 is ever going to adjudicate whether or not they're industrial because the stakes are so low that nobody cares.

The people whose work they're using don't care if they're industrial.

So I like the idea of there being rules for industrial use.

But I think that those rules should err on the side of free expression.

So a good example of where that's worked is there was an African-American writer who wrote an unauthorized sequel to Gone with the Wind called the Windung Gone and it was told from the perspective of the slaves right and it was about revealing the hidden white supremacist subtext of Margaret Mitchell's famous novel, beloved novel.

Now unsurprisingly the Mitchell estate was not happy that Margaret Mitchell's book was being brought into disrepute by this work that was derived from it.

But I think we can understand that artistically, if you wanted to puncture the, you know, white supremacist subtext of the wind on gone, the best way to do, of gone with a wind, rather the best way to do it is to make close reference to that work, especially if you're going to do it in fiction, is to have the same character, same characters, but a different point of view to understand what's missing, what's omitted from the frame.

The Supreme Court said this is fair use, and we're good.

Even though it was commercial, it came up from a publisher, they charged money for it, it was sold in bookstores, it satisfied all the criteria for being commercial.

So, those rules are robust practice of fair use, I think is great.

I think we could combine the European fair dealing approach, where they have enumerated exceptions, with the American fair use approach, where they have principles that are applied to get a kind of best of both worlds where we might say okay here a bunch of things that are always fair use right these kinds of things like if you take x seconds of a song it's always fair If you take X lines from a poem, it's always fair.

The ceiling is if you are doing something that has some free expression nexus that is critical and transformative and so on, these things that are harder, more nebulous and might require a judge, then we can future proof fair use because some fair uses are intensely technological, right?

Like, we never had a question about whether it was fair use for like Dizzy Gillespie to blow 8 bars of night in Tunisia in the middle of a solo.

But we had that question come up when it was Terminator X taking a couple of bars out of a classic jazz or R and B composition and mixing it into a public enemy album.

And those fair use questions are going to evolve as the technology evolves and the way that we address them should be in the hands of both judges and lawmakers.

So we should have judges adjudicate them if the answers become incoherent because we have different circuits making decisions or if they fall afoul of public sentiment, the lawmakers might be enticed to change the law so the judges interpret the law differently.

So for example with deepfakes, we're seeing a lot of opportunity for legitimate free expression, things that are artistically or politically important that are very exciting from an artistic perspective.

And yet we also see a lot of risky things that are happening with it.

Including things that might be harmful to free expression, that might be harmful to artists and their livelihood and so on and if we had a set of principles that could be interpreted you know like we do now with fair use where we have the 4 factors then we can start to build up a set of norms around when a deep fake is good and when a deep fake is bad And we'll have some liminal stuff in the middle that judges will continue to adjudicate.

And maybe eventually we'll get a law that will clarify matters.

Although the idea would be that the law would again form the floor and not the ceiling, that we'd maintain the principles that could be used as the basis for the next set of law as deep fakes evolve and other kinds of technologically assisted creativity evolve.

But you have to allow some freedom there, right?

Because if you write it all down, the future happens.

I mean, I alluded before to what happened when the phonograms met the broadcasters.

The phonograms exist because they successfully fought off an effort by the people who made sheet music to prohibit recorded music.

John Philip Sousa, the composer who was in the sheet music business, went to Congress and said, if the infernal talking machine is allowed to continue, we will lose our voices as we lost our tails when we came down into the trees.

So, you know, many points to Susan for being an early advocate of the sadly still controversial theory of natural selection.

But, but, you know, he clearly missed the boat here.

And so, yeah, so the sheet music people sue the record people who sue the broadcasters who sue the cable operators who sue the VCR who sue Napster.

At each turn, you have someone who claims when I did it, it was legitimate artistic expression, when you do it, it's piracy.

Which brings us back to adversarial interoperability.

Where, you know, you have these firms that routinely engaged in adversarial interoperability, who describe what they did as part of a kind of heroic effort to wrest control from dinosaurs who didn't understand what the future needed, but who now describes themselves as guardians of propriety, who mustn't ever be disrupted.

You know, Zuckerberg in that recording that leaked to the verge of his all hands meeting describing, you know, Facebook's future and rubbishing Elizabeth Warren and her breakup plans She he says of Warren and the breakup plan if you're worried about political disinformation and other harms that arise from from Facebook You You must allow us to be as big as possible for who can generate the surplus capital needed to hire the army of programmers necessary to deal with the dysfunctions of our scale but for us, right?

And you know this is an argument that's been made by monopolists since the year dot AT&T when it was formalized as the bell system and given a license to operate as a monopoly With that came all kinds of special privileges Like they had the right to decide what you could plug into the phone network all the way down to mechanical couplings, they sued a company called Hushiphone that made a cup that fit over the handset of your Bell rental phone, because you can only get a phone from Bell, so that when you had a conversation into it, it would be muffled and other people couldn't read your lips.

And they said, mechanically connecting something to the handset of a bell phone endangers the long-term security of the bell system.

And after all, the bell system is now part of public safety.

It's how we connect the police with their constituents, the people they're supposed to be protecting and so on.

How are we to provide all the service unless you give us the monopoly windfall rents that we collect from monopolizing who can plug what into the system?

And it held back modems, it held back the internet, it held back early use net.

It was only the dismantling of the Bell system that enabled the next generation to emerge.

And Facebook is positioning itself to become a state monopoly like the Bell system was.

All of these companies, they want to be, when they say, please regulate us, right?

When they say, please make rules to tell us when we're on the right side of the law, what they're really saying is, please fashion a kind of throne for us.

And when we sit upon it, we will allow ourselves to be draped with golden chains.

We will become kind of the divine right of kings and you aristocrats in the regulatory world who are after all when you've only got 5 companies in an industry everyone qualified to regulate them as formally an executive at 1 or more of them.

These aristocrats who are drawn from our executive suites will tell us how best to exercise our noblest oblige to the little people so that we can go on running it.

And you see this kind of state monopoly framework emerging again and again when people talk about regulating big tech.

What very few people are yet talking about is just breaking them up.

Well, some, but I think it's often, I mean, you saw it a couple of years ago with the hearing.

Many lawmakers have no idea of the scale, how they work.

I mean, I think WhatsApp's a great example.

Or Amazon is now involved in video surveillance on the, at the behest, as you were saying, of police forces all over the country.

And that's a situation where they have this creeping, growing monopoly power, but it's going to be likely enshrined or ennobled, as you say, by These bastions of legitimacy in the country, which is people who fight the crime and

keep us safe And they're recruiting constituents right to their to their cause if they are part if once you ascribe state-like duties to large firms you make it impossible to make them smaller because then they can't perform the state-like duties.

I think that we are at this point where we can decide that we're going to fix tech or that we're going to fix the tech companies.

If we fix the tech companies, if we say, in order to operate a social network you have to make sure that you are policing hate speech copyright infringement terrorism and every other kind of bad act then what you're really saying is that you can only have a social network if you're so big that you can afford the moderators to do all that work.

The reality is they're not going to do the work very well.

But also the reality is that if you give them 10 years without having to look over their shoulder at a competitor,

they're going to be even more intransigent.

it's going to be even harder to uproot them.

If you look at the AT&T antitrust case that finally broke them up in 1982, it was a 30 year effort to break up AT&T and it arrived at the moment in which Ronald Reagan was dismantling antitrust enforcement, which is why immediately after they were broken up, they started to re-merge because they were like the last hurrah of antitrust enforcement in America.

So thinking about this Kind of in the medium term for founders, like strategically, how would you advise someone?

So nobody knows when these anti-adversarial interoperability laws can be invoked, because the jurisprudence on them is very thin.

What you have is a whole ton of extremely risk-averse counsel and risk-averse investors who don't, you know, they claim that they're swaggering lords of creation and they're, as we were saying before we turned the mics on, they're perfectly willing to say, well, I've got this idea.

I'm going to disrupt everything by turning every apartment in the city into an unlicensed hotel room.

But as soon as you say, well, I've got another idea, Facebook doesn't have users.

They lost 15 million Americans aged 13 to 34 last year, the largest ever exodus of Americans from Facebook.

All those people landed on Instagram, right?

I'm gonna offer a tool that just like Mint, logs into Facebook, pretends to be you, grabs all of the messages waiting for you on Facebook, cleans out all the waiting queue in your favorite groups, and then puts them into a new context for you where Facebook can't watch you and allows you to reply to them.

And Facebook, if you believe that they have 2.3 billion users, which may or may not be true, if they have 2.3 billion users, they have to support 2300 1 in a million use cases every single day, which means that their bot detection and their ability to distinguish a bot from someone who's just doing a 1 in a million thing, it's really, really hard.

You know, I have a friend who, Raf Koster, who designed a game called EverQuest.

And in EverQuest, there was this thing where they set up an equilibrium for crafting, where if you crafted a shirt, a sheep would disappear.

And then if you wore the shirt until it wore out, a sheep would appear in the game.

And so there was an equilibrium between sheep and shirts.

What they didn't imagine was that there would be someone who would find making shirts meditative and who would just fill their house with shirts Until there were no sheep left in the world

because while not wearing the shirt it didn't wear out

Yeah, okay, so that person is a 1 in a million very special player, right?

But the world is full of 1 in a million people, right?

A world of 7000000000 people has, check my math here.

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Cory Doctorow and Joe Betts-Lacroix on Adversarial Interoperability