from Hacker News

Cory Doctorow on how we lost the internet

by howtofly on 5/28/25, 8:07 AM with 129 comments

by bambax on 5/28/25, 9:35 AM
The article is very long; that part is fascinating and a fantastic suggestion:
> Europe and Canada have passed strong right-to-repair legislation, but those efforts ""have been hamstrung by the anti-circumvention laws"" (like the DMCA). (...) That raises the question of why these countries don't repeal their versions of the DMCA.
> The answer is tariffs, it seems. The US trade representative has long threatened countries with tariffs if they did not have such a law on their books. ""Happy 'Liberation Day' everyone"", he said with a smile, which resulted in laughter, cheering, and applause. The response of most countries when faced with the US tariffs (or threats thereof) has been to impose retaliatory tariffs, making US products more expensive for their citizens, which is a weird way to punish Americans. (...)
> What would be better is for the countries to break the monopolies of the US tech giants by making it legal to reverse-engineer, jailbreak, and modify American products and services. (...)
> Or, let a Canadian company set up an App Store that only charges 3% for payment processing, which will give any content producer an immediate 25% raise, so publishers will flock to it. The same could be done for car and tractor diagnostic devices and more.
Europe should do this now; it would be incredibly good -- and incredibly fun.
by whinvik on 5/28/25, 9:01 AM
> In particular, the companies purchase financial information from a data broker before offering a nurse a shift; if the nurse is carrying a lot of credit-card debt, especially if some of that is delinquent, the amount offered is reduced. "Because, the more desperate you are, the less you'll accept to come into work and do that grunt work of caring for the sick, the elderly, and the dying."
I think this should be made illegal.
But I also think judging from how bad people are at making laws, what we will get is something that will make it worse for everyone.
by Voultapher on 5/28/25, 10:47 AM
Cory Doctorow is one of the best contemporary authors that I know, nearly everything he writes is concise, poignant and relevant and he writes new articles nearly every day. You can find his writing here [1]. One of his most memorable articles for me is about remote attestation and the context in lives in [2], absolutely worth a read.
[1] https://pluralistic.net
[2] https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/
by offsky on 5/28/25, 3:59 PM
The thing I don't understand is how unethical stuff like this comes to be built. Take the example where nurses with debt get lower wages because they are desperate. Some manager had to come up with this idea and then get various people to agree and then get a team of engineers to implement it. Thats a lot of people agreeing to do something so clearly evil (to me at least). Are there that many people who just don't care? Whenever I read stories similar to this I always wonder how many people went along without objecting.
by tmjwid on 5/28/25, 9:16 AM
For further listening, Cory has produced a podcast for CBC that might be a good accompaniment to this article called "Understood: Who Broke the Internet?".
by cebert on 5/28/25, 10:17 AM
For the “Uber of Nursing” example, if employers want to play games like this, the best way to combat it is with symmetrical information. Employees should share their salary offers on a website, which would empower them to get a better sense of whether they are being paid fairly.
by usrme on 5/28/25, 9:03 AM
The link to the discussed talk is at the very bottom of the post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydVmzg_SJLw
by ragebol on 5/30/25, 6:57 AM
> There once was an ""old good internet"", Doctorow said, but it was too difficult for non-technical people to connect up to; web 2.0 changed that, making it easy for everyone to get online, but that led directly into hard-to-escape walled gardens.
Maybe we should not 'democratize' some technologies and keep a bit of difficulty as a gatekeeper.
(Yes, I know this is not really a moral position to hold)
by eimrine on 5/28/25, 8:48 AM
Google refuses to translate this webpage to me, are there any chances it does it because Google refuses to ship the criticism of Google?
by jocoda on 5/28/25, 9:02 AM
> "He believes that changes to the policy environment is what has led to enshittification, not changes in technology."
This is the root cause, and as it looks, there is no cure.
by palata on 5/28/25, 8:33 AM
> What would be better is for the countries to break the monopolies of the US tech giants by making it legal to reverse-engineer, jailbreak, and modify American products and services. Let companies jailbreak Teslas and deliver all of the features that ship in the cars, but are disabled by software, for one price; that is a much better way to hurt Elon Musk, rather than by expressing outrage at his Nazi salutes, since he loves the attention. "Kick him in the dongle."
> Or, let a Canadian company set up an App Store that only charges 3% for payment processing, which will give any content producer an immediate 25% raise, so publishers will flock to it.
by keiferski on 5/28/25, 9:10 AM
It’s unfortunate that he is continuing to use the term enshittification, because that pretty much guarantees that no serious academic, legal scholar, or politician is going to engage with these ideas publicly. Which is a shame, as many of the solutions here are explicitly legal ones. Words and names matter, especially when it comes to political actions.