Insight
Doctorow: Legal frameworks create 'kill zones' protecting Big Tech monopolies
“And in the years 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 co…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Doctorow: There will never be another Facebook
“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.”
Opinion
Doctorow: Big Tech's calls for regulation are bids for state monopoly
“And, you know, Facebook is positioning itself to become a state monopoly like the Bell system was, as is Google, as is Apple, right? All of these companies, they want to be, when they say, please regulate us, right? When they say, please make rules to tell us …”
Insight
Doctorow: Comprehensive content moderation mandates entrench Big Tech monopolies
“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 …”
Opinion
Doctorow: Cambridge Analytica mobilized existing racists rather than converting normal people
“Cambridge Analytica's failure to exploit any of the things that you could actually get super rich from if you could control people's minds tells you that probably what they were doing was finding racists And convincing them that Trump was someone to vote for. …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Doctorow: Reverse-engineering iOS for cross-platform compatibility triggers legal thickets
“So today, if you were to try and do this, like say you were to try and make Android devices first class citizens in on 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 suppor…”
Insight
Doctorow: Legally fraught startups with beloved products drive normative legal reform
“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 c…”
Insight
Doctorow: Copyright should combine European statutory exceptions with US fair use principles
“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 are a bunch of…”
Assertion Supported
Doctorow: Facebook allowed non-members to scrape group membership lists
“She discovered that you could enumerate the membership of any Facebook group. Even if you weren't a member of it. And when she reported it to Facebook, they said that is a feature request, not a bug report. We will send it off to the product team. And when she…”
Assertion Supported
Doctorow: Big Tech and entertainment companies secretly colluded on anti-poaching agreements
“In California, we have no enforceable non-competes, so the big tech companies all got together in secret with the big entertainment companies and agreed that they wouldn't hire each other's employees, top employees.”
Insight
Doctorow: Market concentration makes corporate collusion and conspiracies structurally possible
“Those conspiracies are necessarily a function of market concentration, because the collective action problem becomes insoluble when you have too many people who have to be inside the conspiracy.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Doctorow: Disrupting Big Tech platforms will win public and regulatory backing
“Our willingness to trust that big firms have our interests at heart and that the processes that regulate them Are on the side of the public interest and not the side of the firm's parochial interest. That, that is coming to an end. And so if you want to be whe…”
Assertion Supported
Doctorow: Ninth Circuit ruled LinkedIn cannot use CFAA to block scrapers
“HiQ was scraping LinkedIn to produce employer analytics. LinkedIn turned a blind eye to it until they launched their own analytics product. Then they tried to block them out and sue them under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Not only is hiQ won in court and …”
Insight
Doctorow: Disruptive entrants succeed by bridging users rather than forcing disjoint leaps
“Every industry has an incumbent disrupted by a new entrant, not by making a thing that is totally disjoint from the new entrant, not by asking people to leap the chasm from one to the other, to let go of the vine they're holding on before they've got a secure …”
Insight
Doctorow: Copyright law should exempt consumers outside the entertainment industry
“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 …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Doctorow: Dismantling the Bell System was essential for modern internet technologies
“And, you know, it held back modems. It held back the internet. It held back you know, early Usenet. It was only the dismantling of the Bell system that enabled the next generation to emerge.”
Insight
Doctorow: Facebook targets behavioral correlates, not mind control
“What Facebook is mostly good at is finding people. You know, if you're a refrigerator salesman, you know, you've had this conundrum all your life, as have all your forebears since the dawn of refrigeration, because the median person buys one or fewer refrigera…”
Insight
Doctorow: Streaming is functionally downloading without a save button
“Streaming is just downloading without a save button. Streaming is I'm sending, I'm letting you download this thing, and I think the client you're using doesn't have a save button.”
Insight
Doctorow: Science fiction shapes the future rather than predicting it
“I don't think science fiction does predict the future. I think it can make the future, which is exciting. But I think that the idea that the future is predictable is itself horrifically fatalistic, right?”
Assertion Supported
Doctorow: Cable TV originated via adversarial signal retransmission in rural Pennsylvania
“Cable TV came from slurping, slurping down broadcast signals on a big antenna in rural Pennsylvania that was too far for anyone with a TV to reach either Philly or Pittsburgh, and then charging money to retransmit them over wires to people who own televisions …”
Cory Doctorow