Cory Doctorow argues on the Y Combinator podcast that future tech upside lies in replacing dismantled Big Tech monopolies rather than trying to replicate their scale.
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…”
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…”