--- > Technology isn’t the problem. Stop thinking about what technology does and start thinking about who technology does it to and who it does it for. - [Location 55](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CDHB6WCS&location=55) --- > Whenever economists gather to handwave away the rise of Big Tech as a historical inevitability, they will make frequent reference to “network effects.” This is a term of art for products that get more valuable every time they win a new customer: you join Facebook to chat with the people who are already there, and then new users join Facebook because you are there. But network effects are merely how Big Tech gets big. Switching costs are how Big Tech stays big. - [Location 77](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CDHB6WCS&location=77) --- > Interoperability lowers switching costs. Interoperability allows us, the users of technology, to set the terms on which we use that technology. It allows us to use the parts of products and services that benefit us, and block the parts that don’t. - [Location 88](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CDHB6WCS&location=88) --- > “Tech exceptionalism” is the sin of thinking that the normal rules don’t apply to technology. - [Location 111](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CDHB6WCS&location=111) --- > Here’s a partial list of concentrated industries from the Open Markets Institute—industries where between one and five companies account for the vast majority of business: pharmaceuticals, health insurers, appliances, athletic shoes, defense contractors, book publishing, booze, drug stores, office supplies, eyeglasses, LCD glass, glass bottles, vitamin C, car parts, bottle caps, airlines, railroads, mattresses, Lasik lasers, cowboy boots and candy. - [Location 135](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CDHB6WCS&location=135) --- > Forty years ago, countries all over the world altered the basis on which they enforced their competition laws—often called “antitrust” laws—to be more tolerant of monopolies. Forty years later, we have a lot of monopolies. - [Location 146](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CDHB6WCS&location=146) --- > Enter the trustbusters, led by Senator John Sherman, author of the 1890 Sherman Act, America’s first antitrust law. In arguing for his bill, Sherman said to the Senate: “If we will not endure a King as a political power we should not endure a King over the production, transportation, and sale of the necessaries of life. If we would not submit to an emperor we should not submit to an autocrat of trade with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity.” - [Location 164](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CDHB6WCS&location=164) --- > The competition-is-for-losers set never let go of their dream of being autocrats of trade. They dreamt of a world where the invisible hand would tenderly lift them and set them down atop a throne of industry, from which they could direct the lives of millions of lesser beings who don’t know what they want until a man of vision shows it to them. - [Location 180](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CDHB6WCS&location=180) --- > According to Bork’s theories, the existing antitrust statutes recognized that most monopolies were a great deal for “consumers,” and that if we only read the statutes ... we’d see that Congress never set out to block companies from gaining enough power to become autocrats of trade—rather, they only wanted the law to step in when the autocrats abused their power to harm “consumers.” This is the “consumer welfare” standard, a theory as economically bankrupt as it is historically unsupportable. Let’s be clear here: the plain language of America’s antitrust laws makes it very clear that Congress wanted to block monopolies because it worried about the concentration of corporate power, not just the abuse of that power. - [Location 189](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CDHB6WCS&location=189) --- > Friedman believed that if the movement could simply keep plugging, eventually a crisis would occur and its ideas would move from the fringes to the center. ... The oil crisis of the 1970s was the movement’s opportunity. Energy shortages and inflation opened a space for a new radical politics, and around the world, a new kind of far-right leader took office; Ronald Reagan in the USA, Margaret Thatcher in the UK, Brian Mulroney in Canada. Not all of the political revolutions of the 1970s were peaceful: Augusto Pinochet staged a coup in Chile, ... supported—financially, morally and militarily—by the democratically elected right-wing leaders and the Chicago School of Economics, who sent a delegation to Chile to help oversee the transformation of the country based on their “ideas lying around.” This global revolution marked the beginning of the neoliberal era, and with it, generations of policy that celebrated the ultra-rich as the ordained leaders of our civilization. - [Location 244](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CDHB6WCS&location=244) --- > Throughout the neoliberal era, Bork’s antitrust theories have dominated all over the world. The Chicago School’s financial backers had invested wisely: the rise and rise of Chicago economics has shifted trillions in wealth to the already wealthy, while workers’ wages stagnated, the middle class dwindled and millions of residents of the world’s wealthiest countries slipped into poverty. - [Location 253](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CDHB6WCS&location=253) --- > They’re different for two reasons: first, because they control the means of computation. These companies rule our digital world, the place where we find one another, form communities and mobilize in solidarity to take collective action. Winning tech back isn’t more important than preventing runaway climate change or ending gender-based violence and discrimination, but it’s hard to imagine how we’ll do either—or anything else of significance—without digital infrastructure to hold us together. - [Location 303](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CDHB6WCS&location=303) --- > Before World War II, we didn’t have computers—we had electromechanical tabulating engines, giant machines designed to solve a single kind of problem, like calculating a ballistics table or an actuarial table for an insurance company. Turing’s breakthrough was to conceptualize and refine the universal computer: a gadget that could run any program, provided it was expressed in valid symbolic logic. Across the Atlantic, John von Neumann created and built the first “von Neumann machine”—a physical instantiation of a Universal Turing Machine. - [Location 313](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CDHB6WCS&location=313) --- > Computers are exceptional because they are universal, and that inescapable universal characteristic means that they have intrinsically low switching costs. - [Location 342](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CDHB6WCS&location=342) --- > But tech is exceptional in that it is intrinsically interoperable, which means that we can use interop to make Big Tech a lot smaller, very quickly—we can attack network effects by reducing switching costs. - [Location 403](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CDHB6WCS&location=403) --- > That is the other way that tech is exceptional. The fight for a free, fair and open digital future isn’t more important than any of those other fights, but it is foundational. Tech is the terrain on which our future fights will be fought. If we can’t seize the means of computation, we will lose the fight before it is even joined. - [Location 423](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CDHB6WCS&location=423) --- > Gopher was an open protocol. Any programmer who wanted to help other people interact with a service for which there was no menuing system could write their own, and make it available in “gopherspace.” In this way, hundreds of proprietary interfaces designed for highly technical users, many of them the product of the world’s largest technology companies, were commodified, subsumed into a volunteer-managed, globe-spanning interface that was designed to welcome laypeople to the burgeoning internet. - [Location 463](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CDHB6WCS&location=463) --- > As the web’s growth took off, web users tired of having to remember which services they accessed via gopher and which ones they accessed via the web. Gopher’s developers tried to solve this by making it possible to load webpages in a gopher browser, but the web’s developers turned the tables on them, making it possible to load gopher pages in web browsers. - [Location 475](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CDHB6WCS&location=475) --- > IBM was a giant, abusive tech monopoly long before this was in vogue. The company was tightly integrated with the US military and government, and this afforded it a measure of security; even though its rivals griped to their members of Congress about how they were being bigfooted by IBM, the company fended off serious regulatory action for decades, thanks to powerful friends in the Pentagon and other parts of the US state apparatus. Eventually, IBM’s luck ran out. In 1970, the DoJ opened an antitrust case into “Big Blue” ... Because IBM was a monopoly it had a lot of money to spend in the ensuing fight. A lot of money. Over the next twelve years, IBM outspent the entire Department of Justice Antitrust Division, every year, in a war that came to be called “antitrust’s Vietnam.” - [Location 488](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CDHB6WCS&location=488) --- > for the ideologues in Reagan’s orbit, AT&T was an acceptable antitrust target because it was so entwined with the US government that breaking it up was like making the government smaller). - [Location 496](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CDHB6WCS&location=496) --- > Facebook isn’t alone in realizing that winning user loyalty by providing an excellent experience is harder work than punishing disloyal users, nor are its user-facing services the only place where this strategy is deployed. - [Location 556](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CDHB6WCS&location=556) --- > “If you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product” is often invoked to explain why Facebook treats its users so badly. But being Facebook’s customer—an advertiser or even a publisher—doesn’t mean you’ll get better treatment from the company. Time and again, the company has been caught stealing from advertisers, falsifying its records about who it showed their ads to, and for how long. - [Location 559](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CDHB6WCS&location=559) ---