0:02 or Facebook employees who were drunk,
0:04 which makes sense because if I worked
0:05 for Facebook, I would be drunk all the
0:08 time. Tech companies were not born in
0:11 shitified. We they spent years, decades
0:12 making good [Music]
0:26 products. Hello. Hi. Nice to see you
0:29 all. So, a couple of years ago, I coined
0:31 this term inshitification to describe
0:34 how online platforms decay. And it
0:36 describes a three-stage process. First,
0:38 you have platforms that are good to
0:40 their end users, but find a way to lock
0:43 those end users in. So, think of Google,
0:45 which initially minimized ads and
0:47 maximized the spend on engineering for
0:49 high-quality search results. But as they
0:51 were doing that, they were also buying
0:53 their way to dominance. So that no
0:55 matter which browser you used, no matter
0:57 what mobile operating system you were
1:00 using, no matter which carrier you had,
1:01 you would always be searching on Google
1:05 by default, spending tens uh um so uh
1:07 and so Google then spent tens of
1:10 billions of dollars every year to make
1:12 sure that no one would ever try a search
1:15 engine that wasn't Google, thus locking
1:17 their users in. So that is stage one in
1:19 which a platform is good to its end
1:22 users but also locks in those users. In
1:25 stage two, platforms start to abuse
1:27 their users in order to tempt in
1:29 business customers. So for Google,
1:31 obviously that's advertisers and web
1:33 publishers. So today an ever larger
1:36 fraction of a Google results results
1:38 page is given over to ads and those ads
1:41 are marked out with ever subtler ever
1:43 smaller type that says the word ad next
1:46 to it. So uh and Google uses commercial
1:50 surveillance to uh target ads to us. So
1:51 that's stage two making things better
1:53 for business customers while making
1:56 things worse for end users. But those
1:58 business customers also become dependent
1:59 on the platform just like the users are
2:02 locked into the platform. Uh after all
2:03 as soon as a business is getting like
2:06 10% of its customer or its revenue from
2:09 one source it becomes very vulnerable to
2:10 that source. very few businesses can
2:13 stand a 10 or 20% reduction overnight in
2:16 their gross revenue. And so once the
2:17 business customers are locked into the
2:19 platform, you get stage three of
2:21 inshitification. This is where Google
2:25 claws back all the value in the platform
2:27 uh both from business customers and from
2:29 end users leaving behind just like a
2:32 homeopathic residue of value just enough
2:34 to keep everyone locked in while the
2:36 rest of the value is gathered in for
2:38 shareholders and executives. And Google
2:40 becomes inshitified. And you've probably
2:42 noticed this. Google search results suck
2:45 these days. And thanks to the 2019
2:47 Department of Just or thanks to the 2024
2:49 Department of Justice antitrust case
2:52 against Google, we know why it sucks. It
2:54 starts in 2019 when Google found that
2:57 its uh growth had stalled out. After
2:59 all, more than 90% of the world was
3:01 using Google to search. And we searched
3:03 for everything. Any idea that came into
3:05 our head, we typed into a search box.
3:07 And always that search box belonged to
3:10 Google. So how is Google going to grow?
3:12 There were no more users left to switch
3:14 to Google. The users who use Google were
3:16 already using Google to search for
3:19 everything. Well, after that uh trial
3:21 last year, we got these internal memos
3:23 that showed what Google did in order to
3:25 boost growth. What they did was they
3:28 made search worse. They reduced the
3:30 systems accuracy so that you would have
3:32 to search more than once to get the
3:34 results that you were looking for, which
3:36 meant that they would have more queries
3:37 and therefore more opportunities to
3:40 serve ads to you. And even as Google was
3:42 doing that to its end users, it was also
3:44 doing another dirty trick to its
3:46 business customers. Google and Meta
3:48 entered into a secret illegal collusive
3:50 arrangement they cenamed Jedi Blue that
3:52 raised the price of advertising and
3:55 reduced the payout to publishers. So
3:56 that's how we get to the inshitified
3:58 Google that we all live with today where
4:01 every query starts with a blob of AI
4:03 slop at the top of it and then there's
4:05 five paid results tagged with the word
4:08 ad in eight point type that's 90% gray
4:11 on white which in turn sits over 10
4:13 spammy links from SEO companies that
4:17 have generated their own AI slop and yet
4:19 we still keep using Google because we
4:22 are all locked into Google and that is
4:24 in shitification as seen from the side.
4:27 First a c a company is good to its end
4:30 users. Then uh it locks them in and then
4:33 it is good to its business customers uh
4:35 which then who then get locked in and
4:37 then it it takes all the value for
4:39 itself leaving behind a giant pile of
4:42 That is in shitification a tragedy
4:44 in three
4:46 acts. And shitification follows the
4:49 cloud because every app makes a call to
4:51 the cloud to ask how it could perform at
4:53 every moment. Take the way that gig
4:56 workers are paid. The legal scholar Vina
4:58 Dubil coined a term to describe how Uber
5:01 drivers wages are calculated. She calls
5:04 it algorithmic wage discrimination. And
5:06 here's how the trick works. If you're an
5:08 Uber driver and you've been picky about
5:09 the jobs that you're willing to take
5:12 recently, the app starts to put the wage
5:14 offer up and up and up. But if you yield
5:16 to temptation and start to take those
5:19 higher payouts, the wage starts to go
5:22 down again, toggling down in random
5:24 intervals at small increments designed
5:26 to be below the threshold for human
5:28 perception until eventually the Uber
5:30 driver finds himself uh having gone into
5:32 debt to buy a new car, having given up
5:34 the side hustles that they had that used
5:36 to let them be more picky about Uber
5:37 with their wage descending and
5:39 descending until they end up seeking
5:41 government assistance just to buy
5:43 groceries. This is the technical
5:46 mechanism by which inshitification takes
5:49 place and I call it twiddling. Digital
5:50 businesses have infinite flexibility
5:52 that comes from the marvelous
5:54 flexibility of the computers that sit
5:56 underneath them. And that means that
5:58 every firm can reach into its business
6:01 logic at will and twiddle the knobs that
6:03 control the fundamental aspects of that
6:05 business. So every time you interact
6:07 with a firm, everything is different.
6:09 The price, the cost, the search
6:12 rankings, the recommendations. Twiddling
6:14 is just a crude task that's done
6:16 quickly. Any task that's simple but
6:19 timeconuming, as we know, is a natural
6:22 for automation. The wage theft of
6:24 algorithmic wage discrimination would be
6:26 unbearably tedious and labor intensive
6:30 and expensive to perform manually. No
6:32 19th century boiler room full of guys in
6:35 green eye shades slaving over ledgers
6:38 could do this. You need digitalization
6:40 to do this. You need the cloud to do
6:42 this. The bosses who are doing this,
6:44 they're not more evil than the bosses we
6:47 had 10, 20, or 100 years ago. These are
6:50 just the same bosses with better tools.
6:52 Digitalization, the weaving of cloud
6:55 computing through a firm or a sector,
6:57 enables the kind of twiddling that
6:59 allows a firm to swish to shift value
7:02 around from business users to end users,
7:03 from end users back to business users,
7:05 back to the shareholders and the
7:07 investors, uh, leaving behind nothing
7:10 but a pile of And every sector is
7:12 moving to the cloud which means that
7:14 inshitification is coming to every
7:16 sector. Which is why it's foolish to say
7:18 if you're not paying for the product,
7:21 you're the product. This is a dead end.
7:24 The surveillance capitalism idea says
7:26 that companies like Apple are virtuous
7:28 alternatives because Apple is charging
7:31 us money and not attention, which means
7:32 that they can treat us better. They
7:34 don't have to exploit us. But uh and
7:38 that is a superficially logical idea.
7:41 After all, in 2022, Apple did add a
7:44 little checkbox to iOS that allows you
7:46 to opt out of thirdparty surveillance,
7:47 most notably the surveillance of Meta
7:49 and its products, Facebook and
7:53 Instagram. And 96% of Apple users ticked
7:55 the don't spy on me box. We have to
7:58 assume the other 4% were either drunk or
8:00 Facebook employees or Facebook employees
8:02 who were drunk, which makes sense
8:04 because if I worked for Facebook, I
8:07 would be drunk all the time. Thank
8:12 you. So, on the face of it, it seems
8:15 like Apple is not treating its customers
8:17 like the product. But as this was going
8:19 on, as the tick box for don't spy on me
8:21 was being added to iOS, Apple shipped
8:24 another secret feature to iOS, a new way
8:28 to spy on iOS users for Apple's own ad
8:31 targeting service. This is exactly the
8:32 same purpose, targeting ads to you based
8:34 on the places you've been, the things
8:36 you'd searched for, the communications
8:38 you'd had, the links you'd clicked on.
8:40 Now, Apple did not ask its customers for
8:42 permission to spy on them. It didn't let
8:44 them opt out of the spying. It didn't
8:46 tell them about the spying when the
8:48 newspapers printed that it was illegally
8:50 and secretly spying on its users. Apple
8:53 lied about it. So, Apple treats its
8:54 business customers, the app vendors,
8:56 like they're the product. It takes 30
8:59 cents out of every euro that those app
9:03 vendors bring in. Uh that is 3,000% the
9:06 normal payment processing fee. Uh Apple
9:08 treats its end users like the product.
9:11 You shell out €1,000 for a phone and you
9:13 still get spied on to target ads to you.
9:15 Apple is treating everyone like the
9:18 product. In in shitification, the
9:20 product is just whatever you can
9:22 productize. Everyone is the product.
9:24 Everyone gets twiddled because you have
9:26 been conscripted into the tech industry
9:28 because your industry was digitalized.
9:30 So it's tempting to blame the cloud for
9:33 this. But tech companies were not born
9:36 in shitified. We they spent years,
9:39 decades making good products. If you're
9:41 old enough to remember the launch of
9:43 Google, you will recall that at the
9:46 outset searching on Google was magic.
9:48 You could ask Jeeves questions for a
9:50 million years and you would never get an
9:52 answer as crisp, as useful, and as
9:54 helpful as the answer you would get from
9:56 just typing a few vaguely descriptive
9:59 search terms into a Google box. That's
10:01 why we bought iPhones. That's why we
10:03 joined our friends on Facebook. All of
10:05 these services were born on the cloud.
10:07 They could have enshified at any time,
10:10 but they didn't until they did. And then
10:13 they all did it at once.
10:16 Inshitification was not caused by
10:18 changes to technology or the character
10:20 of the people who ran technology firms.
10:23 It was caused by changes to the policy
10:26 environment. After all, social factors
10:29 are far more important than the
10:31 parameters of a technology. Social
10:34 factors are the difference between a
10:36 chime in your car that warns you when
10:38 you've crossed the lane line and a
10:40 system that tells your insurance company
10:42 that you drifted out of your lane so
10:44 they can add €10 to your insurance bill
10:47 this month. We changed the rules of the
10:50 game in living memory by named parties
10:53 undertook these change. They were warned
10:56 at the time about the likely results of
10:58 these changes and they today are very
11:01 rich and very respected and they have
11:03 never faced any accountability for
11:05 creating this primogenic environment
11:08 which led to a vast inshittening of
11:10 everything. And I think that there is
11:13 some good news buried in this hypothesis
11:16 because if inshitification is the result
11:19 not of a new kind of evil person or of
11:21 the great forces of history bearing down
11:23 on this moment to turn everything into
11:26 but rather the result of specific
11:29 policy choices. Then we can reverse
11:31 those policies. We can make better ones.
11:33 We can emerge from this moment, the
11:36 inshitta scene, and we can consign the
11:39 initiat to the scrap heap of history,
11:41 making it a mere transitional state
11:43 between the old good internet that we
11:46 remember and a new good internet that we
11:48 deserve. So, let's talk about the kind
11:50 of corporation that emerges when you
11:52 create this chimogenic environment.
11:55 Every firm wants to maximize profits.
11:57 Every user you don't spend on suppliers,
12:00 workers, or product quality is a euro
12:02 you retain for executives and investors.
12:05 But companies can't just charge infinity
12:07 and pay nothing because no one would
12:09 work for them and no one would buy those
12:12 products. Those market constraints act
12:15 as a disciplining force on firms and the
12:16 way that they treat the people that they
12:19 buy and sell things from. And in tech
12:21 there are three constraints, three
12:23 anti-inchitificatory sources of
12:25 discipline that makes products and
12:27 services better. Now the first
12:30 constraint obviously is the market. All
12:32 other things being equal, a business
12:35 that charges more and delivers less will
12:37 lose customers to firms that are more
12:38 generous about how much value they share
12:40 with their customers, their suppliers,
12:42 and their workers. This is the
12:45 ideological basis of antitrust law,
12:47 which is what our American cousins call
12:49 competition law. And their first
12:52 antitrust law came in 1890 with John
12:55 Sherman's Sherman Act. And when Senator
12:57 Sherman was stumping for this act, he
12:59 said on the floor of the Senate, "If we
13:02 would not endure a king as a political
13:05 power, we should not endure a king over
13:07 the production, transportation, and sale
13:10 of the necessaries of life. If we would
13:13 not sub submit to an emperor, we should
13:15 not submit to an autocrat of
13:18 trade. Lacking competitors, companies
13:21 become autocrats of trade. They become
13:23 too big to fail, which makes them too
13:25 big to jail, which means that they're
13:28 too big to care. So, what happened to
13:30 that disciplining force of competition?
13:33 Well, we killed it. Starting about 40
13:35 years ago, neoliberal economists adopted
13:38 a radical new antitrust theory called
13:40 consumer welfare. They threw out John
13:42 Sherman's idea that we should be on the
13:45 watch for autocrats of trade and instead
13:47 they installed a new idea that
13:50 monopolies are presumptively efficient.
13:52 Uh they did this all around the world in
13:54 the EU, in the US, in the UK and across
13:57 Asia. And the idea was that if Google
13:59 has a 90% search market share, which it
14:02 does, then we should assume that Google
14:04 is the best search engine ever, the best
14:07 search engine possible, and that the
14:09 only reason that a better search engine
14:11 hasn't stepped in is that Google is so
14:13 skilled, so efficient, that there is no
14:16 conceivable way to improve on it. We can
14:17 tell that Google is the best because
14:19 Google has a monopoly. And we can tell
14:21 that Google has a good monopoly because
14:24 it is the best. So 40 years ago we
14:27 adopted this explicitly pro- monopoly
14:30 policy and 40 years later we have
14:31 monopolies. Monopolies in
14:34 pharmaceuticals, beer, glass bottles,
14:37 vitamin C, athletic shoes, microchips,
14:40 cars, mattresses, eyeglasses, and of
14:42 course professional
14:44 wrestling. The economists who conceived
14:46 of those policies are still around
14:48 today. They're still polishing their
14:50 fake Nobel prizes, teaching at elite
14:52 elite schools, making billions of
14:54 dollars consulting for blue chip
14:56 companies. It's like we used to put down
14:58 rat poison and we didn't have a rat
15:00 problem and then these guys told us to
15:02 stop and now rats are chewing our faces
15:04 off and there they are making these
15:06 innocent faces saying, "How can you be
15:10 so sure that our anti-rat policies are
15:12 responsible for the rat problems we have
15:15 today? Maybe we are simply living in the
15:18 time of the rat. Maybe sunspots caused
15:21 rats to multiply beyond all measure. And
15:24 if those rats then bought the rat poison
15:26 factories and shut them down, well, so
15:28 what of it? Shutting down rat poison
15:30 factories after you've decided not to
15:32 put down rat poison, that is
15:35 economically rational. It is a parto
15:37 optimal decision.
15:40 Markets don't discipline comp tech tech
15:42 companies because tech companies don't
15:44 compete with their rivals. They buy
15:46 their rivals. Now that's a quote from
15:49 Mark Zuckerberg who famously said, "It
15:51 is better to buy than to compete." Which
15:53 is why Mark Zuckerberg bought Instagram
15:56 for a billion dollars when it only had
15:58 12 employees and 25 million registered
16:01 users. But I said there are three forces
16:02 that discipline competition. And the
16:04 second of these forces, that's
16:06 regulation. the discipline that is
16:08 imposed by governments and it's a
16:10 mistake to see the discipline of markets
16:12 and the discipline of states as being
16:14 separate. They are intimately connected
16:17 because competition is a necessary
16:20 condition for effective regulation. Once
16:23 a sector cartelizes, once it collapses
16:25 into oligarchy, once it becomes so
16:28 inbred that it develops a Habsburg jaw,
16:30 once it turn once the internet became
16:31 five giant websites filled with
16:34 screenshots of the other four, then that
16:36 sector captures its regulators because a
16:38 sector with a
16:40 hundredmemes is a rabble. They are at
16:42 each other's throat. They can't agree on
16:44 anything. They can't agree on how to
16:47 lobby. But when a sector turns into five
16:49 companies, it is a conspiracy in
16:52 waiting. A sector that has been boiled
16:54 down to a mere handful of firms can
16:56 agree on a common lobbying position. And
16:58 they are so insulated from what Peter
17:01 Teal calls wasteful competition that
17:04 they are a slosh in cash and they
17:06 mobilize that cash to turn their
17:09 regulatory priorities into regulations.
17:11 In other words, they capture their
17:14 regulators. So regulatory capture may
17:17 sound abstract and complicated, but I'll
17:20 put it into concrete terms. The GDPR is
17:24 today 9 years old. And small EU tech ad
17:25 tech firms, companies that were small
17:27 enough to fail and therefore small
17:30 enough to jail, they went extinct in
17:33 droves after the GDPR was passed. But
17:35 big US tech companies, most notably
17:37 Google and Meta, they continue to wipe
17:39 their butts with the GDPR. How do they
17:41 get away with this? Simple. They pretend
17:45 they're Irish. Happy St. Patrick's
17:48 Day. Ireland is a tax haven and every
17:50 tax haven is a crime haven because a
17:52 company that can pretend that it's Irish
17:54 this week, next week it can pretend that
17:57 it's Luxembourge, Criate, Maltese or
18:00 Danish or Dutch rather. So to keep a
18:02 company from decamping to a more pliable
18:05 competitor nation, tax havens have to
18:07 offer a basket of regulatory gifts to
18:09 the countries that h that headquarter
18:12 there. Which is why in Ireland, the data
18:14 protection regulator barely gets out of
18:17 bed. And when they do, they only give
18:19 companies the softest of wrist slaps.
18:21 And so, US tech companies that pretend
18:24 to be Irish violate the GDPR. And once
18:27 those cases arrive in Ireland, they die.
18:30 And it's not just Ireland. In the UK,
18:32 the antitrust regulators called the
18:34 Competition and Markets Authority. And
18:35 until very recently, it was run by a
18:37 very effective fellow named Marcus
18:39 Boarink. But last month, the prime
18:41 minister of the United Kingdom, Kier
18:43 Starmer, fired Marcus Bokerink and
18:44 replaced him with a guy called Doug
18:46 Gerr, whose previous job was being the
18:48 head of Amazon
18:51 UK. So competition is dead. Regulation
18:53 is dead. Companies are no longer
18:54 disciplined by markets, nor are they
18:56 disciplined by states. But there are
18:59 three forces that discipline firms that
19:01 contribute to an inhospitable
19:03 inhospitable environment for the
19:05 reproduction of sociopathic and
19:08 shitifying monsters in the seauite. So
19:10 let's talk about the other force my
19:12 favorite one interoperability. The
19:15 principle of two or more things working
19:17 together. In the non-digital world
19:20 interop is hard to make a light socket
19:22 that works with any light bulb. You're
19:24 going to have to agree on the direction,
19:25 the pitch, and the diameter of the
19:27 thread, the voltage, the amperage, and
19:29 the wattage of the socket, or someone
19:31 gets their hand blown off the next time
19:33 they change a light bulb. But in the
19:36 digital world, interrupt is built in
19:38 because the only computer we know how to
19:40 make is the touring complete universal
19:42 vonoyman machine, a computing machine
19:44 capable of running every valid program,
19:46 which means that for every inshitifying
19:48 program, there is a disinitifying
19:51 program that you can install. So if HP
19:53 writes a program to ensure that its
19:56 printers only use OEM ink, someone else
19:59 can write a program that disables that
20:01 program. So you can use any ink you
20:04 want. Now in the US, a company called
20:07 PAR shipped an app to help Door Dash
20:10 drivers get paid more because in the US,
20:12 Door Dash drivers make most of their
20:15 money from tips, but the Door Dash
20:17 driver app hides the tip amount until
20:20 you irrevocably commit to the job. So,
20:21 you don't know when you accept a job
20:24 whether it's worth a $1.50 or $1.50 with
20:28 a $10 tip. So, Perah, they made an app
20:30 that peaked inside the JSON object that
20:32 got transmitted to the driver's phone,
20:34 found the tip, and revealed it so the
20:36 driver could decide whether they wanted
20:38 to take that job or not. But Door Dash
20:42 shut Paras app down because in America
20:45 apps like Perez were illegal because in
20:47 1998, Bill Clinton signed a law called
20:50 the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or
20:53 DMCA. And section 1201 of the DMCA makes
20:57 it a felony to bypass an access control
20:59 for a copyrighted work with penalties of
21:01 a $500,000 fine and a 5-year prison
21:04 sentence for a first offense. which is
21:07 why com um so uh just the act of reverse
21:09 engineering the Door Dash app, peeling
21:12 away the DRM wrapper became a potential
21:14 felony, which is why companies are so
21:16 desperately horny to get you to stop
21:17 using their websites and start using
21:20 their apps. The web is open. Apps are
21:22 closed. The majority of web users have
21:25 installed an ad blocker. No app user has
21:28 installed an ad blocker because it's a
21:30 felony to distribute such a tool because
21:31 you would have to reverse engineer the
21:34 app to do it. An app is just a website
21:36 you wrap in the right kind of IP so that
21:38 the company that made it can send you to
21:40 prison if you modify it so that it
21:42 serves your interests instead of the
21:45 OEMs. Now, Europe adopted its own
21:48 version of the DMCA in 2001 with article
21:51 6 of the copyright directive which copy
21:53 pasted the US digital millennium
21:55 copyright act into European regulation.
21:57 And the commission was warned at the
21:59 time that making it illegal to bypass
22:01 digital locks would interfere with the
22:04 repair of tractors, cars, ventilators,
22:07 insulin pumps. Europeans warned them
22:09 that laws banning tampering with digital
22:11 locks would let American tech giants
22:14 corner digital markets forced them to
22:16 buy their apps for and their games from
22:18 American app stores and that they could
22:20 cream off any commission that they
22:22 wanted from. They warned that these laws
22:24 were a gift to monopolists who would
22:26 jack up the price of ink. that these
22:28 copyright laws, far from serving
22:31 European artists, would lock them into
22:33 American platforms because every time
22:35 someone in a European creators audience
22:38 buys a book or a game or a video or a
22:40 song, it is locked to an American app
22:43 and can never be unlocked. So if you're
22:45 an artistic worker and you you are in
22:46 the EU and you want to migrate to
22:49 European competitor of an American firm,
22:51 your audience can't come with you unless
22:53 they're prepared to abandon their whole
22:55 library because you cannot give them a
22:57 tool to convert their files to work from
22:59 one app and then in another. The
23:01 commission ignored these warnings and
23:02 now we live in a world where it is
23:05 illegal to tamper with digital logs.
23:07 Which means that if HP puts a digital
23:09 lock on its printers that verifies
23:11 you're not using third party ink or
23:13 refilling the HP ink cartridge, it's a
23:17 crime to bypass that lock, which is how
23:20 HP has gotten away with raising and
23:22 raising and raising the price of ink.
23:25 Printer ink today is the most expensive
23:27 fluid you can buy as a civilian without
23:30 obtaining a special permit. The colored
23:32 liquid that you print your grocery list
23:34 with costs more milliliter formiller
23:36 than the seaman of a Kentucky Derby winning
23:44 [Applause]
23:46 stallion. So that's the world the
23:49 copyright directive gave us. A world
23:51 where a farmer can't fix their tractor.
23:52 An independent mechanic can't fix your
23:54 car. Where a hospital during the
23:56 pandemic couldn't fix its ventilators.
23:59 So we got monopolies. Monopolies capture
24:00 their regulators. They get to ignore the
24:02 laws they don't like. They prevent laws
24:03 that might interfere with their
24:05 predatory conduct from being passed.
24:08 They mobilize IP laws uh uh so that they
24:10 can wield government power to prevent
24:13 new companies from entering the market.
24:15 That is the origin of inshitification.
24:17 Multiple changes to the environment led
24:19 to the three-fold collapse of
24:21 competition, regulation, and
24:23 interoperability, which created the
24:25 initic environment where the greediest,
24:28 most sociopathic elements in the body
24:30 corporate thrive at the expense of those
24:32 elements that act as moderators on their
24:35 initificatory impulses. And until we fix
24:37 that environment, the contagion will
24:40 spread to other firms. So, how do we
24:42 create a hostile environment for
24:44 inshitifiers? Well, first, there's
24:46 antitrust. After 40 years of antitrust
24:50 decline, this decade has seen a massive
24:53 increase in antitrust enforcement. Now,
24:54 it's true the prime minister of the
24:56 United Kingdom did just replace the head
24:58 of the Competition and Markets Authority
25:00 with the guy who used to run Amazon UK.
25:02 But the thing that makes this so tragic
25:04 is that the Competition and Markets
25:06 Authority has done incredible work and
25:07 they did it under a conservative
25:10 government. And in the EU, we've got the
25:11 Digital Markets Act and the Digital
25:14 Services Act going after the uh the big
25:17 tech with both barrels shifting GDPR
25:20 enforcement to uh away from Ireland and
25:21 to the federal courts. And in other
25:23 countries around the world, Australia,
25:26 Germany, France, Japan, South Korea, and
25:29 China, yes, including China, there are
25:32 new antitrust laws, new major antitrust
25:34 enforcement actions, and these comp
25:36 these countries collaborate with each
25:38 other. So, we had the UK Competition and
25:40 Markets Authority using its
25:42 investigatory powers to research and
25:44 publish a deep market study on Apple's
25:47 abuse of 30% app tax. And then the EU
25:49 used that report as the basis for an
25:51 enforcement action against Apple, which
25:53 took billions of euros out of them. And
25:54 then the South Korean and Japanese
25:57 enforcers translated the European case
25:59 and ran it successfully on their
26:01 countries, too. Well, what are we going
26:04 to do about regulatory capture? People
26:06 are getting smarter about regulatory
26:08 capture. Uh Europe Europe has passed
26:10 these muscular right to repair laws.
26:14 They have the DMA uh moving uh uh and
26:17 repair regard. But the DMA and these
26:19 repair regulations have been hamstrung
26:21 because neither of these laws permit
26:24 Europeans to acquire tools to break a
26:26 digital lock. which means that you only
26:28 get to add a third party app store to
26:30 your iPhone if you do so on the terms
26:32 that Apple has pushed through the
26:34 European Commission and those terms are
26:36 nearly impossible to satisfy and it
26:38 still means you can't interpret a car's
26:40 diagnostic messages so any mechanic can
26:43 fix it uh and so on because the digital
26:45 locks stop you from doing it because
26:47 giving someone a tool to break a digital
26:49 lock remains illegal under article six
26:51 of the copyright directive and of course
26:53 every printer, every smart speaker,
26:54 every car, every tractor, every
26:57 appliance Every medical implant has a
26:58 digital lock that stops you from fixing
27:01 it, modifying it or using third party
27:04 parts, software or consumables with it.
27:05 Which means that the big tech
27:07 disciplining forces of these laws on
27:10 repair and interoperability have become
27:12 hamstrung. Well, why don't we just get
27:14 rid of article six of the copyright
27:16 directive? Well, to understand that, you
27:17 have to understand why the copyright
27:19 directive was passed in the first place.
27:21 It was because the US trade
27:22 representative said that if Europe
27:25 wanted tariff-free access to American
27:27 markets, they would have to pass this
27:30 law. Now, I don't know if you've
27:32 heard, Donald Trump is getting rid of
27:34 tariff-free access to American markets.
27:36 Now, the reflexive response to this has
27:39 been to threaten retaliatory tariffs.
27:40 This is what we've done in my country of
27:42 Canada. Like all the best Americans, I'm
27:45 a Canadian. Um, [Applause]
27:51 [Applause]
27:53 Retaliatory tariffs make every American
27:55 good that you import more expensive for
27:57 the people who live in your country,
27:58 which is a very weird way to punish
28:01 America. It's like Europe is punching
28:02 itself in the face so hard that they
28:04 hope that America says,
28:07 "Ouch." You know what would be better?
28:09 If the European Union laws that protect
28:12 US big tech companies were abolished so
28:15 that European competitors could step in,
28:17 make it legal to reverse engineer,
28:19 jailbreak, and modify American
28:21 technology products and services. Make
28:24 it legal for European mechanics to
28:26 jailbreak a Tesla and unlock every
28:29 subscription feature like autopilot and
28:31 full access to your battery for one
28:33 price forever. And when you sell it, the
28:35 next owner will get those features as
28:36 well, meaning your car is now worth more
28:39 used. That is how you hurt Elon Musk,
28:41 not by being performatively offended by
28:44 his Nazi salute. He likes the attention.
28:46 You have to strike at his rent
28:49 extracting insanely high margin sources
28:51 of recurring revenue. You have to kick
28:53 him right in the
29:01 Let Europeans stand up a European app
29:03 store for games consoles and mobile
29:05 devices that charges 3% to process a
29:08 transaction, not 30%. So every European
29:10 news outlet that sells subscriptions
29:12 through an app and every European
29:14 software author uh musician and writer
29:16 who sells through a mobile platform or a
29:19 games uh platform gets a 25% increase in
29:21 revenue overnight before they've signed
29:23 up a single new customer. But of course,
29:25 they will sign up new customers by
29:27 selling jailbreaking software and access
29:30 to European app stores for every mobile
29:32 device and games console to everyone in
29:34 the world. Um, and by pitching every
29:36 games publisher and app maker on selling
29:39 through those European app stores uh to
29:40 customers everywhere without paying the
29:43 30% tax to American monopolists, they
29:46 could sell every mechanic in the world a
29:47 hundred euro per month subscription to a
29:50 universal diagnostic tool. and every
29:51 farmer in the world could buy a kit that
29:53 would let them fix their John Deere
29:56 tractor. They would beat a path to your
29:59 door. The EU could become a tech export
30:00 powerhouse while making everything
30:02 cheaper for European citizens, while
30:05 making everything more profitable uh for
30:07 every for anyone who sells media or
30:09 software in an app store. And this is
30:11 the best part. They would do it by
30:14 frontally assaulting the most lucrative
30:16 lines of business of the most profitable
30:18 companies in the S&P 500 whose CEO sat
30:21 behind Trump on the dis zeroing out
30:23 those recurring sources of revenue
30:26 immediately globally overnight forever.
30:27 That is how you win a trade
30:30 war. We are entering a period of
30:33 omniambolic poly crisis. The long
30:35 ominous rumble of climate change,
30:37 authoritarianism, genocide, xenophobia,
30:40 and transphobia turned into an
30:43 avalanche. The perpetrators of these
30:45 crimes against humanity have weaponized
30:47 the internet, colonizing the 21st
30:50 century's digital nervous system, using
30:52 it to attack its host, threatening
30:56 civilization itself. The insidernet was
30:57 purpose-built for this kind of
31:00 apocalyptic co-option organized around
31:01 giant corporations who would trade a
31:03 habitable planet and human rights for a
31:05 3% tax cut who blocked the
31:07 interoperability that would let us
31:09 escape their clutches. It did not have
31:11 to be this way. The initiat was not
31:14 inevitable. We do not have to be eternal
31:16 prisoners of the catastrophic policy
31:19 blunders of clueless lawmakers. A new
31:22 good internet is possible and necessary.
31:24 We can build it. We can imbue it with
31:26 the technological self-determination of
31:28 the old good internet and the ease of
31:31 use of web 2.0. We can build a place
31:34 where we can resist and survive climate
31:36 collapse, fascism, genocide, and
31:39 authoritarianism. A new good internet.
31:42 We can build that internet and we must. Thank
31:43 Thank [Applause]
31:48 [Applause]
