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Opening Keynote - The Day of the Comet: what Trustbusting Means for Digital Manipulation
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Opening Keynote - The Day of the Comet: what Trustbusting Means for Digital Manipulation
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Segment:0 .
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: Hi, thank you, Jason. Cadmore Media is very happy to once again be sponsoring the NISO Plus conference. And we're especially excited that this year the conference is fully virtual and that all sessions will be available on the Cadmore Media hosted NISO video repository. It's a great pleasure to introduce the opening keynote speaker, Cory Doctorow. In addition to being a prolific and highly successful writer of both fiction and nonfiction, Cory is also a special consultant to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit civil liberties group that defends freedom in technology, law, policy, standards, and treaties.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: He holds an honorary doctorate in computer science from the Open University, where he is a visiting professor. He's also an MIT Media Lab research affiliate, and a visiting professor of practice at the University of North Carolina School Event Library and Information Science. In 2007, he served as the Fulbright Chair at the Annenberg Center for Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: Thank you for being with us today, Cory.
CORY DOCTOROW: It's my pleasure. Thank you very much. Let me get that camera. There we go. Nope, that's not good either. Much better. Hi, thank you. I'm going to get some screen sharing going here and we will be off to the races.
CORY DOCTOROW: You can hear my authentically clacky sysadmin keyboard. And let's see. You should see my slides now. Is that right?
TODD CARPENTER: Yes.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: Yes.
CORY DOCTOROW: Great. Thanks. Well, thank you all very much. It's an honor and a pleasure as someone who spent a lot of time in SDOs wrangling over abstruse technical issues that were very important and that no one else understood yet. I certainly have an appreciation for people who work in standardization. The unappreciated and unsung legislators of the world, indeed.
CORY DOCTOROW: Now, if you are involved in technical standards, there's a pretty good chance that you've encountered this movie, The Social Dilemma, or perhaps the underlying scholarship that went into it. Professor Shoshana's Zuboff's work on surveillance capitalism and her book on that. And there's much about the surveillance capitalism hypothesis that I disagree with. And most of this talk is going to be about where I part ways with them and what I think is really going on and what it means for us.
CORY DOCTOROW: But I want to start with the area where the surveillance capitalism critics and I have 100% convergence, which is that big tech controls our lives and that's a problem. And the reason that it's a problem is that unchecked power does not produce good outcomes. Wise kings are not good kings. There is no such thing as a reliably wise king who can govern over us without accountability, without our consent, without having their judgment checked.
CORY DOCTOROW: The problem with the big tech platforms isn't merely whether or not Mark Zuckerberg is well-suited to be in charge of the social lives of 2.6 billion people. So for the record, I think he isn't. It's that nobody who has ever lived, nobody who ever will live should have the job of unilaterally making decisions about the social lives of 2.6 billion people. Our lives are better when we get to exercise self-determination.
CORY DOCTOROW: When we get to find out about several options for how we can live our lives, and then choose the one of those options that suits us best. Now, surveillance capitalism says that companies control our lives through highly automated data mining tools that allow them to manipulate us for money. And that's where I part ways with them. I think that the way that these companies control our lives-- and they do control our lives.
CORY DOCTOROW: But I think that the way that they control our lives is not by manipulating us so much as it is by having and maintaining a monopoly over our digital lives. I don't think that companies can reliably control our actions by spying on us and then manipulating us. To the extent that that works at all, the effects are very short-lived and rather small. If you think about the most celebrated example of peer reviewed big data style manipulation, behavior manipulation, you probably think about that infamous Facebook experiment where they subjected 60 million people to an experiment to see if they could mobilize them to vote.
CORY DOCTOROW: And they did see that several hundred thousand more people than were expected in the control group, actually, turned up and voted from the experimental side. And on the basis of this, they claim that they were able to do something large and important. But there are a couple of significant things to take account of when we think about that experiment. The first is that the actual effect size of that experiment was 0.4%. 0.4% of the people in the experimental group displayed the desired behavior that they were trying to be influenced towards.
CORY DOCTOROW: And the second is that we don't know how durable this effect is. One thing that we know about as a bedrock of human behaviorism is that we become inured to stimulus with time. Many is the time. I'm speaking to you now for my office, which is also my garage. And in my garage is the washing machine and the dryer. And they're noisy.
CORY DOCTOROW: But I turn them on and I forget about them. And I, actually, have a little note on my monitor that says, before I give a talk, make sure I've turned off the washing machine and the dryer. Because as noisy as they are, I cease to hear them after a very short period of time. And they sink below my threshold. So we know that the first time Facebook exposed people to a stimulus they saw 0.4% outcome.
CORY DOCTOROW: We can predict that there is at least a large likelihood that subsequent re-exposures to that stimulus would produce not larger effect size, but smaller effect size than 0.4%. Facebook released the data on that voting experiment because they thought that it proved that they had a mind control ray. Something that they could sell access to advertisers and political campaigners, too.
CORY DOCTOROW: But that's, obviously, a very self-serving claim. Because if Facebook can reliably control our actions, it can bill its customers more to control our actions on their behalf. And that data was released by the company itself, hardly a neutral observer of the efficacy of its own products. Now, even if we don't believe that Facebook has a mind control ray, we can and could still indict Facebook for performing nonconsensual psychological experiments on tens of millions of people.
CORY DOCTOROW: That disqualifies them from running a social network where they are in charge of the lives of 2.6 billion people. And from there, it is a very short hop to say, maybe there shouldn't be an organization that gets to dictate the social lives of 2.6 billion people. Let's spend a moment dwelling on the arc of the trajectory of the belief in big taxability to manipulate us.
CORY DOCTOROW: Now, it started with big tech itself. It started with companies like Facebook and Google going around to potential advertisers and saying, we can manipulate people if you give us money. They filed patents to explain how they might do that. Now, any of you who's ever filed a patent knows that patents are a source of extremely low quality information about products. That the standard structure of a technical patent goes, this is a method for doing every conceivable thing in every conceivable way.
CORY DOCTOROW: And then, the second clause is, here are some sub-claims that I'm going to make about the things you can do and the ways you can do them. And it gets progressively narrower. And the tactic employed by patent lawyers here is to hope that the patent examiner isn't paying attention. And that they stop well short of the innovative invention that's being claimed in the patent and grant a much wider claim to the company that's filing it.
CORY DOCTOROW: And so the fact that we see patents from these companies that claim that they can manipulate us for money should not be taken in and of themselves as evidence that they are actually able to do this. And then, the third leg of the stool-- of the origin of this hype cycle was these experiments that they did. Experiments that they did themselves that they then released PR about to spin them in a way that made them seem to be as effective as possible.
CORY DOCTOROW: So that was the first stage. The claims originated with the manufacturers. The second stage is these claims being taken up by intermediaries. By advertising agencies and political consultants who took what amounted to sales literature, ingested it, and made their own sales brochures out of it. Come and hire our agency and we'll get people to vote for you or we'll get people to buy your products.
CORY DOCTOROW: Now, the next stage of the hype cycle was the customers of these intermediaries, the advertisers themselves and the politicians. Marketing managers who just wrote POs for tens of millions worth of programmatic ads then went and told their colleagues and their bosses that they had made a good purchase decision. Politicians who had sent their donors money to political consultants to run targeted political ads then went back to those donors and said, I am here to tell you that I'm spending your money wisely.
CORY DOCTOROW: And I have given it to people who will do good things with it. And then, finally, the group of people who took these claims up and promoted them, ironically, were their critics. The people who stopped and said, wait a second, did you just claim that you can control our minds? That sounds bad to me. Hey, everyone, did you notice that these giant companies are claiming that they can control our minds?
CORY DOCTOROW: Doesn't that sound bad to you, too? And you can empathize with critics who take these claims at face value because if you do take these claims at face value, they are extremely alarming. And of course, those critics often had the ears of regulators. And so you saw burgeoning regulation that said, having determined that big tech is controlling our minds, we are now going to make regulations about how that mind control should be used.
CORY DOCTOROW: The evolution of the surveillance capitalism story starts with, we can sell you anything. And turns into, Google and Facebook invented a mind control ray to sell your nephew a fidget spinner. And then, Robert Mercer stole it and made your uncle a racist. But these claims to mind control are self-serving. And the critics who repeat them are actually helping the tech industry sell its main product, the high-priced, unfalsifiable attempts to manipulate users, me and you.
CORY DOCTOROW: Remember, up until now, every claim that we've ever heard to being able to control people's minds turned out to be garbage. From Rasputin to Mesmer to the neurolinguistic programming movement to the CIA's bizarre MKUltra experiments, to the sad men of the pickup artist movement. These extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. And the only thing extraordinary about the proof that we are offered for big tax claims is how extraordinarily thin that proof is.
CORY DOCTOROW: The predictions made by microexpression analysis have been repeatedly shown to underperform a coin toss. The top sentiment analysis tools, like the ones provided by the elite Google spin-out Jigsaw are simply incoherent. And to give you an example of how bad Jigsaw's tool is, you should look to Sarah Jeong's experience with it. Sarah is a New York Times reporter and cyber lawyer. And because she is both racialized and a woman and she's on the internet, she faces a lot of extremely ghastly harassment and threats online.
CORY DOCTOROW: And so she decided to take some of the most vivid of these threats, and this is a bit of a content warning because I'm going to repeat one of them in a moment. She decided to take some of these-- the most vivid of these threats and feed them to Jigsaw's sentiment analysis tool and ask it, does this seem hostile to you? And here's the threat that she asked Google's tool-- Jigsaw's tool to evaluate. I'm going to rip off each one of her hairs and twist her tits clean off.
CORY DOCTOROW: And Jigsaw's sentiment analysis tool so that it found no aggression at all in this statement. Indeed, the whole idea of psychographics, including the Big Five personality types that Cambridge Analytica based its marketing claims on are, in the words of an extensive nature literature review, a scant science that has been most thoroughly developed through the big tech companies own sales claims that they made to potential advertisers.
CORY DOCTOROW: Big tech's defenders and detractors confronted by this are apt to counter that the fact that ad tech makes billions in revenue means that it must work. Who would pay for this if it wasn't doing its job? But this is no proof at all. People buy vitamins, despite careful meta analysis that conclude that vitamins are not beneficial or, are in some cases, actually harmful. Hedge fund managers, who consistently underperform the S&P 500, induce the most sophisticated investors on Earth to entrust them with trillions of dollars when they would make more money by sticking that-- sticking their fortunes in their mattress.
CORY DOCTOROW: Hedge fund managers lose money often enough that you're better off not giving it to anyone at all. And yet, the losers who run those hedge funds make seven figure salaries. And most, or maybe even all of them, think that they're good at their jobs despite all empirical evidence to the contrary. After all, if the smartest investors on Earth gave me trillions of dollars to manage, I could probably talk myself into thinking that I was good at my job, too.
CORY DOCTOROW: And the same is true of techies and their bosses. Some of the highest paid people on Earth are convinced that they are so good at bypassing our cognition to influence our behavior, and of course, so do their customers. But in the absence of hard evidence, we should treat these claims as latter day Rasputin's convinced that they can change our behavior. Convinced that it's moral for them to do so, therefore, some of the great villains of history, but deluded about what's actually going on.
CORY DOCTOROW: So what's actually going on? Well, it's the same thing that happened in the last gilded age, Monopolies. Even when you get big tech and its critics to agree that there are monopolies being formed online. They call these natural monopolies, and they say that they're driven by network effects. But that's not what we see when we examine the actual growth history of the largest tech firms.
CORY DOCTOROW: Google is exemplary in this regard. Google is a 1.5 product company. They made a really excellent search engine and a pretty advanced hotmail clone. Everything else that they made in-house has been a failure in the market, all the way up to the Wi-Fi balloons. Everything that they've done that succeeded, from YouTube to their ad tech stock to Android, come from companies that they bought.
CORY DOCTOROW: The data that they've stored does not constitute a moat against potential competitors. 15-year-old click data does not allow you to sell things better unless maybe you hold on to it for another 10 years. And then, you find all the people who searched for, where do I buy a new roof for my house? And you show them an ad that says, it's been a quarter century since you last bought a roof.
CORY DOCTOROW: Are you interested in buying another one? But that data is still harmful. It leaks. It's used for digital redlining and discrimination. It becomes complicit in state surveillance. And of course, state's governments, they practice forbearance in regard to data collection. They let these companies over collect our data because they're engaged in deep public private surveillance partnerships where the large data repositories that are gathered by big tech are then plundered by law enforcement, public safety, and national security entities in order to conduct their own operations.
CORY DOCTOROW: You see that very vividly with Ring, which was just revealed to have performed surveillance-- street level surveillance for the Los Angeles Police Department during the Black Lives Matter demonstration where Ring owners footage was a primary mechanism by which the LAPD tracked who was protesting and identified those protesters. Monopolies subvert evidence-based policy, right? If we think that surveillance is bad for us, and yet, our governments allow companies to spy on us, we can look to the fact that there are monopolies who have enormous fortunes to mobilize in service of parochial rules that benefit them as an answer to why we cannot muster the political will to do a thing that most of us want to see happen and that the evidence says should happen.
CORY DOCTOROW: Now, technology does, in fact, have some network effects. But network effects are a double-edged sword thanks to interoperability. Because tech monopolies-- digital tech monopolies are not like other monopolies. Digital technology has remedies available to it that are not available to other industries. Railroading is an infamous source of monopolization thanks to literal network effects and lock in.
CORY DOCTOROW: But when a railroad manages to conquer a territory, it's very hard to unbundle it. Think of the Australian experiment where in the 19th century fragmentation among the Australian states led to tracks being laid at different gauges all across the country. And for 150 years, Australian logistics and transportation experts have tried to design rail cars that can hop from one rail gauge to another.
CORY DOCTOROW: They have prototyped hundreds of designs for rail cars that can drop one set of wheels and retract a set of wheels. None of them worked. In the end, what they ended up doing was tearing up thousands of kilometers of rail and laying new rail because that was the easiest way to do it. That's not how it works with digital technology. With digital technology, we just create some middleware. We just create a translation layer.
CORY DOCTOROW: We just stick it in a VM. We just reverse engineer the file format. And yesterday's technology works with today's technology. That interoperability is everywhere. It's why we can wear the socks of our choosing with the shoes that we bought and why the cobbler doesn't get to tell us which socks that we wear. And of course, those of you who work in standardization have made it your bread and butter to figure out how to build interoperability in from the start.
CORY DOCTOROW: But there's a very important kind of interoperability that doesn't involve standardization, and it's what you could call adversarial interoperability, or as with the Electronic Frontier Foundation call it, competitive compatibility. Competitive compatibility is when you make a new product work with an old product, even though the company that made the old product doesn't want you to. So think of how Apple managed its fight with Microsoft in the early 2000s.
CORY DOCTOROW: When Microsoft dominated the office market by making Microsoft Office Suite, a suite that wrote proprietary Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files that could not be read on the Mac. I mean, notionally, they could. There was a piece of software called Office for Mac. But as a former CIO who bought a lot of Mac hardware for my users, I'm here to tell you that the most cursed software that Microsoft ever made was office for the Mac.
CORY DOCTOROW: When the accountants sent the designer a Word file to open on their Mac, that designer's just unfortunate decision to open that document would forever make that document unreadable, not just to the accountant on the Windows system, but likely to the designer as well. Steve Jobs didn't solve that problem by asking Bill Gates very nicely to fix office for Mac. Instead, he got a small team of reverse engineers to produce the compatible iWorks suite, numbers, pages, keynote, that just works with Microsoft Office documents.
CORY DOCTOROW: What it did was it turned Microsoft's walled garden of users into a feedlot. They weren't locked away from Apple. They were all neatly organized and Apple could go in with its switch campaign and say, we know you've got a lot of people that you communicate with by sharing office documents. You can bring them over here and share with them using a Mac instead.
CORY DOCTOROW: And so the network effect collapsed and ended up working to Apple's advantage because everyone who had a Microsoft Office file was now a potential iWorks Suite customer. And it wasn't just Apple who did this, and it's not just file formats that it works with. When Zuckerberg first took Facebook away from a mere academic network and decided to open it up to the general public, he had a problem, which was that everyone in the world who wanted to use a general purpose social networking tool already had one.
CORY DOCTOROW: The most successful one in the history of the world, Myspace, which was owned by a rapacious billionaire who has never let anything go willingly. Now, rather than trying to organize a day when everybody left Myspace and joined Facebook, national leave Myspace day, Mark Zuckerberg and his programmers made a bot. You could give it your Myspace login credentials, switch to Facebook, and it would login to Myspace on your behalf, scrape your inbox, put it in your Facebook inbox, let you reply to it from Facebook, and push it back out to Myspace.
CORY DOCTOROW: And now, every Myspace user was a potential Facebook user because they could watch as their friends dribbled away from Myspace to Facebook and understand that there might be a value proposition for them there. And that the cost of trying it out was effectively zero because they didn't have to forfeit any of their social relations to go there. This competitive compatibility is in the history of every tech company.
CORY DOCTOROW: Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook. And monopoly has allowed these companies to gather together, agree that we've had enough of this competitive compatibility nonsense now that they've all used it to ascend to glory, and to agitate to have competitive compatibility prohibited through new laws and new interpretations of existing laws. Patents, anti-circumvention, enforceable terms of service, this new Supreme Court case where Google and Oracle are fighting each other over whether APIs are copyrightable.
CORY DOCTOROW: If Oracle prevails, that would be the end of most kinds of interoperability without permission. Now, monopolies distort public policy. And public policy is important. Because public policy is how we resolve technical questions that we can't resolve on our own. That you and I cannot research the answers to. I mean, if you're at this conference, you're an expert in something, but you're not an expert in everything.
CORY DOCTOROW: To figure out whether or not you can make it through your day without dying, you have to decide whether you're going to get on a 737 Max, whether the new aviation safety standards for them are good enough. You have to decide whether the food that you've been given is safe enough or whether it's going to kill you. You have to decide whether you're going to wear a mask, maintain social distancing, whether the structural steel members in the ceiling over your head have an alloy that is of sufficient strength and flexibility to keep the ceiling from falling in on you or whether you should have it all torn out and replaced.
CORY DOCTOROW: And even if you are an expert in those things, you can't be an expert in everything. Those questions are not answerable by getting degrees in biological and physical and chemical and computational and mathematical sciences. Those have to be resolved through an expert process where neutral experts, here contesting claims from other experts, adjudicate among them, publish their findings, and then reveal those findings to us showing their workings with a process by which those findings can be clawed back and re-evaluated in the presence of new evidence or in the revelation of corruption or falsehoods from one or more of the parties involved in the process.
CORY DOCTOROW: And those processes have been discredited in every sector because every sector has become monopolized. And the rules that govern them now no longer reflect objective reality, but rather, the self-interest of the industry that they represent. So to understand how monopolized our industry is, we have to look beyond tech at every one of the monopolized sectors.
CORY DOCTOROW: And here's just a smattering of them. Pharmaceuticals, pharmaceutical plans, pharmaceutical benefit managers, pharmacies, the US health insurance market, the appliance market, the athletic shoe market, the defense contracting market, the film production market, the movie and exhibition market, the music publishing market, the music recording market, the publishing market, the book selling market, the stationery market the eyeglass market.
CORY DOCTOROW: One eyeglass vendor left in the world and they own every major eyeglass retailer from Lenscrafters to Sunglass Hut. The LASIK market, the enterprise software market, the car part market, the glass bottle market, one glass bottle manufacturer left in America. It's one of the reasons that we're having so much trouble getting vaccines out to people. The rental car market, the hotel market, the aviation market, the rail market, the logistics market, the mattress market, oil, beer, spirits, champagne, cowboy boots, and candy.
CORY DOCTOROW: And when an industry is concentrated in this way, it gets to buy whatever official truth suits its bottom line the best. To understand what that looks like, think back to the state of West Virginia in 2018. We tend to think of West Virginia as coal country, but coal is a very small industry in West Virginia. The main industry in West Virginia is chemical processing.
CORY DOCTOROW: And because of monopolization, chemical processing is synonymous with Dow. Dow is the industry leader. They control the industry association. And in 2018, they asked the state for a variance on its rules about how much runoff from chemical processing could go into drinking water. Those rules were set nationally by the EPA, but they wanted a higher level permissible within West Virginia.
CORY DOCTOROW: Now, it may be that we can tolerate higher levels than the national guidelines say. And if so, it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world to change those guidelines. That way we could have cheaper chemicals. And I use them and you use them. We've got Saran Wrap in our kitchen and I've got plastic armrests on my chair. We need chemical processing.
CORY DOCTOROW: But we didn't get an evidentiary truth-seeking exercise when the West Virginia legislature took up this question. Instead, the basis that Dow used to argue for this exemption was that West Virginians are fatter than the rest of America. And that their higher BMI meant that they had more tissue and could absorb more poison before suffering negative health effects from the excess chemical waste in their drinking water.
CORY DOCTOROW: Now, there's an old fashioned word for this kind of lawmaking, it's called corruption. And corruption is a synonym for conspiracy. People look at that photo of Donald Trump and the tech leaders up in Trump Tower after he won the election. And they think, this is terrible. How could our tech leaders all meet with this man who had such awful policies? And fair enough.
CORY DOCTOROW: But equally disturbing, and I think more disturbing, is the fact that they all fit around one table. That the people who determine how our digital lives work are in such small number that their industry is so concentrated that they can all fit around one table. When you hear people dismiss conspiracists or decry conspiracists or wring their hands around conspiracists, they often talk about conspiracy as a lazy way of looking at the world.
CORY DOCTOROW: But conspiracy is not lazy. It's energetic. To be a believer in QAnon or 5G or anti-vax is not easy. It's hard work. It starts from the encyclopedic recounting of actual conspiracies. Scratch an anti-vaxxer, you'll find someone who knows chapter and verse about how the FDA was complicit in the opioid epidemic.
CORY DOCTOROW: Scratch a ufologist, and you'll find someone who knows everything about how the DoD covered up various aerospace accidents. And then, this encyclopedic knowledge of the failing of our truth-seeking exercise discredits the idea of official truth itself. And that sets the person floating through an epistemological void with no way to know what is true.
CORY DOCTOROW: And that void gets filled by people, not processes, nor institutions. And that's where we get our personality cults from. Modern conspiracism is the intersection of the experience of real conspiracies, the trauma resulting from those conspiracies, and it's an easy process and an easy process to learn about conspiracies and conspiracy theories and the ability to target people who might be vulnerable to conspiracy theories.
CORY DOCTOROW: Our discourse is all about this third factor, how easy it is to target people. How easy it is to find people with these, otherwise, hard to find traits and engage in so-called digital radicalization. But that focus is incomplete. First, because it fails to ask the most important question, not how do we find people who are vulnerable to conspiracies? But why are so many people vulnerable to conspiracies today?
CORY DOCTOROW: Why, today, are there more people who have been traumatized by real conspiracies from offshoring to opioids. And second, it ignores the beneficial part of this so-called radicalization process. The ability of people with socially disfavored views to discover one another and make common cause. Yeah, that's how we got Nazis marching through the streets of Charlottesville, but it's also how we got Black Lives Matter and the understanding that gender is not a binary.
CORY DOCTOROW: Now, it's easy to see why our immediate concern would be the bad beliefs that our neighbors have been absorbed into. But that is a purely reactive approach. If we want to address ourselves to the causes rather than the effects of radicalization, we have to root out the material circumstances that make conspiracism attractive to its adherents. We have to address the corruption that makes our institutions untrustworthy.
CORY DOCTOROW: The corruption that deprives us of the common epistemological framework by which we know what is true. The corruption that produces the trauma. That sets people seeking out alternate explanations for their frightening, brutal, material circumstances, the corruption that we call monopolies. And that's why it matters whether what's happened with digital is monopolies or mind control.
CORY DOCTOROW: If it's mind control, if the tech companies have created an immortal super weapon that strips us of our free will, then it would be catastrophic to break up those companies and distribute their mind cannons into more hands than we could ever hope to enumerate, much less control. But if it's monopoly, then we must shatter those companies. Destroy their concentrated power as a means of restoring good governance. Think of the mind control hypothesis as the belief that a comet is headed for the Earth.
CORY DOCTOROW: Breaking up that comet would just shower the planet's surface with a killing rain of meteors. Our only recourse is to steer that comet. And the last thing you want would be interoperability. Interoperability just lets members of the public try to steer the comet for their own needs. If it's a comet, it's a fact of life. It's with us for eternity. There to be tamed if we can, but impossible to be rid of.
CORY DOCTOROW: And God help us if we lose control of it and it crashes into the earth anyway. But if it's a monopoly, then we know what to do. We just got to bust the trusts. Rather than looking to exotic explanations for market concentration, like network effects, let's look at how we enforce monopoly law. After all, it's not network effects or first mover advantage or data that gave us one eye wear company and two beer companies and three record labels and four movie studios and five publishers.
CORY DOCTOROW: In fact, it's about to be four publishers, because Random House is buying Simon and Schuster. We know how this happened. 40 years ago, a guy named Robert Bork changed the way that we enforce antitrust law. Bork was a kind of court sorcerer to Ronald Reagan, best known today as being denied a seat on the Supreme Court because the crimes he committed when he was the Solicitor General for Nixon.
CORY DOCTOROW: But he became more influential working for Reagan than he would have on the Supreme Court. He framed monopoly as a purely consumer issue, and said that we would only fight monopolies if we could show that they damage consumer welfare. Unless you could deploy an economic model that only he and his colleagues knew how to make or interpret that showed that a price rise came about as the result of monopolies, or that a monopoly would end up raising prices.
CORY DOCTOROW: And it turned out that when they interpreted the models, you could never attribute consumer welfare harms to price rises. And so every monopoly received forbearance and we did not block monopoly formation, even though there is overwhelming evidence that mergers, acquisitions, and vertical monopolies do raise prices. The fundamental problem of this consumer welfare standard is right there in the name, consumers.
CORY DOCTOROW: It says that we are consumers and not citizens. It says that we're ambulatory wallets, not members of a polity with a stake in the functioning of our economy and our politics. Monopolies are bad because of consumer welfare. They're bad because of Democratic harms. All that is not to say the tech monopolies aren't taking away our free will. They are absolutely taking away our free will because they lock our friends inside a walled garden, guaranteeing that we'll lock ourselves into the walled garden, too, in order to talk to them.
CORY DOCTOROW: They nonconsensually siphon our data out of our devices. They prohibit us from installing apps of our choosing unless those apps are approved by their central committees as not unduly damaging to their shareholders' interests. They tell us which link-- which ink we can use in our printers, which parts we can put in our phones, which repair depots can fix our stuff and when we have to throw that stuff away and buy new stuff from them. These are huge impositions on our free will and our self-determination.
CORY DOCTOROW: And while they depend on odious, irresponsible, and grossly harmful surveillance, not all of them do. You may have heard that if you're not paying for the product, you're the product. But the farmers who aren't allowed to fix their own John Deere tractors paid $600,000 to $2 million for those tractors. They're paying for the product. They're still the product. No one gave you a free iPhone in exchange for promising that you would only get it fixed at the Genius Bar and pay over the odds to get it fixed there.
CORY DOCTOROW: The thing that determines whether you're being treated as a product is not whether you're paying for it, it's whether the company can get away with treating you as a product. Whether the lack of competition and the metastasis of anti-competitive laws like software patents, anti-circumvention, and enforceable terms of service deprive you of the right to choose to go somewhere else. Now, earlier, I suggested that the rise of conspiracism isn't the result of ideology but of material conditions.
CORY DOCTOROW: It's not that conspiratorial arguments are winning. It's that our corrupt and terrifying material world loses the argument. But I want to close today by talking about ideology. Specifically, what are the ideological factors that make the surveillance of capitalism framework so robust, so spreadable? I think it's that the success of surveillance capitalism is the result of a strange ideological marriage between three groups of people who want to preserve the status quo for their own reasons.
CORY DOCTOROW: The first is the tech industry, which is invested in its own status as a bunch of geniuses. If they're damned as evil geniuses, well, they'll take it because at least they're still geniuses. The second is the true believers of capitalism who practice a form of tech exceptionalism when they paint tech as a rogue capitalism, whose mind control rays short-circuit the market's nearly mystical, nearly perfect ability to self-correct.
CORY DOCTOROW: If tech is a rogue capitalism, then the problem is tech, not capitalism. And finally, there are the people who are thriving under the status quo. If conspiratorialism was caused by a contagious mania that afflicts people of defective intellect, then we need to cure those people, not fix the system that benefits its adherents so handsomely. And to those people, I say that, tech did not conquer the world through genius, but through the same mediocre sociopathy practiced by the Rockefellers, the Carnegies, the Bells, and the other monsters of history.
CORY DOCTOROW: That markets tend to monopoly and our minimum response should be muscular state intervention that prohibits anti-competitive mergers, restricts corporate power, and punishes anti-competitive conduct. That we are never going back to brunch. The reason your neighbors went crazy is that the world is on fire and the system is rotten. They may believe crazy things, but there's an utterly sane reason for them to believe them.
CORY DOCTOROW: Surveillance capitalism is not a rogue capitalism. It's just capitalism. It's not a comment. It's just three sociopaths in a trench coat. We've dealt with these jokers before, and it's long past time we dealt with them again. Thank you.
TODD CARPENTER: All right, thank you, Cory. As you exited your presentation, it went from full screen mode and I clicked in the wrong-- clicked into the wrong application. I was like wait, no, I wanted to hit unmute. So thank you. Want to encourage anyone if you have any questions or comments for Cory, please use the Q&A functionality in the Zoom interface. I presume you all know how to use that.
TODD CARPENTER: So many questions, so many great ideas, so many paths to go down here. I wish we had several hours. Maybe just take the entire day with you, Cory.
CORY DOCTOROW: There are some good questions in the Q&A here. I'm happy to just start picking them off, if you'd like.
TODD CARPENTER: Actually, let's start with the first question that caught my eye has to do with the Australian news model. And what's going on in Australia. And in terms of trying to get the large corporations to pay for news. Do you think that's a viable model? Is that something that we might look into? It's kind of interesting what they're-- success they're having.
CORY DOCTOROW: I wrote a short essay about this yesterday and I'll grab the link and paste it in the chat before I go. I think that this is probably the most misunderstood tech thing of the last, I don't know, since CDA230, say, which puts it right up there in the pantheon of badly understood tech policy initiatives. I don't think that they're trying to get them to pay for the news. I think that's the start of the misconception.
CORY DOCTOROW: Here's what's happened. We have an advertising duopoly and news is primarily ad supported. And the ad duopoly runs a crooked market. There's a great paper by [INAUDIBLE] and I'm sorry. I'm very bad at South Indian surnames, but I can find you that paper and link it as well. It's in my essay that I wrote yesterday. That describes in eye-watering detail how these markets are rigged.
CORY DOCTOROW: So for example, Google runs the largest demand side and supply side platform. And it has repeatedly tweaked those platforms so that if you try to use a competitor's, it down ranks you. And then, if you use the platform, it charges you about 40% more than you would pay on the open market for advertising. And it claws back about 40% of what the publishers should receive from that advertising.
CORY DOCTOROW: So they're ripping off the advertisers and they're ripping off the publishers. Facebook and Google were both caught through leaked documents colluding to rig bidding markets for ads and publisher payouts where they actually got together and did illegal collusive behavior to transfer money from the publishers to their own pockets. And Facebook and Google have both been caught repeatedly lying about how their ads work.
CORY DOCTOROW: So for example, Facebook just had a whistle blower come out and publish emails where he told his bosses that they were promising advertisers reach that couldn't be obtained. Like saying that if they placed an ad, they would reach 140% of all young American males, right? Numbers that are just nonsensical. Likewise, we saw a lot of ad fraud with the Facebook pivot to video where they settled a claim for hundreds of millions of dollars about lying about how many people saw it and so on.
CORY DOCTOROW: So if you're a publisher, you are in a market where you are somewhat fragmented and you are negotiating against an intermediary who's extremely concentrated. And that intermediary breaks the law with impunity to steal from you. And so the purpose of the regulation in Australia was to first make it harder to cheat. So the most important piece of this regulation that nobody talks about is the transparency rule that requires the companies to disclose what data they gather, how they use that data, any changes to the algorithm that might result in massive changes to how news articles are ranked, And also it prohibits-- this is very important-- it prohibits retaliation.
CORY DOCTOROW: So one of the reasons links are implicated here is that whenever a publisher decided to take extreme measures to get out of the duopoly, the duopoly then responded by down-ranking that publisher's reach in their social media platform in the case of Facebook, or in search results, in the case of Google. So because they were allowed to effect these anti-competitive vertical monopolies, they were able to use traffic as a club to beat up people who didn't want to participate in a rigged ad market.
CORY DOCTOROW: So the first thing that the regulation does is it forces publication of these opaque processes that are otherwise amenable to corruption and had been used to corrupt-- for corruption to the detriment of the publishers. The second thing that it does is it creates an arbitration process, which is very typical in negotiating systems where you have a diffuse set of actors and a concentrated actor, like bosses and workers or customers and vendor, where an arbitrator sits between them and hears both sides and makes an adjudication about what the fair rate should be as between them.
CORY DOCTOROW: It's how everything from dairy prices to annual contracts get set. And the arbitrator kicks in only if Facebook, Google, and the publishers can't come to an agreement that they like. So that's the idea here is to not de-monopolize the industry, which Australia thinks is too heavy a lift, and there's a question in there about whether or not a national government can break up these international monopolies.
CORY DOCTOROW: Some national governments might be able to, but Australia probably can't. It's not big enough. The EU might be able to, the US might be able to, but Australia can't. So that's the first piece is to try and correct the monopoly without addressing the monopolism-- so to make the system work. But it's important to note that if you wanted to get there, you wouldn't start from here.
CORY DOCTOROW: That the Australian media industry is incredibly corrupt. It's run by Rupert Murdoch. Thanks to the same process that allowed Facebook and Google to grow, he now controls almost the entire press in Australia. He was able to effect anti-competitive mergers and vertical integrations that should have never been permitted by Australia's competition authority. And so the only reason this actually got through the Australian parliament is you have this incredibly powerful billionaire who had benefits.
CORY DOCTOROW: And who's primarily using this as a way to shift a few points from one balance sheet to another balance sheet. And that's no good, right? This is not the-- he is not our hero. And we can absolutely, whether we're journalists or news consumers, we can absolutely demand something better than getting a different set of giants to run the world in the hopes that they will drop more crumbs from their table onto our plate.
CORY DOCTOROW: And the thing that I think is positive about this is not the financial arrangements. The financial arrangements are probably a net negative. Not least because the government gets to decide who's a news entity, and therefore, in the collective bargaining arrangement. And it is not good to have governments decide who is and isn't a journalist because they have historically abused that power to exclude people who are critical of them.
CORY DOCTOROW: And so that is a power that we don't normally irrigate to Democratic governments. But I think the part that is really good is they're going to publish a bunch of data. And they're going to prohibit a bunch of practices that will redound to the benefit of all publishers everywhere. And from there, we can at least start to de-monopolize this one corner of the industry. And it's important to note that the energy to de-monopolize tech comes from a bunch of other monopolistic industries.
CORY DOCTOROW: A lot of the antitrust energy in the US is driven by cable monopolies. And the miscalculation that cable monopolies and media monopolies make when they look at this is they think that antitrust is a one and done thing. And it's really-- it's like-- they're like potato chips. Once you start, you can't stop. Once we create the precedent and muster the political will to break up an industry, history tells us, we'll move on to the rest of them then it will snowball.
CORY DOCTOROW: And there was another question in the Q&A about what we do about all of this. And what we do about all of this is we make a coalition. Because there are people who are really angry that professional wrestling is down to one league and it's-- and that means that all of the wrestlers are now classed as contractors. They've lost their health insurance. And they're all on GoFundMe begging for pennies so they can die with dignity of their workplace-related injuries in their 50s.
CORY DOCTOROW: And there are people who are really angry about one eyeglass vendor or four big accountancy firms who corrupted the tax return process, which is why you have to pay to file your taxes every year instead of what everyone else in the advanced world does, which is to get a prefilled tax return from the government telling you what they already know. That if it looks good, you just sign and then get your tax refund.
CORY DOCTOROW: There are people who are angry about oil and there are people who are angry about beer and there are people who are angry about sneakers. And they think that they're all angry about different issues. In the same way that before the term ecology was coined, there were people who cared about owls and there were people who cared about the ozone layer. And they thought those were different issues. But they're the same issue.
CORY DOCTOROW: They're ecology. And we are fighting about the same issue, which is pluralism, self-determination, anti-monopoly. And what we need to do is transform 1,000 issues into one movement with 1,000 ways to get involved. To have each other's back, whether we're fighting about glass bottles or pianos or guitars sales so that we're all on the same side when it comes to antitrust, to pluralism, to self-determination.
TODD CARPENTER: And related to that, there's another question here about the kind of brief-- of your idea of what this would look like after we started to build an alternative world. How would that be different from an inefficient state monopoly? Or is it just-- are you thinking something more along the lines of like an open-source community that is self-governed and where everyone is running something like Linux?
CORY DOCTOROW: So I think it's more like what-- I think it would look more like what we had in the early days of consumer digital technology, right? The growth of digital technology into consumer markets starting in the mid '70s was an incredibly dynamic time, right? I remember that as 1977, my dad brought home a teletype terminal connected to an acoustic coupler connected to a PDP at the university. 1979, we had an Apple 2 plus.
CORY DOCTOROW: 1982 we got a modem. There were 100 BBSes within local dial-up range of us. 1984, the IBM PC came out. But IBM didn't make the operating system for it. They had been subject to so much antitrust enforcement that they were scared to make their own operating system. So they got a couple of guys in a garage named Bill Gates and Paul Allen to build them an operating system.
CORY DOCTOROW: And then, it wasn't just that there were IBM PCs everywhere. Companies I'd never heard of-- companies no one had ever heard of like Compaq and Dell and Gateway sprung up out of nowhere and grew so big that they bought companies like DEC, the company that made that PDP, that I was connecting to in '77. From two guys in a garage to owning the Digital Equipment Company in less than a decade-- or just over a decade.
CORY DOCTOROW: So that was a really amazing time to be alive. And I think that a lot of us decided that it was something intrinsic to digital, right? That this interoperability that's latent in digital, the Turing completeness that allows any two digital systems to talk to each other, that that was what was driving it. But what was actually driving it was antitrust, right? The reason we got modems and in the early '80s was because AT&T got broken up.
CORY DOCTOROW: And it had spent 20 years fighting against modems. And when they were deprived of the power to block us from having modems, which they disfavoured because they understood correctly that modems would make it hard to charge for services, right? Remember that AT&T-- its business model was the urinary tract infection business model, where everything came in a painful dribble, right? Long distance was charged by the second.
CORY DOCTOROW: And if you want to caller ID, which is the equivalent of being able to see the from line on your email before you open it, you have to give them $2.99 a month, right? They knew that there would come a time with modems that you could no longer charge for services. And so they fought them tooth and nail for decades, right? Keeping them only in the most specialized applications and keeping them out of the hands of their bread and butter customers.
CORY DOCTOROW: And when IBM chose Microsoft to make its operating systems, it was because they just finished a 12 year antitrust investigation. And in each one of those 12 years, IBM spent more on its lawyers than the entire Department of Justice spent on all antitrust lawyers for every case in America. They call it antitrust Vietnam, right? And so IBM knew that doing anything that would attract the FTC's attention would result in some really deeply unpleasant experiences.
CORY DOCTOROW: And so not only did they forbear from making their own operating system, but I have a friend named Tom Jennings. Quite an amazing computing pioneer. He created a thing called FidoNet, which was a very early distributed BBS system. But that was just his hobby. His day job was working for a company called Phoenix Computing. Tom lives just a few miles from here.
CORY DOCTOROW: And when one day Phoenix said to him, hey, can you reverse engineer the ROM in an IBM PC and make a spec for it? We're going to get some TI programmers to re-implement it so that no one can claim that we're stealing Intel Micro code because they'll never have touched an Intel processor. And Phoenix sold Gateway and Dell and Compaq those ROMs. That's where Dell and Gateway and Compaq came from. Why didn't IBM turn Phoenix into a crater?
CORY DOCTOROW: Antitrust. They had just been through 12 years of antitrust. And then, Microsoft came along, right? Grew up because of antitrust forbearance and became the kind of bully that IBM had been. And they destroyed Netscape. And they went through seven years of antitrust hell. And at the end of it, along came Sergei and Larry and Google, and rather than doing to them what they'd done to Netscape, they said, you guys go ahead because we just don't want any part of this.
CORY DOCTOROW: There's this great interview in 2019 where I think it was Kara Swisher asked Bill Gates why he didn't buy Android, and he said, oh, we were distracted by the antitrust. Android went on sale seven years after the antitrust action ended. What he meant was that seven years after the antitrust action ended, they were so demoralized by the punishment that the government can mete out to a monopolist that their hand was stayed.
CORY DOCTOROW: And so we got Google. And the thing that's missing now is not that Google turns out to be made up of the same mediocre sociopaths that Microsoft and IBM were. What's missing is the response to them. The response that every other generation of mediocre sociopaths faced in the years before them. And that's what I think we could get back. We could get back a world where if you had an idea, you could try it out.
CORY DOCTOROW: You could try it out as part of a non-profit, as a tinkerer, as part of a community, as an open-source project, as a startup. You could try it out and you wouldn't be dependent on the forbearance of a monopolist for it to take place. You wouldn't have to worry that you'd be blocked from an app store or that you would be down right-- down ranked by an algorithm.
CORY DOCTOROW: That your users would be able to leave one service and go to another service without losing touch with their friends or the assets that they had there. All of that stuff, I think, is what we could claim back. But most importantly, what we would claim back is evidence-based policy. There is overwhelming national support in America for A consumer privacy law with a private right of action. It is completely politically inconceivable that we'll get one, even in the current political configuration.
CORY DOCTOROW: No way. The reason we won't get that badly needed legislation, there's a monopolist who's got so much money to mobilize in service of blocking legislation that would undermine its profits that we just can't get it. It's the same reason the people of West Virginia have poison in their drinking water. So that's what we really get. We get the chance to make decisions that reflect what we know to be true instead of what giant company's shareholders wish was true.
TODD CARPENTER: Well, hopefully, one of the things that we can do, at least, NISO in our little space here, is provide a forum where we people can talk about those ideas and find ways around some of these bigger black blocks to some of the challenges that we face. Cory, thank you so much. I really appreciate your time.
TODD CARPENTER: Again, it's a pleasure having you. And I hope you've lit an idea or two under some of the participants here. Jason posted in the chat a link to a discourse thread if anyone wants to continue this. We're also going to capture the-- there was a question about a reading list and a number of people piped up into the chat. And we're going to capture that and put that in the discourse as well.
TODD CARPENTER: So now, we're going to move on to the first block of sessions for the conference. The way you get to that is through Sked. Go to Sked and pick the session that you are interested in. There'll be a link to watch the video in that session. And all of the sessions will begin promptly in six minutes. So we'll give you a couple of minutes to transfer over to whatever room you are keen to listen to.
TODD CARPENTER: Enjoy the conversations. This should be a fantastic event for everyone. So thank you all, thank you, Cory.
CORY DOCTOROW: Thank you. And thanks for the work you folks are all doing on standardization. It is a thankless task. And having done my share of it, I'm really in awe of the people who can make a lifetime out of it. Thank you.
TODD CARPENTER: Well, thank you. I appreciate it. [MUSIC PLAYING]
Segment:0 .
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: Hi, thank you, Jason. Cadmore Media is very happy to once again be sponsoring the NISO Plus conference. And we're especially excited that this year the conference is fully virtual and that all sessions will be available on the Cadmore Media hosted NISO video repository. It's a great pleasure to introduce the opening keynote speaker, Cory Doctorow. In addition to being a prolific and highly successful writer of both fiction and nonfiction, Cory is also a special consultant to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit civil liberties group that defends freedom in technology, law, policy, standards, and treaties.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: He holds an honorary doctorate in computer science from the Open University, where he is a visiting professor. He's also an MIT Media Lab research affiliate, and a visiting professor of practice at the University of North Carolina School Event Library and Information Science. In 2007, he served as the Fulbright Chair at the Annenberg Center for Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: Thank you for being with us today, Cory.
CORY DOCTOROW: It's my pleasure. Thank you very much. Let me get that camera. There we go. Nope, that's not good either. Much better. Hi, thank you. I'm going to get some screen sharing going here and we will be off to the races.
CORY DOCTOROW: You can hear my authentically clacky sysadmin keyboard. And let's see. You should see my slides now. Is that right?
TODD CARPENTER: Yes.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: Yes.
CORY DOCTOROW: Great. Thanks. Well, thank you all very much. It's an honor and a pleasure as someone who spent a lot of time in SDOs wrangling over abstruse technical issues that were very important and that no one else understood yet. I certainly have an appreciation for people who work in standardization. The unappreciated and unsung legislators of the world, indeed.
CORY DOCTOROW: Now, if you are involved in technical standards, there's a pretty good chance that you've encountered this movie, The Social Dilemma, or perhaps the underlying scholarship that went into it. Professor Shoshana's Zuboff's work on surveillance capitalism and her book on that. And there's much about the surveillance capitalism hypothesis that I disagree with. And most of this talk is going to be about where I part ways with them and what I think is really going on and what it means for us.
CORY DOCTOROW: But I want to start with the area where the surveillance capitalism critics and I have 100% convergence, which is that big tech controls our lives and that's a problem. And the reason that it's a problem is that unchecked power does not produce good outcomes. Wise kings are not good kings. There is no such thing as a reliably wise king who can govern over us without accountability, without our consent, without having their judgment checked.
CORY DOCTOROW: The problem with the big tech platforms isn't merely whether or not Mark Zuckerberg is well-suited to be in charge of the social lives of 2.6 billion people. So for the record, I think he isn't. It's that nobody who has ever lived, nobody who ever will live should have the job of unilaterally making decisions about the social lives of 2.6 billion people. Our lives are better when we get to exercise self-determination.
CORY DOCTOROW: When we get to find out about several options for how we can live our lives, and then choose the one of those options that suits us best. Now, surveillance capitalism says that companies control our lives through highly automated data mining tools that allow them to manipulate us for money. And that's where I part ways with them. I think that the way that these companies control our lives-- and they do control our lives.
CORY DOCTOROW: But I think that the way that they control our lives is not by manipulating us so much as it is by having and maintaining a monopoly over our digital lives. I don't think that companies can reliably control our actions by spying on us and then manipulating us. To the extent that that works at all, the effects are very short-lived and rather small. If you think about the most celebrated example of peer reviewed big data style manipulation, behavior manipulation, you probably think about that infamous Facebook experiment where they subjected 60 million people to an experiment to see if they could mobilize them to vote.
CORY DOCTOROW: And they did see that several hundred thousand more people than were expected in the control group, actually, turned up and voted from the experimental side. And on the basis of this, they claim that they were able to do something large and important. But there are a couple of significant things to take account of when we think about that experiment. The first is that the actual effect size of that experiment was 0.4%. 0.4% of the people in the experimental group displayed the desired behavior that they were trying to be influenced towards.
CORY DOCTOROW: And the second is that we don't know how durable this effect is. One thing that we know about as a bedrock of human behaviorism is that we become inured to stimulus with time. Many is the time. I'm speaking to you now for my office, which is also my garage. And in my garage is the washing machine and the dryer. And they're noisy.
CORY DOCTOROW: But I turn them on and I forget about them. And I, actually, have a little note on my monitor that says, before I give a talk, make sure I've turned off the washing machine and the dryer. Because as noisy as they are, I cease to hear them after a very short period of time. And they sink below my threshold. So we know that the first time Facebook exposed people to a stimulus they saw 0.4% outcome.
CORY DOCTOROW: We can predict that there is at least a large likelihood that subsequent re-exposures to that stimulus would produce not larger effect size, but smaller effect size than 0.4%. Facebook released the data on that voting experiment because they thought that it proved that they had a mind control ray. Something that they could sell access to advertisers and political campaigners, too.
CORY DOCTOROW: But that's, obviously, a very self-serving claim. Because if Facebook can reliably control our actions, it can bill its customers more to control our actions on their behalf. And that data was released by the company itself, hardly a neutral observer of the efficacy of its own products. Now, even if we don't believe that Facebook has a mind control ray, we can and could still indict Facebook for performing nonconsensual psychological experiments on tens of millions of people.
CORY DOCTOROW: That disqualifies them from running a social network where they are in charge of the lives of 2.6 billion people. And from there, it is a very short hop to say, maybe there shouldn't be an organization that gets to dictate the social lives of 2.6 billion people. Let's spend a moment dwelling on the arc of the trajectory of the belief in big taxability to manipulate us.
CORY DOCTOROW: Now, it started with big tech itself. It started with companies like Facebook and Google going around to potential advertisers and saying, we can manipulate people if you give us money. They filed patents to explain how they might do that. Now, any of you who's ever filed a patent knows that patents are a source of extremely low quality information about products. That the standard structure of a technical patent goes, this is a method for doing every conceivable thing in every conceivable way.
CORY DOCTOROW: And then, the second clause is, here are some sub-claims that I'm going to make about the things you can do and the ways you can do them. And it gets progressively narrower. And the tactic employed by patent lawyers here is to hope that the patent examiner isn't paying attention. And that they stop well short of the innovative invention that's being claimed in the patent and grant a much wider claim to the company that's filing it.
CORY DOCTOROW: And so the fact that we see patents from these companies that claim that they can manipulate us for money should not be taken in and of themselves as evidence that they are actually able to do this. And then, the third leg of the stool-- of the origin of this hype cycle was these experiments that they did. Experiments that they did themselves that they then released PR about to spin them in a way that made them seem to be as effective as possible.
CORY DOCTOROW: So that was the first stage. The claims originated with the manufacturers. The second stage is these claims being taken up by intermediaries. By advertising agencies and political consultants who took what amounted to sales literature, ingested it, and made their own sales brochures out of it. Come and hire our agency and we'll get people to vote for you or we'll get people to buy your products.
CORY DOCTOROW: Now, the next stage of the hype cycle was the customers of these intermediaries, the advertisers themselves and the politicians. Marketing managers who just wrote POs for tens of millions worth of programmatic ads then went and told their colleagues and their bosses that they had made a good purchase decision. Politicians who had sent their donors money to political consultants to run targeted political ads then went back to those donors and said, I am here to tell you that I'm spending your money wisely.
CORY DOCTOROW: And I have given it to people who will do good things with it. And then, finally, the group of people who took these claims up and promoted them, ironically, were their critics. The people who stopped and said, wait a second, did you just claim that you can control our minds? That sounds bad to me. Hey, everyone, did you notice that these giant companies are claiming that they can control our minds?
CORY DOCTOROW: Doesn't that sound bad to you, too? And you can empathize with critics who take these claims at face value because if you do take these claims at face value, they are extremely alarming. And of course, those critics often had the ears of regulators. And so you saw burgeoning regulation that said, having determined that big tech is controlling our minds, we are now going to make regulations about how that mind control should be used.
CORY DOCTOROW: The evolution of the surveillance capitalism story starts with, we can sell you anything. And turns into, Google and Facebook invented a mind control ray to sell your nephew a fidget spinner. And then, Robert Mercer stole it and made your uncle a racist. But these claims to mind control are self-serving. And the critics who repeat them are actually helping the tech industry sell its main product, the high-priced, unfalsifiable attempts to manipulate users, me and you.
CORY DOCTOROW: Remember, up until now, every claim that we've ever heard to being able to control people's minds turned out to be garbage. From Rasputin to Mesmer to the neurolinguistic programming movement to the CIA's bizarre MKUltra experiments, to the sad men of the pickup artist movement. These extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. And the only thing extraordinary about the proof that we are offered for big tax claims is how extraordinarily thin that proof is.
CORY DOCTOROW: The predictions made by microexpression analysis have been repeatedly shown to underperform a coin toss. The top sentiment analysis tools, like the ones provided by the elite Google spin-out Jigsaw are simply incoherent. And to give you an example of how bad Jigsaw's tool is, you should look to Sarah Jeong's experience with it. Sarah is a New York Times reporter and cyber lawyer. And because she is both racialized and a woman and she's on the internet, she faces a lot of extremely ghastly harassment and threats online.
CORY DOCTOROW: And so she decided to take some of the most vivid of these threats, and this is a bit of a content warning because I'm going to repeat one of them in a moment. She decided to take some of these-- the most vivid of these threats and feed them to Jigsaw's sentiment analysis tool and ask it, does this seem hostile to you? And here's the threat that she asked Google's tool-- Jigsaw's tool to evaluate. I'm going to rip off each one of her hairs and twist her tits clean off.
CORY DOCTOROW: And Jigsaw's sentiment analysis tool so that it found no aggression at all in this statement. Indeed, the whole idea of psychographics, including the Big Five personality types that Cambridge Analytica based its marketing claims on are, in the words of an extensive nature literature review, a scant science that has been most thoroughly developed through the big tech companies own sales claims that they made to potential advertisers.
CORY DOCTOROW: Big tech's defenders and detractors confronted by this are apt to counter that the fact that ad tech makes billions in revenue means that it must work. Who would pay for this if it wasn't doing its job? But this is no proof at all. People buy vitamins, despite careful meta analysis that conclude that vitamins are not beneficial or, are in some cases, actually harmful. Hedge fund managers, who consistently underperform the S&P 500, induce the most sophisticated investors on Earth to entrust them with trillions of dollars when they would make more money by sticking that-- sticking their fortunes in their mattress.
CORY DOCTOROW: Hedge fund managers lose money often enough that you're better off not giving it to anyone at all. And yet, the losers who run those hedge funds make seven figure salaries. And most, or maybe even all of them, think that they're good at their jobs despite all empirical evidence to the contrary. After all, if the smartest investors on Earth gave me trillions of dollars to manage, I could probably talk myself into thinking that I was good at my job, too.
CORY DOCTOROW: And the same is true of techies and their bosses. Some of the highest paid people on Earth are convinced that they are so good at bypassing our cognition to influence our behavior, and of course, so do their customers. But in the absence of hard evidence, we should treat these claims as latter day Rasputin's convinced that they can change our behavior. Convinced that it's moral for them to do so, therefore, some of the great villains of history, but deluded about what's actually going on.
CORY DOCTOROW: So what's actually going on? Well, it's the same thing that happened in the last gilded age, Monopolies. Even when you get big tech and its critics to agree that there are monopolies being formed online. They call these natural monopolies, and they say that they're driven by network effects. But that's not what we see when we examine the actual growth history of the largest tech firms.
CORY DOCTOROW: Google is exemplary in this regard. Google is a 1.5 product company. They made a really excellent search engine and a pretty advanced hotmail clone. Everything else that they made in-house has been a failure in the market, all the way up to the Wi-Fi balloons. Everything that they've done that succeeded, from YouTube to their ad tech stock to Android, come from companies that they bought.
CORY DOCTOROW: The data that they've stored does not constitute a moat against potential competitors. 15-year-old click data does not allow you to sell things better unless maybe you hold on to it for another 10 years. And then, you find all the people who searched for, where do I buy a new roof for my house? And you show them an ad that says, it's been a quarter century since you last bought a roof.
CORY DOCTOROW: Are you interested in buying another one? But that data is still harmful. It leaks. It's used for digital redlining and discrimination. It becomes complicit in state surveillance. And of course, state's governments, they practice forbearance in regard to data collection. They let these companies over collect our data because they're engaged in deep public private surveillance partnerships where the large data repositories that are gathered by big tech are then plundered by law enforcement, public safety, and national security entities in order to conduct their own operations.
CORY DOCTOROW: You see that very vividly with Ring, which was just revealed to have performed surveillance-- street level surveillance for the Los Angeles Police Department during the Black Lives Matter demonstration where Ring owners footage was a primary mechanism by which the LAPD tracked who was protesting and identified those protesters. Monopolies subvert evidence-based policy, right? If we think that surveillance is bad for us, and yet, our governments allow companies to spy on us, we can look to the fact that there are monopolies who have enormous fortunes to mobilize in service of parochial rules that benefit them as an answer to why we cannot muster the political will to do a thing that most of us want to see happen and that the evidence says should happen.
CORY DOCTOROW: Now, technology does, in fact, have some network effects. But network effects are a double-edged sword thanks to interoperability. Because tech monopolies-- digital tech monopolies are not like other monopolies. Digital technology has remedies available to it that are not available to other industries. Railroading is an infamous source of monopolization thanks to literal network effects and lock in.
CORY DOCTOROW: But when a railroad manages to conquer a territory, it's very hard to unbundle it. Think of the Australian experiment where in the 19th century fragmentation among the Australian states led to tracks being laid at different gauges all across the country. And for 150 years, Australian logistics and transportation experts have tried to design rail cars that can hop from one rail gauge to another.
CORY DOCTOROW: They have prototyped hundreds of designs for rail cars that can drop one set of wheels and retract a set of wheels. None of them worked. In the end, what they ended up doing was tearing up thousands of kilometers of rail and laying new rail because that was the easiest way to do it. That's not how it works with digital technology. With digital technology, we just create some middleware. We just create a translation layer.
CORY DOCTOROW: We just stick it in a VM. We just reverse engineer the file format. And yesterday's technology works with today's technology. That interoperability is everywhere. It's why we can wear the socks of our choosing with the shoes that we bought and why the cobbler doesn't get to tell us which socks that we wear. And of course, those of you who work in standardization have made it your bread and butter to figure out how to build interoperability in from the start.
CORY DOCTOROW: But there's a very important kind of interoperability that doesn't involve standardization, and it's what you could call adversarial interoperability, or as with the Electronic Frontier Foundation call it, competitive compatibility. Competitive compatibility is when you make a new product work with an old product, even though the company that made the old product doesn't want you to. So think of how Apple managed its fight with Microsoft in the early 2000s.
CORY DOCTOROW: When Microsoft dominated the office market by making Microsoft Office Suite, a suite that wrote proprietary Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files that could not be read on the Mac. I mean, notionally, they could. There was a piece of software called Office for Mac. But as a former CIO who bought a lot of Mac hardware for my users, I'm here to tell you that the most cursed software that Microsoft ever made was office for the Mac.
CORY DOCTOROW: When the accountants sent the designer a Word file to open on their Mac, that designer's just unfortunate decision to open that document would forever make that document unreadable, not just to the accountant on the Windows system, but likely to the designer as well. Steve Jobs didn't solve that problem by asking Bill Gates very nicely to fix office for Mac. Instead, he got a small team of reverse engineers to produce the compatible iWorks suite, numbers, pages, keynote, that just works with Microsoft Office documents.
CORY DOCTOROW: What it did was it turned Microsoft's walled garden of users into a feedlot. They weren't locked away from Apple. They were all neatly organized and Apple could go in with its switch campaign and say, we know you've got a lot of people that you communicate with by sharing office documents. You can bring them over here and share with them using a Mac instead.
CORY DOCTOROW: And so the network effect collapsed and ended up working to Apple's advantage because everyone who had a Microsoft Office file was now a potential iWorks Suite customer. And it wasn't just Apple who did this, and it's not just file formats that it works with. When Zuckerberg first took Facebook away from a mere academic network and decided to open it up to the general public, he had a problem, which was that everyone in the world who wanted to use a general purpose social networking tool already had one.
CORY DOCTOROW: The most successful one in the history of the world, Myspace, which was owned by a rapacious billionaire who has never let anything go willingly. Now, rather than trying to organize a day when everybody left Myspace and joined Facebook, national leave Myspace day, Mark Zuckerberg and his programmers made a bot. You could give it your Myspace login credentials, switch to Facebook, and it would login to Myspace on your behalf, scrape your inbox, put it in your Facebook inbox, let you reply to it from Facebook, and push it back out to Myspace.
CORY DOCTOROW: And now, every Myspace user was a potential Facebook user because they could watch as their friends dribbled away from Myspace to Facebook and understand that there might be a value proposition for them there. And that the cost of trying it out was effectively zero because they didn't have to forfeit any of their social relations to go there. This competitive compatibility is in the history of every tech company.
CORY DOCTOROW: Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook. And monopoly has allowed these companies to gather together, agree that we've had enough of this competitive compatibility nonsense now that they've all used it to ascend to glory, and to agitate to have competitive compatibility prohibited through new laws and new interpretations of existing laws. Patents, anti-circumvention, enforceable terms of service, this new Supreme Court case where Google and Oracle are fighting each other over whether APIs are copyrightable.
CORY DOCTOROW: If Oracle prevails, that would be the end of most kinds of interoperability without permission. Now, monopolies distort public policy. And public policy is important. Because public policy is how we resolve technical questions that we can't resolve on our own. That you and I cannot research the answers to. I mean, if you're at this conference, you're an expert in something, but you're not an expert in everything.
CORY DOCTOROW: To figure out whether or not you can make it through your day without dying, you have to decide whether you're going to get on a 737 Max, whether the new aviation safety standards for them are good enough. You have to decide whether the food that you've been given is safe enough or whether it's going to kill you. You have to decide whether you're going to wear a mask, maintain social distancing, whether the structural steel members in the ceiling over your head have an alloy that is of sufficient strength and flexibility to keep the ceiling from falling in on you or whether you should have it all torn out and replaced.
CORY DOCTOROW: And even if you are an expert in those things, you can't be an expert in everything. Those questions are not answerable by getting degrees in biological and physical and chemical and computational and mathematical sciences. Those have to be resolved through an expert process where neutral experts, here contesting claims from other experts, adjudicate among them, publish their findings, and then reveal those findings to us showing their workings with a process by which those findings can be clawed back and re-evaluated in the presence of new evidence or in the revelation of corruption or falsehoods from one or more of the parties involved in the process.
CORY DOCTOROW: And those processes have been discredited in every sector because every sector has become monopolized. And the rules that govern them now no longer reflect objective reality, but rather, the self-interest of the industry that they represent. So to understand how monopolized our industry is, we have to look beyond tech at every one of the monopolized sectors.
CORY DOCTOROW: And here's just a smattering of them. Pharmaceuticals, pharmaceutical plans, pharmaceutical benefit managers, pharmacies, the US health insurance market, the appliance market, the athletic shoe market, the defense contracting market, the film production market, the movie and exhibition market, the music publishing market, the music recording market, the publishing market, the book selling market, the stationery market the eyeglass market.
CORY DOCTOROW: One eyeglass vendor left in the world and they own every major eyeglass retailer from Lenscrafters to Sunglass Hut. The LASIK market, the enterprise software market, the car part market, the glass bottle market, one glass bottle manufacturer left in America. It's one of the reasons that we're having so much trouble getting vaccines out to people. The rental car market, the hotel market, the aviation market, the rail market, the logistics market, the mattress market, oil, beer, spirits, champagne, cowboy boots, and candy.
CORY DOCTOROW: And when an industry is concentrated in this way, it gets to buy whatever official truth suits its bottom line the best. To understand what that looks like, think back to the state of West Virginia in 2018. We tend to think of West Virginia as coal country, but coal is a very small industry in West Virginia. The main industry in West Virginia is chemical processing.
CORY DOCTOROW: And because of monopolization, chemical processing is synonymous with Dow. Dow is the industry leader. They control the industry association. And in 2018, they asked the state for a variance on its rules about how much runoff from chemical processing could go into drinking water. Those rules were set nationally by the EPA, but they wanted a higher level permissible within West Virginia.
CORY DOCTOROW: Now, it may be that we can tolerate higher levels than the national guidelines say. And if so, it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world to change those guidelines. That way we could have cheaper chemicals. And I use them and you use them. We've got Saran Wrap in our kitchen and I've got plastic armrests on my chair. We need chemical processing.
CORY DOCTOROW: But we didn't get an evidentiary truth-seeking exercise when the West Virginia legislature took up this question. Instead, the basis that Dow used to argue for this exemption was that West Virginians are fatter than the rest of America. And that their higher BMI meant that they had more tissue and could absorb more poison before suffering negative health effects from the excess chemical waste in their drinking water.
CORY DOCTOROW: Now, there's an old fashioned word for this kind of lawmaking, it's called corruption. And corruption is a synonym for conspiracy. People look at that photo of Donald Trump and the tech leaders up in Trump Tower after he won the election. And they think, this is terrible. How could our tech leaders all meet with this man who had such awful policies? And fair enough.
CORY DOCTOROW: But equally disturbing, and I think more disturbing, is the fact that they all fit around one table. That the people who determine how our digital lives work are in such small number that their industry is so concentrated that they can all fit around one table. When you hear people dismiss conspiracists or decry conspiracists or wring their hands around conspiracists, they often talk about conspiracy as a lazy way of looking at the world.
CORY DOCTOROW: But conspiracy is not lazy. It's energetic. To be a believer in QAnon or 5G or anti-vax is not easy. It's hard work. It starts from the encyclopedic recounting of actual conspiracies. Scratch an anti-vaxxer, you'll find someone who knows chapter and verse about how the FDA was complicit in the opioid epidemic.
CORY DOCTOROW: Scratch a ufologist, and you'll find someone who knows everything about how the DoD covered up various aerospace accidents. And then, this encyclopedic knowledge of the failing of our truth-seeking exercise discredits the idea of official truth itself. And that sets the person floating through an epistemological void with no way to know what is true.
CORY DOCTOROW: And that void gets filled by people, not processes, nor institutions. And that's where we get our personality cults from. Modern conspiracism is the intersection of the experience of real conspiracies, the trauma resulting from those conspiracies, and it's an easy process and an easy process to learn about conspiracies and conspiracy theories and the ability to target people who might be vulnerable to conspiracy theories.
CORY DOCTOROW: Our discourse is all about this third factor, how easy it is to target people. How easy it is to find people with these, otherwise, hard to find traits and engage in so-called digital radicalization. But that focus is incomplete. First, because it fails to ask the most important question, not how do we find people who are vulnerable to conspiracies? But why are so many people vulnerable to conspiracies today?
CORY DOCTOROW: Why, today, are there more people who have been traumatized by real conspiracies from offshoring to opioids. And second, it ignores the beneficial part of this so-called radicalization process. The ability of people with socially disfavored views to discover one another and make common cause. Yeah, that's how we got Nazis marching through the streets of Charlottesville, but it's also how we got Black Lives Matter and the understanding that gender is not a binary.
CORY DOCTOROW: Now, it's easy to see why our immediate concern would be the bad beliefs that our neighbors have been absorbed into. But that is a purely reactive approach. If we want to address ourselves to the causes rather than the effects of radicalization, we have to root out the material circumstances that make conspiracism attractive to its adherents. We have to address the corruption that makes our institutions untrustworthy.
CORY DOCTOROW: The corruption that deprives us of the common epistemological framework by which we know what is true. The corruption that produces the trauma. That sets people seeking out alternate explanations for their frightening, brutal, material circumstances, the corruption that we call monopolies. And that's why it matters whether what's happened with digital is monopolies or mind control.
CORY DOCTOROW: If it's mind control, if the tech companies have created an immortal super weapon that strips us of our free will, then it would be catastrophic to break up those companies and distribute their mind cannons into more hands than we could ever hope to enumerate, much less control. But if it's monopoly, then we must shatter those companies. Destroy their concentrated power as a means of restoring good governance. Think of the mind control hypothesis as the belief that a comet is headed for the Earth.
CORY DOCTOROW: Breaking up that comet would just shower the planet's surface with a killing rain of meteors. Our only recourse is to steer that comet. And the last thing you want would be interoperability. Interoperability just lets members of the public try to steer the comet for their own needs. If it's a comet, it's a fact of life. It's with us for eternity. There to be tamed if we can, but impossible to be rid of.
CORY DOCTOROW: And God help us if we lose control of it and it crashes into the earth anyway. But if it's a monopoly, then we know what to do. We just got to bust the trusts. Rather than looking to exotic explanations for market concentration, like network effects, let's look at how we enforce monopoly law. After all, it's not network effects or first mover advantage or data that gave us one eye wear company and two beer companies and three record labels and four movie studios and five publishers.
CORY DOCTOROW: In fact, it's about to be four publishers, because Random House is buying Simon and Schuster. We know how this happened. 40 years ago, a guy named Robert Bork changed the way that we enforce antitrust law. Bork was a kind of court sorcerer to Ronald Reagan, best known today as being denied a seat on the Supreme Court because the crimes he committed when he was the Solicitor General for Nixon.
CORY DOCTOROW: But he became more influential working for Reagan than he would have on the Supreme Court. He framed monopoly as a purely consumer issue, and said that we would only fight monopolies if we could show that they damage consumer welfare. Unless you could deploy an economic model that only he and his colleagues knew how to make or interpret that showed that a price rise came about as the result of monopolies, or that a monopoly would end up raising prices.
CORY DOCTOROW: And it turned out that when they interpreted the models, you could never attribute consumer welfare harms to price rises. And so every monopoly received forbearance and we did not block monopoly formation, even though there is overwhelming evidence that mergers, acquisitions, and vertical monopolies do raise prices. The fundamental problem of this consumer welfare standard is right there in the name, consumers.
CORY DOCTOROW: It says that we are consumers and not citizens. It says that we're ambulatory wallets, not members of a polity with a stake in the functioning of our economy and our politics. Monopolies are bad because of consumer welfare. They're bad because of Democratic harms. All that is not to say the tech monopolies aren't taking away our free will. They are absolutely taking away our free will because they lock our friends inside a walled garden, guaranteeing that we'll lock ourselves into the walled garden, too, in order to talk to them.
CORY DOCTOROW: They nonconsensually siphon our data out of our devices. They prohibit us from installing apps of our choosing unless those apps are approved by their central committees as not unduly damaging to their shareholders' interests. They tell us which link-- which ink we can use in our printers, which parts we can put in our phones, which repair depots can fix our stuff and when we have to throw that stuff away and buy new stuff from them. These are huge impositions on our free will and our self-determination.
CORY DOCTOROW: And while they depend on odious, irresponsible, and grossly harmful surveillance, not all of them do. You may have heard that if you're not paying for the product, you're the product. But the farmers who aren't allowed to fix their own John Deere tractors paid $600,000 to $2 million for those tractors. They're paying for the product. They're still the product. No one gave you a free iPhone in exchange for promising that you would only get it fixed at the Genius Bar and pay over the odds to get it fixed there.
CORY DOCTOROW: The thing that determines whether you're being treated as a product is not whether you're paying for it, it's whether the company can get away with treating you as a product. Whether the lack of competition and the metastasis of anti-competitive laws like software patents, anti-circumvention, and enforceable terms of service deprive you of the right to choose to go somewhere else. Now, earlier, I suggested that the rise of conspiracism isn't the result of ideology but of material conditions.
CORY DOCTOROW: It's not that conspiratorial arguments are winning. It's that our corrupt and terrifying material world loses the argument. But I want to close today by talking about ideology. Specifically, what are the ideological factors that make the surveillance of capitalism framework so robust, so spreadable? I think it's that the success of surveillance capitalism is the result of a strange ideological marriage between three groups of people who want to preserve the status quo for their own reasons.
CORY DOCTOROW: The first is the tech industry, which is invested in its own status as a bunch of geniuses. If they're damned as evil geniuses, well, they'll take it because at least they're still geniuses. The second is the true believers of capitalism who practice a form of tech exceptionalism when they paint tech as a rogue capitalism, whose mind control rays short-circuit the market's nearly mystical, nearly perfect ability to self-correct.
CORY DOCTOROW: If tech is a rogue capitalism, then the problem is tech, not capitalism. And finally, there are the people who are thriving under the status quo. If conspiratorialism was caused by a contagious mania that afflicts people of defective intellect, then we need to cure those people, not fix the system that benefits its adherents so handsomely. And to those people, I say that, tech did not conquer the world through genius, but through the same mediocre sociopathy practiced by the Rockefellers, the Carnegies, the Bells, and the other monsters of history.
CORY DOCTOROW: That markets tend to monopoly and our minimum response should be muscular state intervention that prohibits anti-competitive mergers, restricts corporate power, and punishes anti-competitive conduct. That we are never going back to brunch. The reason your neighbors went crazy is that the world is on fire and the system is rotten. They may believe crazy things, but there's an utterly sane reason for them to believe them.
CORY DOCTOROW: Surveillance capitalism is not a rogue capitalism. It's just capitalism. It's not a comment. It's just three sociopaths in a trench coat. We've dealt with these jokers before, and it's long past time we dealt with them again. Thank you.
TODD CARPENTER: All right, thank you, Cory. As you exited your presentation, it went from full screen mode and I clicked in the wrong-- clicked into the wrong application. I was like wait, no, I wanted to hit unmute. So thank you. Want to encourage anyone if you have any questions or comments for Cory, please use the Q&A functionality in the Zoom interface. I presume you all know how to use that.
TODD CARPENTER: So many questions, so many great ideas, so many paths to go down here. I wish we had several hours. Maybe just take the entire day with you, Cory.
CORY DOCTOROW: There are some good questions in the Q&A here. I'm happy to just start picking them off, if you'd like.
TODD CARPENTER: Actually, let's start with the first question that caught my eye has to do with the Australian news model. And what's going on in Australia. And in terms of trying to get the large corporations to pay for news. Do you think that's a viable model? Is that something that we might look into? It's kind of interesting what they're-- success they're having.
CORY DOCTOROW: I wrote a short essay about this yesterday and I'll grab the link and paste it in the chat before I go. I think that this is probably the most misunderstood tech thing of the last, I don't know, since CDA230, say, which puts it right up there in the pantheon of badly understood tech policy initiatives. I don't think that they're trying to get them to pay for the news. I think that's the start of the misconception.
CORY DOCTOROW: Here's what's happened. We have an advertising duopoly and news is primarily ad supported. And the ad duopoly runs a crooked market. There's a great paper by [INAUDIBLE] and I'm sorry. I'm very bad at South Indian surnames, but I can find you that paper and link it as well. It's in my essay that I wrote yesterday. That describes in eye-watering detail how these markets are rigged.
CORY DOCTOROW: So for example, Google runs the largest demand side and supply side platform. And it has repeatedly tweaked those platforms so that if you try to use a competitor's, it down ranks you. And then, if you use the platform, it charges you about 40% more than you would pay on the open market for advertising. And it claws back about 40% of what the publishers should receive from that advertising.
CORY DOCTOROW: So they're ripping off the advertisers and they're ripping off the publishers. Facebook and Google were both caught through leaked documents colluding to rig bidding markets for ads and publisher payouts where they actually got together and did illegal collusive behavior to transfer money from the publishers to their own pockets. And Facebook and Google have both been caught repeatedly lying about how their ads work.
CORY DOCTOROW: So for example, Facebook just had a whistle blower come out and publish emails where he told his bosses that they were promising advertisers reach that couldn't be obtained. Like saying that if they placed an ad, they would reach 140% of all young American males, right? Numbers that are just nonsensical. Likewise, we saw a lot of ad fraud with the Facebook pivot to video where they settled a claim for hundreds of millions of dollars about lying about how many people saw it and so on.
CORY DOCTOROW: So if you're a publisher, you are in a market where you are somewhat fragmented and you are negotiating against an intermediary who's extremely concentrated. And that intermediary breaks the law with impunity to steal from you. And so the purpose of the regulation in Australia was to first make it harder to cheat. So the most important piece of this regulation that nobody talks about is the transparency rule that requires the companies to disclose what data they gather, how they use that data, any changes to the algorithm that might result in massive changes to how news articles are ranked, And also it prohibits-- this is very important-- it prohibits retaliation.
CORY DOCTOROW: So one of the reasons links are implicated here is that whenever a publisher decided to take extreme measures to get out of the duopoly, the duopoly then responded by down-ranking that publisher's reach in their social media platform in the case of Facebook, or in search results, in the case of Google. So because they were allowed to effect these anti-competitive vertical monopolies, they were able to use traffic as a club to beat up people who didn't want to participate in a rigged ad market.
CORY DOCTOROW: So the first thing that the regulation does is it forces publication of these opaque processes that are otherwise amenable to corruption and had been used to corrupt-- for corruption to the detriment of the publishers. The second thing that it does is it creates an arbitration process, which is very typical in negotiating systems where you have a diffuse set of actors and a concentrated actor, like bosses and workers or customers and vendor, where an arbitrator sits between them and hears both sides and makes an adjudication about what the fair rate should be as between them.
CORY DOCTOROW: It's how everything from dairy prices to annual contracts get set. And the arbitrator kicks in only if Facebook, Google, and the publishers can't come to an agreement that they like. So that's the idea here is to not de-monopolize the industry, which Australia thinks is too heavy a lift, and there's a question in there about whether or not a national government can break up these international monopolies.
CORY DOCTOROW: Some national governments might be able to, but Australia probably can't. It's not big enough. The EU might be able to, the US might be able to, but Australia can't. So that's the first piece is to try and correct the monopoly without addressing the monopolism-- so to make the system work. But it's important to note that if you wanted to get there, you wouldn't start from here.
CORY DOCTOROW: That the Australian media industry is incredibly corrupt. It's run by Rupert Murdoch. Thanks to the same process that allowed Facebook and Google to grow, he now controls almost the entire press in Australia. He was able to effect anti-competitive mergers and vertical integrations that should have never been permitted by Australia's competition authority. And so the only reason this actually got through the Australian parliament is you have this incredibly powerful billionaire who had benefits.
CORY DOCTOROW: And who's primarily using this as a way to shift a few points from one balance sheet to another balance sheet. And that's no good, right? This is not the-- he is not our hero. And we can absolutely, whether we're journalists or news consumers, we can absolutely demand something better than getting a different set of giants to run the world in the hopes that they will drop more crumbs from their table onto our plate.
CORY DOCTOROW: And the thing that I think is positive about this is not the financial arrangements. The financial arrangements are probably a net negative. Not least because the government gets to decide who's a news entity, and therefore, in the collective bargaining arrangement. And it is not good to have governments decide who is and isn't a journalist because they have historically abused that power to exclude people who are critical of them.
CORY DOCTOROW: And so that is a power that we don't normally irrigate to Democratic governments. But I think the part that is really good is they're going to publish a bunch of data. And they're going to prohibit a bunch of practices that will redound to the benefit of all publishers everywhere. And from there, we can at least start to de-monopolize this one corner of the industry. And it's important to note that the energy to de-monopolize tech comes from a bunch of other monopolistic industries.
CORY DOCTOROW: A lot of the antitrust energy in the US is driven by cable monopolies. And the miscalculation that cable monopolies and media monopolies make when they look at this is they think that antitrust is a one and done thing. And it's really-- it's like-- they're like potato chips. Once you start, you can't stop. Once we create the precedent and muster the political will to break up an industry, history tells us, we'll move on to the rest of them then it will snowball.
CORY DOCTOROW: And there was another question in the Q&A about what we do about all of this. And what we do about all of this is we make a coalition. Because there are people who are really angry that professional wrestling is down to one league and it's-- and that means that all of the wrestlers are now classed as contractors. They've lost their health insurance. And they're all on GoFundMe begging for pennies so they can die with dignity of their workplace-related injuries in their 50s.
CORY DOCTOROW: And there are people who are really angry about one eyeglass vendor or four big accountancy firms who corrupted the tax return process, which is why you have to pay to file your taxes every year instead of what everyone else in the advanced world does, which is to get a prefilled tax return from the government telling you what they already know. That if it looks good, you just sign and then get your tax refund.
CORY DOCTOROW: There are people who are angry about oil and there are people who are angry about beer and there are people who are angry about sneakers. And they think that they're all angry about different issues. In the same way that before the term ecology was coined, there were people who cared about owls and there were people who cared about the ozone layer. And they thought those were different issues. But they're the same issue.
CORY DOCTOROW: They're ecology. And we are fighting about the same issue, which is pluralism, self-determination, anti-monopoly. And what we need to do is transform 1,000 issues into one movement with 1,000 ways to get involved. To have each other's back, whether we're fighting about glass bottles or pianos or guitars sales so that we're all on the same side when it comes to antitrust, to pluralism, to self-determination.
TODD CARPENTER: And related to that, there's another question here about the kind of brief-- of your idea of what this would look like after we started to build an alternative world. How would that be different from an inefficient state monopoly? Or is it just-- are you thinking something more along the lines of like an open-source community that is self-governed and where everyone is running something like Linux?
CORY DOCTOROW: So I think it's more like what-- I think it would look more like what we had in the early days of consumer digital technology, right? The growth of digital technology into consumer markets starting in the mid '70s was an incredibly dynamic time, right? I remember that as 1977, my dad brought home a teletype terminal connected to an acoustic coupler connected to a PDP at the university. 1979, we had an Apple 2 plus.
CORY DOCTOROW: 1982 we got a modem. There were 100 BBSes within local dial-up range of us. 1984, the IBM PC came out. But IBM didn't make the operating system for it. They had been subject to so much antitrust enforcement that they were scared to make their own operating system. So they got a couple of guys in a garage named Bill Gates and Paul Allen to build them an operating system.
CORY DOCTOROW: And then, it wasn't just that there were IBM PCs everywhere. Companies I'd never heard of-- companies no one had ever heard of like Compaq and Dell and Gateway sprung up out of nowhere and grew so big that they bought companies like DEC, the company that made that PDP, that I was connecting to in '77. From two guys in a garage to owning the Digital Equipment Company in less than a decade-- or just over a decade.
CORY DOCTOROW: So that was a really amazing time to be alive. And I think that a lot of us decided that it was something intrinsic to digital, right? That this interoperability that's latent in digital, the Turing completeness that allows any two digital systems to talk to each other, that that was what was driving it. But what was actually driving it was antitrust, right? The reason we got modems and in the early '80s was because AT&T got broken up.
CORY DOCTOROW: And it had spent 20 years fighting against modems. And when they were deprived of the power to block us from having modems, which they disfavoured because they understood correctly that modems would make it hard to charge for services, right? Remember that AT&T-- its business model was the urinary tract infection business model, where everything came in a painful dribble, right? Long distance was charged by the second.
CORY DOCTOROW: And if you want to caller ID, which is the equivalent of being able to see the from line on your email before you open it, you have to give them $2.99 a month, right? They knew that there would come a time with modems that you could no longer charge for services. And so they fought them tooth and nail for decades, right? Keeping them only in the most specialized applications and keeping them out of the hands of their bread and butter customers.
CORY DOCTOROW: And when IBM chose Microsoft to make its operating systems, it was because they just finished a 12 year antitrust investigation. And in each one of those 12 years, IBM spent more on its lawyers than the entire Department of Justice spent on all antitrust lawyers for every case in America. They call it antitrust Vietnam, right? And so IBM knew that doing anything that would attract the FTC's attention would result in some really deeply unpleasant experiences.
CORY DOCTOROW: And so not only did they forbear from making their own operating system, but I have a friend named Tom Jennings. Quite an amazing computing pioneer. He created a thing called FidoNet, which was a very early distributed BBS system. But that was just his hobby. His day job was working for a company called Phoenix Computing. Tom lives just a few miles from here.
CORY DOCTOROW: And when one day Phoenix said to him, hey, can you reverse engineer the ROM in an IBM PC and make a spec for it? We're going to get some TI programmers to re-implement it so that no one can claim that we're stealing Intel Micro code because they'll never have touched an Intel processor. And Phoenix sold Gateway and Dell and Compaq those ROMs. That's where Dell and Gateway and Compaq came from. Why didn't IBM turn Phoenix into a crater?
CORY DOCTOROW: Antitrust. They had just been through 12 years of antitrust. And then, Microsoft came along, right? Grew up because of antitrust forbearance and became the kind of bully that IBM had been. And they destroyed Netscape. And they went through seven years of antitrust hell. And at the end of it, along came Sergei and Larry and Google, and rather than doing to them what they'd done to Netscape, they said, you guys go ahead because we just don't want any part of this.
CORY DOCTOROW: There's this great interview in 2019 where I think it was Kara Swisher asked Bill Gates why he didn't buy Android, and he said, oh, we were distracted by the antitrust. Android went on sale seven years after the antitrust action ended. What he meant was that seven years after the antitrust action ended, they were so demoralized by the punishment that the government can mete out to a monopolist that their hand was stayed.
CORY DOCTOROW: And so we got Google. And the thing that's missing now is not that Google turns out to be made up of the same mediocre sociopaths that Microsoft and IBM were. What's missing is the response to them. The response that every other generation of mediocre sociopaths faced in the years before them. And that's what I think we could get back. We could get back a world where if you had an idea, you could try it out.
CORY DOCTOROW: You could try it out as part of a non-profit, as a tinkerer, as part of a community, as an open-source project, as a startup. You could try it out and you wouldn't be dependent on the forbearance of a monopolist for it to take place. You wouldn't have to worry that you'd be blocked from an app store or that you would be down right-- down ranked by an algorithm.
CORY DOCTOROW: That your users would be able to leave one service and go to another service without losing touch with their friends or the assets that they had there. All of that stuff, I think, is what we could claim back. But most importantly, what we would claim back is evidence-based policy. There is overwhelming national support in America for A consumer privacy law with a private right of action. It is completely politically inconceivable that we'll get one, even in the current political configuration.
CORY DOCTOROW: No way. The reason we won't get that badly needed legislation, there's a monopolist who's got so much money to mobilize in service of blocking legislation that would undermine its profits that we just can't get it. It's the same reason the people of West Virginia have poison in their drinking water. So that's what we really get. We get the chance to make decisions that reflect what we know to be true instead of what giant company's shareholders wish was true.
TODD CARPENTER: Well, hopefully, one of the things that we can do, at least, NISO in our little space here, is provide a forum where we people can talk about those ideas and find ways around some of these bigger black blocks to some of the challenges that we face. Cory, thank you so much. I really appreciate your time.
TODD CARPENTER: Again, it's a pleasure having you. And I hope you've lit an idea or two under some of the participants here. Jason posted in the chat a link to a discourse thread if anyone wants to continue this. We're also going to capture the-- there was a question about a reading list and a number of people piped up into the chat. And we're going to capture that and put that in the discourse as well.
TODD CARPENTER: So now, we're going to move on to the first block of sessions for the conference. The way you get to that is through Sked. Go to Sked and pick the session that you are interested in. There'll be a link to watch the video in that session. And all of the sessions will begin promptly in six minutes. So we'll give you a couple of minutes to transfer over to whatever room you are keen to listen to.
TODD CARPENTER: Enjoy the conversations. This should be a fantastic event for everyone. So thank you all, thank you, Cory.
CORY DOCTOROW: Thank you. And thanks for the work you folks are all doing on standardization. It is a thankless task. And having done my share of it, I'm really in awe of the people who can make a lifetime out of it. Thank you.
TODD CARPENTER: Well, thank you. I appreciate it. [MUSIC PLAYING]
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