Anthropic is now racing to close this gap because they realize there's no lock-in. If the product is just .md files with hierarchy, you can drop any harness and intelligence on top of it. It is interoperable by default, possibly not even by intention.
We should do everything possible to stop the great lock-in that they'll attempt in the next 18 months.
Interoperability can save the open web - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37399799 - Sept 2023 (97 comments)
Image you are a 1960s household and RCA tries to sell you a TV to only watch ABC and Zenith has a TV to only watch CBS. 60 years later linear TV is unwatchable by normal humans IMO. It's not like "let advertising pay for this" enshittifying an entire industry hasn't happened before.
I don't even understand what the first point is even proposing, legislating use cases now? It's gotta be some dog whistle about Twitter pushing "fascism" and entirely hinges on the weasel word "overweight"
The second statement just seems like a category error. In what way can you leave twitter yet still retain followers and followees. Those words only mean something in the context of Twitter. We have no relationship in the world. If I follow someone on twitter and then they exercise their "right to exit and retain" do i now follow them on tiktok and mastodon and telegram and etc. No of course not.
Suppose I hate nazis and follow all the nazis on twitter. Now I exercise my right to exit. What data about the people I hate will Twitter be forced to provide me?
You might also define "exists" in some sort of way that makes sense. And you can also realize that payers are encroaching on every aspect of interoperability data exchange.
I am deeply in self-host. For the self-host to succeed it needs to be better, unregulated, and free. It needs to be easily distributed. The data should be easily distributed. Import and export should be fast and easy.
That is why most of my programs use JSONs that are human readable, or use SQLite tables that are just copy-paste away.
I am from Poland. My ancestors were able to survive by hiding, and by fighting small partisan battles. My idea of software is "partisan". It battles big tech in small, distributed ways.
I am not sure, but I think what I said is similar to interoperability.
In his new book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation, author Cory Doctorow presents a strong case for disrupting Big Tech. While the dominance of Internet platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or Amazon is often taken for granted, Doctorow argues that these walled gardens are fenced in by legal structures, not feats of engineering. Doctorow proposes forcing interoperability—any given platform’s ability to interact with another—as a way to break down those walls and to make the Internet freer and more democratic.
IEEE Spectrum contributor Michael Nolan spoke with Doctorow about his new book and how interoperability could break up monopolies both in tech and beyond.
Your new book, The Internet Con, as you write in its acknowledgements, “crystallizes two decades’ worth of advocacy writing about and working on issues in digital human rights.” How did that come to take the form of an argument for interoperability as a way to break up Big Tech monopolies?
Cory DoctorowJonathan Worth
Cory Doctorow: Over the decades that I’ve been involved in technology, the entities that are on the user’s side have really changed. Sometimes it was tech platforms or companies and sometimes it wasn’t. Sometimes it was governments and sometimes it wasn’t. Having started off defending tech companies that really did have their users’ backs from entertainment companies, I realized that the distinction between them was not that one industry was made up of entertainment executives whose commitment to human rights was very thin and the other was made up of tech executives who had a more good-faith commitment. When a sector is extremely concentrated, the people who are willing to trade the public good and foundational democratic values for incremental increases in their employer’s profitability get a hearing within the company and take over the company’s decision making. When a business doesn’t have to worry about losing its customers due to abusing them, then the people arguing, “We shouldn’t do this because it’s wrong and also it’s bad for business” can only argue, “We shouldn’t do this because it’s wrong.” They have to grudgingly admit that it might be good for business. Any firm in that state eventually becomes a serious hazard to human rights. It’s this “curse of bigness,” as Brandeis called it, that we should really be attuned to and is really pernicious.
That leads to the main proposal of the book, which is that reaffirming interoperability between systems and platforms can break apart these very large companies. Can you define interoperability?
Doctorow: At its root, it’s just the ability to use one thing with something else. Use any ink in your printer with any paper, use any socks with your shoes, anyone’s gasoline in your car, put any lightbulb in your light socket. There’s voluntary, mandatory interoperability, where a group of stakeholders get together and they say, “This is the goal we want all of our products to achieve, and we are going to design a framework so that we can make sure that every lightbulb lights up when you stick it in a light socket.” Then there’s the stuff where they’re indifferent: Car companies don’t stop you from putting a little cigarette-lighter-to-USB adapter into your car.
Companies can grow very quickly because tech has got these great network effects, but they also have, because of interoperability, really low switching costs.—Cory Doctorow
Then there’s the third kind of interop, the kind of chewy, interesting, lots-of-rich-Internet-history interop, which is adversarial interoperability, which in the book we call “comcom,” short for competitive compatibility. It’s the interop that’s done against the wishes of the original equipment manufacturer: scraping, reverse engineering, bots, all of that gnarly stuff done in the face of active hostility. This would be like Apple reverse-engineering Microsoft Office and making the iWork suite—Pages, Numbers, and Keynote—so that anyone with a Mac could read any Windows-based office file without having to buy any software from Microsoft.
There are so many examples of this from technology’s history. It’s really the engine of technology. It’s the reason we’ve had this incredible boom-and-bust cycle within tech companies. Companies can grow very quickly because tech has got these great network effects, but they also have, because of interoperability, really low switching costs. Anytime a platform isn’t suited to you or someone has a better idea for it, they can just make a tool [that] kind of greases the skids for you to leave the last one and to jump to the new one. Because of that interoperability, the companies that grow really big become irresistible targets for other companies that want to come in, tempt their users away, and offer them a very easy path to get from the old place to the new one. I think interoperability being interrupted explains “Why are tech companies bad when they used to be good?” It’s because the users can’t leave. If you can’t leave, they don’t have to treat you well.
So how has tech interoperability become interrupted?
Doctorow: There are lots of platforms that have become, effectively, walled gardens. The argument is that the reason that these businesses are so sturdy, that no one has disrupted them or displaced them is that they have such good engineers. I get this from people about iOS all the time, saying “iOS is an impregnable vault, they’ve figured out how to stop people from doing it.” and I say, “wait a second—it’s a felony to try.” If I say I’m the world champion boxer, and no one has ever defeated me, but I can also send you to prison for five years for trying to take my title, how do we know how good a boxer I am? The question of why they use the lawyers and not the engineers, why their go-to is the lawyers and not the engineers, to me the answer is because the lawyers are much more effective at preventing a capitalized, motivated rival from figuring out how to bypass their technical countermeasures.
So you’re saying it’s not technical dominance or business superiority or network effects that keep these platforms dominant; it’s instead the switching costs imposed by law. How could those laws be changed to make existing platforms more interoperable?
Doctorow: One of the things I’m interested in is how to make a law you can’t cheat on. Facebook often proposes rules only they can follow. Rules for interoperability have two constraints: they have to be administrable and cannot constitute a capital barrier. For example, we can propose two different rules for Twitter [now X]. One would be an end-to-end principle, which is a rule that says: If I follow someone, and they post something, I can see it. That rule makes it really hard for Twitter to overweight content from its preferred suppliers. On top of that we add the Right to Exit. This is the right to leave Twitter without losing your followers and followees. This would be a mandate to stand up an API, and it would be, probably, an ActivityPub API. It’s a pretty good standard and its deficiencies can be remedied more easily than we can design a new standard. You put those two together, Twitter can’t keep anyone prisoner, and Twitter will have to treat the people who choose to stay well.
You also argue that requiring interoperability will lead to something of a virtuous antitrust cycle. Is it that breaking down tech monopolies lessens their ability to reinforce the policies that have prevented interoperability in the first place?
Doctorow: That’s half of it. To understand the success of an industry in achieving its regulatory goals, you have to understand it needs two things. The first thing is power in the form of excess profits it can maneuver to lobbying. The second is unity.
Think back to the Napster wars. That was a sector of hundreds of small and medium-sized tech companies that in aggregate had more profit than the whole music industry and the whole movie industry. But the movie industry and the music industry had a smaller number of participants: music was five, movies were seven back then, now it’s three and four. As a result, they were able to agree on what to spend the money on. The tech industry was all over the place. They were knifing each other in the back. The reason the tech industry treats people like the music industry treated them 20 years ago is that unity.
The two benefits of competition are that it breaks the cash reserves that are used to enact public policy and it introduces the collective action problem that makes the remaining reserves harder to spend.
How does that virtuous cycle then extend from tech into other sectors?
Doctorow: Think about what happened with the breakup of Standard Oil in the first part of the 20th century. Standard Oil was not the only trust. There were trusts for everything: whiskey, railroads, iron, aluminum, cars. Standard Oil’s dominance made people so hopeless about whether or not they could have an accountable government that the toppling of Standard Oil opened up a floodgate of political will that saw all of those other trusts shattered.
I want to go after tech because it has this characteristic interoperability that makes it a soft target. We start with tech, and that gives us the momentum, the credibility, and the political will to go after everybody else.
Cory Doctorow is an author, activist, journalist, and blogger. His new book, The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation, from Verso Books, is available 5 September 2023. He is special advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Seems pretty clear, and subject neutral
Pre and post acquisition it was a clear shift. I would only see that style of poster when people I followed purposefully interacted with them. Post Acquisition, I began to get many more anti-immigrant, pro-white, pro-nationalism style posts in my feed.
This is an implementation of something called MUMPS, which is apparently some US system that is very arcane but widely used.
Again, I'm not an expert on this topic, but it indeed seems like standards, API's, file formats and whatnot would be keys to a system where decoupled components can be evolved step-by-step over time instead of the current system which seems to be a humongous monolith.
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If you're only talking specifically about your program that no one else has access to, I don't think there is any battle? Do whatever you want, no one cares nor would even know about it.
If you're talking about making software available for others, for free and open source, I also don't think there is any battles to be won here.
When people talk about the web not being open, or "age checks" and "backdoors" and so on, they're mainly talking about for-profit platforms, that let users "use" their platform in exchange for something. These probably shouldn't be "do whatever you want, consequences be damned" but instead have some sort of checks against them, so we don't end up letting the business-people rush towards building torment nexuses.
Even if platforms has to have age checks, encryption backdoors and a whole slew of other "bad stuff" or just "annoying stuff", I don't think the self-hosted ecosystem has much to worry about, we all run software "without warranties" already, and plenty of the stuff I'm running at home I've written myself, of course I won't care about age checks or whatever, even if it was regulated to be forced.
For me the freedom to own my computer means I can run any software I want on it.
Self hosting is predicated on some openness of computing in general. Interestingly it still does not practically allow you to use certain services like Google Maps, where even if the end user has great benefit, they get it for free because they give back their data.
1) Use HTTP (secure is not the way to decentralize).
2) Selfhost DNS server (hard to scale in practice).
3) Selfhost SMTP server (also tricky).
4) Know and backup your router (dd-wrt or iptables).
JSON over HTTP is the way.
XML is not bad for certain things too; even if I understand the legacy of abuse.
But there is a real health element to it. Although I perfectly agree that standards are good for the consumer, the incentives here are not as strong.
All my programs and data are open. It is something that anybody can pick up, and use as they wish
- https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database - domains I found
- https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-feeds - feeds I found
- https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database-2026 - news from 2026
- https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database-2025 - news from 2025, etc.
Does make any change? I don't know. I run web crawlers. It is interesting for me to see what my crawlers pick up from the Internet. It did change my life, these project changed how I see the Internet. More pro-activly.
I think there are many projects which can be useful for niche groups. I suppose I have 390 stars on one repo. I hope at least my projects were useful for them. That is a hopeful thought.
Can I do it on my phone?
This doesn't seem like useful advice. If you're going to use HTTP at all there is essentially zero practical advantage in not using Let's Encrypt.
The better alternative would be to use new protocols that support alternative methods of key distribution (e.g. QR codes, trust on first use) instead of none.
> Selfhost DNS server (hard to scale in practice).
This is actually very easy to do.
If you host friends over for dinner at your house a lot, nobody will ever say you are subject to the same rules as a restaurant. You start letting other people host dinners at your house, and things could change. You start letting people solicit your place for paid dinners, similar outcome. Do it once, nobody will probably know or care. Continue to do it at scale, though, and I don't know why you would expect to not be subject to regulations.
DNS is easy for yourself, but if you host it for others (1000+ of people) and it needs to have all domains in the world, then it becomes a struggle.
Or maybe Comaps, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43961908
I was talking about creating/running software for yourself, in a self-hosted scenario, not just "I run the software, but it's for others" but really "I run software and it's for myself and/or my family, no one else"./
You can't just run programs on your phone. You have to run apps, which require approved by the government and the company that made the phone, which tacks on additional fees as well. The phone also has constant cellular/GPS/wifi/bt-mesh location tracking, and it can never be completely turned off by the user without destroying the phone because even the batteries are glued in.
It's basicially the perfect slave device for your average goy. And everyone will need one to to access your bank account, recieve insecure SMS authentication, talk to other NPCs, and generally participate in the neo-economy.
If you don't think this is right, you are literally going to empty the bank account of my dumb ass grandma who can't stop installing malware, and in every way is better served by a flip phone from the early 2000's.
Also if people need more food for (decentralized) thought:
Then why are you demanding that everyone else's mobile computers have to be locked down instead of demanding that somebody make a mobile phone that only makes phone calls?
What I'm saying in the previous comment is that regulations requiring "Age checks, encryption backdoors and other bad/annoying stuff" also apply to small hosts and can be abused like DMCA (unless you are hosting on tor/i2p with good opsec).
It's this notion that any regulation is good because it's done on a "big bad public company" that is at the heart of what I disagree with. At what point do you become a "big bad company"? Does anna's archive count? they accept donations. It just doesn't seem like a fleshed-out worldview.
DNS can answer thousands of queries per second on a Raspberry Pi and crazy numbers on a single piece of old server hardware that costs less than $500.
Yes, just like even if it's just you and your bakery, you still have to follow a bunch of health and food safety regulations, as you're providing something people can be harmed by.
I don't think it's so out of this world to require similar things for platforms and services available to the public on the internet. Although I wouldn't maybe say it should be straight up illegal, I wouldn't mind more research and understanding of how we could prevent the biggest harms, without infringing on what people do in private. But then is a self-hosted Mastodon instance connected to the public internet and other instances in public or in private? Personally I'd lean towards the first.
Revenue exceeds 0.1% of US GDP or market share exceeds 10% of their own market.
As has been pointed out elsewhere, if you want to take the effort to connect and verify the different parties that are going to communicate with your server, you are almost certainly going to remain free to do so.
Do I think there are probably some concerning ways those burdens can be placed on folks? Certainly. But we already require inspections and other similar activities for things that individuals can do at home without an inspection. See the food industry.
If your DNS port is closed by your ISP, you can't have people use your DNS server from the outside and then you need Google or Amazon which are not decentralized.
Also to be selfhosted you can't just forward what root DNS servers say, you need to store all domains and their IPs in a huge database.