Cory Doctorow enthüllt, wie er die Herrschaft von Big Tech reparieren würde

>Safely ensconced, our digital overlords can start “twiddling” the parameters of transactions until they’ve maximized every outcome in their favor. “The bosses who are doing this — they’re not more evil than the bosses we had before,” Doctorow said. “They just have better tools.” Unsuspecting visitors to their platforms discover that “every app makes a call to the cloud to ask how it should perform in that moment” — based on all the information it has for endlessly monetizing each individual customer.

>One mistake was allowing these companies to grow so big that they have these massive hoards of customers to exploit. Though the U.S. enacted antitrust laws back in 1890, Doctorow says things changed in the 1980s when the U.S. and its trading partners adopted “a pro-monopoly policy.” In today’s world tech firms now go virtually unchecked by the free market, Doctorow argues, “because tech firms don’t compete with their rivals. They buy them.”

>But this lack of competition also leaves these companies “a-slosh in cash — that they can mobilize to make their regulatory preferences into regulation.” If a sector collapses into a handful of powerful players, you’ve suddenly created an ad hoc oligarchy that’s writing its own rules. “That’s a cartel — it’s a racket. It’s a conspiracy in waiting.”