Air Date: 10/7/20

(Music Playing: 00:00:00 - 00:00:07)

Brian Kahn: Hi and welcome to System Reboot. A podcast from Gizmodo, where
we dive into the systems that are failing us and explore realistic
opportunities to create something better. I’m Brian Kahn, the
managing editor at Earther.

Alex Cranz: And I’m Alex Cranz, senior consumer tech editor at Gizmodo. And
today, Brian, I’m very excited because we’re going to talk about
something near and dear to my heart and probably yours and every
single person who has had to work from home or watch a movie from
home or do anything from home that requires the internet. Why does
the internet suck?

Brian Kahn: Indeed, near and dear to my heart, or maybe your like near and dear
to like the rage inside my body because why does it suck? Screw you
internet.

Alex Cranz: Like that question just fuels us, right? Like it gets us through our
days.

Brian Kahn: Yeah, I mean, truly, I dwell in this very often and I’m very, very
hopeful that we’ll get an answer to why it sucks and also what we can
do better about it. Today we’re talking with Cory Doctorow, who is a
special adviser to the Electronic Frontier Foundation and co-founder of
the UK Open Rights Group.

Alex Cranz: Cory is also a journalist, a blogger, an activist. He’s been writing
science fiction for years. He’s really, like was almost not at the birth of
the internet. I don’t want to age Cory like that, but no, he’s really was
at the forefront on the internet from very early time.

Brian Kahn: It’s actually pretty amazing like, how did he do all this?

Alex Cranz: It’s very incredible and he started as a Boing Boing. He started Boing
Boing. He’s going to message us after this and say we’re terrible
people because we mispronounce Boing Boing. So, he started there
and then he quickly started writing about science fiction and he’s such
a passionate dude that he really started talking about all the other
stuff too. Like, when you have that kind of passion it leads from
“Okay, I’m going to write about weird shit I find on the Internet too.
I’m going to write about fiction based on weird shit I found on the
Internet too. I’m going to write about why the Internet sucks” and
he’s just so, so smart about this subject, which I’m really excited for
because I have a decent idea of why the internet sucks. One, we
probably all need to go buy a new router and a new cable modem
that’s very important, but also we are facing such as big uphill battle
from companies, from our politicians. It seems like everybody is
against us and keeping us from the internet that we all crave.

Brian Kahn: Why does everyone want the internet to suck? It’s bizarre.

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 Air Date: 10/7/20

Alex Cranz: Yeah. I don’t get it. I feel like a question that Cory can probably
answer better than I can because I just like to feel a lot of rage in my
heart as you said. So, we should probably get talking to Cory. He
could explain it better than either of us.

Brian Kahn: Let’s have him explained it and hopefully channel our rage.

Alex Cranz: Yes.

(Music Playing: 00:02:44 - 00:02:50)

Brian Kahn: Cranz, do you want to -- will let you open the tech on -- I’ll give you
the open.

Alex Cranz: I get to open it.

Brian Kahn: I’ll give you the welcome.

Alex Cranz: Okay. Well, now we’re here with Cory. Who is going to talk about net
neutrality and these pipes that may or may not be giving us all the
data we crave.

Cory Doctorow: Yes, I’m happy to do that. Particularly, I am burningly frustrated by

the poor state of my own data and that was even before it became the
single wire that was delivering access to the entire plagued world, so
I’m here for you.

Alex Cranz: Thank you.

Brian Kahn: What’s your biggest data frustration? I want to know.

Cory Doctorow: I’ll tell you. So, I live in Burbank, California, but of many Johnny
Carson jokes. A City of 100 thousand people on the outskirts of Los
Angeles where we have the three major movie studios. I can walk to
Disney, Warner and Universal from my front door in under half an
hour.

Brian Kahn: Lucky you.

Cory Doctorow: And as befits a city where you have a lot of media, we raised a bond
and built a fiber loop called Burbank One. That’s 100 gigabit fiber
loop, but our deal with Charter Spectrum are monopoly cable operator
prohibits the city from terminating in, in any business that is not so in
commercial, so even though I operate a business out of my home, pay
taxes on that business and have a piece of fiber running under my
foundation slab, I am paying a 100 bucks a month for the junkiest,
crappiest internet from a monopolist. Whose CEO is the fourth highest
compensated CEO in America last year and whose linesmen and
technicians who come into our homes were not given PPE and instead
they were given in lieu of hazard pay, vouchers to use at restaurants
that had closed during the pandemic.

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 Air Date: 10/7/20

Brian Kahn: Oh, God. Wow, I thought that Spectrum, which I have was bad, but
this sounds --

Cory Doctorow: This is Spectrum.

Alex Cranz: No, that is Spectrum.

Brian Kahn: Same companies.

Alex Cranz: Yeah, I was about to say. You mentioned Spectrum and I was like,
“Well, there’s your problem”.

Cory Doctorow: Yeah, but you know what? It’s not like Comcast. Customers are
jumping for joy and what we really should do in this call is we should
talk about Frontier not because they are the worst in America,
although they were. It’s because they’re the one that went bankrupt
and we got to see all their paperwork, so we know more about the
operation of these firms. Thanks to Frontier, then we would -- if this
conversation been going on a couple of months ago, where we’re all
have been conjecture, but now we have the receipts.

00:05:00

Brian Kahn: So, we can thank them for going bankrupt for having insights into this
horrible, horrible thing that’s happening behind the scenes basically
everywhere?

Cory Doctorow: And that bankruptcy is not unrelated to the horribleness.

Alex Cranz: Who filled in the gap when Frontier went away?

Cory Doctorow: Nobody.

Alex Cranz: So, people just don’t have internet?

Cory Doctorow: Well, no, they’re like, restructured in, like chapter 11, so you know,
they have a skeleton crew running their thing.

Alex Cranz: Okay.

Cory Doctorow: I mean, the thing about Frontier is that a lot of their connectivity --
well, let me step back a bit. So, America stopped enforcing Antitrust
law meaningfully 40 years ago. It’s only gotten worse for the last 40
years and among the elements of the mannered Kabuki we engage in
when firms do anticompetitive things like merging with major
competitors is we put conditions on the mergers like, “Hey, you know
ATT&T buying some other companies business, Verizon’s business.”
You have to sell off some of your exclusive territory, which, like again,
how is a pro-competitive law ever talking about exclusive territory?

Alex Cranz: Never.

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 Air Date: 10/7/20

Cory Doctorow: Yeah, and those snips right -- those dregs were the things that
Frontier bought and in their bankruptcy filing, one of the things that
we see is they identified and booked as assets in their balance sheet
one million households that had no choice. Where they could make no
infrastructure investments, where they could provide service at the
highest prices and the lowest reliability and bandwidth that you could
imagine and where people would just be stuck using it.

Alex Cranz: Yeah, I mean, that sounds like where most of my friends and family
live. Who are all in rural Texas, like they get one guy. He’s terrible.
He gives them no help and that’s it. You have that, or you can, like,
sit on your roof and use your phone.

Cory Doctorow: Yeah, I think that’s right. And you know, it doesn’t have to be that
way, so one of the things about this debate is that there is a way out.
So, towns that have built their own fiber loops like mine, are doing
really, really well if they provide those fiber loops to their citizens and
it’s not just like affluent suburbs of Los Angeles, they get to do this.
There’s a county in Kentucky, I'm just looking up the name of this
county. It’s an Appalachian County, and it is the poorest majority
white county in America, obviously. The racial dimension means that
there are counties that are poorer, but they started a company called
Kentucky Wired and Kentucky Wired use some federal money and
some bonds and some other sources of income to pull 100 gigabit fiber
to every single address in the county. They got a mule called Old Bub
to haul fiber through mountain passes that no motorized vehicle could
get through.

Brian Kahn: Wow, mule powered internet.

Alex Cranz: This is incredible.

Cory Doctorow: They raise the median wage to $25 an hour. Those people are now
your tech support and they are your customer service and there is an
entire region of China where affluent children are being taught to
speak English in Appalachian’s accents by these people. So, it has
been absolutely transformative and it’s not limited to fancy places
where I live. Everywhere in America could benefit from this. This
could be the second wave of electrification. It could be an economic
revolution and a human rights revolution because when you get your
romance and education and everything else through your single wire,
then who runs that wire and how it runs really matters.

Alex Cranz: And right now it’s Spectrum?

Cory Doctorow: Well, it’s Spectrum, it’s Comcast, it’s AT&T. I mean, one of the things
about these companies is although there are many of them, they
never compete head to head.

Alex Cranz: Right.

Cory Doctorow: They carved up the country.

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 Air Date: 10/7/20

Alex Cranz: I always say it’s like, they have their little fiefdoms and like they stay
clear of each other. Every once in a while, Verizon’s like, “Oh, no, no,
I'm going to come in with some with some FiOS”, but otherwise it’s
each one to themselves.

Cory Doctorow: It’s like the pope dividing up the new world, right? You stay on this
side, I’ll stay on that side and we will never try and rate each other’s
customers and you know, one of the things about highly concentrated
industries is that they don’t need to actively collude to still have
activity that’s indistinguishable from collusion. You know, when you’ve
got five companies in a sector, everybody qualified to be in the C suite
of any of them has been in the C suite of a couple others and everyone
qualified to regulate them as an alumna of their C suites too. So, the
bad FCC chairman we have now Ajit Pai is a Verizon alum, but the
good one we had before, Tom Wheeler was a Comcast alum.

Alex Cranz: I remember when Tom Wheeler was brought in. Everybody’s like,
“Oh, he’s going to be terrible because Comcast” and then he turned
out to not suck.

Cory Doctorow: Well, yeah, but I mean --

Alex Cranz: As much.

Cory Doctorow: Is that our standard right? That we just cross our fingers and hope we
get an honest broker instead of someone who’s neutral. Who actually
like is not beholden to any of the companies, is not the executor of the
states of any of their executives or godparents doing the executive
parents? I mean, that’s what it means to be in these very
concentrated sectors is that you are interwoven very tightly.

Brian Kahn: I mean, it’s really interesting thing that you mention. It sounds like
it’s a closed ecosystem. Essentially, the regulators are the regulated,
are the regulators back and forth until the end of time. How did we
end up in this place in the first place?

00:10:03

Cory Doctorow: Well, there’s a couple of things that happened. So, one is that
telecoms enjoy some natural monopolies, right? Once you’ve run the
wires, it makes sense for no one else to have them, but, you know,
the other thing that happened is that AT&T, which was the Bell System
was never very kind to the other entities in the ecosystem. AT&T
wanted to wire up the plum networks and not the rural ones that
wouldn’t be very profitable. They enjoyed getting giant subsidies in
the forms of rights of way. Like, if you think about what it would cost
you if you were like John Galt doing your network without any
government subsidy to knock on every door in New York and say,
“Hey, what are you going to charge me to run a wire through your
basement?” You know, the clearing cost of that exceeds the entire
possible revenue of your network from now until the heat death of the
universe.

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 Air Date: 10/7/20

And so, AT&T was happy to soak up these government subsidies, but
like the rural telephone co-ops that grew out of the rural electrification
co-ops from the WPA from the new deal, AT&T, which is mercilessly
crushed them. They would crush the little mom and pop operators.
They wouldn’t interconnect with them and so, the FTC over many
years and the DOJ and then later the FCC, they put lots of conditions
on AT&T and waggled their finger at them and said, “You better
behave yourself” and AT&T sort of roundly ignored them and by 1956,
this was so absolutely egregious that the DOJ was ready to break them
up, but the Pentagon came to their rescue, and they said, “We cannot
prosecute the war in Korea without AT&T because they become a de
facto arm of the state.” Now, they fail to prosecute the war in Korea
anyway, right?

But, AT&T wasn’t broken up until 1982 and it was virtually the last
thing that we did in terms of muscular anti-trust enforcement and it
only came in because Regan’s anti-trusts are didn’t want to break up
IBM and he had these two breakups on his hands. IBM for 12 years
had spent more fighting the DOJ action against it just on lawyers than
the entire DOJ anti-trust division was spending on lawyers for all of its
actions for 12 consecutive years. So, he was like, “How do I get out of
this morass? I know, I’ll break up AT&T and I will stick to my doctrine
that we shouldn’t break up companies by saying AT&T is not really a
company. They’ve been interfered with by the state so much that it’s
not really a market entity, so we have to break them up and then I’ll
create this competitor for IBM and I’ll say we don't have to break up
IBM either”.

It was basically, regulators being asleep at the switch over a long

period and there’s a lesson here for people worried about big tech
because I hate big tech with the heat of 1000 suns, but every time
people are like, “Oh, I know what we can do to make big tech better,
we’ll just force them to behave themselves.” We will create, like
conduct remedies that air so expensive that you have to be a
monopolist to do them like, “Go higher 10 million moderators to make
sure no one’s being naughty on Facebook”. As opposed to like, “break
up Facebook or introduce compatibility mandates, so that people who
don't like Facebook’s moderation policies can leave Facebook without
leaving behind their friends” and when you do that, you just make
Facebook an arm of the state the way that AT&T was an arm of the
state and it just makes it harder. It’s going to give him 30 more years
of monopolization.

Alex Cranz: I never even thought about like what Facebook could become. That is
absolutely terrifying.

Cory Doctorow: Yeah, don’t give them stakeholders and the most upper echelons of
the power structure because then they will intervene to stop them
from having their power weakened.

Alex Cranz: Right. That's like, terrifying. I love to be scared. It’s a hot day here
in New York, so this is a nice little chill for me, thanks.

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 Air Date: 10/7/20

Cory Doctorow: I am a dystopian science fiction writer.

​ 0:14:00)
(Music Playing: 00:13:40 -​ 0

Alex Cranz: How dystopian can it get because it’s pretty dystopian now. Can it get
more dystopian? Specifically with relation to the ISPs?

Cory Doctorow: Yeah. So, you know, America today, lags, the OECD for cost and for
efficiency of its network.

(Voice Overlap)

The Organization for Economic Co-operation Development, the rich

countries.

Alex Cranz: Okay.

Cory Doctorow: Of all the rich countries in the world, America is number one in bad
telecoms. U.S.A.

Alex Cranz: I’m so proud of us. Good job guys.

Cory Doctorow: You know, number one. And so, America’s poor network conditions
have become especially salient now that we’re delivering education,
employment, primary health care, mental health services, civic and
political engagement, even access to things like nutrition or
community. Those are all being delivered by that one wire. I mean,
it’s the wire that gives you both free speech and free assembly and all
the rest of it.

Alex Cranz: Right.

Cory Doctorow: And to the extent that the carriers are concentrated and not doing
their job. First of all, having a bad wire means that all of those things
are bad.

00:15:03

But, it can be worse because the wire can be adverse to you, right? It
can be not just that it’s neglected or under invested in. They can
preferentially steer you towards the services that are good for their
shareholders rather than the services that are good for you and this is
a universal impact of all lock in, right? And this is why we see app
stores under so much investigation as we’re speaking today, Epic has
kicked over a couple of ant hills over Fortnite.

Alex Cranz: I’m very aware. It’s been fantastic.

Brian Kahn: I’ve heard a few things about that.

Cory Doctorow: And you know, the last thing we want is for firms to be able to like
conjure up a new tort called “Felony contempt of business model”.
When these firms can engineer the law because they are the only

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 Air Date: 10/7/20

game in town, right? When they are an essential service, if they could
go to lawmakers and say, “Well, you must allow us to block this spy on
that monetize this other in order to have a level playing field”. One of
the great opponents to privacy legislation has been the carriers
because the carriers say, “Well, we have a gap. Google gets to spy on
you and monetize its surveillance of you, how will we compete with
Google unless we can spy on you too?” Thanks guys. That is not what
we hope for an intersectoral competition, right? We hope that one of
them is like, “These guys are bad guys who are working against the
interests of the citizenry. We will weigh in on behalf of the citizenry as
they’re competing sector” to say, “No, you must liberate them”.
They’re like, “No, no, we want a piece too”.

Alex Cranz: And the government says, “Sure”. They say, “Yeah, that makes way
more sense than saying no to everybody”.

Cory Doctorow: Well, what are you going to do when these carriers are your only
access to the world? And now, I want to come back to Frontier
because it wasn’t just the one million households that they booked as
there asset because they had no choice. Much more salient, I think is
the four million households whom they determined they could make
800 million additional dollars in profit off of over 10 years by installing
fiber to them profitably, but whom they chose to leave on antique 20th
Century copper DSL infrastructure. Not because it wouldn’t be
profitable, but because the primary analyst that moved the share
prices of the telecom sector don’t like investments that advertise over
more than five years and the C suites compensation was primarily
shares based. And so, the stock would go down if they made the
company an extra $800 million ​over 10 years and gave the most under
serviced four million households in America access to 100 gigabit fiber.
And so, they deliberately chose not to install profitable fiber to four
million households.

Alex Cranz: And it was all because they were going to make the money in 10 years
instead of 5.

Cory Doctorow: Right. And the analysts are giving advice to investors who are not
buying hold investors. They are short-term investors who need early
liquidity and they said, “Well, we don’t like Capax(ph) that advertises
over more than five years and because the C suite gets all of its
money in shares and you know the WES about giving your executive
money and shares is that gives them skin in the game, right? Like
they will only act in ways that make the company more profitable.
That’s not true. They will only act in ways that make the share price
go up.

Brian Kahn: So, you’re saying there’s a bunch of perverse incentives that basically
-- it’s have said everything up to suck for us, the people that actually
pay for these services.

Cory Doctorow: And of course, you know, to get back to this theme about competition
monopoly. It’s not just telecoms because why do they care so much
about what institutional investors do? Because the institutional

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 Air Date: 10/7/20

investors have come to dominate the market as well, right? It’s like
there’s half a dozen people making decisions and half a dozen funds,
some of them companies that you might have your 401k in that makes
spread bets that are index to the market and some of them being
private equity funds. We take really big positions, but this small
number of people have an enormous amount of influence and their
parochial needs for liquidity over five-year timescales means that four
million households in rural America are now trying to teach their kids
over DSL.

Alex Cranz: Or worse.

Cory Doctorow: Or worse, yeah.

Brian Kahn: I mean, what is it about that five-year timeframe? Is it just another
sort of arbitrary deadline to count the money again or is there
anything special?

Cory Doctorow: It’s like you just want to know that -- like, say, the company goes
under and you want to make sure that it’s capital can be liquidated
and dispersed to a shareholders like that. Your hedge against the
company going under is greater when the company is not making
capital bets that they don’t start earning on for more than five years.
So like, they had to put a billion dollars in and they would get $1.8
billion out over a decade. That was their own math, right? They just
were like, “We don’t want the $800 million. What I want is the extra
$1 million that I get in my pay packet at the end of the year for going
the $800 million and the service to our customers”.

00:20:03

Brian Kahn: I mean, I guess that basically puts a price on people essentially --

Cory Doctorow: Yeah.

Brian Kahn: That's your value to ISPs.

Alex Cranz: Is the answer to just give it to the stock market? I mean, that's often
the answer.

Cory Doctorow: Right. We got it all. We have to do, so--

Alex Cranz: Because this is (00:20:16)

Cory Doctorow: No one can really hope for any relief in this until Capitalism has been
replaced by a more miracleable (ph) system and we just -- no, that's
not true. We have lots of interventions we can make. Here in
California, we have a broadband bill that will fund the state to help the
cities put fiber in, and that fiber will be municipally owned but
operated by competing entities. So, you can get your -- if you
remember, before G. W. Bush nerfed this with DSL, there was a time
where your DSL infrastructure was provided by your monopoly carrier
or AT&T ot whoever. But AT&T had to lease space.

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 Air Date: 10/7/20

Alex Cranz: Southwestern Bell.

Cory Doctorow: Yeah, Southwestern Bell, that's right, yeah. But they had to lease
space to a competing operator. So, you know, like I had, a little group
of hardcore nerds and I moved to San Francisco in ‘99 to work on a
dot com, just like everybody else who's my age. And I had, like,
hardcore nerds who ran an ISP for themselves, right? They were
network engineers who provided a network engineers ISP and I could
get them to provisioned my DSL and Bush nuked that order, right?
So, you know, California is like, “Okay, let's just do it again except this
time with fiber. Let's have conduit. Let's have fiber in the conduit.
We can upgrade the fiber later through the conduit,” and then lots of
people can compete to give you service based on their customer
service levels and so on. Federally, one of the things that we could do
that would be very important is the FCC or Congress could move to
make it unambiguously lawful for cities to install their own fiber and to
prohibit states from passing laws that banned cities from installing
fiber. So, the telecoms industry working primarily with ALEC, the
American Legislative Exchange Committee, who you will know from
other elements of bad law that were promulgated through state
houses around the country, they managed to get many states to enact
laws that banned cities from providing fiber.

Alex Cranz: Right. I think like Oklahoma is one. There's a lot of states where --

Cory Doctorow: North Carolina.

Alex Cranz: -- that are the most affected right now by bad broadband.

Cory Doctorow: Right.

Alex Cranz: Then the state they were like, “Oh, but you can't make your own.”

Cory Doctorow: Yeah, and you know, these are laws that are so broad that even if no
one offers broadband in a town. So the argument is oh well, the
private sector can’t compete with the state because the state has all
kinds of resources at a time, so you'll crowd out the private sector.
But they won't allow you to pull fiber in your town, even if no one from
the private sector wants it, right? You just sit there until the private
sector is ready for you, and until then, you know, here's your tin can
and here's your string. Good luck with it.

(Music Playing: 00:22:52-00:23:11)

Brian Kahn: It seems very strange maybe because I mean, you mentioned ALEC. I
mean, they are too is working with conservative lawmakers, and
there's often this idea that conservative, you know, lawmakers really
love big business, they love business and competition and, you know,
like it's very -- that is pro-business mindset. And yet it sounds like it's
a very pro five businesses, and no one else gets in kind of mindset
from the way that we've approached internet so far.

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Cory Doctorow: Yeah, I think there's a kind of misconception that liking business is the
same as liking competition. I think those have been thoroughly on
couple for quite some time. You know, Warren Buffett is pretty
cheerful in what he describes as an ideal firm, you know. This idea
that Buffett has moats around businesses, that's just businesses you
can't compete with, you know. When he described why he got into
Verisign for example, he said, “I don't know anything about domain
registration, but I recognize a government monopoly when I see one
and the government has given through ICANN, Verisign and monopoly
over two important assets dot org and dot net, and that means that
they don't have to worry about pricing. They can set prices, right?
There are a lot of people think the definition of monopoly is when
there's only one seller. That kind of policy definition of monopoly is
when you set prices.

Alex Cranz: Right. That's why Apple and Google are monopolies with their App
Store.

Cory Doctorow: Right. Because they get to set the price and they get to decide who's
in and who's out and so on. Yeah, so you know, Peter Thiel, he wrote
an article, “Competition is for Suckers.” You know, firms strongly
disprefer(ph) competition except when they are trying to break in,
right?

Alex Cranz: Yeah.

Cory Doctorow: I mean, I think this is a universal factor. I mean, when we talk about
pro-competitive measures like interoperability, right? Apple was like
completely gung ho for its right and rightly so.

00:24:55

Gung ho for its right to reverse engineer Microsoft office and produce
the iWork suite that only added a bunch of cool new features but also
could read and write office files and no longer subject Mac users to
Microsoft's deliberate slowdown of compatibility with the Mac version
of office. And you know, good for Apple., but then when it came time
for people to say, Well, I would like to reverse engineer the file
formats in iTunes, Apple was like, “well, know that violates the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act” or you know, Google is publishing editorials
on their website right now about the beauty of interoperability when it
comes to APIs because Oracle is quite wrongly suing them to establish
copyright over APIs. But Google is no fan of interoperability if you're
an android handset maker that wants to leave the G suite out.

Alex Cranz: No, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, these companies all really like to be
very selective on what monopolies and stuff they'll protest and fight
and it's only ever for their benefit, which I think we're seeing even now
with epic games like epic games is doing this. But it's not necessarily
just to make it a more open marketplace, it's so that they could get
their own marketplace.

Cory Doctorow: Sure.

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Alex Cranz: They already undercuts the competition.

Cory Doctorow: Well, you look at Spotify, you know, they were the first ones to do
what epic is doing. They sued Apple over the payment lock in on the
App Store and you know, Spotify is also creating walled gardens,
right? They’re like they took in all this investment capital, they're
buying a podcast, they're sticking them behind pay walls. They're
doing all this stuff that they themselves objected to and, you know,
this is not unusual in industry. It's why we like to have a referee who
isn't in the tank for one of the teams.

Alex Cranz: Like we have with the FCC now.

Cory Doctorow: Yeah, which we would hope that they would be neutral brokers, not
just within the sector, but intersectorally(ph), so not just regulating
telecoms but regulating telecoms to make sure that telecoms isn't
nerfing IT or tech or whatever and vice versa. Back in the copyright
wars, you know, in the Napster days, when there was all of this fight
to like make firms liable for what their users posted, but basically the
CDA 230 fight, you know, version 0.96 beta back in the old days of
Napster, you know, the entertainment companies that we would be
adverse to would say things like, “Well, you know, how can you accuse
us a censorship? All of our key litigation has been about free speech.”
And it is true, you know, the record industry fighting Tipper Gore and
the Parental Music Resource Committee and so on. And what my
boss, the woman who now runs EFF, Cindy Cohn used to say, is like,
“Guys we know you love the first amendment, we just wish you'd
share. And like the firms love competition. They just don't want to
share it. They just want one rule for them and another role for
someone else. Fair enough, that's what they're supposed to do, but
let's have some referees who do believe in competition.

Brian Kahn: So, you know, thinking about that then, what's the solution referee
was. I mean, is there a neutral arbiter that you're thinking of that
would be like, oh, yeah, like, put that person or put that institution in
where the FCC is and let's get to work.

Cory Doctorow: No, I think that the issue about the regulators being suborn to industry
is really a competition question because, as I said before, when the
firms converge, they arrive at a common law being positioned. All of
the people qualified to evaluate whether that law positioned is a good
one or drawn from the firms that the referees end up being alumna of
the firms. And they have these monopoly rents that they extract that
they can spend. So, you know, the net neutrality fight with Ajit Pai at
the start of the Trump administration, there was an enormous amount
of blood and treasures spilled. Buying bots that scraped email
addresses and sent fake emails in support of dismantling net neutrality
and so on. All of that dry powder, all that excess revenue that they
had available in their arsenal is also part of the competition question.

And so, what we have is an iterative problem where we need to make

the sector more competitive, which will make its regulation more

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 Air Date: 10/7/20

honest, which will let us make the sector more competitive, which will
let us make the industry more honest, right? And it has to go around
and around. You know, as I say, this California bill would do a lot,
right? Just creating competitive pressure does a lot. Most places you
don't have any consumer power, but you do have lawmakers who are
increasingly alive to these questions. You know, in Burbank, where I
live, everyone who's knocked on my door asking me about my City
Hall vote, I've said what are you doing about the fiber? And I've seen
their eyes start to glitter, they're like, wait a second this is a total
pocketbook issue, right? With one little vote, with one little act in
committee, I could be the person who brought Burbank 100 gigabit
fiber while other kids were stuck at home and while they were stuck at
home trying to work, right? So that's the political force that you have
available to you. Some places you do have a market choice to make
so in San Francisco, for example, there's an ISP called Monkeybrains
that's run by --

Alex Cranz: Incredible name.

Cory Doctorow: Yeah, it's so good. Rudy Rucker, Jr. who owns it, his father is one of
the great titans of cyberpunk, Rudy Rucker, Sr.

Alex Cranz: Yeah.

Cory Doctorow: And I fictionalized Monkeybrains in my little brother books that the ISP
called Pigspleen is a version of Monkeybrains.

Alex Cranz: Oh, that’s awesome!

00:30:00

Brian Kahn: I like Pigspleen actually, that’s good.

Cory Doctorow: Yeah.

Brian Kahn: And Monkeybrains is good. Pigspleen is like next level.

Cory Doctorow: Even better. And Monkeybrains has a microwave relays on the top of
Sutro Tower, and they will give you gigabit wireless internet from this
antenna that they have that overlooks the city. So, when you have
that you can do something with it. But really, this is a question of
reinvigorated competition law, which will also reinvigorate telecoms
law. And the good news is that there are a lot of sectors that would
benefit from an increase in competition law. The Web need not be five
giant websites filled with screenshots from the other four, right? And
we need not have --

Alex Cranz: And ads.

Cory Doctorow: And ads. We need not have only --

(Voice Overlap)

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 Air Date: 10/7/20

Cory Doctorow: Right. And we need not have only four big banks, right? And we need
not have just one wrestling league, right? There used to be 30 and
now there's one, and we've seen how the winners in the wrestling
league game use their perch to fight media companies who are
unflattering to them, Hi Gizmodo, right?

Brian Kahn: Hi!

Cory Doctorow: There are a lot of pro wrestling fans who may not care about the
internet, but they do care about the fact that all the wrestlers that
they love have been reclassified as contractors by the monopolist, and
they're now begging on GoFundMe for money to help them die with
dignity in their 50s from the injuries they sustained over their careers.
Those people are natural allies, right? We have the eyewear market,
is now completely controlled by one private equity fund that bought a
company based in Italy called Luxottica. They bought every major
retailer, so they own LensCrafters, Sunglass Hut, Target Optical, Sears
Optical and so on. They refused to carry eyewear brands unless the
company would sell to them. So now they own Coach, Dolce and
Gabbana, Oliver Peoples, Versace. They own Oakley and every other
major eyewear brand as well Essilor, the largest labs. So even if you
buy hipster or internet glasses, your lenses come from them and they
own the largest insurer, EyeMEd.

And so, even if you get artisanally(ph) ground lenses from a man in
leather apron in Portland, the insure is still them. They dipped their
beak. The cost of glasses has gone up 1000% over 10 years, right?
So, there are a lot of constituents who should care about competition
and monopoly. And they may all think that they're working on
different issues. They may think that they're pissed off about
wrestling or telecoms or eyewear and the same way that before the
term ecology was founded, there were people who cared about owls or
the ozone layer, but they didn't. And they thought, “Oh, well, you
know, I'm all in favor of your ozone layer fight, but I care about owls.”
The term ecology turned those issues into a movement, and we're on
the verge of there being a movement about competition because these
concentrated markets, they're bad for all of us.

Alex Cranz: So, do you have a term for it?

Cory Doctorow: I call it pluralism.

Alex Cranz: Okay.

Cory Doctorow: Yeah, that's why I have a new website where that I write on everyday
called pluralistic.net.

Brian Kahn: Good plug.

Cory Doctorow: Ironically, I write on it alone.

Brian Kahn: If anyone wants to join you, can they come over and like chip in the
site, chip in an article.

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 Air Date: 10/7/20

Cory Doctorow: Maybe, send me a pitch.

Brian Kahn: All right, (00:33:10) about the earth dying. But maybe there's
something in this for me, too. I'm sure there's an angle.

Cory Doctorow: Oh, yeah. Well definitely. If you want to talk about like because of
the things that we didn't talk about here, that intersects with climate is
that the job of a regulator isn’t just to be a referee, it's to be a neutral
adjudicator of the truth, right? Because firms have competing truth
claims, sometimes they're motivated by good faith disagreements.
Sometimes they're parochial, but you want a neutral entity in the
middle who says, yes masks are good for preventing coronavirus or
no, opioids aren't safer than we used to think they are, you shouldn't
be taking them on the reg or, you know, yes, climate change is being
caused by fossil fuels. And as our markets concentrate, truth seeking
ceases to be a neutral adjudication and becomes an auction. And
that's obviously the case with climate questions. It's also obviously
the case with health questions. You know, ask yourself, how did the
Sacklers gets richer than the Rockefellers, telling risible lies about the
safety of opioids and kicking off an epidemic that killed 200,000
Americans? Well, it's because the truth was up for sale, and so, yeah,
if we're going to fight climate change. We need to agree that climate
change is real, and we need to agree on what we can do about it. And
maybe we'll make mistakes about what we can do about it because the
science will evolve. But let us have those mistakes be good faith
mistakes that are corrected by new evidence and not mistakes that
were created because we sold the truth to the highest bidder.

Brian Kahn: I think this raises the question that, you know, we like to present here
to folks in general is like, what is the one thing a listener could do?
And I mean, we want to, you know, let's go back to where we started
with this, with the Internet and the fact that this is the thing that has
become more of a life blood to our society, that we probably even
could have imagined even six months ago. I mean, if someone is
freaked out by hearing about this concentration of power and wealth
and these five ISPs or whatever it is, (00:35:00) both their glasses for
that matter.

00:35:03
I mean, what's the one thing someone can do to get involved with this
and try to make a difference?

Cory Doctorow: It's a really good question, and I think the answer that people look for
when they say that is like, well, if you just were cycled your batteries
and didn't put them in the garbage but actually took them to the
dump, then we would start to make a difference, right? The reality is
that the one that, like you, you can be the world's most recycling
person, you can reduce your footprint to zero, and it still isn't going to
stop your kids from having to dig through rubble looking for canned
goods while drinking their own urine, right? The actual answer to what
you can do about climate change or these other systemic problems,
like the problem with cable and internet and monopolies and telecoms

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 Air Date: 10/7/20

is join a movement. That's the most important thing an individual can

do is to be part of a movement. There are a lot of organizations. I
happen to work for, one of them as a contractor. I worked for the
Electronic Frontier Foundation.

It has been nearly 20 years that I've been doing that. They're very
good. They spend your money wisely. They also give you lots of
things that you could do. We have local affiliates, the Electronic
Frontiers Alliance that create local actions that are related to local
activities. Our Oakland chapter was instrumental in getting facial
recognition ban in Oakland. Other chapters use their playbook and got
them banned in towns in Massachusetts. So you know, that's great.
You can you can join EFF, but they're not the only ones. There are a
lot of movements, and within the two major political parties, there are
groups that are very interested in trust busting for different reasons,
and I agree with some more than others. But it doesn't matter, right?
If you care about trust busting, if you care about competition, there
are pro competition groups within the two major political parties, and
there are also competition opportunities at your local level. Your town
council is in a position where they can make their procurement
contingent on competitive activity. They can say well, the city won't
buy from any vendor that binds its employees to binding arbitration or
its customers to binding arbitration or non competes so that there is
competition in the labor market because one of the areas where we've
lost competition is in the labor market. The largest source of
non-compete agreements is fast food restaurants. You become
managers at a Wendy and you can never work in a McDonald's. So
procurement has an enormous look in here. And, you know, the state
net neutrality laws that were passed after Ajit Pai killed that federally
that was their main lever, right? They just said, if you are an ISP and
you're not neutral, there's no state entity can buy internet from you
and that's super powerful.

Alex Cranz: So, start small.

Cory Doctorow: Well, start with an org.

Alex Cranz: Okay.

Cory Doctorow: Find an organization that is doing this work and ask them how you can
help and shop for organizations that can match with your skills.
There's four ways we intervene in the world, code, law, norms and
markets. We have conversations with people that change their minds,
that's norms. We pass laws that change what you're allowed to do,
that laws. We have new technologies that change what you can do,
that's code. And we have new businesses that change what's
profitable and that's markets. Everyone listening has at least one of
those things that they could do to intervene, right? Everyone could at
least be normative. Everyone could at least go out and talk to their
neighbors and say, “Look, has it ever occurred to you that there's a
connection between the one ISP we have access to and the one search
engine we all use and the one company that makes our eyewear and

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 Air Date: 10/7/20

the one company that supplies all the textbooks for our kids in
school?”

Alex Cranz: I love it. I mean, I don't love the monopolies, those are terrible. But I
love the idea that, like, even now as soon as you're done listening to
this podcast, you could go out, see your neighbor, hopefully with your
mask on and start to help. Start for change phase.

Cory Doctorow: From six feet away.

Alex Cranz: From six feet away.

Cory Doctorow: Start shouting at them.

Alex Cranz: Shout out, “Hey iI got a thing a thing to talk to you about!” It will be
great.

Cory Doctorow: It certainly would be. And, you know, you will have local candidates in
your election who will take positions on this. You can push them
towards it. You can push them towards it congressionally. You can
push them towards it at the state and local level. This is an issue that
touches so many areas of our lives, and if you can educate them on
that, they can get behind it. I mean, you know, one of the things
about monopolies is that they never, ever front for themselves, they
always front for someone else, right? The cable monopolists say,
“We're fronting for disadvantaged groups that were giving preferential
internet access.” They never mind that they never really are, right,
because nobody is out there saying, “Well, no one think of the cable
monopolists”, right? It's always like, “What don't you think of the guys
climbing the poles? What do you think of the people who use the
internet?” That's what we're here for. And if you can separate those
two, if you can say, “I want the internet, I just don't want it run by
some douchebag making tens of millions of dollars a year to provide
the worst quality service that he possibly can get away with.” Then
you can start to drive a wedge.

Alex Cranz: Hell, yes.

00:40:00

Brian Kahn: I think that's really -- I think this is really helpful. I do feel somewhat
more hopeful knowing that there are multiple avenues to exact change
And I got to say, like I did not think a conversation about the internet
would get us to wrestling and fast food. But I'm glad to -- I'm glad I
did. I think it really is an eye opening frankly.

Cory Doctorow: It’s all one thing, man.

Alex Cranz: We just grip on (00:40:20). I love it. Well, thank you Cory so much
for taking the time to talk with us today. I know you have a very busy
day, but really, really appreciate it.

Cory Doctorow: Thank you.

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 Air Date: 10/7/20

Alex Cranz: Thank you guys, for listening to System Reboot. It's hosted by me,
Alex Cranz and Brian Khan. Our producer is Michaela. Heck and Jamie
Collazo mixed the episode.

Brian Khan: If you like what you heard, please rate and review it. It helps spread
the word and allow others to find our show.

Alex Cranz: Yeah, if you have any other feedback questions or thoughts about
what you heard today you can tweet me at alexhCranz or --

Brian Khan: Speaker 0: you can tweet me at blkhan.

Alex Cranz: See you next week.

(Music Playing: 00:41:00-0041:09)

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