The Post-American Internet

I've spent a couple of decades in the Danish public sector of digitalisation and in the private sector for global green energy. 10 years ago people would've laughed if you talked about leaving Microsoft and iOS in enterprise. Now we all have contingency plans for just that, and a lot of organisations are already actually doing it. So I would argue that there is more of a crack, but I'm not sure the post-american internet is going to be all that great. Because unlike the open source and decentralised platforms which are taking the place of US tech, the EU is going to regulate the internet. There is a saying about how us citizens trust companies but not their government, and how Europeans trust their governments but not their companies. Which obviously doesn't apply to everyone, but it's how you can view the EU. With one hand they do so much to protect consumer rights for us citizens, but with the other hand they build a survailance state.

Of course that is how democracy works. You'll have multiple factions working toward their own goals with very different ideologies, and the EU has a lot of that. For the most part what comes out is great, because compromise is how you get things done when there aren't just two sides. For survailance, however, there are really just two sides and the wrong one of them is winning.

> If the EU repeals Article 6 of the Copyright Directive, some smart geeks in Finland could reverse-engineer Apple's bootloaders and make a hardware dongle that jailbreaks phones so that they can use alternative app stores, and sell the dongle – along with the infrastructure to operate an app store – to anyone in the world who wants to go into business competing with Apple for users and app vendors.

I have twoo problems with this idea.

1. Users are extremely lazy and anything that doesn't work out of the box doesn't gain any commercial traction. See: Epic Games Store, Amazon App Store, F-Droid to some extent.

2. Apple already allows alternative app stores inside of Finland (the entire EU, actually). There's the issue of Apple's bullshit installation fees, of course, but with Epic covering those so far, cost doesn't seem to be a problem when it comes to the proliferation of app stores.

While I'm all for an iPhone running free code, commercial interests for alternative app stores won't be what will bring forth these improvements.

> If the EU repeals Article 6 of the Copyright Directive, some smart geeks in Finland could reverse-engineer Apple's bootloaders and make a hardware dongle that jailbreaks phones so that they can use alternative app stores

Apple could easily block this, and in the situation described here of a complete rupture with the US, they would no longer operate and sell phones in the EU. If Google decided to do the same, that essentially leaves Europeans without smartphones. Microsoft could "brick" the rest of the EU's digital infrastructure overnight if they so wished, or were compelled to do so.

This makes the transition described in the article much more difficult. Although likely more urgent, from an European perspective.

> We wouldn't tolerate secrecy in the calculations used to keep our buildings upright, and we shouldn't tolerate opacity in the software that keeps our tractors, hearing aids, ventilators, pacemakers, trains, games consoles, phones, CCTVs, door locks, and government ministries working.

Construction industry if full of privately owned technologies and closed source software, from architectural drawing board up to the last glass panel in a window.

Building are staying upright not because of openness, but because of the enforced standards for construction. Same can be applied to software orders.

Want to prevent a government office suite to be bricked remotely? Put forth requirements for autonomous work, self hosting, multiyear coverage for critical patches and ability to export the data at any moment in the format of your preference. Whoever provides this will get the contract.

This seems to me far more realistic aim than trying to enforce global legal straight jacket to be universally applied to all software and hardware products available for purchase in your country

Europe is in a tough spot these days, trying to unwind decades of economic partnership with the USA while simultaneously trying to fend off Russia from Ukraine.

Maybe countries need to seriously consider stockpiling old hardware. Rather than sending ewaste to Southeast Asia for “recycling”, old laptops and smartphones could be the only things usable in a future fractured world.

The irony of this talk is that the prospect of the US having its own de facto "Great Firewall," albeit one imposed from without rather than from within, doesn't sound that bad to any American old enough to remember what the Internet was like before its successive waves of global Septemberings: https://old.reddit.com/r/Infographics/comments/1l5bhfo/total...

The Twitter/X location experiment/debacle laid this bare, showing how much low-effort, divisive, often racially or religiously antagonistic content directed at Americans was actually foreign (e.g., the Indians LARPing as white nationalists with classical statue avatars).

I think outright shortening copyright terms could be a beneficial policy along similar lines.

> Think of [...] all those "Effective Altruists," who claimed the moral high ground by claiming to care about 53 trillion imaginary artificial humans who will come into existence in 10,000 years at the expense of extending moral consideration to people alive today.

That's not an accurate summary of what most Effective Altruists preach or do. The stereotypical EA interventions are "direct cash transfer to super-poor communities", "buying mosquito nets to fight malaria" and "lobbying for animal welfare", long-termism is much much more niche.

It does seem like something will need to be done. Not just on this but other world order matters too. The US centric version is no longer viable

Americans aren’t your enemy. We’re just as upset by these idiots running our government as you are.

I've noticed some OSS orgs have been shifting their center of gravity to europe recently. Notably the Eclipse, Linux Foundations, and soon WikiMedia.

VCs and politicians forgot that Silicon Valley did not appear out of thin air, it was the product of public research and open-source ecosystems that made the internet revolution possible.

If the US betrays these ecosystems too much, they could migrate and make another tech industry flourish somewhere else.

Why not go all the way and establish your own publicly owned central bank and establish an alternative to the dollar?

Oh, yeah, the US will send the CIA or the military in and take you out and make you take on IMF debt to ensure your future compliance.

Clearly, there are limits to what tech alone can accomplish.

> That's why they're so fucking horny to have chatbots shit out software at superhuman speeds. That's why they think it's good that they've got a chatbot that "produces a thousand times more code than a human programmer."

Then when you think with some certain people saying yeah use A.I to write your code .... we will become forever renters. if you can't write code by hand & have to depend on A.I what happens when the providers raise prices ? same thing with cloud computing ?

a certain crowd - SF people - VCs etc want people to be technoserfs

Reading this from South America, there is another layer that often gets lost in US-centric discussions like this.

For many people here, the move away from US platforms is not primarily about surveillance, product quality, or even conscious digital sovereignty in the European sense. It is more visceral and historical. There is a long-standing anti-US sentiment rooted in decades of interventionism in Latin America. For some users, avoiding US tech products is simply a symbolic refusal to participate in systems that come from a country associated with coups, economic pressure, and political interference in the region.

This is not necessarily about whether European alternatives are better. Often they are chosen precisely because they are not American. That conversation has been present for years, but it intensified during the Trump era, especially as his international posture became more openly aggressive, erratic, and performative. The image projected abroad is less diplomatic and more about asserting power at any cost.

The recent capture of Nicolás Maduro brought this sentiment back to the surface. This is not about defending Maduro or denying authoritarianism in Venezuela. It is about the methods. The way the US exercises power, bypasses norms, and frames these actions as demonstrations of dominance reinforces long-held distrust, regardless of who the target is.

From this side of the world, it often looks like a superpower acting out of anxiety. A fear of losing its central position as China, Russia, and other actors gain influence. That fear translates into unilateral actions and a public discourse that feels unhinged compared to the more restrained, protocol-driven communication of previous administrations.

So when people here talk about abandoning US platforms, it is not always a tech debate. Sometimes it is a political and emotional one, shaped by memory, history, and how power is experienced from the outside rather than from the center.

Disclaimer: this comment was written in Spanish and translated and edited with the assistance of ChatGPT, which is, admittedly, a US-based tool.

There's a lot of interesting stuff in here – e.g. the Polish trains and the ventilators.

Though I wish he'd tone it down a little occasionally. (This is why I'm not an activist.)

It's interesting as for the first time I've found myself mildly encumbered by DRM, notably some old Apple FairPlay files I bought prior to 2007 (or 2009) - which I can't play in non-Apple software.

But these are minor inconveniences compared to servicing costs of trains, tractors and so on, which get passed on to the rest of us indirectly.

I'm not sure if "disenshittificatory" will ever catch on. I'd propose d17n for disenshittification, except there's already a d18n for a project that masks sensitive fields in databases..

Obvious problem is anticircumvention laws are just as much an interest of the EU and others. These laws pass power from the individual, and the EU (its corps and govs) are just as interested in exercising power over the individual.

That’s a long speech but it’s interesting. I recommend to read it, it brings interesting point. Although experience tell me none of them will become true.

As always a nice article that make us think.

But the greatest pillar is his alliance is governments. They must fund these projects.

This is powerful stuff, I think these trends will grow rapidly and it’s bound to become a hot topic

I thought this article would have to do with the transfer of ICANN's power from the US government to a general non-profit thing in 2016.

I'm not sure what benefit any country outside of the USA gets for honoring trade agreements that bind them to enforce US anti-circumvention, US copyright, and US DRM. A fortune awaits any country who has the guts to say "you know what, USA, we're going to allow blatantly copying your shit--what are you going to do, tariff us? Oh, wait, you already are!"

I like the initial emphasis on the trade treaties of his talk.

IMO the scope and amount of these treaties have been unacceptable and the only reason they passed were due to the framing of thia magical thinking that any increased trade is always great "enlarging the pie" and everyone ignores the fact that it creates a huge monoculture that is unable to accommodate people's with vastly different needs.

These treaties alienate people in the same same supranational orgs like EU does.

The framing of "rules" based order masks the fact that its "rules set mostly by the hegemon in its favour"

This anticircumvention law is criminally stupid and scandalous. It has to go.

"Freedom exists in the tension between equals" - TFM (one of those "self-described libertarians" this article speaks of).

Simply by being powerful, the US became the weapon of choice by the worst people to censor and block anyone they didn't like (socialists, libertarians).

Now that there is a multipolar world, with competing principles and goals, it's a lot more work to evict your enemies from the entire internet.

It's not clear that the EU can force Apple to write code that opens up the iOS platform for alternative app stores and payment methods, but there is one thing that the EU can absolutely do with 100% reliability, any time they want: the EU can decide not to let Apple use Europe's courts to shut down European companies that defend European merchants, performers, makers, news outlets, game devs and creative workers, from Apple's ripoff, by jailbreaking phones.

This is my approach to far-reaching private property in general, not just IP: just have courts decline to enforce it. That is less violence and more libertarian than anarcho-capitalists.

Imagine having the courts vigorously defend your personal property rights and your first 3 homes, but gradually less guarantees for your 10th and 100th house. It would be hard for, say, Blackrock to buy up all those houses or Bill Gates to buy up all that farmland.

This is philosophically in step with the Lockian proviso, and just closer to natural law in general. A lion, no matter how strong or clever, can’t defend and enforce his rules on a swath of land past a certain point. Humans just came up with these systems due to abstract concepts like property ownership, corporations, countries etc. having no limits.

PS: This guy is onto something. Repealing or relaxing laws benefiting others is exactly the way you get back at them. Tariffs are not.

halfway through reading it and while i like this guys attitude and agree wholeheartedly with what hes saying, if any country does what hes suggesting they'll be sanctioned, have their leaders kidnapped or get nuked... who's gonna go for that? best you can do right now is step quietly and try to build your nations strength for the coming conflict.

Unfortunately, all it will take is an appropriate choice of story about "Nazis"/"child predators"/"pirates"/"terrorists"/"Russian bots" sideloading unregulated apps or disabling the GPS trackers on their cars, and every prospective member of Doctorow's great new coalition (including most everyone in attendance when the talk was given) can be peeled away with ease.

Cory's new book is also a pretty cool read, glad I found his work. Shows the enshittification processes big tech went through really well. Also touches on the post-american internet.

Recent incidents with Grok creating sexualized pics is yet another example of "enshittification", IMO. This is also the result of too permissive laws + monopolies, which only erodes trust.

Verbose, meandering and hopeful all spelled out in over 8,000 words. My own conclusion.... the cowardly countries of the world will do nothing to upset the US, they will not even consider uniting as a coalition because they don't trust each other enough. It's a dog eat dog world now.

They will do less to empower their own people. In fact, empowering people seem to be on the bottom of the list for most countries.

If we keep believing hopeful dribble like this, we get nowhere. There was nothing actionable here, no call to arms, no organization, no solutions.

You can't undo 25 years of a well engineered, intertwined logistical nightmare maintain by trillions of dollars and millions of people... by the "possible" action of a single country that may possibly, hopefully, maybe... repeal a thing.

It's this kind of hopeful rhetoric that keeps the current system humming happily and the billionaire class drinking champagne. The world has changed. There is a new world order coalescing and gaining strength. It is the one that entered a sovereign country and stole their oil.

There is a true ruling class emerging and the rest of us that will serve them.

> A post-American Internet that is possible because Trump has mobilized new coalition partners to join the fight on our side.

I'm sorry, was the pre-trump era more pro-privacy or respectful of European's sovereignty? Is Snowden forgotten now? What about the State department cable leaks?

I didn't know people relied on governments being friendly for internet security so much.

> In politics, coalitions are everything.....That's where Trump came from: a coalition of billionaires, white nationalists, Christian bigots, authoritarians, conspiratorialists, imperialists, and self-described "libertarians" who've got such a scorching case of low-tax brain worms that they'd vote for Mussolini if he'd promise to lower their taxes by a nickel.

Ok, inflammatory wording aside, this isn't wrong, but the item over which a coalition is built is important. Building a coalition because of some group membership will always result in toxic cesspools in my opinion. But coalitions build around policy can be productive. quid-pro-quo coalitions of "I'll support you on X if you support me on Y" is also how political parties start and they result in terrible results for regular people.

A lot of anti-privacy law these days is also coming out of Europe (recent one: Chat control). I think current politics and trump are good recruitment tools, but they're not effective in terms of getting things done. For example, I disagree on just about everything with trumpers, but I guarantee you can build a coalition that includes many trumpers/MAGAts when it comes to stopping things like chat control. Point being, if you have a goal, stick to it. Build coalitions and policies around it. Thinking like this does more harm than good, now it is a social/cultural/national warfare. If I didn't know better, I would feel like I should oppose this person simply as a result of being an American myself.

How can you talk about coalitions and make a point about excluding people from your coalition. Your coalition in other words is built not around policy, or enacting change but around opposing groups of people. It's worded and crafted as if supporters of this cause must view it as a means to opposing other people, instead of making changes.

Even something as simple as "let's stop using Microsoft office" makes sense, we can then talk about funding something that can compete with it. But if you worded it as "let's oppose america" umm..ok, I guess people that don't really care about america either way probably don't have a place in your coalition?

That's one thing I'm disliking heavily, the nationalization of open source and privacy related things.

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Personally, I think it would be great if various foreign countries reacted to the Trump tariffs by repealing laws compelling them to defend various intellectual property claims that primarily but not exclusively benefit large American companies. I think this is extremely unlikely to happen, in large part because this issue just has very little to do with US tariffs at all, and affects business relationships in non-US countries as well, and is clearly just Cory Doctorow's long-standing hobbyhorse that he cared about decades ago when the world and US political landscape looked very different. But I largely agree with him on this point, so sure, whatever.

I also think it would largely be good if European institutions used more free software hosted directly by the people who use it, rather than relying on software platforms ultimately run by American companies subject to American law. Like Doctorow, I thought the same thing 15 or 20 years ago as well.

There's also the important caveat that American free speech law is the best in the world, and in particular other anglophone countries, not to mention European countries in general, routinely arrest and charge people for political speech on social media that would be unambiguously protected speech in the US. Yeah, it's bad that Larry Bushart was jailed because the local sheriff's department interpreted his joke about the Charlie Kirk assassination as a terroristic threat, but this was ultimately one local sheriff and prosecutor being basically individually corrupt - charges were dropped because there is no legal basis in the US for making jokes about people getting politically assassinated on social media to be a crime, and he's apparently suing the sheriff's department over this. I hope he wins. Lucy Connolly in the UK spent a year in prison for her social media tweets and the prime minister of the UK defended the conduct of the UK criminal justice system. I do not think that a social media platform run by a company directly subject to UK speech law (or the laws of most other countries around the world) would be dramatically better than the status quo.

> And speaking of ICE thugs, there are plenty of qualified technologists who have fled the US this year, one step ahead of an ICE platoon looking to put them and their children into a camp. Those skilled hackers are now living all over the world, joined by investors who'd like to back a business whose success will be determined by how awesome its products are, and not how many $TRUMP coins they buy.

This is wishful thinking - the average person actively evading ICE right now is a low-wage laborer from a 3rd world country who either snuck over the US border or overstayed a visa years ago because they judged that living illegally in the US was better than staying in their shitty 3rd world country. Any person who is actually a qualified technologist probably has some better options than illegally immigrating to the US with their minor children.

Also any children that an illegal immigrant has on US soil are legally natural-born US citizens by the 14th amendment. ICE has no power to deport them, and indeed those anchor babies can potentially use their legal status as a way to get other members of their family including the illegal-immigrant parents who bore them some kind of legal status in the US.

> Rich, powerful people are, at root, solipsists. The only way to amass a billion dollars is to inflict misery and privation on whole populations. The only way to look yourself in the mirror after you've done that, is to convince yourself that those people don't matter, that, in some important sense, they aren't real.

This is simply not true. The way to amass a billion dollars is to either be a local elite in a 3rd world country taking advantage of oil resources, or to be a founder or extremely early investor in a company that gets world-changingly big. Misery and privation is the default state of humanity, humanity has only conquered that to the extent we have so far by technological innovation, and a lot of important technological innovations come from companies that got to be huge by selling stuff that people find valuable and pay money for. This is the exact opposite of inflicting misery and privation on people.

> Think of Elon Musk calling everyone who disagrees with him an "NPC,” or all those "Effective Altruists," who claimed the moral high ground by claiming to care about 53 trillion imaginary artificial humans who will come into existence in 10,000 years at the expense of extending moral consideration to people alive today.

Elon Musk calling people who disagree with him NPCs is him acting exactly the same way as an edgy, extremely-online, pseudonymous shitposter. Which is frankly novel for someone with his immense level of wealth, and makes him more akin to the average internet shitposter than most billionaires. Bill Gates wasn't doing this kind of thing when he was the richest person on earth.

Effective altruists who buy into extreme longtermist moral theories that put a lot of weight on trillions of sentient beings who might exist in the far-future are certainly weird from the perspective of the average person; but moral philosophies that have unintuitive consequences are nothing new, and have more to do with very smart, high-openness academic nerds than the ultra-wealthy.

I think that bringing up extreme-longtermist EAs in this section of the essay betrays an important lack of understanding on Doctorow's part. He's trying to argue that the software products produced by well-known American corporations are bad because they allow those companies to control what their users can do, and wield this control towards earning more money from ads - sure, fair enough, this is a reasonable criticism. He then pivots towards attacking AI on the grounds that it will let these companies replace their programmers and produce more bad code - this is, I think, failing to really think about the promises and risks of this fairly-new set of technologies, but okay, yeah, in principle someone could use AI to generate code that is bad for some purpose.

Then he starts talking about tech company CEOs he dislikes and throws in this jab at effective altruists in general - and this clearly has nothing at all to do with his actual argument. Doctorow is basically free-associating about people he dislikes, and some bay area tech company CEOs are vaguely socially-adjacent to some bay area tech effective altruists and some effective altruists think that extreme-longterm visions of humanity's future imply that there will be astronomically more sentient beings existing then than exist now, and this has unintuitive moral consequences.

Not all Effective Altruists are extreme-longtermists in this way - the modal EA cause is trying to reduce human suffering and death in Africa today by making anti-malarial bednets more widely available - and there's certainly plenty of reasonable moral-philosophical debate to be had about exactly what various visions of the long-term future of humanity imply about how we ought to act now. Doctorow doesn't care about this, he isn't even thinking about it, he's tossing off a throwaway line in an essay because he wants to complain about a group of people he thinks are obviously bad. This is lazy and unprincipled writing.

> That's where Trump came from: a coalition of billionaires, white nationalists, Christian bigots, authoritarians, conspiratorialists, imperialists,

Uh, no.

I've been told my entire life it is good for me to ship jobs overseas and for the country I live in, to be a "service" industry. I thought it was crazy then, as I do now.

The Trump coalition is the ONLY administration who has meaningfully reversed policies that push jobs away from my own country.

Crappification is a better word.

This post highlights Enshittification, which in genera; is the process where platforms start out serving users, then shift to exploiting users to benefit business customers, and finally hollow everything out to extract maximum profit for themselves.

European countries are de facto vassals of the US. Not because they have to be, not because it benefits them, but because this is what the politicians and their voters want.

Instead of taking care of Ukraine themselves, and providing security guarantees to Ukraine themselves, they expect the US to do it. Instead of supplying Ukraine itself, they need the US to do it. And all of this against an opponent, Russia, that is on paper almost entirely insignificant.

As things stand today, European countries cannot survive independently with US support, making them effectively vassals. And what is worse is, most of the political elite in Europe hate the Americans that they have made themselves completely dependent on.

I don't really like this status quo, as a European I think this is pathetic and embarrassing that we are entirely dependent on US without any need for us being dependent on them. But I don't get the elites that complain about the status quo on one hand, and on the other hand refuse to do anything to change it.

With the incoming invasion of Greenland this will massively accelerate.