Interoperability Won’t Save Us. But It Might Help.
Cory Doctorow’s pro-interoperability treatise is a welcome salvo in the battle for the internet, but its reach exceeds its grasp
by Kurt Schiller
The Internet Con: How To Seize The Means Of Computation is a short, sharp strike from the heart—a rallying cry in a battle for the soul of the internet. It is sincere, righteous, and focused.
It is also, unfortunately, misguided—or at least incomplete.
The Internet Con is a bit of a bifurcated endeavor. On the one hand, it offers a brief overview of the internet’s journey from anarchic free space to corporate-controlled monopoly playground. On the other, it outlines a blueprint for exactly how this digital enclosure could be undone; how the creative (and financial) energies currently captured by the likes of Google, Twitter, and Facebook could be liberated and redirected into a more egalitarian and equal playing field, where the fruits of digital labor are shared rather than centralized, and the internet could once again be a domain of free expression and creator-ownership, rather than a borderland of controlling middlemen perched atop unjust pyramids of digital creators and misappropriated labor.
On the first goal—that of a concise history of internet monopolization—Doctorow is quite successful. He makes a compelling (if incomplete—the book’s focus is primarily regulatory, while underplaying the impact of business and social changes) case that much of the blame for internet consolidation should fall on the toothlessness of modern monopoly law and the failure to mandate open standards. And indeed, the internet was a major break from past communication standards—like VHS, telephony, broadcast and cable television, and so on—in that monopoly law was applied loosely, if at all, and there was far less drive for adopted top-down standards, opting instead for an open-market model that gave large businesses more and more unfettered control over the medium’s governance. This historical section is engaging, entertaining, and a welcome throwback to the sort of techno-activism that Doctorow has always excelled at, criticizing the shape of technology and technology policy for its outsize and often overlooked impacts on the modern world.
But the same grognardian focus that makes Doctorow so effective at unspooling computer history is decidedly less helpful when it comes time to contemplate a better future for the internet, or to outline the steps it might take to get us there.
Doctorow’s basic argument for fixing the internet comes down to the idea that its current state can be explained by a lack of interoperability—the ability of one piece of software to speak and share data with another piece of software, in particular one made by a different and even competing organization. In practice, that means being able to open Microsoft Word docs in Google Docs or OpenOffice; exporting a list of email subscribers from MailChimp to Substack; or including support for open standards like MP3 and EPUB instead of forcing users to use corporate-controlled formats like ALAC (Apple’s music format) and AZW3 (Amazon’s DRM-ridden proprietary ebook format). Critically for Doctorow’s argument, it also means the ability to take a service like Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp and access it not only through the official apps, but through third-party apps that make use of the same infrastructure. Such multi-service applications were once commonplace—allowing a user to ditch AOL Instant Messenger or ICQ for a different app, while retaining the ability to talk to their AOL and ICQ friends—but have become rarer and rarer as fragmentation and app-based lock-in became the norm. (Even the humble SMS message has been subject to this digital enclosure—when your friends with Android phones can’t respond or even properly see iPhone group messages, that is precisely the lack of interoperability that Doctorow thinks we should address.)
There is a fair bit of truth to this assessment—or, at least, its first half. The platform companies that have come to dominate the modern internet (and receive a disproportionate amount of the profit) certainly do oppose broad interoperability, at least when it threatens their bottom line. The business models of these companies—namely, digital ads and the data required to effectively target them—is dependent upon its userbase remaining confined to their first-party software. If you could use Google search or YouTube without having to visit Google.com or YouTube itself, Google would miss out on the mountains of ad revenue it generates by keeping us confined to those platforms. The same is true of Facebook, Twitter, and so on—and so predictably these companies have all taken increasingly hardline stances against third-party apps and plugins, either because of security and UX concerns (as they would have you believe) or the simple expedient of not making much, if any, money from them, while still being left holding the bill for their maintenance and upkeep. If you could simply export your Facebook friends list and all its associated data, Doctorow argues, and then keep talking with them even after you have ditched Facebook itself, users would be far more likely (and far more able) to abandon it for one of its many competitors.
The ad-based business models of today’s internet giants depend on keeping users confined to first-party software.
The problem comes when the book recommends this same course of action for the far larger issue of centralized corporate control. While users like Doctorow and I would almost certainly avail ourselves of alternative applications that brought Facebook and Twitter’s features and functionality more in line with our expectations for the mediums, Doctorow and I are not the average Facebook user; or, indeed, the average user of ANY social network or even major website, save perhaps for outliers such as Stack Overflow or Hacker News. Average Facebook users like, say, my mother—in her seventies, and already near the top of her demographic in terms of computer expertise—aren’t going to be experimenting with third-party Facebook clients any time soon; indeed, the simplicity and broad appeal of these products is one of the reasons she joined and stayed with it to begin with.
As evidence of this, we can look to examples of platforms that do (or did) allow third-party clients. Twitter, for instance, once took a fairly permissive approach to APIs, and third-party clients like Talon, Owly, and TweetDeck were widely available. The service has since cracked down on the use (and usefulness) of their APIs, especially after its acquisition by Elon Musk in 2022, and finally killed off third-party clients more or less completely as of 2023—but even when they were available, as little as 1.1% of all Twitter users actually used third-party clients. And that’s already a platform that skews younger than, say, Facebook or LinkedIn. Interoperability cannot bring back the DIY ethos of the early internet, nor can it defang the companies that have already made trillions—and grown to societal ubiquity—on the backs of its absence. To be sure, mandated interoperability would still be a boon for those few users prepared to avail themselves of it, but it would be a far cry from the usability jubilee Doctorow foretells—especially now that these companies have the benefit of an audience that has only ever navigated today’s walled garden internet.
To me, what Doctorow has provided is a treatise that’s intensely (if well-meaningly) tied to the bygone internet of the 1990s and early 2000s. If this were still the internet of that era—an internet of power users and the skilled, highly educated techno-elite—interoperability may well be enough, and it’s certainly believable that a greater emphasis on interoperability would have slowed or even stopped the ascent of today’s internet monopolists. But here in 2023, Facebook, Google, and Amazon aren’t genies that can be so easily restored to their bottles. Amazon controls nearly 50% of the cloud computing market, despite data portability being foundational to its approach. Google controls an astonishing 91% of search, despite the comparative ease of switching to a different provider.
Would even greater interoperability change this? Maybe—to an extent, and exceedingly slowly. But removing barriers to data portability isn’t enough to undo it, and certainly not to undo it quickly enough to outpace these same companies’ own ability to influence the structure, shape, and tendencies of the internet. Google has already remade the structure of the internet, in large part by changing the behaviors of the internet—just look to technologies like RSS, IRC, and even basic text editors, which have all been displaced by the lowest common denominator appeal of the tech giants’ often less-functional and less-feature-rich first-party alternatives.
Even the simple website has been completely reshaped by Google’s ubiquity. The rise of aggressive SEO and the shift to smartphones—with their constant push notifications and content discovery features—have changed the websites of yesteryear from front page-oriented publications that owned their audience and traffic to mere card-file indexes for Google to pick and choose as it pleases, directing users where it will. There is no closed standard or lock-in preventing people from leaving Google. There is instead habit, and custom, and laziness, and convenience. Google, Apple, and their ilk are more than happy to strong-arm users when it comes to it, but most of the time the simple soft-arm of human behavior more than suffices.
And then there is the troubling matter of interoperability’s double-edged sword. At one point, Doctorow frames Microsoft’s decision to open up the doc/docx format as a victory for free access, and one that helped defang one of the most vicious perpetrators of monopoly practice. But history tells a different story: while Microsoft did indeed open up its standards, it did so at the same time as it began shifting to an alternative subscription-based model that was less dependent upon bulk sales of Microsoft Office licenses—abandoning interoperability-based lock-in for an arguably more insidious form of sunk-cost lock-in. As of this year, Office is used by 83% of Fortune 500 companies, and 45% of the total market. The true beneficiary of Microsoft’s open standards decision was Google, which has successfully captured more than 50% of the office productivity market in the years since. If the ostensible goal of interoperability is to break up these tech giants, it must thus far be called a resounding failure.
And indeed, the same mega-corporations that now control much of the internet’s data are often the foremost champions of open access and interoperability—as long as it suits their needs, of course. The sort of hard lock-in Doctorow speaks of was the castle keep of an earlier age; today they lie open and unguarded. Nor are neutral standards bodies immune to the charms of moneyed corporations. Google, Apple, and Microsoft all use their market dominance and “free” technical contributions to exert considerable influence over the structure and provenance of open standards, tilting them subtly or overtly in their favor. (It would be easy to argue that this, then, is not “true” interoperability, but addressing it would require a far larger top-down regulatory regime than Doctorow’s book is prepared to recommend.)
In the end, my quibble with The Internet Con is one of degree, not of kind. Doctorow is a compelling writer, and an astute thinker, and it would be foolish to dismiss his proposal merely for being incomplete. Interoperability is indeed a foundational value of the internet, and of a free society in general. Right-to-repair, data privacy, and data portability are essential aspects of a modern, egalitarian internet—even if they alone are not enough to overturn the dominant order.
Reclaiming the soul of the internet will require the same disparate domains that brought it into being—social, behavioral, organizational, technological, and regulatory. These are, after all, the same domains in which Google, Apple, and their kin now wage war against us; each must be won in kind if victory is to be realized, and the internet is to become truly ours once again.
Kurt Schiller is the editor-in-chief of Blood Knife and co-host of the podcast Podside Picnic. You can find him on Twitter at @mechanicalkurt.
