Happy Marin Luther King Jr day! In honor of the holiday, I have a hopeful (in a strange kind of way) newsletter today.
I’ve written a number of times about how bored I am with the internet. The primary reason for this feeling is that the internet as I knew it in the late 90s, where it held the promise of being a free and independent communication and publishing platform, has been replaced with just a handful of monopolies that get all the traffic. So, while it’s still possible to build your own website, it doesn’t stand much of a chance of getting anyone to look at it unless you advertise it on Facebook. Even then, it doesn’t stand much of a chance of getting anywhere near the amount of traffic as Facebook and a handful of other sites.
I stumbled upon a video while I was procrastinating today that gave me reason for hope.
The video is of a talk Cory Doctorow gave at in Hamburg at the end of 2025 titled “A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet.” If you don’t know by now who Cory Doctorow is or what “enshittification” is, you probably don’t live on the same planet as me. Cory Doctorow has been at the frontier of digital rights since the beginning of the Internet. He has long talked about the concept of “enshittification,” which is the time-tested process by which internet services that were once useful and good become evil and shitty by focusing on providing value to their advertisers and stockholders rather than to users. He recently released a book about this concept and has been seemingly everywhere lately promoting it.
In this video (which I’ve linked below), Doctorow talks about how the U.S. has, ever since the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, made it a crime (punishable by prison time!) to bypass digital right management or modify digital devices and code without the permission of their creator. This law was written for the benefit of giant tech companies, and they’re the reason why you can only buy iPhone apps from the Apple App Store, why phones are locked in to carriers, why a handful of social media sites control the internet, why you have to take your car to the dealer to get repaired, and why owners of John Deere tractors have to pay John Deere a fee for the privilege of repairing their own tractors.
In the years since 1998 (prior to the current administration), every country the U.S. trades with passed similar laws and made American companies’ monopolies stronger and worse (shittier). The reason they did this is because the U.S. demanded that they do or else the U.S. would impose tariffs on them.
This brings us to the hopeful part. As Cory points out, tariffs are no longer an effective threat when they’re being implemented randomly anyway and are subject to change at any moment and when trade agreements no longer mean anything to the U.S.
Any other country now has an opportunity to repeal its law that criminalize modifying and reverse-engineering digital devices and code. The result will be that companies in that country will be free to create fixes and improvements to products and services and it will start to break up the tech monopolies, who will no longer be able to rely on locking users into their platforms and services. This will open up a huge market for people to repair their own computers and phones, create software and services that make the internet better and more interoperable, and increase your freedom to what you want to do with the digital products you use.
I highly recommend you watch the full video to understand how important this could be, and how there’s now a real chance for positive progress, even when it seems like the world is otherwise falling apart.
Thanks for reading, and best wishes.
-Chris