The Post-American Internet  ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Anti-Circumvention Made Devices Untouchable** - Anti-circumvention laws criminalize modifying devices and investigating their defects even when lawful. - Cory Doctorow argues these laws turned manufacturers' products into no-go zones and enabled widespread enclosure of user control. Transcript: Cory Doctorow Next month, I start my 25th year there. And I know I'm hardly unbiased, but as far as I'm concerned, there is no group anywhere on earth that does the work of the caliber that EFF does for our digital rights. And I'm an activist there. And so for the past quarter of a century, my job has been fighting something that I call the war on general purpose computing. Now, if you were at 28C3 14 years ago, you may have heard me give a talk with that title. Those are the trenches I have been in with EFF since my very first day on the job. That was a day when I flew to Los Angeles and crashed the inaugural meeting of something called the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group. This was an unholy alliance of tech companies, media companies, broadcasters, and cable operators, and they'd gathered at the invitation of this lavishly corrupt American congressman, A man called Billy Tozen, who had promised them a new regulation, a rule that would ban the manufacture and sale of digital computers unless they had been damaged to specifications Set by that group. Specifications for technical measures to block the execution of code that their shareholders did not want to see executed in the wild. Now that rule was called the broadcast flag and it actually did pass through the American regulatory system. The Federal Communications Commission passed it as a rule, so we sued the FCC. We overturned the rule. So, thank you. Yeah, it was a good day. So, we won that skirmish, but my friends, I have very bad news, although it's not news that will surprise you. Despite wins like that important one, we have been losing the war on general purpose computers for the past 25 years. But that's why I've come to Hamburg today, because after decades of throwing myself against a locked door, the door that leads to a new good internet, one that delivers the technological Self-determination of the old good internet, and the ease of use of Web 2.0 that let our normie friends come and join the party, that door has been unlocked. Today, it is open a crack. I mean, it's open a crack. And here's the weirdest part. The guy who unlocked that door is Donald Trump. Now, he didn't do it on purpose, but thanks to Trump's incontinent belligerence, we are on the cusp of the post-American internet, a new digital nervous system for the 21st century. An internet that we can build together without worrying about America's demands or its priorities. Now, don't get me wrong, I am not happy about Trump or his policies, but as my friend Joey Davila likes to say, when life gives you SARS, you make SARS-CoV The only thing worse than living Through all the terror that Trump has unleashed on America and the world would be going through all of that and not salvaging anything of value from it. So that's what I'm here to talk to you about today. The post-American internet that we can wrestle away from Trump's chaos. The post-American internet that is possible because Trump has mobilized new coalition partners to fight on our side. Now in politics, coalitions are everything. Anytime you see a group of people suddenly make a breakthrough in making a change that they failed to make for years and years, it's a sure bet that they have found coalition partners. New allies who don't want all the same things that they want, but want enough of the same things to fight on their side. And that's where Trump came from. He's at the front of a coalition of billionaires, white nationalists, Christian bigots, authoritarians, conspiratorialists, imperialists, and of course, self-described libertarians Who've got such a scorching case of low-tax brain worms that they'd vote for Mussolini if he'd take five cents off their tax bill. And that's what's got me... And that's what's got me so excited, is that we've got a new coalition in the war on general purpose computers. A coalition that includes digital rights activists who've been on the lines for decades, but also now people who want to turn America's tech trillions into billions for their own economy. And national security hawks who are quite rightly worried about digital sovereignty. Now my thesis here is that this is an unstoppable coalition, which is good news because for the first time in decades, I think victory is in our grasp. So let me explain. 14 years ago, I stood in front of this group and I talked about the war on general purpose computing. Now that's my snappy name for the fight, but the boring name that they use in legislatures for this fight is something called anti-circumvention law. Under anti-circumvention law, it is a crime to alter the functioning of a digital product or service unless the manufacturer approves of your modification. And crucially, this is true whether or not your modification violates any other law. Anti-circumvention law, it originates in the USA with section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, which establishes a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence And a $500,000 fine for a first offense bypassing an access control to a copyrighted work. So practically speaking, if you design a service or device with even the flimsiest of systems to prevent modification of its application code or its firmware, it is a felony. It is a jailable felony to modify that code or that firmware. ([Time 0:03:21](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ad756618-0a10-404e-a597-3d24fbdf2c52)) - **Coffee For Compliance** - A Central American trade negotiator said they accepted anti-circumvention because the U.S. threatened to withhold coffee. - Doctorow uses this story to show how trade pressure forced many countries to adopt these laws. Transcript: Cory Doctorow Many years ago, in the years before Viktor Orban took over Hungary, I used to guest lecture at a PhD program in political science at the Central European University in Budapest. And one summer, after I'd lectured to my students on anti-circumvention law, one of them approached me. Now, they had been the information minister of a Central American country during the CAFTA negotiations, and one day they'd received a call from the trade negotiator calling from The CAFTA trade negotiating room, and the negotiator said, you know how you told me not to give the Americans anti-circumvention law under any circumstances? Well, they've told me they will not take our coffee unless we give them anti-circumvention. And I'm sorry, we just can't lose the U.S. Coffee market. Our economy could collapse, so we're going to get anti-circumvention. I'm really sorry. That's it. That's why every government in the world allowed U.S. Big tech companies to declare open season on their own people's private data and ready cash. The alternative was tariffs. Well, I don't know if you've heard, but we have tariffs now. ([Time 0:12:14](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b506732d-eb4c-4fa9-80fe-a3f0d9c73def)) - **Repeal Anti-Circumvention Laws** - Repeal anti-circumvention laws to enable companies to build jailbreaks, alternate app stores, and migration tools. - Doctorow says this would create new businesses that undercut big tech margins and enable global competition. Transcript: Cory Doctorow One that is just sitting there, begging to be tried. What about repealing anti-circumvention law? Now, if you're a technologist or an investor based in a country that repeals its anti-circumvention law, you can go into business making the disincentificatory products that plug Into America's defective tech exports and allow the people who own and use those products to use them in ways that are good for them, even if those ways are bad for the shareholders of The company that made the product. Think of John Deere tractors. When a farmer's John Deere tractor, thank you, there's going to be a lot more of that. When a farmer's John Deere tractor breaks down, they are expected to repair it, to swap in the new parts and assemblies to replace whatever's mouthing. But that tractor will not recognize new part and will not start working again, not until the farmer spends $200 on a service call-out from an official John Deere service rep, whose only Job is to type an unlock code into the tractor's console to initialize the part and pair it with the tractor's main computing unit. Modding a tractor to bypass this activation step violates anti-circumvention law, meaning farmers all over the world are stuck with this rip-off garbage because their own government Will lock up anyone who makes a tractor mod that disables this parts-pairing check in this American product. So what if Canada repealed Bill C-11, the Copyright Modernization Act of 2012? That's our anti-circumvention law. Well, then a company like Honeybee, a Canadian company that already makes tractor front ends and attachments, could hire some smart University of Waterloo computer science graduates. I'm a proud U of W dropout. And it could put them to work jailbreaking John Deere's defective tractor firmware. And then they could offer to everyone in the world. They could sell that crack to anyone with an internet connection and a payment method, including that poor American farmer whose soybeans were currently tariffing. ([Time 0:14:49](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4f8e7551-3aae-4877-b605-e2c5b22d2b44)) - **Trump Opened A Door To A Post-American Internet** - Trump's tariffs and behavior have dismantled the global trade consensus that enforced US-friendly tech rules. - Doctorow sees this disruption as an opportunity to build a post-American internet freed from U.S. legal pressure. Transcript: Cory Doctorow So it has been pretty amazing to watch Trump swiftly and decisively dismantle the global system of trade and destroy the case for the world continuing to arrange its affairs to protect The interests of America's capital class. I mean, it's not a path I would have chosen. I'd have preferred no Trump at all to this breakthrough, but I'll take this massive own goal if Trump insists. I mean, I'm not saying I've become an accelerationist, but at this point, I'm not exactly not an accelerationist. ([Time 0:19:15](https://share.snipd.com/snip/aa2a02aa-5b71-4234-937f-63fec2df990f)) - **Tractors Can Be Remotely Bricked** - John Deere remotely bricked tractors taken to another region after theft in Ukraine, showing manufacturer control over hardware. - Doctorow uses this to demonstrate how manufacturers can weaponize remote kill-switches against users. Transcript: Cory Doctorow Do you remember back in 2022 when Putin's thugs looted millions of dollars worth of John Deere tractors from Ukraine and all those tractors showed up in Chechnya, the John Deere company Pushed a kill signal over the air to those tractors and bricked them. John Deere is every bit as vulnerable to the Trump administration as Microsoft is, and they can brick most of the tractors in the world, and the tractors they can't brick are probably Made by Massey Ferguson, the number two company in the ag-tech cartel, also an American company just as vulnerable to political attacks from the U.S. Government. ([Time 0:26:46](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a0f00e2b-e6c0-4a82-a9e8-5b88acca0546)) - **ICC Email Outage Example** - Doctorow cites the ICC incident where Microsoft's services failed after the U.S. criticized the court. - He uses it to illustrate how reliance on U.S. cloud providers creates geopolitical vulnerability. Transcript: Cory Doctorow Do you remember back in 2022 when Putin's thugs looted millions of dollars worth of John Deere tractors from Ukraine and all those tractors showed up in Chechnya, the John Deere company Pushed a kill signal over the air to those tractors and bricked them. John Deere is every bit as vulnerable to the Trump administration as Microsoft is, and they can brick most of the tractors in the world, and the tractors they can't brick are probably Made by Massey Ferguson, the number two company in the ag-tech cartel, also an American company just as vulnerable to political attacks from the U.S. Government. Now, none of this is news to global leaders. Even before Microsoft and Trump bricked the ICC, they were trying to figure out a path to digital sovereignty. But the Trump administration's outrageous conduct and rhetoric over the past 11 months has turned digital sovereignty from a nice-to to a must-have. So finally, we're starting to see some movement, like Eurostack, a really cool project to clone the functionality of ([Time 0:26:46](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c33f4f2b-bb9a-4a05-85ea-8c5521449247)) - **Build Migration And Interop Tools** - Build adversarial interoperability tools like scrapers and headless browsers to export data from US platforms without their cooperation. - Doctorow stresses migration tooling is essential for digital sovereignty and mass exodus from US clouds. Transcript: Cory Doctorow But the Eurostack is heading for a crisis. It's great to build open, locally hosted, auditable, trustworthy services that replicate the useful features of big tech, but you also need to build the adversarial interoperability Tools that allow for the mass export of millions of documents, sensitive data structures, and edit histories. We need scrapers and headless browsers to accomplish the adversarial interoperability that will guarantee ongoing connectivity to institutions still housed in U.S. Data centers and U.S. Clouds. Because U.S. Companies are not going to facilitate the mass exodus of international customers from their products. Just think of how Apple responded to the relatively minor demand to open up the iOS app store, and now imagine the thermonuclear foot-dragging, tantrum-throwing, and malicious compliance That they'll come up with when faced with the departure of a plurality of businesses and governments in a 27-nation block of 500 million affluent consumers. Any serious attempt at digital sovereignty needs migration tools that work without the cooperation of American big tech companies. ([Time 0:27:51](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a11a27d7-653c-4af7-a6c1-2ea0231d1739)) - **Software As A Commons Reduces Liability** - Open, collaboratively maintained software scales as a commons and reduces software liability for public institutions. - Doctorow argues commons-based code benefits from international auditability and shared maintenance. Transcript: Cory Doctorow The project to rip out all the cloud-connected, backdoored, untrustworthy black boxes that power our institutions, our medical implants, our vehicles, and our tractors, and replace Them with collectively maintained, open, free, trustworthy, auditable code. This project is the only project that benefits from economies of scale, rather than being paralyzed by the exponential crises of scale that everyone else in the post-American world Are confronting. That's because any open free tool adopted by any public institution, like the Eurostack services, can be audited, localized, pen-tested, debugged, and improved by institutions In every country. It's a commons. It's more like a science than a technology in that it is universal and international and collaborative. ([Time 0:33:32](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b17d6197-f152-43e5-8dcd-beae9fe1707e)) - **Replace Silos With Open Alternatives** - Build free, open alternatives to siloed services and firmware to end vendor lock-in. - Doctorow calls for dropping in interoperable replacements to reclaim technological self-determination. Transcript: Cory Doctorow Let's build, drop in, free open alternatives to the services and firmware we rely on. Let us end the era of silos. I mean, isn't it fucking weird that you have to care which network someone is using if you want to talk to them instead of just deciding who you want to talk to? The fact that you have to figure out whether the discussion you want to join is on Twitter or Blue Sky, Mastodon or Instagram, that is just the most prodigy AOL, CompuServe ass way of running A digital world. ([Time 0:49:29](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4cd93394-e486-406d-bda1-8d7155e0a3b8)) - **Get Organized With Digital Rights Groups** - Join local and international digital rights organizations to help repeal anti-circumvention and build the post-American internet. - Doctorow lists groups like EFF and Netzpolitik as ways to get involved. Transcript: Cory Doctorow You can join EFF, and you can join groups in your own country, like Netzpolitik here in Germany, the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, La Quadratur de Net in France, the Open Rights Group in the UK, EF Finland, ISOC Bulgaria, Xnet, DFRI, Quintessence, Bits of Freedom, Open Media, FSFE, or any of dozens of organizations around the world. The door is open a crack. The wind is blowing. The post-American internet is upon us. It's a new good internet that delivers the technological self-determination of the old good internet and the ease of use of Web 2.0 that let our normie friends use it too. And I can't wait for all of us to get to hang out there because it's going to be great. ([Time 0:53:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/fc08fd92-44dd-41d4-beea-59f1f54f35e6))