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With Power Comes Great Responsibility Platforms Want to Be Utilities (2021)
Whether it’s “bringing the world closer together” (Facebook), “organizing the world’s information” (Google), to be a market “where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online” (Amazon) or “to make personal computing accessible to each and every individual” (Apple), the founding missions of tech giants reveal a desire to become indispensable to our digital lives.
CFAA, DMCA, and other rules allowing easy termination and limiting how users and competitors could reconfigure existing technology created a world where doing things that displeased a company’s shareholders could literally be turned into a crime - a kind of “ felony contempt of business-model. That’s how we’ll turn the internet back into an ecosystem of companies, co-ops and nonprofits of every size that can take receipt of your data, and offer you an online base of operations from which you can communicate with friends, communities and customers regardless of whether they’re on the indieweb or inside a Big Tech silo. The fact that terms of service, DRM, and other technologies and laws can prevent third parties from supplying software for your phone, playing back the media you’ve bought, and running the games you own still gives big companies too much leverage over your digital life.
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