#dmca 1201

To stop that from happening, Congress passed the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Despite the word "copyright" appearing in the name of the law, it's not really about defending copyright, it's about defending business models. Under Section 1201 of the DMCA, helping someone bypass a software lock is a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine (for a first offense). That's true whether or not any copyright infringement takes place.

So if you want to modify your Tesla – say, to prevent the company from cheating your odometer – you have to get around a software lock, and that's a felony. Indeed, if any manufacturer puts a software lock on its product, then any changes that require disabling or bypassing that lock become illegal. That's why you can't just buy reliable third-party printer ink – reverse-engineering the "is this an original HP ink cartridge?" program is a literal crime, even though using non-HP ink in your printer is absolutely not a copyright violation. Jay Freeman calls this effect "felony contempt of business model."

Thus we arrive at this juncture, where every time you use a product or device or service, it might behave in a way that is totally unlike the last time you used it. This is true whether you own, lease or merely interact with a product. The changes can be obvious, or they can be subtle to the point of invisibility. And while manufacturers can confine their "updates" to things that make the product better (for example, patching security vulnerabilities), there's nothing to stop them from using this uninspectable, non-countermandable veto over your devices' functionality to do things that harm you – like fucking with your odometer.

Or, you know, bricking your car. The defunct EV maker Fisker – who boasted that it made "software-based cars" – went bankrupt last year and bricked the entire fleet of unsold cars:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/10/software-based-car/#based

I call this ability to modify the underlying functionality of a product or service for every user, every time they use it, "twiddling," and it's a major contributor to enshittification:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

Enshittification's observable symptoms follow a predictable pattern: first, a company makes things good for its users, while finding ways to lock them in. Then, once it knows the users can't easily leave, the company makes things worse for end-users in order to deliver value to business customers. Once these businesses are locked in, the company siphons value away from them, too, until the product or service is a pile of shit, that we still can't leave:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/26/ursula-franklin/#franklinite

Twiddling is key to enshittification: it's the method by which value is shifted from end-users to business customers, and from business customers to the platform. Twiddling is the "switch" in enshittification's series of minute, continuous bait-and-switches. The fact that DMCA 1201 makes it a crime to investigate systems with digital locks makes the modern computerized device a twiddler's playground. Sure, a driver might claim that their odometer is showing bad readings, but they can't dump their car's software and identify the code that is changing the odometer.

This is what I mean by "demon-haunted computers": a computer is "demon-haunted" if it is designed to detect when it is under scrutiny, and, when it senses a hostile observer, it changes its behavior to the innocuous, publicly claimed factory defaults:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/18/descartes-delenda-est/#self-destruct-sequence-initiated

But as soon as the observer goes away, the computer returns to its nefarious ways. This is exactly what happened with Dieselgate, when VW used software that detected the test-suite run by government emissions inspectors, and changed the engine's characteristics when it was under their observation. But once the car was back on the road, it once again began emitting toxic gas at levels that killed killed dozens of people and sickened thousands more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/29/upshot/how-many-deaths-did-volkswagens-deception-cause-in-us.html

Cars are among the most demon-haunted products we use on a daily basis. They are designed from the chassis up to do things that are harmful to their owners, from stealing our location data so it can be sold to data-brokers, to immobilizing themselves if you miss a payment, to downgrading themselves if you stop paying for a "subscription," to ratting out your driving habits to your insurer:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

These are the "legitimate" ways that cars are computers that ignore their owners' orders in favor of instructions they get from the internet. But once a manufacturer arrogates that power to itself, it is confronted with a tempting smorgasbord of enshittificatory gambits to defraud you, control you, and gaslight you. Now, perhaps you could wield this power wisely, because you are in possession of the normal human ration of moral consideration for others, to say nothing of a sense of shame and a sense of honor.

But while corporations are (legally) people, they are decidedly not human. They are artificial lifeforms, "intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic" (as HG Wells said of the marauding aliens in War of the Worlds):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/14/timmy-share/#a-superior-moral-justification-for-selfishness

These alien invaders are busily xenoforming the planet, rendering it unfit for human habitation. Laws that ban reverse-engineering are a devastating weapon that corporations get to use in their bid to subjugate and devour the human race.

The US isn't the only country with a law like Section 1201 of the DMCA. Over the past 25 years, the US Trade Representative has arm-twisted nearly every country in the world into passing laws that are nearly identical to America's own disastrous DMCA. Why did countries agree to pass these laws? Well, because they had to, or the US would impose tariffs on them:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/03/friedmanite/#oil-crisis-two-point-oh

The Trump tariffs change everything, including this thing. There is no reason for America's (former) trading partners to continue to enforce the laws it passed to protect Big Tech's right to twiddle their citizens. That goes double for Tesla: rather than merely complaining about Musk's Nazi salutes, countries targeted by the regime he serves could retaliate against him, in a devastating fashion. By abolishing their anticircuvmention laws, countries around the world would legalize jailbreaking Teslas, allowing mechanics to unlock all the subscription features and software upgrades for every Tesla driver, as well as offering their own software mods. Not only would this tank Tesla stock and force Musk to pay back the loans he collateralized with his shares (loans he used to buy Twitter and the US predidency), it would also abolish sleazy gimmicks like hacking drivers' odometers to get out of paying for warranty service:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/08/turnabout/#is-fair-play

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/15/musklemons/#more-like-edison-amirite

Image: Steve Jurvetson (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tesla_Model_S_Indoors.jpg

Youtube, of course, is the internet's monopoly video platform, with a commanding majority of video streams. It was acquired by Google in 2006 for $1.65b. At the time, the service was hemorrhaging money and mired in brutal litigation, but it had one virtue that made it worth nine figures: people liked it. Specifically, people liked it in a way they didn't like Google Video, which was one of the many, many, many failed internally developed Google products that tanked, and was replaced by a product developed by a company that Google bought, because Google sucks at developing products. They're not Willy Wonka's idea factory – they're Rich Uncle Pennybags, buying up other kids' toys:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/02/google-ai-chatbots-microsoft-bing-chatgpt/673052/

Google operationalized Youtube and built it up to the world's most structurally important video platform. Along the way, Google added some javascript that was intended to block people from "downloading" its videos. I put "downloading" in scare-quotes because "streaming" is a consensus hallucination: there is no way for your computer to display a video that resides on a distant server without downloading it – the internet is not made up of a cunning series of paper-towel rolls and mirrors that convey photons to your screen without sending you the bits that make up the file. "Streaming" is just "downloading" with the "save file" button removed.

In this case, the "save file" button is removed by some javascript on every Youtube page. This isn't hard to bypass: there are dozens of "stream-ripping" sites that let you save any video that's accessible on Youtube. I use these all the time – indeed, I used one last week to gank the video of my speech in Ottawa so I could upload it to my own Youtube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZxbaCNIwg8

(As well as the Internet Archive, natch):

https://archive.org/details/disenshittification-nation

Now, all of this violates Youtube's terms of service, which means that someone who downloads a stream for an otherwise lawful purpose (like I did) is still hypothetically at risk of being punished by Google. We're relying on Google to be reasonable about all this, which, admittedly, isn't the best bet, historically. But at least the field of people who can attack us is limited to this one company.

That's good, because there's zillions of people who rely on stream-rippers, and many of them are Youtube's most popular creators. Youtube singlehandedly revived the form of the "video essay," popularizing it in many guises, from "reaction videos" to full-fledged, in-depth documentaries that make extensive use of clips to illuminate, dispute, and expand on the messages of other Youtube videos.

These kinds of videos are allowed under US copyright law. American copyright law has a broad set of limitation and exceptions, which include "fair use," an expansive set of affirmative rights to access and use copyrighted works, even against the wishes of the copyright's proprietor. As the Supreme Court stated in Eldred, the only way copyright (a government-backed restriction on who can say certain words) can be reconciled with the First Amendment (a ban on government restrictions on speech) is through fair use, the "escape valve" for free expression embedded in copyright:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eldred_v._Ashcroft

Which is to say that including clips from a video you're criticizing in your own video is canonical fair use. What else is fair use? Well, it's "fact intensive," which is a lawyer's way of saying, "it depends." One thing that is 100% true, though, is that fair use is not limited to the "four factors" enumerated in the statute and anyone who claims otherwise has no idea what they're talking about and can be safely ignored:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/27/nuke-first/#ask-questions-never

Now, fair use or not, there are plenty of people who get angry about their videos being clipped for critical treatment in other videos, because lots of people hate being criticized. This is precisely why fair use exists: if you had to secure someone's permission before you were allowed to criticize them, critical speech would be limited to takedowns of stoics and masochists.

This means that the subjects of video essays can't rely on copyright to silence their critics. They also can't use the fact that those critics violated Youtube's terms of service by clipping their videos, because only Youtube has standing to ask a court to uphold its terms of service, and Youtube has (wisely) steered clear of embroiling itself in fights between critics and the people they criticize.

But that hasn't stopped the subjects of criticism from seeking legal avenues to silence their critics. In a case called Cordova v. Huneault, the proprietor of "Denver Metro Audits" is suing the proprietor of "Frauditor Troll Channel" for clipping the former's videos for "reaction videos."

One of the plaintiff's claims here is that the defendant violated Section 1201 of the DMCA by saving videos from Youtube. They argue that Youtube's javascript obfuscator (a "rolling cipher") is an "effective access control" under the statute. Magistrate Judge Virginia K DeMarchi (Northern District of California) agreed with the plaintiff:

https://torrentfreak.com/images/Cordova-v.-Huneault-25-cv-04685-VKD-Order-on-Motion-to-Dismiss.pdf

As Torrentfreak reports, this ruling "gives creators who want to sue rivals an option to sue for more than just simple copyright infringement":

https://torrentfreak.com/ripping-clips-for-youtube-reaction-videos-can-violate-the-dmca-court-rules/

Remember, DMCA 1201 applies whether or not you infringe someone's copyright. It is a blanket prohibition on the circumvention of any "effective access control" for any copyrighted work, even when no one's rights are being violated. It's a way to transform otherwise lawful conduct into a felony. It's what Jay Freeman calls "Felony contempt of business model."

If the higher court upholds this magistrate judge's ruling, then all clipping becomes a crime, and the subjects of criticism will have a ready tool to silence any critic. This obliterates fair use, wipes it off the statute-book. It welds shut copyright's escape valve for free expression.

Now, it's true that the US Copyright Office holds hearings every three years where it grants exemptions to DMCA 1201, and it has indeed granted an exemption for ripping video for critical and educational purposes. But this process is deceptive! The exemptions that the Copyright Office grants are "use exemptions" – they allow you to "make the use." However, they are not "tools exemptions" – they do not give you permission to acquire or share the tool needed to make the use:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/28/mcbroken/#my-milkshake-brings-all-the-lawyers-to-the-yard

Which means that you are allowed to rip a stream, but you're not allowed to use a stream-ripping service. If Youtube's rolling cipher is an "effective access control" then all of those stream-ripping services are wildly illegal, felonies carrying a five-year sentence and a $500k fine for a first offense under DMCA 1201.

Under the US Copyright Office's exemption process, if you want to make a reaction video, then you, personally must create your own stream-ripper. You are not allowed to discuss how to do this with anyone else, and you can't share your stream-ripper with anyone else, and if you do, you've committed a felony.

So this is a catastrophic ruling. If it stands, it will make the production of video essays, reaction videos, and other critical videos into a legal minefield, by giving everyone whose video is clipped and criticized a means to threaten their critics with long prison sentences, fair use be damned. The only people who will safely be able to make this kind of critical video are skilled programmers who can personally defeat Youtube's "rolling cipher." And unlike claims about stream-ripping violating Youtube's terms of service – which can only be brought by Youtube – DMCA 1201 claims can be brought by anyone whose videos get clipped and criticized.

Is Youtube's rolling cipher an "effective access control?" Well, I don't know how to bypass it, but there are dozens of services that have independently figured out how to get around it. That seems like good evidence that the access control is not "effective."

When the DMCA was enacted in 1998, this is exactly the kind of thing experts warned would happen:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/13/ctrl-ctrl-ctrl/#free-dmitry

And here we are, more than a quarter-century later, living in the prison of lawmakers' reckless disregard for evidence and expertise, a world where criticism can be converted into a felony. It's long past time we get rid of this stupid, stupid law:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition

Image: Electronic Frontier Foundation https://www.eff.org/wp/unfiltered-how-youtubes-content-id-discourages-fair-use-and-dictates-what-we-see-online

A thing that keeps happening:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/20/24202166/snoo-premium-subscription-happiest-baby

And happening:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

And happening:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/24/record-scratch/#autoenshittification

In fact, it happens so often I've coined a term for it, "The Darth Vader MBA" (as in, "I'm altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further"):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/01/fulu/#i-am-altering-the-deal

Here's what this all means: any manufacturer who devotes a small amount of engineering work and incurs a small hardware expense can extinguish private property rights altogether.

What do I mean by private property? Well, we can look to Blackstone's 1753 treatise:

The right of property; or that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe.

You can't own your iPhone. If you take your iPhone to Apple and they tell you that it is beyond repair, you have to throw it away. If the repair your phone needs involves "parts pairing" (where a new part won't be recognized until an Apple technician "initializes" it through a DMCA-protected access control), then it's a felony to get that phone fixed somewhere else. If Apple tells you your phone is no longer supported because they've updated their OS, then it's a felony to wipe the phone and put a different OS on it (because installing a new OS involves bypassing an "access control" in the phone's bootloader). If Apple tells you that you can't have a piece of software – like ICE Block, an app that warns you if there are nearby ICE killers who might shoot you in the head through your windshield, which Apple has barred from its App Store on the grounds that ICE is a "protected class" – then you can't install it, because installing software that isn't delivered via the App Store involves bypassing an "access control" that checks software to ensure that it's authorized (just like the toaster with its unauthorized bread).

It's not just iPhones: versions of this play out in your medical implants (hearing aid, insulin pump, etc); appliances (stoves, fridges, washing machines); cars and ebikes; set-top boxes and game consoles; ebooks and streaming videos; small appliances (toothbrushes, TVs, speakers), and more.

Increasingly, things that you actually own are the exception, not the rule.

And this is not normal. The end of ownership represents an overturn of a foundation of modern civilization. The fact that the only "people" who can truly own something are the transhuman, immortal colony organisms we call "Limited Liability Corporations" is an absolutely surreal reversal of the normal order of things.

It's a reversal with deep implications: for one thing, it means that you can't protect yourself from raids on your private data or ready cash by adding privacy blockers to your device, which would make it impossible for airlines or ecommerce sites to guess about how rich/desperate you are before quoting you a "personalized price":

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/11/nothing-personal/#instacartography

It also means you can't stop your device from leaking information about your movements, or even your conversations – Microsoft has announced that it will gather all of your private communications and ship them to its servers for use by "agentic AI":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ANECpNdt-4

Microsoft has also confirmed that it provides US authorities with warrantless, secret access to your data:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2025/07/22/microsoft-cant-keep-eu-data-safe-from-us-authorities/

This is deeply abnormal. Sure, greedy corporate control freaks weren't invented in the 21st century, but the laws that let those sociopaths put you in prison for failing to arrange your affairs to their benefit – and your own detriment – are.

But because computers got faster and cheaper over decades, the end of ownership has had an incremental rollout, and we've barely noticed that it's happened. Sure, we get irritated when our garage-door opener suddenly requires us to look at seven ads every time we use the app that makes it open or close:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lead-me-not-into-temptation/#chamberlain

But societally, we haven't connected that incident to this wider phenomenon. It stinks here, but we're all used to it.

It's not normal to buy a book and then not be able to lend it, sell it, or give it away. Lending, selling and giving away books is older than copyright. It's older than publishing. It's older than printing. It's older than paper. It is fucking weird (and also terrible) (obviously) that there's a new kind of very popular book that you can go to prison for lending, selling or giving away.

We're just a few cycles away from a pair of shoes that can figure out which shoelaces you're using, or a dishwasher that can block you from using third-party dishes:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/13/if-dishwashers-were-iphones

It's not normal, and it has profound implications for our security, our privacy, and our society. It makes us easy pickings for corporate vampires who drain our wallets through the gadgets and tools we rely on. It makes us easy pickings for fascists and authoritarians who ally themselves with corporate vampires by promising them tax breaks in exchange for collusion in the destruction of a free society.

I know that these problems are more important than whether or not we think this is normal. But still. It. Is. Just. Not. Normal.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

The US Copyright Office has been valiantly holding exemptions proceedings every three years since the start of this century, and they've granted many sensible exemptions, including ones to benefit people with disabilities, or to let you jailbreak your phone, or let media professors extract video clips from DVDs, and so on. Tens of thousands of person-hours have been flushed into this pointless exercise, generating a long list of things you are now technically allowed to do, but only if you are a reverse-engineering specialist type of computer programmer who can manage the process from beginning to end in total isolation and secrecy.

But there is one kind of use exception the Copyright Office can grant that is potentially game-changing: an exemption for decoding diagnostic codes.

You see, DMCA 1201 has been a critical weapon for the corporate anti-repair movement. By scrambling error codes in cars, tractors, appliances, insulin pumps, phones and other devices, manufacturers can wage war on independent repair, depriving third-party technicians of the diagnostic information they need to figure out how to fix your stuff and keep it going.

This is bad enough in normal times, but during the acute phase of the covid pandemic, hospitals found themselves unable to maintain their ventilators because of access controls. Nearly all ventilators come from a single med-tech monopolist, Medtronic, which charges hospitals hundreds of dollars to dispatch their own repair technicians to fix its products. But when covid ended nearly all travel, Medtronic could no longer provide on-site calls. Thankfully, an anonymous hacker started building homemade (illegal) circumvention devices to let hospital technicians fix the ventilators themselves, improvising housings for them from old clock radios, guitar pedals and whatever else was to hand, then mailing them anonymously to hospitals:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/10/flintstone-delano-roosevelt/#medtronic-again

Once a manufacturer monopolizes repair in this way, they can force you to use their official service depots, charging you as much as they'd like; requiring you to use their official, expensive replacement parts; and dictating when your gadget is "too broken to fix," forcing you to buy a new one. That's bad enough when we're talking about refusing to fix a phone so you buy a new one – but imagine having a spinal injury and relying on a $100,000 exoskeleton to get from place to place and prevent muscle wasting, clots, and other immobility-related conditions, only to have the manufacturer decide that the gadget is too old to fix and refusing to give you the technical assistance to replace a watch battery so that you can get around again:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/26/24255074/former-jockey-michael-straight-exoskeleton-repair-battery

When the US Copyright Office grants a use exemption for extracting diagnostic codes from a busted device, they empower repair advocates to put that gadget up on a workbench and torture it into giving up those codes. The codes can then be integrated into an unofficial diagnostic tool, one that can make sense of the scrambled, obfuscated error codes that a device sends when it breaks – without having to unscramble them. In other words, only the company that makes the diagnostic tool has to bypass an access control, but the people who use that tool later do not violate DMCA 1201.

This is all relevant this month because the US Copyright Office just released the latest batch of 1201 exemptions, and among them is the right to circumvent access controls "allowing for repair of retail-level food preparation equipment":

https://publicknowledge.org/public-knowledge-ifixit-free-the-mcflurry-win-copyright-office-dmca-exemption-for-ice-cream-machines/

While this covers all kinds of food prep gear, the exemption request – filed by Public Knowledge and Ifixit – was inspired by the bizarre war over the tragically fragile McFlurry machine. These machines – which extrude soft-serve frozen desserts – are notoriously failure-prone, with 5-16% of them broken at any given time. Taylor, the giant kitchen tech company that makes the machines, charges franchisees a fortune to repair them, producing a steady stream of profits for the company.

This sleazy business prompted some ice-cream hackers to found a startup called Kytch, a high-powered automation and diagnostic tool that was hugely popular with McDonald's franchisees (the gadget was partially designed by the legendary hardware hacker Andrew "bunnie" Huang!).

In response, Taylor played dirty, making a less-capable clone of the Kytch, trying to buy Kytch out, and teaming up with McDonald's corporate to bombard franchisees with legal scare-stories about the dangers of using a Kytch to keep their soft-serve flowing, thanks to DMCA 1201:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/20/euthanize-rentier-enablers/#cold-war

Kytch isn't the only beneficiary of the new exemption: all kinds of industrial kitchen equipment is covered. In upholding the Right to Repair, the Copyright Office overruled objections of some of its closest historical allies, the Entertainment Software Association, Motion Picture Association, and Recording Industry Association of America, who all sided with Taylor and McDonald's and opposed the exemption:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/10/us-copyright-office-frees-the-mcflurry-allowing-repair-of-ice-cream-machines/

This is literally the only useful kind of DMCA 1201 exemption the Copyright Office can grant, and the fact that they granted it (along with a similar exemption for medical devices) is a welcome bright spot. But make no mistake, the fact that we finally found a narrow way in which DMCA 1201 can be made slightly less stupid does not redeem this outrageous law. It should still be repealed and condemned to the scrapheap of history.

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/28/mcbroken/#my-milkshake-brings-all-the-lawyers-to-the-yard

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

But while Musk lacks the charm of earlier Silicon Valley grifters, he’s much better than they ever were at running a long con. For years, he’s been promising “full self driving…next year.”

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

He’s hasn’t delivered, but he keeps claiming he has, making Teslas some of the deadliest cars on the road:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/10/tesla-autopilot-crashes-elon-musk/

Tesla is a giant shell-game masquerading as a car company. The important thing about Tesla isn’t its cars, it’s Tesla’s business arrangement, the Tesla-Financial Complex:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/24/no-puedo-pagar-no-pagara/#Rat

Once you start unpacking Tesla’s balance sheets, you start to realize how much the company depends on government subsidies and tax-breaks, combined with selling carbon credits that make huge, planet-destroying SUVs possible, under the pretense that this is somehow good for the environment:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/14/for-sale-green-indulgences/#killer-analogy

But even with all those financial shenanigans, Tesla’s got an absurdly high valuation, soaring at times to 1600x its profitability:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/15/hoover-calling/#intangibles

That valuation represents a bet on Tesla’s ability to extract ever-higher rents from its customers. Take Tesla’s batteries: you pay for the battery when you buy your car, but you don’t own that battery. You have to rent the right to use its full capacity, with Tesla reserving the right to reduce how far you go on a charge based on your willingness to pay:

https://memex.craphound.com/2017/09/10/teslas-demon-haunted-cars-in-irmas-path-get-a-temporary-battery-life-boost/

That’s just one of the many rent-a-features that Tesla drivers have to shell out for. You don’t own your car at all: when you sell it as a used vehicle, Tesla strips out these features you paid for and makes the next driver pay again, reducing the value of your used car and transfering it to Tesla’s shareholders:

https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/6/21127243/tesla-model-s-autopilot-disabled-remotely-used-car-update

To maintain this rent-extraction racket, Tesla uses DRM that makes it a felony to alter your own car’s software without Tesla’s permission. This is the root of all autoenshittification:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

This is technofeudalism. Whereas capitalists seek profits (income from selling things), feudalists seek rents (income from owning the things other people use). If Telsa were a capitalist enterprise, then entrepreneurs could enter the market and sell mods that let you unlock the functionality in your own car:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/11/1-in-3/#boost-50

But because Tesla is a feudal enterprise, capitalists must first secure permission from the fief, Elon Musk, who decides which companies are allowed to compete with him, and how.

Once a company owns the right to decide which software you can run, there’s no limit to the ways it can extract rent from you. Blocking you from changing your device’s software lets a company run overt scams on you. For example, they can block you from getting your car independently repaired with third-party parts.

But they can also screw you in sneaky ways. Once a device has DRM on it, Section 1201 of the DMCA makes it a felony to bypass that DRM, even for legitimate purposes. That means that your DRM-locked device can spy on you, and because no one is allowed to explore how that surveillance works, the manufacturer can be incredibly sloppy with all the personal info they gather:

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/29/tesla-model-3-keeps-data-like-crash-videos-location-phone-contacts.html

All kinds of hidden anti-features can lurk in your DRM-locked car, protected from discovery, analysis and criticism by the illegality of bypassing the DRM. For example, Teslas have a hidden feature that lets them lock out their owners and summon a repo man to drive them away if you have a dispute about a late payment:

https://tiremeetsroad.com/2021/03/18/tesla-allegedly-remotely-unlocks-model-3-owners-car-uses-smart-summon-to-help-repo-agent/

DRM is a gun on the mantlepiece in Act I, and by Act III, it goes off, revealing some kind of ugly and often dangerous scam. Remember Dieselgate? Volkswagen created a line of demon-haunted cars: if they thought they were being scrutinized (by regulators measuring their emissions), they switched into a mode that traded performance for low emissions. But when they believed themselves to be unobserved, they reversed this, emitting deadly levels of NOX but delivering superior mileage.

The conversion of the VW diesel fleet into mobile gas-chambers wouldn’t have been possible without DRM. DRM adds a layer of serious criminal jeopardy to anyone attempting to reverse-engineer and study any device, from a phone to a car. DRM let Apple claim to be a champion of its users’ privacy even as it spied on them from asshole to appetite:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Now, Tesla is having its own Dieselgate scandal. A stunning investigation by Steve Stecklow and Norihiko Shirouzu for Reuters reveals how Tesla was able to create its own demon-haunted car, which systematically deceived drivers about its driving range, and the increasingly desperate measures the company turned to as customers discovered the ruse:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/tesla-batteries-range/

The root of the deception is very simple: Tesla mis-sells its cars by falsely claiming ranges that those cars can’t attain. Every person who ever bought a Tesla was defrauded.

But this fraud would be easy to detect. If you bought a Tesla rated for 353 miles on a charge, but the dashboard range predictor told you that your fully charged car could only go 150 miles, you’d immediately figure something was up. So your Telsa tells another lie: the range predictor tells you that you can go 353 miles.

But again, if the car continued to tell you it has 203 miles of range when it was about to run out of charge, you’d figure something was up pretty quick — like, the first time your car ran out of battery while the dashboard cheerily informed you that you had 203 miles of range left.

So Teslas tell a third lie: when the battery charge reached about 50%, the fake range is replaced with the real one. That way, drivers aren’t getting mass-stranded by the roadside, and the scam can continue.

But there’s a new problem: drivers whose cars are rated for 353 miles but can’t go anything like that far on a full charge naturally assume that something is wrong with their cars, so they start calling Tesla service and asking to have the car checked over.

This creates a problem for Tesla: those service calls can cost the company $1,000, and of course, there’s nothing wrong with the car. It’s performing exactly as designed. So Tesla created its boldest fraud yet: a boiler-room full of anti-salespeople charged with convincing people that their cars weren’t broken.

This new unit — the “diversion team” — was headquartered in a Nevada satellite office, which was equipped with a metal xylophone that would be rung in triumph every time a Tesla owner was successfully conned into thinking that their car wasn’t defrauding them.

When a Tesla owner called this boiler room, the diverter would run remote diagnostics on their car, then pronounce it fine, and chide the driver for having energy-hungry driving habits (shades of Steve Jobs’s “You’re holding it wrong”):

https://www.wired.com/2010/06/iphone-4-holding-it-wrong/

The drivers who called the Diversion Team weren’t just lied to, they were also punished. The Tesla app was silently altered so that anyone who filed a complaint about their car’s range was no longer able to book a service appointment for any reason. If their car malfunctioned, they’d have to request a callback, which could take several days.

Meanwhile, the diverters on the diversion team were instructed not to inform drivers if the remote diagnostics they performed detected any other defects in the cars.

The diversion team had a 750 complaint/week quota: to juke this stat, diverters would close the case for any driver who failed to answer the phone when they were eventually called back. The center received 2,000+ calls every week. Diverters were ordered to keep calls to five minutes or less.

Eventually, diverters were ordered to cease performing any remote diagnostics on drivers’ cars: a source told Reuters that “Thousands of customers were told there is nothing wrong with their car” without any diagnostics being performed.

Predicting EV range is an inexact science as many factors can affect battery life, notably whether a journey is uphill or downhill. Every EV automaker has to come up with a figure that represents some kind of best guess under a mix of conditions. But while other manufacturers err on the side of caution, Tesla has the most inaccurate mileage estimates in the industry, double the industry average.

Other countries’ regulators have taken note. In Korea, Tesla was fined millions and Elon Musk was personally required to state that he had deceived Tesla buyers. The Korean regulator found that the true range of Teslas under normal winter conditions was less than half of the claimed range.

Now, many companies have been run by malignant narcissists who lied compulsively — think of Thomas Edison, archnemesis of Nikola Tesla himself. The difference here isn’t merely that Musk is a deeply unfit monster of a human being — but rather, that DRM allows him to defraud his customers behind a state-enforced opaque veil. The digital computers at the heart of a Tesla aren’t just demons haunting the car, changing its performance based on whether it believes it is being observed — they also allow Musk to invoke the power of the US government to felonize anyone who tries to peer into the black box where he commits his frauds.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/edison-not-tesla/#demon-haunted-world

This Sunday (July 30) at 1530h, I’m appearing on a panel at Midsummer Scream in Long Beach, CA, to discuss the wonderful, award-winning “Ghost Post” Haunted Mansion project I worked on for Disney Imagineering.

Image ID [A scene out of an 11th century tome on demon-summoning called 'Compendium rarissimum totius Artis Magicae sistematisatae per celeberrimos Artis hujus Magistros. Anno 1057. Noli me tangere.' It depicts a demon tormenting two unlucky would-be demon-summoners who have dug up a grave in a graveyard. One summoner is held aloft by his hair, screaming; the other screams from inside the grave he is digging up. The scene has been altered to remove the demon's prominent, urinating penis, to add in a Tesla supercharger, and a red Tesla Model S nosing into the scene.]

Image: Steve Jurvetson (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tesla_Model_S_Indoors.jpg

Digital locks let Chamberlain, a garage-door opener monopolist block all third-party garage-door apps. Then, Chamberlain stuck ads in its app, so you have to watch an ad to open your garage-door:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lead-me-not-into-temptation/#chamberlain

Digital locks let John Deere block third-party repair of its tractors:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/

And they let Apple block third-party repair of iPhones:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/22/apples-cement-overshoes/

These companies built 11-foot ladders to get over their competitors' 10-foot walls, and then they kicked the ladder away. Once they were secure atop their walls, they committed enshittifying sins their fallen adversaries could only dream of.

I've been campaigning to abolish anticircumvention laws for the past quarter-century, and I've noticed a curious pattern. Whenever these companies stand to lose their legal protections, they freak out and spend vast fortunes to keep those protections intact. That's weird, because it strongly implies that their locks don't work. A lock that works works, whether or not it's illegal to break that lock. The reason Signal encryption works is that it's working encryption. The legal status of breaking Signal's encryption has nothing to do with whether it works. If Signal's encryption was full of technical flaws but it was illegal to point those flaws out, you'd be crazy to trust Signal.

Signal does get involved in legal fights, of course, but the fights it gets into are ones that require Signal to introduce defects in its encryption – not fights over whether it is legal to disclose flaws in Signal or exploit them:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/05/theyre-still-trying-to-ban-cryptography/

But tech companies that rely on digital locks manifestly act like their locks don't work and they know it. When the tech and content giants bullied the W3C into building DRM into 2 billion users' browsers, they categorically rejected any proposal to limit their ability to destroy the lives of people who broke that DRM, even if it was only to add accessibility or privacy to video:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/09/open-letter-w3c-director-ceo-team-and-membership

The thing is, if the lock works, you don't need the legal right to destroy the lives of people who find its flaws, because it works.

Do digital locks work? Can they work? I think the answer to both questions is a resounding no. The design theory of a digital lock is that I can provide you with an encrypted file that your computer has the keys to. Your computer will access those keys to decrypt or sign a file, but only under the circumstances that I have specified. Like, you can install an app when it comes from my app store, but not when it comes from a third party. Or you can play back a video in one kind of browser window, but not in another one. For this to work, your computer has to hide a cryptographic key from you, inside a device you own and control. As I pointed out more than a decade ago, this is a fool's errand:

https://memex.craphound.com/2012/01/10/lockdown-the-coming-war-on-general-purpose-computing/

After all, you or I might not have the knowledge and resources to uncover the keys' hiding place, but someone does. Maybe that someone is a person looking to go into business selling your customers the disenshittifying plugin that unfucks the thing you deliberately broke. Maybe it's a hacker-tinkerer, pursuing an intellectual challenge. Maybe it's a bored grad student with a free weekend, an electron-tunneling microscope, and a seminar full of undergrads looking for a project.

The point is that hiding secrets in devices that belong to your adversaries is very bad security practice. No matter how good a bank safe is, the bank keeps it in its vault – not in the bank-robber's basement workshop.

For a hiding-secrets-in-your-adversaries'-device plan to work, the manufacturer has to make zero mistakes. The adversary – a competitor, a tinkerer, a grad student – only has to find one mistake and exploit it. This is a bedrock of security theory: attackers have an inescapable advantage.

So I think that DRM doesn't work. I think DRM is a legal construct, not a technical one. I think DRM is a kind of magic Saran Wrap that manufacturers can wrap around their products, and, in so doing, make it a literal jailable offense to use those products in otherwise legal ways that their shareholders don't like. As Jay Freeman put it, using DRM creates a new law called "Felony Contempt of Business Model." It's a law that has never been passed by any legislature, but is nevertheless enforceable.

In the 25 years I've been fighting anticircumvention laws, I've spoken to many government officials from all over the world about the opportunity that repealing their anticircumvention laws represents. After all, Apple makes $100b/year by gouging app makers for 30 cents on ever dollar. Allow your domestic tech sector to sell the tools to jailbreak iPhones and install third party app stores, and you can convert Apple's $100b/year to a $100m/year business for one of your own companies, and the other $999,900,000,000 will be returned to the world's iPhone owners as a consumer surplus.

But every time I pitched this, I got the same answer: "The US Trade Representative forced us to pass this law, and threatened us with tariffs if we didn't pass it." Happy Liberation Day, people – every country in the world is now liberated from the only reason to keep this stupid-ass law on their books:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/15/beauty-eh/#its-the-only-war-the-yankees-lost-except-for-vietnam-and-also-the-alamo-and-the-bay-of-ham

In light of the Trump tariffs, I've been making the global rounds again, making the case for an anticircumvention repeal:

https://www.ft.com/content/b882f3a7-f8c9-4247-9662-3494eb37c30b

One of the questions I've been getting repeatedly from policy wonks, activists and officials is, "Is it even possible to jailbreak modern devices?" They want to know if companies like Apple, Tesla, Google, Microsoft, and John Deere have created unbreakable digital locks. Obviously, this is an important question, because if these locks are impregnable, then getting rid of the law won't deliver the promised benefits.

It's true that there aren't as many jailbreaks as we used to see. When a big project like Nextcloud – which is staffed up with extremely accomplished and skilled engineers – gets screwed over by Google's app store, they issue a press-release, not a patch:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/05/nextcloud-accuses-google-of-big-tech-gatekeeping-over-android-app-permissions/

Perhaps that's because the tech staff at Nextcloud are no match for Google, not even with the attacker's advantage on their side.

But I don't think so. Here's why: we do still get jailbreaks and mods, but these almost exclusively come from anonymous tinkerers and hobbyists:

https://consumerrights.wiki/Mazda_DMCA_takedown_of_Open_Source_Home_Assistant_App

Or from pissed off teenagers:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/29/23378541/the-og-app-instagram-clone-pulled-from-app-store

These hacks are incredibly ambitious! How ambitious? How about a class break for every version of iOS as well as an unpatchable hardware attack on 8 years' worth of Apple bootloaders?

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/25/mafia-logic/#sosumi

Now, maybe it's the case at all the world's best hackers are posting free code under pseudonyms. Maybe all the code wizards working for venture backed tech companies that stand to make millions through clever reverse engineering are just not as mad skilled as teenagers who want an ad-free Insta and that's why they've never replicated the feat.

Or maybe it's because teenagers and anonymous hackers are just about the only people willing to risk a $500,000 fine and 5-year prison sentence. In other words, maybe the thing that protects DRM is law, not code. After all, when Polish security researchers revealed the existence of secret digital locks that the train manufacturer Newag used to rip off train operators for millions of euros, Newag dragged them into court:

https://fsfe.org/news/2025/news-20250407-01.en.html

Tech companies are the most self-mythologizing industry on the planet, beating out even the pharma sector in boasting about their prowess and good corporate citizenship. They swear that they've made a functional digital lock…but they sure act like the only thing those locks do is let them sue people who reveal their workings.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

That flexibility is why we call computers a "general purpose" technology. The same computer that helps your optometrist analyze your retina can also control your car's anti-lock braking system, and it can also play Doom.

Enshittification runs on that flexibility. It's that flexibility that allows a digital products or service to offer different prices, search rankings, recommendations, and costs to every user, every time they interact with it:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

It's that flexibility that lets tech companies send over-the-air "updates" to your property that takes away functionality you paid for and valued, and then sell it back to you as an "upgrade" or worse, a monthly subscription:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/26/hit-with-a-brick/#graceful-failure

But that flexibility cuts both ways. The fact that every computer can run every valid program means that every enshittificatory app and update, there's a disenshittificatory program you could install that would reverse the damage. For every program that tells your HP printer to reject third-party ink, forcing you to buy HP's own colored water at $10,000/gallon, there's another program that tells your HP printer to enthusiastically accept third-party ink that costs mere pennies:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

In other worse, show me a 10-foot enshittifying wall, and I'll show you an 11-foot disenshittifying ladder.

Interoperability has long been technology's most important disenshittifier. Interop harnesses the rapaciousness of tech bros and puts it in service to making things better. Someone who hacks Instagram to take out the ads and recommendations and just show you posts from people you follow need not be motivated by the desire to make your life better – they can be motivated by the desire to poach Instagram users and build a rival business, and still make life better for you:

https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/the-og-app-instagram-alternative-ad-free/

And if they succeed and then recapitulate the sins of Instagram's bosses, turning the screws on users with ads, suggestions and slop? That just invites more disenshittifying interoperators to do unto them as they did unto Zuck.

That's the way it used to work: the 10-foot piles of shit deployed by tech bosses conjured up 11-foot ladders. This is what disruption is, when it is at its best. There's nothing wrong with moving fast and breaking things – provided the things you're breaking belong to billionaire enshittifiers. Those things need to be broken.

Enter IP law. For the past 25+ years, IP law has been relentlessly expanded in ways that ensure that disruption is always for thee, never me. "IP" has come to mean, "Any law that lets a dominant company reach out and exert control over its critics, competitors and customers":

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

The most pernicious IP law is far and away "anticircumvention." Under anticircumvention, it is illegal to "break a digital lock" that controls access to a copyrighted work, including software (and digital locks are software, so any digital lock automatically gets this protection).

This is mind-bending, particularly because it's one of those things that's so unreasonable, so very, very stupid that it's easy to think you're misunderstanding it, because surely it can't be that stupid.

But oh, it is.

One of the best ways to grasp this point is to start with what you might do in a world without digital locks. Take your printer: if HP raises the price of ink, you might start to refill your cartridges or buy third-party cartridges. Obviously, this is not a copyright violation. Ink is not a copyrighted work. But once HP puts a digital lock on the printer that checks to see if you've done an end-run around the HP ink ripoff, then refilling your cartridge becomes illegal, because you have to break that digital lock to get your printer to use the ink you've chosen.

Or think about cars: taking your car to your mechanic does not violate anyone's copyright. If your car, you decide who fixes it. But all car makers use digital locks to prevent mechanics from reading out the diagnostic information they need to access to fix your car. If a mechanic wants to know why your check engine light has turned on, they have to buy a tool – spending 5-figure sums every year for every manufacturer – in order to decode that error. Now, it's your car, and error messages aren't copyrighted works, but bypassing the lock that prevents independent diagnosis is a crime, thanks to anticircumvention law.

Then there's app stores. You bought your console. You bought your phone. These devices are your property. If I want to sell you some software I've written so you can run it on your device, that's not a copyright violations. It is the literal opposite of a copyright violation: an author selling their copyrighted works to a customer who gets to enjoy those works using their own property. But the digital lock on your iPhone, Xbox, Playstation and Switch all prevent your device from running software unless it is delivered by the manufacturer's app store, which takes 30 cents out of every dollar you spend. Installing software without going through the manufacturer's app store requires that you break the device's digital lock, and that's a crime, which means that buying a copyrighted work from its author becomes a copyright violation!

This is what Jay Freeman calls "felony contempt of business model." We created laws – again, in living memory, thanks to known individuals – that had the foreseeable, explicit intent of making it illegal to disenshittify the products and services you rely on. We created this enshittogenic environment, and we got the enshittocene.

That's where "Who Broke the Internet?" comes in. We tell the story of Bruce Lehman, who was Bill Clinton's IP czar. Anticircumvention was really Lehman's brainchild, and he had a plan to make it the law of the land. When Al Gore was overseeing the demilitarization of the internet (the "Information Superhighway" proceedings), Lehman pitched this idea to him as the new rules of the road for the internet. To Gore's eternal credit, he flatly rejected Lehman's proposal as the batshit nonsense it plainly was.

So Lehman scuttled to Switzerland, where a UN agency, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) was crafting a pair of new treaties to create a global system of internet regulation. Lehman lobbied the national delegations to WIPO to put anticircumvention in their treaties, and he succeeded – partially. WIPO is a very bad agency, since the majority of delegations that are sent to Geneva by the world's nations come from poor countries in the global south, and they're made up of experts in things like water, agriculture and child health. The vast majority of national reps at WIPO are not experts in IP, and they are often easy prey for fast-talking lobbyists from US-based media, pharma and tech companies, as well as the US government reps who carry their water.

But even at WIPO, Lehman's proposal was viewed as far too extreme. In the end, the anticircumvention rules embedded in the WIPO treaties are much more reasonable than Lehman's demands. Under the WIPO treaty, signatories must pass laws that make copyright infringement extra illegal if you have to break a digital lock on the way. But if you break a lock and you don't infringe copyright (say, because you refilled a printer cartridge, took your car to an independent mechanic, or got some software without using an app store), then you're fine.

Lehman's next move was to convince Congress that they needed to pass a version of the anticircumvention rule that went far beyond the obligations in the WIPO treaties. In this, he was joined by powerful, deep-pocketed lobbyists from Big Content, and later, Big Tech. They successfully pressured Congress into passing Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 1998 – a law that protects digital locks, at the expense of copyright and the creative workers whom copyright is said to serve.

Lehman has repeatedly, publicly described this maneuver as "doing an end-run around Congress." Once America adopted this extreme anticircumvention rule, the US Trade Representative made it America's top priority to ram identical laws through the legislatures of all of America's trading partners, under the explicit or tacit threat of tariffs on any country that refused (the information minister of a Central American country once told me that the USTR threatened them, saying that if they didn't accept anticircumvention as a clause in the Central American Free Trade Agreement – CAFTA – they would lose their ability to export soybeans to America).

Canada took more than a decade to enact its own version of the anticircumvention rule, which was the source of public outrage by the USTR and US industry lobbyists. These neocolonialists found plenty of Parliamentary sellouts willing to introduce laws on their behalf, but every time this happened, the Canadian people reacted with a kind of mass outrage that had never been seen in response to highly technical proposals for internet regulation. For example, the Liberal MP Sam Bulte was challenged on her support of the rule by her Parkdale constituents at a public meeting, and had a screeching meltdown, screaming that she would not be "bullied by user-rights zealots and EFF members." Voters put "User-Rights Zealot" signs on their lawns and voted her out of office.

Anticircumvention remained a priority for the US, and they found new MPs to do their dirty work. Stephen Harper's Conservatives made multiple tries at this. After Jim Prentice utterly failed to get the rule through Parliament, the brief was picked up by Heritage Minister James Moore (who liked to call himself "the iPad Minister") and now-disgraced Industry minister Tony Clement. Clement and Moore tried to diffuse the opposition to the proposal by conducting a public consultation on it.

This backfired horribly. Over 6,000 Canadians wrote into the consultation with individual, detailed, personal critiques of anticircumvention, explaining how the rule would hurt them at work and at home. Only 53 submissions supported the rule. Moore threw away these 6,130 negative responses, justifying it by publicly calling them the "babyish" views of "radical extremists":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/15/radical-extremists/#sex-pest

Named individuals created policies in living memory. They were warned about the foreseeable outcomes of those proposals. They passed them anyway – and then no one held them accountable.

Until now.

The point of remembering where these policies came from isn't (merely) to ensure that these people are forever remembered as the monsters they showed themselves to be. Rather, it is to recover the true history of enshittification, the choices we made that led to enshittification, so that we can reverse those policies, disenshittify our tech, and give rise to a new, good internet that's fit for the purpose of being the global digital nervous system for a species facing a polycrisis of climate catastrophe, oligarchy, fascism and genocide.

There's never been a more urgent moment to reconsider those enshittificatory policies – and there's never been a more auspicious moment, either. After all, Canada's anticircumvention law exists because it was supposed to guarantee tariff-free access to American markets. That promise has been shattered, permanently. It's time to get rid of that law, and make it legal for Canadian technologists to give the Canadian public the tools they need to escape from America's Big Tech bullies, who pick our pockets with junk-fees and lock-in, and who attack our social, legal and civil lives with social media walled gardens:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/15/beauty-eh/#its-the-only-war-the-yankees-lost-except-for-vietnam-and-also-the-alamo-and-the-bay-of-ham

"Understood: Who Broke the Internet" is streaming now. We've got three more episodes to go – part two drops on Monday (and it's a banger). You can subscribe to it wherever you get your podcasts, and here's the RSS feed:

https://www.cbc.ca/podcasting/includes/nakedemperor.xml

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

But de-dollarization isn't easy. It presents the same O(n^2) problem as rewiring the world's fiber: creating deep, liquid markets to trade every currency against every other currency is an impossible lift (thus far), and there's no obvious candidate as a replacement for the dollar as a clearing currency.

As with fiber, we are in an unsettled period, with no obvious answer, and lots of chaotic, one-off gestures towards de-dollarization. For example, Ethiopia is re-valuing its foreign debt in Chinese renminbi:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-20/ethiopia-in-talks-with-china-to-convert-dollar-loans-into-yuan

But fiber and dollars aren't the only seemingly neutral platforms that America provided to the world as a way of both facilitating the world's orderly operation and consolidating America's centrality and power on the global stage.

America is also the world's great digital exporter. The world's governments, corporations and households run on American cloud software, like Google Docs and Office365. Their records are held in Oracle databases. Their messages and media run on iPhones. Their cloud compute comes from AWS.

The Snowden revelations shook this arrangement, but it held. The EU extracted a series of (ultimately broken) promises from the US to the effect that America wouldn't spy on Europeans using Big Tech. And now, after a brittle decade of half-measures and uneasy peace with American tech platforms, Trump has made it clear that he will not hesitate to use American tech platforms to pursue his geopolitical goals.

Practically speaking, that means that government officials that make Trump angry can expect to have their cloud access terminated:

https://apnews.com/article/icc-trump-sanctions-karim-khan-court-a4b4c02751ab84c09718b1b95cbd5db3

Trump can – and does – shut down entire international administrative agencies, without notice or appeal, as a means of coercing them into embracing American political goals.

What's more, US tech giants have stopped pretending that they will not share sensitive EU data – even data housed on servers in the EU – with American spy agencies, and will keep any such disclosures a secret from the European governments, companies and individuals who are affected:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2025/07/22/microsoft-cant-keep-eu-data-safe-from-us-authorities/

All this has prompted a rush of interest in the "Eurostack," an effort to replicate the functionality of US tech companies' cloud services:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/15/freedom-of-movement/#data-dieselgate

But the Eurostack's proponents are really working on the preliminaries to digital sovereignty. It's not enough to have alternatives to US Big Tech. There also needs to be extensive work on migration tools, to facilitate the move to those alternatives. No one is going to manually copy/paste a million documents out of their ministry or corporation's GSuite repository and into a Eurostack equivalent. There are a few tools that do this today, but they're crude and hard to use, because they are probably illegal under America's widely exported IP laws.

Faithfully transferring those files, permissions, edit histories and metadata to new clouds will require a kind of guerrilla warfare called "adversarial interoperability." Adversarial interoperability is the process of making a new thing work with an existing thing, against the wishes of the existing thing's manufacturer:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

The problem is that adversarial interoperability has been mostly criminalized in countries all around the world, thanks to IP laws that prohibit study, reverse engineering and modification of software without permission. These laws were spread all over the world at the insistence of the US Trade Representative, who, for 25 years, has made this America's top foreign trade priority.

Countries that balked at enacting laws were threatened with tariffs. Virtually every country in the world fell into line:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/15/beauty-eh/#its-the-only-war-the-yankees-lost-except-for-vietnam-and-also-the-alamo-and-the-bay-of-ham

But then Trump happened. The Trump tariffs apply to countries that have voluntarily blocked their own investors and entrepreneurs from making billions by supplying products that unlock and improve America's enshittified tech exports. These blocks also exposed everyone in the world to the data- and cash-plundering scams of US Big Tech, by preventing the creation of privacy blockers, alt clients, jailbreaking kits, and independent app stores for phones, tablets and consoles.

What's more, the laws that block reverse-engineering are also used to block repair, forcing everyone from train operators to hospitals to drivers to everyday individuals to pay a high premium and endure long waits to get their equipment serviced by the manufacturer's authorized representatives:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/24/record-scratch/#autoenshittification

These US-forced IP laws come at a high price. They allow American companies to pick your nation's pockets and steal its data. They interfere with repair and undermine resiliency. They also threaten security researchers who audit critical technologies and identify their dangerous defects:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/30/life-finds-a-way/#ink-stained-wretches

On top of that, they expose your country to a range of devastating geopolitical attacks by the Trump administration, who have made it clear that they will order American tech companies to brick whole governments as punishment for failing to capitulate to US demands. And of course, all of these remote killswitches can be operated by anyone who can hack or trick the manufacturer, including the Chinese state:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/07/foreseeable-outcomes/#calea

Speaking of China, isn't this exactly the kind of thing we were warned would happen if we allowed Chinese technology into western telecommunications systems? The Chinese state would spy on us, and, in times of extremis, could shut down our critical infrastructure with a keystroke.

This is exactly what America is doing now (and has been doing for some time, as Snowden demonstrated). But it's actually pretty reasonable to assume that a regime as competent and ambitious (and ruthless) as Xi Jinping's might make use of this digital power if doing so serves its geopolitical goals.

And there is a hell of a lot of cloud-connected digital infrastructure that Xi does (or could) control, including the solar inverters and batteries that are swiftly replacing fossil fuel in the EU:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/23/our-friend-the-electron/#to-every-man-his-castle

And if you're worried about China shutting down your solar energy, you should also worry about America's hold on the embedded processors in your country's critical systems.

Take tractors. Remember when Putin's thugs looted millions of dollars' worth of tractors from Ukraine and spirited them away to Chechnya? The John Deere company sent a kill command to those tractors and bricked them, rendering them permanently inoperable:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/

Sure, there's a certain cyberpunk frisson in this tale of a digital comeuppance for Russian aggressors. But think about this for ten seconds and you'll realize that it means that John Deere can shut down any tractor in the world – including all the tractors in your country, if Donald Trump forces them to:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/20/post-american-internet/#huawei-with-american-characteristics

The national security case for digital sovereignty includes people worried about American aggression. It includes people worried about Chinese aggression. It includes people worried about other countries that might infiltrate and make use of these remote kill switches. And it includes people worried about criminals doing the same.

True digital sovereignty requires more than building Eurostack data-centers and the software to run on them. It requires more than repealing the IP laws that block cloud customers from migrating their data to those Eurostack servers. It requires the replacement of the cloud software and embedded code that power our infrastructure and administrative tools.

This is a gigantic task. Ripping out all the proprietary code that powers our cloud software and devices and replacing it with robust, auditable, user-modifiable free/open source software is a massive project.

It's also a project that's long overdue. And crises precipitate change. Putin's invasion of Ukraine vaporized every barrier to Europe's solar conversion, rocketing the bloc from ten years behind schedule to fifteen years ahead of schedule in just a few years.

The fact that changing out all the proprietary, opaque, vulnerable code in our world and replacing it with open, free, reliable code is hard has no bearing on whether it is necessary.

It is necessary. What's more, replacing all the code isn't like replacing the dollar, or replacing the fiber. It isn't hamstrung by the O(n^2) problem.

Because if the Eurostack code is open and free, it can also be the Canadian stack, the Mexican stack, the Ghanaian stack, and the Vietnamese stack. It can be a commons, a set of core technologies that everyone studies for vulnerabilities and improves, that everyone adds features to, that everyone localizes and administers and bears the costs for.

It is a novel and curious form of "international nationalism," a technology that is more like a science. In the same way that the Allies and the Axis both used the same radio technologies to communicate, a common, open digital infrastructure is one that everyone – even adversaries – can rely upon.

This is a move that's long overdue. It's a move that's in the power of every government, because it merely involves changing your own domestic laws to enable adversarial interoperability. Its success doesn't depend on a foreign state forcing Apple or Google or Microsoft or Oracle to do something they don't want to do:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/01/redistribution-vs-predistribution/#elbows-up-eurostack

The opportunity and challenge of building the post-American internet is part of the package of global de-Americanization, which includes running new fiber and de-dollarization. But the post-American internet is unique in that it is the only part of this project that can be solved everywhere, all at once, and that gets cheaper and easier as more nations join in.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/26/difficult-multipolarism/#eurostack