#eurostack

The result is the burgeoning movement to build a "post-American internet." In Canada, PM Mark Carney's announcement of a "rupture" has the country rethinking its deep connections to the American internet and asking what it could do to escape it:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/27/i-want-to-do-it/#now-make-me-do-it

Europe, meanwhile, has multiple, advanced, well-funded initiatives to leave the American internet behind and migrate to a post-American internet, like "Eurostack" and the European Digital Infrastructure Consortium:

https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/edic

But status quo bias exerts a powerful gravity. A reactionary counterrevolution is being waged in the European Commission – the permanent bureaucracy that executes Europe's laws and regulations. Within the EC, an ascendant faction has announced plans for a "dialogue" with representatives from the Trump regime to let them direct the enforcement of the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and Digital Services Act (DSA), Europe's landmark 2024 anti-Big Tech regulations:

https://www.politico.eu/article/fatal-decision-eu-slammed-for-caving-to-us-pressure-on-digital-rules/

The DMA and DSA require America's tech giants to open up their platforms in ways that would halt the plunder of Europeans' private data and cash. US tech giants have flatly refused to comply with these rules, relying on Trump to get them out of any obligations under EU law:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/26/empty-threats/#500-million-affluent-consumers

That's a sound bet. After all, the last thing Trump did before his inauguration was publicly announce his intention to destroy any country that attempted to enforce these laws:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/23/us/politics/trump-davos-europe-tariffs.html

He's making good on his threats. He's already sanctioned a group of officials who helped draft the DSA:

https://www.npr.org/2025/12/24/nx-s1-5655855/trump-administration-bars-5-europeans-from-entry-to-the-u-s-over-alleged-censorship

And he's ordered his tech companies to turn over the private emails and messages of other European officials, so he can identify the ones most dangerous to US tech plunder and sanction them, too:

https://www.politico.eu/article/us-congress-judiciary-committee-big-tech-private-communication-eu-officials/

The quislings and appeasers in the Commission who've been spooked by Trump's belligerence (or tempted by offers of cushy jobs in Big Tech after they leave public service) are selling out the EU's future. Caving to Trump won't make him more favorably disposed to Europe or Europeans. Trump treats every capitulation as a sign of weakness that signals that he can safely ignore his end of the bargain and demand twice as much. For Trump, the "art of the deal" can be summed up in one word: reneging.

Within the EU, there's fury at the Commission's announcement of "dialogue." As Politico's Milena Wälde reports, lawmakers like Alexandra Geese (Greens) say that this is a move that eliminates the "sovereign path for Europe" by letting tech giants "grade their own homework." She calls it a "fatal decision for our companies and our democracy."

Moving to the post-American internet is hard – but it will only get harder. Sure, Europe could wait for the next crisis to let go of the Big Tech vine and grab the Eurostack one, but that next crisis will be far, far worse. The EU can't afford to wait for Trump to brick one or more of its member states to (finally, at long last) take this threat seriously:

So let me explain: 14 years ago, I stood in front of this group and explained the "War on General Purpose Computing." That was my snappy name for this fight, but the boring name that they use in legislatures for it is "anticircumvention,"

Under anticircumvention law, it's 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.

Anticircumvention law originates in the USA: Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 establishes a felony punishable by a five year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for a first offense for bypassing an "access control" for a copyrighted work.

So practically speaking, if you design a device or service with even the flimsiest of systems to prevent modification of its application code or firmware, it's a felony – a jailable felony – to modify that code or firmware. It's also a felony to disclose information about how to bypass that access control, which means that pen-testers who even describe how they access a device or system face criminal liability.

Under anticircumvention law any manufacturer can trivially turn their product into a no-go zone, criminalizing the act of investigating its defects, criminalizing the act of reporting on its defects, and, criminalizing the act of remediating its defects.

This is a law that Jay Freeman rightly calls "Felony Contempt of Business Model." Anticircumvention became the law of the land in 1998 when Bill Clinton signed the DMCA. But before you start snickering at those stupid Americans, know this: every other country in the world has passed a law just like this in the years since. Here in the EU, it came in through Article 6 of the 2001 EU Copyright Directive.

Now, it makes a certain twisted sense for the US to enact a law like this, after all, they are the world's tech powerhouse, home to the biggest, most powerful tech companies in the world. By making it illegal to modify digital products without the manufacturer's permission, America enhances the rent-extracting power of the most valuable companies on US stock exchanges.

But why would Europe pass a law like this? Europe is a massive tech importer. By extending legal protection to tech companies that want to steal their users' data and money, the EU was facilitating a one-way transfer of value from Europe to America. So why would Europe do this?

Well, let me tell you about the circumstances under which other countries came to enact their anticircumvention laws and maybe you'll spot a pattern that will answer this question.

Australia got its anticircumvention law through the US-Australia Free Trade Agreement, which obliges Australia to enact anticircumvention law.

Canada and Mexico got it through the US-Mexico-Canada Free Trade Agreement, which obliges Canada and Mexico to enact anticircumvention laws.

Andean nations like Chile got their anticircumvention laws through bilateral US free trade agreements, which oblige them to enact anticircumvention laws.

And the Central American nations got their anticircumvention laws through CAFTA – The Central American Free Trade Agreement with the USA – which obliges them to enact anticircumvention laws, too.

I assume you've spotted the pattern by now: the US trade representative has forced every one of its trading partners to adopt anticircumvention law, to facilitate the extraction of their own people's data and money by American firms. But of course, that only raises a further question: Why would every other country in the world agree to let America steal its own people's money and data, and block its domestic tech sector from making interoperable products that would prevent this theft?

Here's an anecdote that unravels this riddle: many years ago, in the years before Viktor Orban rose to power, I used to guest-lecture at a summer PhD program in political science at Budapest's Central European University. And one summer, after I'd lectured to my students about anticircumvention law, one of them approached me.

They had been the information minister of a Central American nation during the CAFTA negotiations, and one day, they'd received a phone-call from their trade negotiator, calling from the CAFTA bargaining table. The negotiator said, "You know how you told me not to give the Americans anticircumvention under any circumstances? Well, they're saying that they won't take our coffee unless we give them anticircumvention. And I'm sorry, but we just can't lose the US coffee market. Our economy would collapse. So we're going to give them anticircumvention. I'm really sorry."

That's it. That's why every government in the world allowed US Big Tech companies to declare open season on their people's private data and ready cash.

The alternative was tariffs. Well, I don't know if you've heard, but we've got tariffs now!

I mean, if someone threatens to burn your house down unless you follow their orders, and then they burn your house down anyway, you don't have to keep following their orders. So…Happy Liberation Day?

So far, every country in the world has had one of two responses to the Trump tariffs. The first one is: "Give Trump everything he asks for (except Greenland) and hope he stops being mad at you." This has been an absolute failure. Give Trump an inch, he'll take a mile. He'll take fucking Greenland. Capitulation is a failure.

But so is the other tactic: retaliatory tariffs. That's what we've done in Canada (like all the best Americans, I'm Canadian). Our top move has been to levy tariffs on the stuff we import from America, making the things we buy more expensive. That's a weird way to punish America! It's like punching yourself in the face as hard as you can, and hoping the downstairs neighbor says "Ouch!"

And it's indiscriminate. Why whack some poor farmer from a state that begins and ends with a vowel with tariffs on his soybeans. That guy never did anything bad to Canada.

But there's a third possible response to tariffs, one that's just sitting there, begging to be tried: what about repealing anticircumvention law?

If you're a technologist or an investor based in a country that's repealed its anticircumvention law, you can go into business making disenshittificatory products that plug into America's defective tech exports, allowing the people who own and use those products to use them in ways that are good for them, even if those uses make the company's shareholders mad.

Think of John Deere tractors: when a farmer's John Deere tractor breaks down, they are expected to repair it, swapping in new parts and assemblies to replace whatever's malfing. But the tractor won't recognize that new part and will not start working again, not until the farmer spends a couple hundred bucks on a service callout from an official John Deere tractor repair 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 anticircumvention law, meaning farmers all over the world are stuck with this ripoff garbage, because their own government will lock up anyone who makes a tractor mod that disables the parts-pairing check in this American product.

So what if Canada repealed Bill C-11, the Copyright Modernization Act of 2012 (that's our anticircumvention law)? Well, then a company like Honeybee, which makes tractor front-ends and attachments, could hire some smart University of Waterloo computer science grads, and put 'em to work jailbreaking the John Deere tractor's firmware, and offer it to everyone in the world. They could sell the crack to anyone with an internet connection and a payment method, including that poor American farmer whose soybeans we're currently tariffing.

It's hard to convey how much money is on the table here. Take just one example: Apple's App Store. Apple forces all app vendors into using its payment processor, and charges them a 30 percent commission on every euro spent inside of an app.

30 percent! That's such a profitable business that Apple makes $100 billion per year on it. If the EU repeals Article 6 of the Copyright Directive, some smart geeks in Finland could reverse-engineer Apple's bootloaders and make a hardware dongle that jailbreaks phones so that they can use alternative app stores, and sell the dongle – along with the infrastructure to operate an app store – to anyone in the world who wants to go into business competing with Apple for users and app vendors.

Those competitors could offer a 90% discount every crafter on Etsy, every performer on Patreon, every online news outlet, every game dev, every media store. Offer them a 90% discount on payments, and still make $10b/year.

Maybe Finland will never see another Nokia, but Nokia's a tough business to be in. You've got to make hardware, which is expensive and risky. But if the EU legalizes jailbreaking, then Apple would have to incur all the expense and risk of making and fielding hardware, while those Finnish geeks could cream off the $100b Apple sucks out of the global economy in an act of a disgusting, rip-off rent-seeking.

As Jeff Bezos said to the publishers: "Your margin is my opportunity." With these guys, it's always "disruption for thee, but not for me." When they do it to us, that's progress. When we do it to them, it's piracy, and every pirate wants to be an admiral.

Well, screw that. Move fast and break Tim Cook's things. Move fast and break kings!

It's funny: I spent 25 years getting my ass kicked by the US Trade Representative (in my defense, it wasn't a fair fight). I developed a kind of grudging admiration for the skill with which the USTR bound the entire world to a system of trade that conferred parochial advantages to America and its tech firms, giving them free rein to loot the world's data and economies. So it's 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.

Now, you might have heard that governments around the world have been trying to get Apple to open its App Store, and they've totally failed at this. When the EU hit Apple with an enforcement order under the Digital Markets Act, Apple responded by offering to allow third party app stores, but it would only allow those stores to sell apps that Apple had approved of.

And while those stores could use their own payment processors, Apple would charge them so much in junk fees that it would be more expensive to process a payment using your own system, and if Apple believed that a user's phone had been outside of the EU for 21 days, they'd remotely delete all that user's data and apps.

When the EU explained that this would not satisfy the regulation, Apple threatened to pull out of the EU. Then, once everyone had finished laughing, Apple filed more than a dozen bullshit objections to the order hoping to tie this up in court for a decade, the way Google and Meta did for the GDPR.

It's not clear that the EU can force Apple to write code that opens up the iOS platform for alternative app stores and payment methods, but there is one thing that the EU can absolutely do with 100% reliability, any time they want: the EU can decide not to let Apple use Europe's courts to shut down European companies that defend European merchants, performers, makers, news outlets, game devs and creative workers, from Apple's ripoff, by jailbreaking phones.

All the EU has to do is repeal Article 6 of the Copyright Directive, and in so doing, strip Apple of the privilege of mobilizing the European justice system to shore up Apple's hundred billion dollar annual tax on the world's digital economy. The EU company that figures out how to reliably jailbreak iPhones will have customers all over the world, including in the USA, where Apple doesn't just use its veto over which apps you can run on your phone to suck 30% out of every dollar you spend, but where Apple also uses its control over the platform to strip out apps that protect Apple's customers from Trump's fascist takeover.

Back in October, Apple kicked the "ICE Block" app out of the App Store. That's an app that warns the user if there's a snatch squad of masked ICE thugs nearby looking to grab you off the street and send you to an offshore gulag. Apple internally classified ICE kidnappers as a "protected class," and then declared the ICE Block infringed on the rights of these poor, beset ICE goons.

And speaking of ICE thugs, there are plenty of qualified technologists who have fled the US this year, one step ahead of an ICE platoon looking to put them and their children into a camp. Those skilled hackers are now living all over the world, joined by investors who'd like to back a business whose success will be determined by how awesome its products are, and not how many $TRUMP coins they buy.

Apple's margin could be their opportunity.

Legalizing jailbreaking, raiding the highest margin lines of business of the most profitable companies in America is a much better response to the Trump tariffs than retaliatory tariffs.

For one thing, this is a targeted response: go after Big Tech's margins and you're mounting a frontal assault on the businesses whose CEOs each paid a million bucks to sit behind Trump on the inauguration dais.

Raiding Big Tech's margins is not an attack on the American people, nor on the small American businesses that are ripped off by Big Tech. It's a raid on the companies that screw everyday Americans and everyone else in the world. It's a way to make everyone in the world richer at the expense of these ripoff companies.

It beats the shit out of blowing hundreds of billions of dollars building AI data-centers in the hopes that someday, a sector that's lost nearly a trillion dollars shipping defective chatbots will figure out a use for GPUs that doesn't start hemorrhaging money the minute they plug them in.

So here are our new allies in the war on general-purpose computation: businesses and technologists who want to make billions of dollars raiding Big Tech's margins, and policymakers who want their country to be the disenshittification nation – the country that doesn't merely protect its people's money and privacy by buying jailbreaks from other countries, but rather, the country that makes billions of dollars selling that privacy and pocketbook-defending tech to the rest of the world.

That's a powerful alliance, but those are not the only allies Trump has pushed into our camp. There's another powerful ally waiting in the wings.

Remember last June, when the International Criminal Court in the Hague issued an arrest warrant for the génocidaire Benjamin Netanyahu, and Trump denounced the ICC, and then the ICC lost its Outlook access, its email archives, its working files, its address books, its calendars?

Microsoft says they didn't brick the ICC – that it's a coincidence. But when it comes to a he-said/Clippy-said between the justices of the ICC and the convicted monopolists of Microsoft, I know who I believe.

This is exactly the kind of infrastructural risk that we were warned of if we let Chinese companies like Huawei supply our critical telecoms equipment. Virtually every government ministry, every major corporation, every small business and every household in the world have locked themselves into a US-based, cloud-based service.

The handful of US Big Tech companies that supply the world's administrative tools are all vulnerable to pressure from the Trump admin, and that means that Trump can brick an entire nation.

The attack on the ICC was an act of cyberwarfare, like the Russian hackers who shut down Ukrainian power-generation facilities, except that Microsoft doesn't have to hack Outlook to brick the ICC – they own Outlook.

Under the US CLOUD Act of 2018, the US government can compel any US-based company to disclose any of its users' data – including foreign governments – and this is true no matter where that data is stored. Last July, Anton Carniaux, Director of Public and Legal Affairs at Microsoft France, told a French government inquiry that he "couldn't guarantee" that Microsoft wouldn't hand sensitive French data over to the US government, even if that data was stored in a European data-center.

And under the CLOUD Act, the US government can slap gag orders on the companies that it forces to cough up that data, so there'd be no way to even know if this happened, or whether it's already happened.

It doesn't stop at administrative tools, either: remember back in 2022, when Putin's thugs looted millions of dollars' worth of John Deere tractors from Ukraine and those tractors showed up in Chechnya? The John Deere company pushed an over-the-air kill signal to those tractors and bricked 'em.

John Deere is every bit as politically vulnerable to the Trump admin 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, which is also an American company and just as vulnerable to political attacks from the US government.

Now, none of this will be news to global leaders. Even before Trump and Microsoft bricked the ICC they were trying to figure out a path to "digital sovereignty." But the Trump administration's outrageous conduct and rhetoric over past 11 months has turned "digital sovereignty" from a nice-to-have into a must-have.

So finally, we're seeing some movement, like "Eurostack," a project to clone the functionality of US Big Tech silos in free/open source software, and to build EU-based data-centers that this code can run on.

But 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 mass exporting of millions of documents, the sensitive data-structures and edit histories.

We need scrapers and headless browsers to accomplish the adversarial interoperability that will guarantee ongoing connectivity to institutions that are still hosted on US cloud-based services, because US companies are not going to facilitate the mass exodus of international customers from their platform.

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 they'll come up with when faced with the departure of a plurality of the businesses and governments in a 27-nation bloc of 500,000,000 affluent consumers.

Any serious attempt at digital sovereignty needs migration tools that work without the cooperation of the Big Tech companies. Otherwise, this is like building housing for East Germans and locating it West Berlin. It doesn't matter how great the housing is, your intended audience is going to really struggle to move in unless you tear down the wall.

Step one of tearing down that wall is killing anticircumvention law, so that we can run virtual devices that can be scripted, break bootloaders to swap out firmware and generally seize the means of computation.

So this is the third bloc in the disenshittification army: not just digital rights hippies like me; not just entrepreneurs and economic development wonks rubbing their hands together at the thought of transforming American trillions into European billions; but also the national security hawks who are 100% justified in their extreme concern about their country's reliance on American platforms that have been shown to be totally unreliable.

This is how we'll get a post-American internet: with an unstoppable coalition of activists, entrepreneurs and natsec hawks.

This has been a long time coming. Since the post-war settlement, the world has treated the US as a neutral platform, a trustworthy and stable maintainer of critical systems for global interchange, what the political scientists Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman call the "Underground Empire." But over the past 15 years, the US has systematically shattered global trust in its institutions, a process that only accelerated under Trump.

Take transoceanic fiber optic cables: the way the transoceanic fiber routes were planned, the majority of these cables make landfall on the coasts of the USA where the interconnections are handled. There's a good case for this hub-and-spoke network topology, especially compared to establishing direct links between every country. That's an Order(N^2) problem: directly linking each of the planet Earth's 205 countries to every other country would require 20,910 fiber links.

But putting all the world's telecoms eggs in America's basket only works if the US doesn't take advantage of its centrality, and while many people worried about what the US could do with the head-ends of the world's global fiber infra, it wasn't until Mark Klein's 2006 revelations about the NSA's nation-scale fiber optic taps in AT&T's network, and Ed Snowden's 2013 documents showing the global scale of this wiretapping, that the world had to confront the undeniable reality that the US could not be trusted to serve as the world's fiber hub.

It's not just fiber. The world does business in dollars. Most countries maintain dollar accounts at the Fed in New York as their major source of foreign reserves. But in 2005, American vulture capitalists bought up billions of dollars worth of Argentinian government bonds after the sovereign nation of Argentina had declared bankruptcy.

They convinced a judge in New York to turn over the government of Argentina's US assets to them to make good on loans that these debt collectors had not issued, but had bought up at pennies on the dollar. At that moment, every government in the world had to confront the reality that they could not trust the US Federal Reserve with their foreign reserves. But what else could they use?

Without a clear answer, dollar dominance continued, but then, under Biden, Putin-aligned oligarchs and Russian firms lost access to the SWIFT system for dollar clearing. This is when goods – like oil – are priced in dollars, so that buyers only need to find someone who will trade their own currency for dollars, which they can then swap for any commodity in the world.

Again, there's a sound case for dollar clearing: it's just not practical to establish deep, liquid pairwise trading market for all of the world's nearly 200 currencies, it's another O(N^2) problem.

But it only works if the dollar is a neutral platform. Once the dollar becomes an instrument of US foreign policy – whether or not you agree with that policy – it's no longer a neutral platform, and the world goes looking for an alternative.

No one knows what that alternative's going to be, just as no one knows what configuration the world's fiber links will end up taking. There's kilometers of fiber being stretched across the ocean floor, and countries are trying out some pretty improbable gambits as dollar alternatives, like Ethiopia revaluing its sovereign debt in Chinese renminbi. Without a clear alternative to America's enshittified platforms, the post-American century is off to a rocky start.

But there's one post-American system that's easy to imagine. 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 it with collectively maintained, open, free, trustworthy, auditable code.

This project is the only one that benefits from economies of scale, rather than being paralyzed by exponential crises of scale. 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 other country.

It's a commons, more like a science than a technology, in that it is universal and international and collaborative. We don't have dueling western and Chinese principles of structural engineering. Rather, we have universal principles for making sure buildings don't fall down, adapted to local circumstances.

We wouldn't tolerate secrecy in the calculations used to keep our buildings upright, and we shouldn't tolerate opacity in the software that keeps our tractors, hearing aids, ventilators, pacemakers, trains, games consoles, phones, CCTVs, door locks, and government ministries working.

The thing is, software is not an asset, it's a liability. The capabilities that running software delivers – automation, production, analysis and administration – those are assets. But the software itself? That's a liability. Brittle, fragile, forever breaking down as the software upstream of it, downstream of it, and adjacent to it is updated or swapped out, revealing defects and deficiencies in systems that may have performed well for years.

Shifting software to commons-based production is a way to reduce the liability that software imposes on its makers and users, balancing out that liability among many players.

Now, obviously, tech bosses are totally clueless when it comes to this. They really do think that software is an asset. That's why they're so fucking horny to have chatbots shit out software at superhuman speeds. That's why they think it's good that they've got a chatbot that "produces a thousand times more code than a human programmer."

Producing code that isn't designed for legibility and maintainability, that is optimized, rather, for speed of production, is a way to incur tech debt at scale.

This is a neat encapsulation of the whole AI story: the chatbot can't do your job, but an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with a chatbot that can't do your job.

Your boss is an easy mark for that chatbot hustler because your boss hates you. In their secret hearts, bosses understand that if they stopped coming to work, the business would run along just fine, but if the workers stopped showing up, the company would grind to a halt.

Bosses like to tell themselves that they're in the driver's seat, but really, they fear that they're strapped into the back seat playing with a Fisher Price steering wheel. For them, AI is a way to wire the toy steering wheel directly into the company's drive-train. It's the realization of the fantasy of a company without workers.

When I was walking the picket line in Hollywood during the writer's strike, a writer told me that you prompt an AI the same way a studio boss gives shitty notes to a writer's room: "Make me ET, but make it about a dog, and give it a love interest, and a car-chase in the third act."

Say that to a writer's room and they will call you a fucking idiot suit and tell you "Why don't you go back to your office and make a spreadsheet, you nitwit. The grownups here are writing a movie."

Meanwhile, if you give that prompt to a chatbot, it will cheerfully shit out a script exactly to spec. The fact that this script will be terrible and unusable is less important than the prospect of a working life in which no one calls you a fucking idiot suit.

AI dangles the promise of a writer's room without writers, a movie without actors, a hospital without nurses, a coding shop without coders.

When Mark Zuckerberg went on a podcast and announced that the average American had three friends, but wanted 15 friends, and that he could solve this by giving us chatbots instead of friends, we all dunked on him as an out-of-touch billionaire Martian who didn't understand the nature of friendship.

But the reality is that for Zuck, your friends are a problem. Your friends' interactions with you determine how much time you spend on his platforms, and thus how many revenue-generating ads he can show you.

Your friends stubbornly refuse to organize their relationship with you in a way that maximizes the return to his shareholders. So Zuck is over there in Menlo Park, furiously fantasizing about replacing your friends with chatbots, because that way, he can finally realize the dream of a social media service without any socializing.

Rich, powerful people are, at root, solipsists. The only way to amass a billion dollars is to inflict misery and privation on whole populations. The only way to look yourself in the mirror after you've done that, is to convince yourself that those people don't matter, that, in some important sense, they aren't real.

Think of Elon Musk calling everyone who disagrees with him an "NPC,” or all those "Effective Altruists," who claimed the moral high ground by claiming to care about 53 trillion imaginary artificial humans who will come into existence in 10,000 years at the expense of extending moral consideration to people alive today.

Or think of how Trump fired all the US government scientists, and then announced the "Genesis" program, declaring that the US would begin generating annual "moonshot"-scale breakthroughs, with a chatbot. It's science without scientists.

Chatbots can't really do science, but from Trump's perspective, they're still better than scientists, because a chatbot won't ever tell him not to stare at an eclipse, or not to inject bleach. A chatbot won't ever tell him that trans people exist, or that the climate emergency is real.

Powerful people are suckers for AI, because AI fuels the fantasy of a world without people: just a boss and a computer, and no ego-shattering confrontations with people who know how to do things telling you "no."

AI is a way to produce tech debt at scale, to replace skilled writers with defective spicy autocomplete systems, to lose money at a rate not seen in living memory.

Now, compare that with the project of building a post-American internet: a project to reduce tech debt, to unlock America's monopoly trillions and divide them among the world's entrepreneurs (for whom they represent untold profits), and the world's technology users (for whom they represent untold savings); all while building resiliency and sovereignty.

Now, some of you are probably feeling pretty cynical about this right now. After all, your political leaders have demonstrated decades of ineffectual and incompetent deference to the US, and an inability to act, even when the need was dire. If your leaders couldn't act decisively on the climate emergency, what hope do we have of them taking this moment seriously?

But crises precipitate change. Remember when another mad emperor – Vladimir Putin – invaded Ukraine, and Europe experienced a dire energy shortage? In three short years, the continent's solar uptake skyrocketed. The EU went from being 15 years behind in its energy transition, to ten years ahead of schedule.

Because when you're shivering the dark, a lot of fights you didn't think were worth it are suddenly existential battles you can't afford to lose. Sure, no one wants to argue with a tedious neighbor who has an aesthetic temper tantrum at the thought of a solar panel hanging from their neighbor's balcony.

But when it's winter, and there's no Russian gas, and you're shivering in the dark, then that person can take their aesthetic objection to balcony solar, fold it until it's all corners, and shove it right up their ass.

Besides, we don't need Europe to lead the charge on a post-American internet by repealing anticircumvention. Any country could do it! And the country that gets there first gets to reap the profits from supplying jailbreaking tools to the rest of the world, it gets to be the Disenshittification Nation, and everyone else in the world gets to buy those tools and defend themselves from US tech companies' monetary and privacy plunder.

Just one country has to break the consensus, and the case for every country doing so is the strongest it's ever been. It used to be that countries that depended on USAID had to worry about losing food, medical and cash supports if they pissed off America. But Trump killed USAID, so now that's a dead letter.

Meanwhile, America's status as the planet's most voracious consumer has been gutted by decades of anti-worker, pro-billionaire policies. Today, the US is in the grips of its third consecutive "K-shaped" recovery, that's an economic rally where the rich get richer, and everyone else gets poorer. For a generation, America papered over that growing inequality with easy credit, with everyday Americans funding their consumption with credit cards and second and third mortgages.

So long as they could all afford to keep buying, other countries had to care about America as an export market. But a generation of extraction has left the bottom 90% of Americans struggling to buy groceries and other necessities, carrying crushing debt from skyrocketing shelter, education and medical expenses that they can't hope to pay down, thanks to 50 years of wage stagnation.

The Trump administration has sided firmly with debt collectors, price gougers, and rent extractors. Trump neutered enforcement against rent-fixing platforms like Realpage, restarted debt payments for eight million student borrowers, and killed a plan to make live-saving drugs a little cheaper, leaving Americans to continue to pay the highest drug prices in the world.

Every dollar spent servicing a loan is a dollar that can't go to consumption. And as more and more Americans slip into poverty, the US is gutting programs that spend money on the public's behalf, like SNAP, the food stamps program that helps an ever-larger slice of the American public stave off hunger.

America is chasing the "world without people" dream, where working people have nothing, spend nothing, and turn every penny over to rentiers who promptly flush that money into the stock market, shitcoins, or gambling sites. But I repeat myself.

Even the US military – long a sacrosanct institution – is being kneecapped to enrich rent-seekers. Congress just killed a military "right to repair" law. So now, US soldiers stationed abroad will have to continue the Pentagon's proud tradition of shipping materiel from generators to jeeps back to America to be fixed by their manufacturers at a 10,000% markup, because the Pentagon routinely signs maintenance contracts that prohibit it from teaching a Marine how to fix an engine.

The post-American world is really coming on fast. As we repeal our anticircumvention laws, we don't have to care what America thinks, we don't have to care about their tariffs, because they're already whacking us with tariffs; and because the only people left in the US who can afford to buy things are rich people, who just don't buy enough stuff. There's only so many Lambos and Sub-Zeros even the most guillotineable plute can usefully own.

But what if European firms want to go on taking advantage of anticircumvention laws? Well, there's good news there, too. "Good news," because the EU firms that rely on anticircumvention are engaged in the sleaziest, most disgusting frauds imaginable.

Anticircumvention law is the reason that Volkswagen could get away with Dieselgate. By imposing legal liability on reverse-engineers who might have discovered this lethal crime, Article 6 of the Copyright Directive created a chilling effect, and thousands of Europeans died, every year.

Today, Germany's storied automakers are carrying on the tradition of Dieselgate, sabotaging their cars to extract rent from drivers. From Mercedes, which rents you the accelerator pedal in your luxury car, only unlocking the full acceleration curve of your engine if you buy a monthly subscription; to BMW, which rents you the automated system that automatically dims your high-beams if there's oncoming traffic.

Legalize jailbreaking and any mechanic in Europe could unlock those subscription features for one price, and not share any of that money with BMW and Mercedes.

Then there's Medtronic, a company that pretends it is Irish. Medtronic is the world's largest med-tech company, having purchased all their competitors, and then undertaken the largest "tax-inversion" in history, selling themselves to a tiny Irish firm, in order to magick their profits into a state of untaxable grace, floating in the Irish Sea.

Medtronic supplies the world's most widely used ventilators, and it booby-traps them the same way John Deere booby-traps its tractors. After a hospital technician puts a new part in a Medtronic ventilator, the ventilator's central computing unit refuses to recognize the part until it completes a cryptographic handshake, proving that an authorized Medtronic technician was paid hundreds of euros to certify a repair that the hospital's own technician probably performed.

It's just a way to suck hundreds of euros out of hospitals every time a ventilator breaks. This would be bad enough, but during the covid lockdowns, when every ventilator was desperately needed, and when the planes stopped flying, there was no way for a Medtronic tech to come and bless the hospital technicians' repairs. This was lethal. It killed people.

There's one more European company that relies on anticircumvention that I want to discuss here, because they're old friends of CCC: that's the Polish train company Newag. Newag sabotages its own locomotives, booby-trapping them so that if they sense they have been taken to a rival's service yard, the train bricks itself. When the train operator calls Newag about this mysterious problem, the company "helpfully" remotes into the locomotive's computers, to perform "diagnostics," which is just sending a unbricking command to the vehicle, a service for which they charge 20,000 euros.

Last year, Polish hackers from the security research firm Dragon Sector presented on their research into this disgusting racket in this very hall, and now, they're being sued by Newag under anticircumvention law, for making absolutely true disclosures about Newag's deliberately defective products.

So these are the European stakeholders for anticircumvention law: the Dieselgate killers, the car companies who want to rent you your high-beams and accelerator, the med-tech giant that bricked all the ventilators during the pandemic, and the company that tied Poland to the train-tracks.

I relish the opportunity to fight these bastards in Brussels, as they show up and cry "Won't someone think of the train saboteurs?"

The enshittification of technology – the decay of the platforms and systems we rely on – has many causes: the collapse of competition, regulatory capture, the smashing of tech workers' power. But most of all, enshittification is the result of anticircumvention law's ban on interoperability.

By blocking interop, by declaring war on the general-purpose computer, our policy-makers created an enshittogenic environment that rewarded companies for being shitty, and ushered in the enshittocene, in which everything is turning to shit.

Let's call time on enshittification. Let's seize the means of computation. Let's build the drop-in, free, open, auditable alternatives to the services and firmware we rely on.

Let's end the era of silos. I mean, isn't it fucking weird how 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're trying to join is on Twitter or Bluesky, Mastodon or Instagram – that is just the most Prodigy/AOL/Compuserve-ass way of running a digital world. I mean, 1990 called and they want their walled gardens back

Powerful allies are joining our side in the War on General Purpose Computation. It's not just people like us, who've been fighting for this whole goddamned century, but also countries that want to convert American tech's hoarded trillions into fuel for a single-use rocket that boosts their own tech sector into a stable orbit.

It's national security hawks who are worried about Trump bricking their ministries or their tractors, and who are also worried – with just cause – about Xi Jinping bricking all their solar inverters and batteries. Because, after all, the post-American internet is also a post-Chinese internet!

Nothing should be designed to be field updatable without the user's permission. Nothing critical should be a black box.

Like I said at the start of this talk, I have been doing this work for 24 years at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, throwing myself at a door that was double-locked and deadbolted, and now that door is open a crack and goddammit, I am hopeful.

Not optimistic. Fuck optimism! Optimism is the idea that things will get better no matter what we do. I know that what we do matters. Hope is the belief that if we can improve things, even in small ways, we can ascend the gradient toward the world we want, and attain higher vantage points from which new courses of action, invisible to us here at our lower elevation, will be revealed.

Hope is a discipline. It requires that you not give in to despair. So I'm here to tell you: don't despair.

All this decade, all over the world, countries have taken up arms against concentrated corporate power. We've had big, muscular antitrust attacks on big corporations in the US (under Trump I and Biden); in Canada; in the UK; in the EU and member states like Germany, France and Spain; in Australia; in Japan and South Korea and Singapore; in Brazil; and in China.

This is a near-miraculous turn of affairs. All over the world, governments are declaring war on monopolies, the source of billionaires' wealth and power.

Even the most forceful wind is invisible. We can only see it by its effects. What we're seeing here is that whenever a politician bent on curbing corporate power unfurls a sail, no matter where in the world that politician is, that sail fills with wind and propels the policy in ways that haven't been seen in generations.

The long becalming of the fight over corporate power has ended, and a fierce, unstoppable wind is blowing. It's not just blowing in Europe, or in Canada, or in South Korea, Japan, China, Australia or Brazil. It's blowing in America, too. Never forget that as screwed up and terrifying as things are in America, the country has experienced, and continues to experience, a tsunami of antitrust bills and enforcement actions at the local, state and federal level.

And never forget that the post-American internet will be good for Americans. Because, in a K-shaped, bifurcated, unequal America, the trillions that American companies loot from the world don't trickle down to Americans. The average American holds a portfolio of assets that rounds to zero, and that includes stock in US tech companies.

The average American isn't a shareholder in Big Tech, the average American is a victim of Big Tech. Liberating the world from US Big Tech is also liberating America from US Big Tech.

That's been EFF's mission for 35 years. It's been my mission at EFF for 25 years. If you want to get involved in this fight – and I hope you do – it can be your mission, too. You can join EFF, and you can join groups in your own country, like Netzpolitik here in Germany, or the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, or La Quadrature du Net in France, or the Open Rights Group in the UK, or EF Finland, or ISOC Bulgaria, XNet, DFRI, Quintessenz, Bits of Freedom, Openmedia, 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: a new, good internet that delivers all the technological self-determination of the old, good internet, and the ease of use of Web 2.0 so that our normie friends can use it, too.

And I can't wait for all of us to get to hang out there. It's gonna be great.

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:

Apple's threats are lies, but the privacy risks of interop are very real. It's entirely possible to plug something into a secure tool that renders it insecure. It's nice when companies test third party add-ons and warn their customers about defective or risky aftermarket mods, and to the extent that Apple does this, it's doing good work. But Apple has an irreconcilable conflict of interest when it comes to vetoing its customers' decisions about which non-Apple products they use. Apple has some genuinely stonking margins on its payment processing, repair, and other lines of business, and Apple's CEO has openly boasted about using deliberately engineered incompatibilities to drive people to switch to Apple products:

https://www.businessinsider.com/tim-cook-buy-your-mom-iphone-doj-apple-complaint-2024-3

How do we get Apple to protect its customers' privacy without picking their pockets or invading their privacy? By removing the company's veto over who can make software and hardware that works with Apple's competing offerings. The ultimate decision about which products are too dangerous for Europeans to use can't be vested with Apple – instead, it should be vested with expert agencies working for democratically accountable governments. This is the point that Bennett Ciphers and I made at length in our EFF white-paper "Privacy Without Monopoly," which has a whole section explaining how the EU's big, muscular privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), makes this an especially attractive proposition in the EU:

https://www.eff.org/document/privacy-without-monopoly-data-protection-and-interoperability

It's also a point that EFF board member and infosec legend Bruce Schneier made in his open letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, discussing opening up app stores:

https://www.eff.org/document/letter-bruce-schneier-senate-judiciary-regarding-app-store-security

Apple isn't going to exit a market with half a billion affluent consumers. If it does, expect its shareholders to wreak swift and terrible vengeance on the company. You know how people are always complaining that investors are only interested in short-term returns? It's true and here's a place where that cuts in our favor: shareholders aren't going to accept a half-billion-person market exit tomorrow in anticipation of forcing the EU to capitulate next year and thereafter safeguard Apple's continental scale rent-extraction racket. They want returns to their capital tomorrow, not in some hypothetical future in which Tim Cook tears out Henna Virkkunen's still-beating heart with his bare hands and parades it through Strasbourg, brandishing it at legions of trembling, vanquished eurocrats.

But let's say Apple does exit the EU.

Good.

The EU needs to get the hell off US tech infrastructure. Under Trump, Big Tech and the US government have stopped even pretending that American tech companies are independent of the US government. We know (from China) that Apple will happily backdoor its cloud servers to assuage authoritarian governments like Xi Xinping's. You know, Xi Xinping, the guy that Trump says he wants to emulate?

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/18/trump-praise-authoritarians-00132350

US Big Tech companies keep demonstrating that they are de facto arms of the US and constitute a hostile foreign power operating on European soil. When the International Criminal Court indicted Israeli génocidaires, Trump issued an executive order sanctioning the body. Immediately thereafter, Microsoft deleted the email and cloud accounts of ICC prosecutor Karim Khan – named in the Trump EO – and then Microsoft President Brad Smith perjured himself in his denial:

https://www.politico.eu/article/microsoft-did-not-cut-services-international-criminal-court-president-american-sanctions-trump-tech-icc-amazon-google/

Microsoft publicly admitted that it can't stop US authorities from conducting secret surveillance of EU citizens' (and EU governments') data, even when that data is stored on server in the EU:

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

The EU's response is something called "Eurostack" – a top-to-bottom "stack" of technologies from data-centers to operating systems and applications made and maintained by EU entities (for-profits, nonprofits, and public bodies):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/25/eurostack/#viktor-orbans-isp

Nearly all of the emphasis on Eurostack has been on building the data-centers and creating these applications, but some ways, this is the least important part of the project. Cloning GDocs or Office365 or iWork is the easy part. The hard part is migrating from US-controlled platforms to their Eurostack equivalents. If leaving Office365 means leaving all the documents your company, organization or government agency has ever created, or losing all the sharing and collaboration permissions, or losing all the edit-histories, well, no one is gonna migrate.

Thankfully, this is something technology can easily fix: all you need to do is reverse-engineer the US offering and create a tool that extracts and transforms the data to the new format, and moves a copy of it into the new Eurostack services. This is called "adversarial interoperability" and is eminently do-able, as Apple proved when they broke open Microsoft Office by creating the iWork suite (Pages, Numbers and Keynote):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interoperability-reviving-elegant-weapon-more-civilized-age-slay

The major impediment to this kind of seamless bulk migration tool isn't the technological challenge – it's the law. In 2001, the EU – under pressure from the USA – included an "anticircumvention" rule in the EU Copyright Directive (EUCD). Article 6 of the EUCD mirrors the language of Section 1201 of America's Digital Millennium Copyright Act, banning reverse-engineering and adversarial interoperability, even where no copyright infringement takes place. That means that a European company that made an account migration tool to help European companies or government agencies move their own data out of a US Big Tech silo could face liability under Article 6 of the EUCD, with severe criminal and civil penalties. EUCD 6 gives American tech giants more rights to Europeans' copyrighted works than the Europeans who created those works. It's a terrible law, and after a quarter century, it's long past its expiry date.

Bringing this full circle: Article 6 of the EUCD is also the law that stops European companies from reverse-engineering the iPhone and creating their own app stores, without having to rely on Apple's help. Given that Apple has flagrantly violated laws that order it to open its app store, it's time to unleash Europe's accomplished legion of top technologists on the problem:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/06/spoil-the-bunch/#dma

Doing that becomes even easier if Apple exits the EU and abandons EU customers, cutting off their supply of security patches and application updates. After all, Europeans own their Apple devices. It's up to them – not Apple – whether they want to trust their fellow Europeans to protect their security and add new functionality of their own property.

The EU doesn't need to be a technology-taker – it can be a technology maker. The Apple/Google duopoly may have sewn up the mobile market with illegal monopoly tactics, but that doesn't mean that the EU will never spawn another Nokia or Ericsson. The shortest, most efficient, most reliable path to reestablishing technological sovereignty for the EU's half-billion residents and 27 member-states is to allow domestic firms to take over the relationship between the Trump-controlled American tech giants and the Europeans who rely on their technology.

If Trump can seize Chinese companies like Tiktok and sell them to his major donors at a 90% discount, then American companies have no right to cry foul when the EU gets rid of the America First Copyright Directive and lets Europeans choose to get their software, updates, and hardware from European companies.

Image: Alex Popovkin, Bahia, Brazil from Brazil (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Annelid_worm,_Atlantic_forest,_northern_littoral_of_Bahia,_Brazil_%2816107326533%29.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

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But the fact that it's hard to get Big Tech to do the bidding of publicly accountable governments doesn't mean that those governments are powerless. There's one institution a government has total control over: itself.

The world's governments have all signed up to "anticircumvention" laws that criminalize reverse-engineering and modifying US tech products. This was done at the insistence of the US Trade Rep, who has spent this entire century using the threat of tariffs to bully every country in the world into signing up to laws that ban their own technologists from directly blocking American Big Tech companies' scams.

It's because of anticircumvention laws that a Canadian company can't go into business making an alternative Facebook client that blocks ads but restores the news. It's because of anticircumvention laws that a Canadian company can't go into business with a product that lets media companies bypass the Meta/Google ad-tech duopoly.

It's because of anticircumvention laws that a European company can't go into business modifying your phone, car, apps, smart devices and operating system to block all commercial surveillance. If companies can't get your data, they can't violate the GDPR. It's because of anticircumvention laws that a European company can't sell you a hardware dongle that breaks into your iPhone and replaces Apple's ripoff app store with a Made-in-the-EU alternative.

Anticircumvention law is the reason Canada's only response to Trump's illegal tariffs is more tariffs, which make everything in Canada more expensive. Get rid of anticircumvention law and Canada could get into the business of shifting billions of dollars from American tech monopolists to Canadian startups and the Canadian people:

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

Anticirumvention law is the reason the EU can't get its data out of the Big Tech silos that Trump controls, which lets Trump shut down any European government agency or official that displeases him:

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

American monopolists like John Deere have installed killswitches in every tractor in the world – killswitches that can't be removed until we get rid of anticircumvention laws, which will let us create open source firmware for tractors. Until we do that, Trump can shut down all the agriculture in any country that makes him angry:

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

For a decade, we've been warned that allowing China to supply our telecoms infrastructure was geopolitical suicide, because it would mean that China could monitor and terminate our network traffic. That's the threat that Trump's America now poses for the whole world, as Trump makes it clear that America doesn't have allies or trading partners, only rivals and competitors, and he will stop at nothing to beat them.

And if you are worried about China, well, perhaps you should be. The world's incredible rush to solarization has left us with millions of solar installations whose inverters are also subject to arbitrary updates by their (Chinese) manufacturers, including updates that could render them inoperable. The only way around this? Get rid of anticircumvention law and replace all the software in these critical systems with open source, transparent, owner-controlled alternatives:

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

Getting Big Tech to do your government's bidding is a big lift. The companies are too big to jail, especially with Trump behind them. That's why each of America's Big Tech CEOs paid $1m out of their own pockets to sit behind him on the dais at the inauguration:

https://apnews.com/article/trump-inauguration-tech-billionaires-zuckerberg-musk-wealth-0896bfc3f50d941d62cebc3074267ecd

Even America can't bring its tech companies to heel. When Google was convicted of being an illegal monopolist, the judge punished the company by sentencing it to…nothing:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/03/unpunishing-process/#fucking-shit-goddammit-fuck

But ultimately, breakups and fines and interoperabilty mandates are all forms of redistribution – a way to strip the companies of the spoils of their decades-long looting spree. That's a laudable goal, but if we want to get there, we must start with predistribution: halting the companies' ongoing extraction efforts, by getting rid of the laws that prevent other technologists from unfucking their products and halting their cash- and data-ripoffs.

Do that long and hard enough and we stand a real chance of draining off so much of their power that we can get moving on those redistributive moves. And getting rid of anticircumvention laws only requires that governments control their own behavior – unlike taxing or fining companies, which only works if governments can control the behavior of companies that have proven, time and again, to be more powerful than any country in the world.

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/2025/11/01/redistribution-vs-predistribution/#elbows-up-eurostack/a>

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

The DMCA was a enshittifier's charter, an invitation for corporations to use tactical "access controls" to write invisible, private laws that would let them threaten their customers – and competitors who might help those customers – with criminal prosecution.

Now, the DMCA has a known, living author, Bruce Lehman, a corporate IP lawyer who did a turn in government service as Bill Clinton's IP Czar.

Lehman tried several ways to get American policymakers to adopt this stupid idea, only to be rebuffed. So, undaunted, he traveled to Geneva, home of the World Intellectual Property Organization or WIPO, aa UN "specialized agency" that makes the world's IP treaties. At Lehman's insistence, WIPO passed a pair of treaties in 1996, collectively known as the "Internet Treaties," and in 1998, he got Congress to pass the DMCA, in order to comply with the terms of these treaties, a move he has since repeatedly described as "doing an end-run around Congress."

This guy, Bruce Lehman, he is still with us, breathing the same air as you and me. We are sharing a planet with the Louis Pasteur of making everything as shitty as possible.

But Bruce Lehman only enshittified America, turning our southern cousins into fodder for the immortal colony organisms we call limited liability corporations. To understand how Canada enshittified, we have to introduce some Canadian enshittifiers.

Specifically, two of Stephen Harper's ministers: James Moore, Harper's Heritage minister, and the disgraced sex-pest Tony Clement, who was then Industry minister. Stephen Harper really wanted a Canadian anti-circumvention law, and he put Clement and Moore in charge of the effort.

Everyone knew that it was going to be a hard slog. After all, Canadians had already rejected anti-circumvention law three times. Back in 2006, Sam Bulte – a Liberal MP in Paul Martin's government – tried to get this law through, but it was so unpopular that she lost her seat in Parkdale, which flipped to the NDP for a generation.

Moore and Clement hatched a plan to sell anti-circumvention to the Canadian people. They decided to do a consultation on the law. The thinking was that if we all "felt heard" then we wouldn't be so angry when they rammed it through.

Boy, did that backfire. 6,138 of us filed consultation responses categorically rejecting this terrible law, and only 53 responses offered support for the idea.

How were Moore and Clement going to spin this? Simple. Moore went to a meeting of the International Chamber of Commerce in Toronto, and gave a speech where he denounced all 6,132 of us as "babyish" and "radical extremists." Then Harper whipped his caucus and in 2012, Bill C-11, the Copyright Modernisation Act passed, and we got a Made-in-Canada all-purpose, omnienshittificatory anti-circumvention law.

Let's be clear about what this law does: because it makes no exemptions for circumvention for lawful purposes, Canada's anti-circumvention law criminalizes anything you do with your computer, phone or device, if it runs counter to the manufacturer's wishes.

It's an invitation for foreign manufacturers to use Canada's courts to punish Canadian customers and Canadian companies for finding ways to make the products we buy and use less shitty.

Anti-circumvention is at the root of the repair emergency. All companies have to do is add an "initialization" routine to their devices, so that any new parts installed in a car, or a tractor, or a phone, or a ventilator has to be unlocked by the manufacturer's representative before the device will recognize the new part, and it becomes a crime for an independent mechanic, or a farmer, or an independent repair shop, or a hospital technician to fix a car, or a tractor, or a phone, or a ventilator.

This is called "parts pairing" or "VIN locking. "Now, we did pass C-244, a national Right to Repair law, last year, but it's just a useless ornament, because it doesn't override anti-circumvention. So Canadians can't fix their own technology if the manufacturers uses an access control to block the repair.

Anti-circumvention means we can't fix things when they break, and it also means that we can't fix them when they arrive pre-broken by their enshittifying manufacturers.

Take the iPhone: it can only use one app store, Apple's official one, and everyone who puts an app in the app store has to sign up to use Apple's payment processor, which takes 30 cents out of every dollar you spend inside an app.

That means that when a Canadian user sends $10 to a month to a Canadian independent news outlet or podcast, $3 out of that $10 gets sucked out of the transaction and lands in Cupertino, California, where it is divvied by Apple's shareholders and executives.

It's not just news sites. Every dollar you send through an app to a performer on Patreon, a crafter on Etsy, a games company, or a software company takes a roundtrip through Silicon Valley and comes back 30 cents lighter.

A Canadian company could bypass the iPhone's "access controls" and give you a download or a little hardware dongle that installed a Canadian app store, one that used the Interac network to process payments for free, eliminating Apple and Google's 30% tax on Canada's entire mobile digital economy.

And indeed, we have 2024's Bill C-294, an interoperability law, that lets Canadians do this. But just as with the repair law, our interoperability law is also useless, because it doesn't repeal the anti-circumvention law, meaning you are only allowed to reverse engineer products to make interoperable alternatives if there is no access control in the way. Of course, every company that's in a position to rip you off just adds an access control.

The fact that foreign corporations have the final say over how Canadians use their own property is a font of endless enshittification. Remember when we told Facebook to pay news outlets for links and Facebook just removed all links to the news? Our anti-circumvention law is the only reason that a Canadian company couldn't jailbreak the Facebook app and give you an alternative app, one that slurped up everything Facebook was waiting to show you in your feed, all the updates from your friend and your groups while blocking all the surveillance, the ads and the slop and the recommendations, and then mixing in the news that you wanted to see.

Remember when we tried to get Netflix to show Canadian content in your recommendations and search results? Anti-circumvention is the only reason some Canadian company can't jailbreak the Netflix app and give you an alternative client that lets you stream all your Netflix shows but also shows you search results from the NFB and any other library of Canadian media, while blocking Netflix's surveillance.

Anticircumvention means that Canadian technologists can't seize the means of computation, which means that we're at the mercy of American companies and we only get the rights that they decide to give us.

Apple will block Facebook's apps from spying on you while you use your iPhone, but they won't let you block Apple from spying on you while you use your iPhone, to gather exactly the same data Facebook steals from you, for exactly the same purpose: to target ads to you.

Apple will screen the apps in its app store to prevent malicious code from running on your iPhone, but if you want to run a legitimate app and Apple doesn't want you to, they will block it from the app store and you will just have to die mad.

That's what's happened in October, when Apple kicked an app called ICE Block out of the App Store. ICE Block is an app that warns you if masked thugs are at large in your neighborhood waiting to kidnap you and send you to a camp. Apple decided that ICE thugs were a "protected class" that ICE Block discriminated against, hey decided that you don't deserve to be safe from ICE kidnappings, and what they say goes.

The road to enshittification hell is paved with anticircumvention. We told our politicians this, a decade and a half ago, and they called us "babyish radical extremists" and did it anyway.

Now, I've been shouting about this for decades. I was one of those activists who helped get Sam Bulte unelected and flipped her seat for 20 years. But I will be the first person to tell you that I have mostly failed at preventing enshittification.

Bruce Lehman, James Moore and even Tony "dick pic" Clement are way better at enshittifying the world than I am at disenshittifying it. Of course, they have an advantage over me: they are in a coalition with the world's most powerful corporations and their wealthy investors.

Whereas my coalition is basically, you know, you folks. People who care about human rights, workers' rights, consumer rights, privacy rights. And guys, I hate to tell you, but we're losing.

Let's talk about how we start winning.

Any time you see a group of people successfully push for a change that they've been trying to make unsuccessfully for a long-ass time it's a sure bet that they've found some coalition partners. People who want some of the same things, who've set aside their differences and joined the fight.

That's the Trump story, all over. The Trump coalition is basically, all the billionaires, plus the racists, plus the dopes who'd vote for a slime mold if it promised to lower their taxes by a nickle, even though they somehow expect to have roads and schools. Well, maybe not schools. You know, Ford Nation.

Plus everyone who correctly thinks the Democratic Party are a bunch of do-nothing sellouts, who think they can bully you into voting for genocide because the other guy is an out-and-out fascist.

Billionaires, racists, freaks with low-tax brain-worms and people who hate the sellout Dems: Trump's built a coalition that gets stuff done. Sure, it's terrible stuff, but you can't deny that they're getting it done.

To escape from the enshittificatory black hole that Clement and Moore blew in Canadian policy, we need a coalition, too. And thanks to Trump and his incontinent belligerence, we're getting one.

Let's start with the Trump tariffs. When I was telling you about how anticircumvention law took four tries under two different Prime Ministers, perhaps you wondered "Why did all these Canadian politicians want this stupid law in the first place?"

After all, it's not like Canadian companies are particularly enriched by this law. Sure, it lets Ted Rogers rent you a cable box that won't let you attach a video recorder, so you have to pay for Rogers' PVR, which only lets you record some shows, and deletes them after a set time, and won't let you skip the ads.

But the amount of extra money Rogers makes off this disgusting little racket is dwarfed by the billions that Canadian business leave on the table every year, by not going into business disenshittifying America's shitty tech exports. To say nothing of the junk fees and app taxes and data that those American companies rip off every Canadian for.

So why were these Canadian MPs and prime ministers from both the Liberals and the Tories so invested in getting anticircumvention onto our law-books?

Simple: the US Trade Rep threatened us with tariffs if we didn't pass an anti-circuvmention law.

Remember, digital products are slippery. If America bans circumvention, and American companies starts screwing the American public, that just opens an opportunity for companies elsewhere in the world to make disenshittifying products, which any American with an internet connection and a payment method can buy. Downloading jailbreaking code is much easier than getting insulin shipped from a Canadian pharmacy!

So the US Trade Rep's top priority for the past quarter-century has been bullying America's trading partners into passing anti-circumvention laws to render their own people defenseless against American tech companies' predation and to prevent non-American tech companies from going into business disenshittifying America's defective goods.

The threat of tariffs was so serious that multiple Canadian PMs from multiple parties tried multiple times to get a law on the books that would protect us from tariffs.

And then in comes Trump, and now we have tariffs anyway.

And let me tell you: when someone threatens to burn your house down if you don't follow their orders, and you follow their orders, and they burn your house down anyway, you are an absolute sucker if you keep following their orders.

We could respond to the tariffs by legalizing circumvention, and unleashing Canadian companies to go into business raiding the margins of the most profitable lines of business of the most profitable corporations the world has ever seen.

Sure, Canada might not ever have a company like Research In Motion again, but what we could have is a company that sells the tools to jailbreak iPhones to anyone who wants to set up an independent iPhone store, bypassing Apple's 30% app tax and its high-handed judgments about what apps we can and can't have.

Apple's payment processing business is worth $100b/year. We could offer people a 90% discount and still make $10b/year. And unlike Apple, we wouldn't have to assume the risk and capital expenditure of making phones. We could stick Apple with all of the risk and expense, and cream off the profits.

That's fair, isn't it? It's certainly how Big Tech operates. When Amazon started, Jeff Bezos said to the publishers, "Your margin is my opportunity." $100b/year off a 30% payment processing fee is a hell of a margin, and a hell of an opportunity.

With Silicon Valley, it's always "disruption for thee, not for me. When they do it to us, that's progress, when we do it to them, it's piracy (and every pirate wants to be an admiral).

Now, of course, Canada hasn't responded to the Trump tariffs with jailbreaking. Our version of "elbows up" turns out to mean retaliatory tariffs. Which is to say, we're making everything we buy from America more expensive for us, which is a pretty weird way of punishing America, eh?

It's like punching yourself in the face really hard and hoping the downstairs neighbour says "Ouch."

Plus, it's pretty indiscriminate. We're not angry at Americans. We're angry at Trump and his financial backers. Tariffing soybeans just whacks some poor farmer in a state that begins and ends with a vowel who's never done anything bad to Canada.

I guarantee you that poor bastard is making payments on a John Deere tractor, which costs him an extra $200 every time it breaks down, because after he fixes it himself, he has to pay two hundred bucks to John Deere and wait two days for them to send out a technician who types an unlock code into the tractor's console that unlocks the "parts pairing," so the tractor recognises the new part.

Instead of tariffing that farmer's soybeans, we could sell him the jailbreaking tool that lets him fix his tractor without paying an extra $200 to John Deere.

Instead of tsking at Elon Musk over his Nazi salute, we could sell every mechanic in the world a Tesla jailbreaking kit that unlocks all the subscription features and software upgrades, without sending a dime to Tesla, kicking Elon Musk square in the dongle.

This is all stuff we could be doing. We could be building gigantic Canadian tech businesses, exporting to a global market, whose products make everything cheaper for every Canadian, and everyone else in the world, including every American.

Because the American public is also getting screwed by these companies, and we could stand on guard for them, too. We could be the Disenshittification Nation.

But that's not what we've done. Instead, we've decided to make everything in Canada more expensive, which is just about the stupidest political strategy I've ever heard of.

This might be the only thing Carney could do that's less popular than firing 10,000 civil servants and replacing them with chatbots on the advice of the world's shadiest art dealer, who is pretty sure that if we keep shoveling words into the word-guessing program it will wake up and become intelligent.

Which is just, you know, stupid. It's like thinking that if we just keep breeding our horses to run faster, one of our mares will eventually give birth to a locomotive. Human beings are not word-guessing programs who know more words that ChatGPT.

So it's clear that the coalition of "people who care about digital rights" and "people who want to make billions of dollars off jailbreaking tech" isn't powerful enough to break the coalition that makes hundreds of billions of dollars from enshittification.

But Trump – yes, Trump! – keeps recruiting people to our cause.

Trump has made it clear that America no longer has allies, nor does it have trading partners. It has adversaries and rivals. And Trump's favorite weapon for attacking his foreign adversaries are America's tech giants.

When the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant against Bejamin Netanyahu for ordering a genocide, Trump denounced them, and Microsoft shut down their Outlook accounts.

The chief prosecutor and other justices immediately lost access to all the working files of the court, to their email archives, to their diaries and address books.

This was a giant, blinking sign, visible from space, reading AMERICAN TECHNOLOGY CANNOT BE TRUSTED.

Trump's America only has adversaries and rivals, and Trump will pursue dominance by bricking your government, your businesses, your whole country.

It's not just administrative software that Trump can send kill signals to. Remember when those Russian looters stole Ukrainian tractors and they turned up in Crimea? John Deere sent a kill-signal to the tractors and permanently immobilized them.

This was quite a cool little comeuppance, the kind of thing a cyberpunk writer like me can certainly relish. But anyone who thinks about this for, oh, ten seconds will immediately realise that anyone who can push around the John Deere company can order the permanent immobilization of any tractor in the world, or all the tractors in your country.

Because John Deere is a monopolist, and whatever part of the market Deere doesn't control is controlled by Massey Ferguson, and Trump can order the bricking of those tractors, too.

This is the thing we were warned we'd face if we let Huawei provide our telecoms infrastructure, and those warnings weren't wrong. We should be worried about any gadget that we rely on that can be bricked by its manufacturer.

Because that means we are at risk from the manufacturer, from governments who can suborn the manufacturer, from corporate insiders who can hijack the manufacturer's control systems, and from criminals who can impersonate the manufacturer to our devices.

This is the third part of our coalition: not just digital rights weirdos like me; not just investors and technologists looking to make billions; but also national security hawks who are justifiably freaking out about America, China, or someone else shutting down key pieces of their country, from its food supply to its administrative capacity.

Trump is a crisis, and crises precipitate change.

Just look at Europe. Before Putin invaded Ukraine, the EU was a decade behind on its energy transition goals. Now, just a few years later, they're 15 years ahead of schedule.

It turns out that a lot of "impossible" things are really just fights you'd rather not have. No one wants to argue with some tedious German who hates the idea of looking at "ugly solar panels" on their neighbour's balcony. But once you're all shivering in the dark, that's an argument you will have and you will win.

Today, another mad emperor is threatening Europe – and the world. Trump's wanton aggression has given rise to a new anti-enshittification coalition: digital rights advocates, investors and technologists, and national security hawks; both the ones who worry about America, and the ones who worry about China.

That's a hell of a coalition!

The time is right to become a disenshittification nation, to harness our own tech talent, and the technologists who are fleeing Trump's America in droves, along with capital from investors who'd like to back a business whose success isn't determined by how many $TRUMP Coins they buy.

Jailbreaking is how Canada cuts American Big Tech down to size.

It's unlike everything else we've tried, like the Digital Services Tax, or forcing Netflix to support cancon, or making Facebook and Google pay to link to the news.

All of those tactics involve making these companies that are orders of magnitude richer than Canada do something they absolutely do not want to do.

Time and again, they've shown that we don't have the power to make them do things. But you know what Canada has total power over? What Canada does.

We are under no obligation to continue to let these companies use our courts to attack our technologists, our businesses, our security researchers, our tech co-ops, our nonprofits, who want to jailbreak America's shitty tech, to seize the means of computation, to end the era in which American tech companies can raid our wallets and our data with impunity.

In a jailbroken Canada, we don't have to limit ourselves to redistribution, to taxing away some of the money that the tech giants steal from us. In a jailbroken Canada, we can do predistribution. We can stop them from stealing our money in the first place.

And if we don't do it, someone else will. Because every country was arm-twisted into passing an anti-circumvention law like ours. Every country had a supine and cowardly lickspittle like James Moore or Tony Clement who'd do America's bidding, a quisling who'd put their nation's people and businesses in chains, rather than upset the US Trade Rep.

And all of those countries are right where we are: hit with tariffs, threatened by Trump, waiting for the day that Microsoft or Oracle or Google or John Deere bricks their businesses, their government, their farms.

One of those countries is going to jump at this opportunity, the opportunity to consume the billions in rents stolen by US Tech giants, and use them as fuel for a single-use rocket booster that launches their tech sector into a stable orbit for decades to come.

That gives them the hottest export business in living memory: a capital-light, unstoppable suite of products that save businesses and consumers money, while protecting their privacy.

If we sleep on this, we'll still benefit. We'll get the consumer surplus that comes from buying those jailbreaking tools online and using them to disenshittify our social media, our operating systems, our vehicles, our industrial and farm equipment.

But we won't get the industrial policy, the chance to launch a whole sector of businesses, each with the global reach and influence of RIM or Nortel.

That'll go to someone else. The Europeans are already on it. They're funding and building the "Eurostack": free, open source, auditable and trustworthy versions of the US tech silos. We're going to be able to use that here.

I mean, why not? We'll just install that code on metal running in Canadian data-centres, and we'll debug it and add features to it, and so will everyone else.

Because that's how IT should work, and it should go beyond just the admin and database software that businesses and governments rely on. We should be building drop-in, free, open software for everything: smart speakers, smart TVs, smart watches, phones, cars, tractors, powered wheelchairs, ventilators.

That's how it should already be: that the software that powers these devices that we entrust with our data, our integrity, our lives should be running code that anyone can see, test, and improve.

That's how science works, after all. Before we had science, we had something kind of like science. We had alchemy. Alchemy was very similar to science, in that an alchemist would observe some natural phenomena in the world, hypothesise a causal relationship between them, and design an experiment to validate that hypothesis.

But here's where alchemy and science diverge: unlike a scientist, an alchemist wouldn't publish their results. They'd keep them secret, rather than exposing them to the agony of adversarial peer review, where your enemies seek out every possible reason to discredit your work. This let the alchemists kid themselves about the stuff they thought they'd discovered, and that's why every alchemist discovered for themself, in the hardest way possible, that you shouldn't drink mercury.

But after 500 years of this, alchemy finally achieved its long sought-after goal of converting something common to something of immeasurable value. Alchemy discovered how to transform the base metal of superstition into the precious metal of knowledge, through the crucible of publishing.

Disclosure is the difference between knowledge and ignorance. Openness is the difference between dying of mercury poisoning and discovering medicine.

The fact that we have a law on our statute books, in the year of two thousand and twenty-five, that criminalises discovering how the software we rely on works, and telling other people about it and improving it – well, it's pretty fucking pathetic, isn't it?

We don't have to keep on drinking the alchemists' mercury. We don't have to remain prisoners of the preposterous policy blunders of Tony Clement and James Moore. We don't have to tolerate the endless extraction of Big Tech. We don't have to leave billions on the table. We need not abide the presence of lurking danger in all our cloud-connected devices.

We can be the vanguard of a global movement of international nationalism, of digital sovereignty grounded in universal, open, transparent software, a commons that everyone contributes to and relies upon. Something more like science than technology.

Like the EU's energy transition, this is a move that's long overdue. Like the EU's energy transition, amad emperor has created the conditions for us to get off of our asses, to build a better world.

We could be a disenshittification nation. We could seize the means of computation. We could have a new, good internet that respects our privacy and our wallets. We could make a goddamned fortune doing it.

And once we do it, we could protect ourselves from spineless digital vassals of the mad king on our southern border, and rescue our American cousins to boot.

What's not to like?

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/2025/11/28/disenshittification-nation/#post-american-internet

For starters, the Swiss recognized what any Simcity player knows: fiber is a "natural monopoly." It doesn't make any sense to build multiple, competing fiber networks – any more than it would make sense to build multiple, competing sewer systems or electric grids.

In the US, private fiber providers get city permits to dig up the roads and lay their network. If you have two competing networks, they dig up the road twice.

You'd think that the (more regulated) Germans would lay a single network, but they, too, have multiple, competing networks. German regulators have a complex set of priorities and constraints: to encourage competition, they promote the idea of competing networks in competing trenches, often just meters apart (rather than on competing services running over the same fiber and/or fiber run through the same conduit – pipe – laid in a single trench).

This makes setting up fiber extremely capital-intensive, so Germany backstops this system with "essential facilities sharing" – a rule that requires the incumbent (formerly state-owned, now partially state-owned) Deutsche Telekom to offer space in its conduit to smaller ISPs that want to thread their own fiber from their data-centers to their customers' homes. This is a good idea in theory – but in practice, DT has largely captured its regulators and so it is free to place all kinds of administrative hurdles in the paths of competitors seeking to use its lines.

The result is that Germans can get fiber from multiple, heavily capitalized network providers who overbuilt redundant systems under the city streets, squandering capital digging trenches that they could have spent on providing faster and/or cheaper connections.

Meanwhile, in the US, they leave this all up to "the market" (though, of course, there's no way "the market" could get fiber laid down without public participation, because the clearing price for privately negotiated licenses to dig up every street in town is "infinity"). The US is dominated by a cartel of massive incumbents: there's AT&T (formerly a regulated monopoly that was so entangled with the US government that it was effectively a for-profit state enterprise) and the cable giants, Comcast and Charter, who divide up the country into exclusive territories like the Pope dividing up the "New World."

These companies generally enjoy regional monopolies, which means they're less interested in making profits (money you get by mobilizing capital) than they are from extracting rent (money you get from sweating assets). For example, when Frontier went bankrupt in 2020, we got to look at its internal bookkeeping system, and learned that the company treated 1m customers who had no alternative carriers as special assets because it could charge them more for worse service and poor maintenance:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/15/useful-idiotsuseful-idiots/

This means that US fiber networks tend to be underbuilt (the opposite of Germany's overbuilt networks), meaning that even if you're buying "gigabit" fiber, you're probably sharing that one gig connection with your whole block or neighborhood, so you only get your nominal throughput at weird hours when all the other subscribers aren't streaming Netflix.

(Note that there are cities in the US with a better situation; particularly cities served by Ting, which is owned by Hover, the amazing domain registry. Ting operates an excellent mobile carrier and a fiber networks in many cities. If you are lucky enough to have Ting as an option, then you should treasure that option.)

So, that's Germany and America. What did they do in Switzerland?

For starters, they ran a four-strand, dedicated line (an insulated wire with four separate strands of fiber in it) to every house. That wire terminates at your wall with a "neutral, open hub." Any carrier can provide service over those four strands: Swisscom (the incumbent, majority state-owned carrier); Init7 or Salt (national, commercial carriers); or a local ISP.

Each of the strands in your neutral hub operate independently. That means that you can switch from one carrier to another with a click. You can also run two or more carriers' signal through your hub, meaning that you can try out a new carrier before canceling your old one. The carriers compete on price, speed and customer service – but they don't compete on who can actually connect your home to the internet.

The origins of this excellent system are in 2008, when Switzerland's Federal Communications Commission convened a roundtable to determine the future of the country's broadband. Incredibly, it was Swisscom that pushed for the multi-strand, dedicated fiber system, on the grounds that anything less would lead to monopolization.

I say "incredibly," because in all my travels over the past three decades, a single encounter with Swisscom stands out as the most absurd and backwards run-in I ever experienced with a telco.

It was while I was working as EFF's delegate to the United Nations in Geneva, as part of an infinitesimal coalition of digital rights group convened by James Love and Manon Ress of Knowledge Ecology International. Geneva is not a forgiving city for someone working for a cash-strapped NGO: it's a city where everyone (except you) is on a lavish expense account courtesy of a national government, or (better still) an industry body that lobbies the UN.

My usual daggy two-star hotel (which cost as much as a four-star in London) didn't have its own wifi: instead, you signed on through Swisscom, which did not offer its own payment processing. To get onto the Swisscom wifi, you had to buy a scratch-off prepaid card that was good for a certain number of hours or minutes. The hotel was always sold out of these cards.

So my normal ritual upon my arrival in Geneva was to scour the tobacco shops around the train station for scratch-off cards. Normally, this would take four or five tries – the shops would either be completely sold out, or would only have the two-hour cards (needless to say, these were a lot more expensive on a per-hour basis than the one-day and multi-day cards).

On one trip, though, all the shops were sold out of these cards, so I skipped breakfast the next morning to wait outside the doors of the Swisscom offices, which opened five minutes late (the only business in Switzerland that wasn't achingly prompt!). The clerk let me in eventually, but when I approached his counter, he made me trudge to the opposite end of the room to take a number (I was the only person in the shop).

After an ostentatious delay, the clerk called out "Numero un!" and I went up to his counter and asked for a three-day card. No dice, he was sold out. Two-day cards? Nope. One-day? Uh-uh. He only had two-hour cards, too. Literally, the Swiss national telco had run out of integers.

This incident stuck with me so durably that I wrote it into my third novel, Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town. You can hear me read that passage here:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/17/aura-of-benevolence/#sctt-slt

So it's frankly amazing to me to learn that Swisscom – who will forever be synonymous in my mind with the most catastrophically stupid internet delivery system imaginable – demanded this anti-monopoly fiber rollout.

But – as Schüller points out – Swisscom's foray into uncharacteristic reasonableness was short-lived. By 2020, the company had regressed to its mean, and was demanding an end to the neutral, four-strand, point-to-point system, petitioning for regulatory permission to switch to a cheaper, slower, shared hub-and-spoke system. This system wouldn't just be slower – it would also require all of Swisscom's rivals to rent access to its fiber, with Swisscom having the final say over who could compete with it and how.

This went all the way to the Swiss federal courts, who ruled that Swisscom had failed to demonstrate "sufficient technological or economic grounds" for the change and fined the company CHF18m for wasting everyone's time with this stupid idea (that is, "violating Swiss competition law"). And so it is that, in 2026, you can get 25Gbit symmetrical fiber throughout Switzerland. Wunderschön!

Schüller closes out his piece with a set of recommendations for countries hoping to replicate Switzerland's broadband miracle: open access to physical infrastructure; point-to-point service; neutral fiber standards; municipal fiber; and strong antitrust enforcement to keep the incumbent carriers in line.

These are great recommendations; they address the contradiction of regulated monopoly telcoms provision. On the one hand, these networks are natural monopolies, and they can only exist with extensive government intervention (at a minimum, to clear the way for poles, trenches and conduit for the physical fiber).

On the other hand, telcoms (especially broadband) play an important role in the political realm, because broadband connections are essential to civic and political engagement. You can't turn people out for a protest, or run an election campaign, a referendum, a ballot initiative, a regulatory notice-and-comment campaign, or even a campaign to get people to a public meeting or listening session without broadband.

This means that state-provided broadband is an incredibly tempting target for political corruption and regulatory capture. Think of all the terrible things that governments are doing with broadband regulation today, like Trump demanding that service providers turn over the identities and locations of his political enemies so that ICE can hunt them down and kidnap or murder them; or "age verification" systems that accumulate mountains of easily raided personal information on adults and children.

Do you want Trump's FCC chairman Brendan Carr setting content moderation policies for your internet connection? The guy who wants to pull TV and radio stations' broadcast licenses if they criticize Trump and Israel's catastrophic Iran war?

https://www.techdirt.com/2026/03/17/brendan-carr-pretends-to-be-tough-demands-broadcasters-support-disastrous-war/

Do you want your local ISP being run by your mayor? I mean, sure, there are some reasonable mayors out there, but imagine if your ISP was managed by Eric Adams, Boris Johnson…or Rob Ford:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/rob-ford-part-1-111985831

Saying that broadband should be run "like a utility," raises more questions than it answers. I, too, want broadband run "like a utility," but that doesn't mean that I want the whole show to be provided solely by my federal or municipal government. A "utility" model for broadband should mean running conduit to every home in town, with point-to-point connections that deliver broadband via a municipally owned network – but not just that.

The municipal network should also offer "essential facilities sharing" in two forms: first, they should allow anyone to set up an ISP by renting shelf-space in the municipal data-center and installing their own switches that can provide internet to anyone in town. This would let large and small companies set up ISPs, as well as co-ops and nonprofits, or even tinkerers wanting to provide access to a group of friends. Beyond that, the city should rent space in the conduit itself, to support point-to-point links beyond those offered by the city – for example, between a university campus and an offsite supercomputing center, or two buildings owned by the same company, or even as a parallel set of fiber connections run by someone who's fed up with getting their internet service from Eric Adams.

This is a "pluralized" utility model: one that involves the city in providing infrastructure at several layers, as well as a "public option" – but which doesn't allow a city that's in thrall to Moms For Liberty to decide what you can say on the internet.

This principle generalizes beyond internet provision, too. Many people have observed that social media, with its strong "network effects" (meaning its value increases as more people use it), could be a "natural monopoly" and want a social media "utility." I can see the reasoning there, but if there's one thing we've learned from zuckermuskian legacy social media, it's that centralized control over speech forums is a moral hazard and an attractive nuisance. It's a political prize beyond measure, and it attracts all sorts of skullduggerous bids to suborn it and harness it to some political faction.

But there's a pluralized utility model for social media, too, thanks to modern, federated social media systems like Mastodon and Bluesky. These are open platforms that can support multiple, interconnected servers that all talk to one another. Unlike, say, Twitter, where you can only talk to other Twitter users, federated social media allows you to talk with anyone on any server, provided they want to talk with you.

As with fiber, a "utility" model for federated social media would feature public intervention at multiple layers of the system. Governments could (should!) run their own servers, providing the canonical source of government information. They can also provide turnkey cloud services for people who want to start their own services – and they can spin out the code that goes into these services into free/open source projects that others can use (and contribute to). Governments could support people who are trying to migrate off of legacy social media (for example, through library workshops and helplines), and pay to label and tag media (for example, media that is compliant with the public education curriculum). Governments could also offer public servers where you could sign up to get online – and because federated social media makes it easy to move your account from one server to another, it would be easy to move from that server to one run by a nonprofit, a co-op or a business:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/25/eurostack/#viktor-orbans-isp

Think of this pluralized utility model as being something like your city's roads. It's great for your city to provide roads, and great for them to run buses on those roads, and to create bike lanes and bike parking spots and other infrastructure. For roads to be "public," it does not follow that everything on them be licensed and operated by the municipal government: we can still have private bikes, bikeshares, regulated taxis and licensed private motor vehicles. The roads are still "public" but Boris Johnson doesn't get to decide where you can go.

I think this is a lazy conclusion. It's true that it takes more steps to sign up for Mastodon than it does to get onboard with Instagram, and that Instagram has a recommendation system that can help you bootstrap your network and start to populate your feed. But it's also true that Instagram has thousands of engineers and UX/UI people working on it, while Mastodon operates on a skeleton crew.

The idea that Mastodon's rough edges are due to the fact that it's open and federated – and not because it operates with a fraction of a percent of the resources as Instagram – is pretty implausible to my mind.

Indeed, there's a long history of tools designed by and for developers being picked up by commercial teams and polished into mass consumer products, which suggests that the tools' usability problems stemmed from resource constraints, not the openness or the flexibility of the tool. Think of how Slack transformed irc, or how Android packaged up GNU/Linux.

Another way to think about investment in improving free/open tools that suffer from being overly technical is that there is tons of room for improvement. There are so many easy wins to be scored when it comes to Libreoffice, Mastodon, The Gimp, ffmpeg, etc. Under the hood, these tools are stunning, but their front-ends have lagged.

By contrast, Big Tech has done so much fine-tuning of its user interfaces and workflows that there's very little room to maneuver. Every new product release for a dominant Big Tech tool is as much a regression as it is an improvement, and often these releases are expensive catastrophes:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1mkhros/gpt5_sucks_thats_all/

People are often baffled at how a company with all these experts can produce "improvements" that are actually massive steps backwards, but that's what happens when you try to add more polish to something you've already been polishing for a decade or more:

https://kottke.org/25/09/0047552-im-usually-pretty-go-with

There's plenty of room at the bottom (of the tech stack). It's hard to overstate just how under-resourced some free/open projects are, how many millions of people rely on the work of just one dedicated maintainer. Snowden coordinated his disclosures to journalists using GPG, the free/open version of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), a way to secure email conversations. After the Snowden revelations, many people tried to use GPG – and failed. It was just too complicated.

But is GPG too complicated to use because it's impossible to make it easier to use? Maybe. But maybe it was the fact that one part-time volunteer was doing all the work on GPG/email integration:

https://www.propublica.org/article/the-worlds-email-encryption-software-relies-on-one-guy-who-is-going-broke

Likewise, there are millions of people who rely on Pidgin, a tool that lets you use multiple chat systems from a single interface. Those millions of users are supported by one part-time developer who funds the work out of his dayjob:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/07/tower-babel-how-public-interest-internet-trying-save-messaging-and-banish-big

If the EU were to fund even a small team to improve the usability of these systems, they could plausibly make them ten or twenty times easier to use (that is, put them within the technical understanding of ten to twenty times more users). What a growth opportunity! Does anyone think Apple can make iOS twenty times more legible?

Getting these free/open tools over a threshold for everyday usage puts them on a glide path to sustainability. As more users – and more kinds of users – pile into them, this improves the business-case for different kinds of organizations (co-ops, tinkerers, government agencies, startups) investing in improving them. And because these tools are free/open, those improvements go back into the commons, and benefit all the users. This is the kind of network effect we love to see.

And these tools won't just work better – they'll also fail better. For years now, I've been using Framework laptops, designed to be upgraded, repaired and maintained by their users:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/21/monica-byrne/#think-different

The Framework is the best computer I've ever owned. Not only does it work brilliantly, but it fails even better:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/13/graceful-failure/#frame

For years, I relied on Apple hardware, and had to buy my Powerbooks in pairs, because one of them was always broken and had to be sent back to Applecare for repair. After I switched to Thinkpads, I was able to buy IBM (then Lenovo's) global, onsite, next-day hardware replacement warranty, and so I was able to just have one laptop at a time, and use an old one for 24-36 hours while I waited for a technician to travel to my home or hotel room to fix my machine.

But with the Framework, I just fix whatever breaks myself. When I dropped my laptop during a UK tour, I was able to get a replacement screen Fedexed to my hotel. I did the screen swap in 15 minutes, at midnight, after getting off a late train from Edinburgh. It worked the first time, and the next day I turned in two columns and did a livecast.

Last week, I discovered that my laptop battery had overheated and swollen so much I could barely keep the case screwed shut – something that happens to all kind of hardware. It's really dangerous, presenting a serious risk of fire. If that had happened to a Mac or a Thinkpad, I would have been screwed, unable to safely board my airplane on Friday morning.

But I was able to remove the battery before checking out of my hotel in Ithaca (the desk clerk accepted it to be given to facilities people for safe disposal), and Framework sent a replacement battery to my next hotel in NYC, so after I got off my plane and checked in there, I was able to swap my new battery in and pick right up again.

The other day, my wife said that she thought that between my operating system (Ubuntu, a flavor of GNU/Linux) and hardware (the Framework), I was having more technical problems than I used to have with my Macs. I was shocked – but after we talked it over, I realized she got that impression because when something goes wrong with my laptop, I can fix it, so I spend a bunch of time tinkering with things, rather than bringing it to an Apple Store and switching to a backup computer.

Another example: while I was in Ithaca, I decided to upgrade my 2TB solid state drive to a 4TB one. The reliable way to do this is to install the OS and all my apps on the new drive, and then copy over my user files, but that requires a lot of manual attending. I wanted a process that I could start before bed and then pick up in the morning. So I used "dd," a command that duplicates whole disks, to copy the 2TB disk to the 4TB one.

Then I used a bunch of arcane utilities to resize the partition to fill the disk (a task that was made much more complex because I have full-disk encryption turned on). It worked – but then the disk wouldn't boot. Turned out this operation had messed up GRUB, a key part of the Linux boot system.

I had many choices at that juncture. I could have scrapped the project and started over, wiping the disk, installing the OS and apps, and re-copying my data. I could have parked the whole project until I was back home in LA. Instead, I worked with some great tech support people at Canonical (who make Ubuntu) to fix GRUB, and an hour or two later, I was up and running.

The point here is that I had all options open to me. I could do this The Mac Way (bringing my machine to a technician and asking them to do it). I could do it the labor-intensive but reliable way (install OS and apps, move data). I could do it the risky, high-tech way (dd, resize partition, fix GRUB). If I'd been at home with a light work week, I might have done the middle option. If I was advising a friend without a lot of technical chops on how to do this, I might have recommended the first option. But the fact that I was on the road with limited time didn't place this upgrade out of reach. I got to decide which tradeoffs I wanted to make.

What's more, the only reason my method was so damned tricky is that no one's bothered to automate it. The process involved cutting and pasting a lot of long, machine-readable, alphanumeric identifiers into config files, and I screwed up a step. There's nothing about this process that's intrinsically hard, it's just hard because I was doing it manually. If lots of people had the ability to swap their hard drives (a process that takes less than five minutes with a Framework), it would absolutely be worth someone's time to turn all that fiddly work into an app with one big button labeled "MAKE BOOTABLE COPY GO NOW."

I love it when a system works well, but I really hate it when a system fails badly. It doesn't matter how much you can get done with your technology when it works properly if it's broken and you can't get it to work.

But I'm much more interested in the international coalitions that are forming to fight Trump. It started with my longstanding fight for a good internet, free from surveillance, extraction and manipulation, the three evils inherent to the business models of America's shitty, enshittifying tech companies.

Under normal circumstances, you'd expect tech companies in other countries to capitalize on the fact that America exports its obviously defective tech products around the world. As Jeff Bezos often reminds his suppliers: "Your margin is my opportunity." Whether it's Apple taking a 30% margin on iPhone payments, Apple and Meta creaming 51 cents off every ad dollar, Amazon harvesting 50-60% from every platform seller, or inkjet printer companies marking up the colored water you use to print your grocery list by 25 quattuordecillion percent, there's a ton of opportunities to disrupt these comfortable ex-disruptors.

But no one does that, because the US Trade Representative bullied every US trading partner into enacting an "anticircumvention" law that makes it a crime to modify America's tech exports. The quid pro quo for this? Free trade with the USA – and tariffs for any country that didn't fall into line. Well, they all fell into line, and Trump tariffed them anyway.

That means that America's tech giants' margins are now everyone else's opportunity. The trillions that US tech companies extract could be someone else's billions – all they'd have to do is offer the interoperable goods and services that disenshittify America's tech products. They could sell the tools that let anyone in the world use independent app stores, or fix their cars and tractors, and put generic ink in their printers. A year ago, no country could afford to allow a company headquartered in its borders to get into this business, lest they be clobbered with tariffs. Today, any country that isn't thinking about this is a sucker that will end up buying these tools from another country that gets there first.

This means that digital rights hippies like me (who've been banging this drum for 25 years), suddenly have a new ally in the fight against enshittified tech products. Today, there are people who want to help you protect your pocketbook and your privacy, but not because they believe in human rights – rather, because they want to get really, really rich. They see Big Tech's margin as their opportunity.

But it's not just entrepreneurs and activists who want a post-American internet – we have a third member of our coalition: national security hawks. Trump wants to steal Greenland. He wants to steal Alberta. He wants to steal all the oil in Venezuela. He wants to interfere in foreign elections to keep his dictator cronies in office, lest they lose power and find themselves facing prison. And when Trump's allies do face justice, he wants to fire the judges who dare hold these corrupt, powerful men to account.

So when the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for the genocidaire Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump had Microsoft shut down the court's IT systems. The Chief Justice of the ICC lost his Office 365 account, which means he can't access his email archives, his working files, his calendar or his address books. He can't even log in to his non-Microsoft accounts because they're tied to his Outlook email address.

The ICC was just a warmup: Trump did the same thing to the Brazilian high court judge who sentenced the dictator Jair Bolsonaro to prison for attempting a coup after he lost his re-election bid, having presided over a term of gross misrule.

All of this has inflamed concerns within every (former) US ally's national security establishment. These people all understand that Trump doesn't need to roll tanks to take over their countries: he can just brick their key ministries, major firms, and households. He doesn't need to send an army to steal Greenland, he can just shut down Denmark and cut off the world's supply of Lego, Ozempic and ferociously strong black licorice.

Combine the natsec hawks; the economic development wonks, entrepreneurs and investors; and the privacy and digital and human rights activists, and you've got a hell of an anti-Trump coalition around the world, all pulling together to build the post-American internet, a disenshittified and enshittification-resistant internet built on international digital public goods and running on servers outside of the USA:

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

But this coalition isn't limited to the post-American internet – you'll find a coalition much like it in every place where Comrade Trump is calling forth a post-American world. That's the shape of the coalition that's winning Trump's war on fossil fuels: climate activists (hippies), electrification manufacturers and installers (businesses) and national security hawks who don't want to get hormuzed:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/04/hope-in-the-dark/#hormuzed-into-the-gretacene

I'm not as plugged into the other areas where Trump has dismantled US hegemony, but it wouldn't surprise me to learn that a coalition much like this one is popping up in the countries where Trump and Musk doged the public health system into oblivion. The global south is full of countries that signed up to enforce US agricultural and pharmaceutical patents and US restrictions on birth control and abortion in exchange for the food-aid and health-aid that Elon Musk and his merry band of broccoli-haired brownshirts killed. It's easy to imagine that reproductive rights and health justice advocates in those countries are now on the same side as investors who'd like to get into business selling generic pharmaceuticals and agricultural inputs, and that they're being backed by people worried that their country's food and health sovereignty are at risk unless they hasten the transition to a post-American world.

I have been an activist all my life, and a digital rights activist for the majority of my adult life. I'm sure there are members of this post-American coalition who want things that are absolutely antithetical to my agenda. That's what makes us a coalition – we disagree about so much, but we all agree on this: it's past time for a post-American world, and Comrade Trump is delivering it.

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: