#retaliatory tariffs

The US isn't the only country with a law like this – far from it! At the very instant Bill Clinton signed the DMCA, the US Trade Rep sent officials all over the world to bully America's trading partners into enacting their own version of this law, threatening them with tariffs unless they changed their national laws to make it a crime to fix the broken technology America shipped around the globe.

Which brings me back to Canada's retaliatory tariffs, those self-punishing, indiscriminate, ally-alienating tits-for-tat.

Canada presented no more of a challenge for the bullying US Trade Rep than any of those other countries. In 2012, two of Stephen Harper's ministers, James Moore and Tony Clement, rammed a carbon copy of DMCA 1201 through Parliament: Bill C-11, the Copyright Modernization Act:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/08/who-broke-the-internet/#bruce-lehman

C-11 was incredibly unpopular. Three earlier attempts to pass a law like this had failed, and in the end, Clement and Moore had to ignore their own consultation results and dismiss the thousands of respondents who wrote in to object to the bill as "babyish…radical extremists."

Harper, Clement and Moore whipped C-11 through Parliament because the US trade rep threatened them with tariffs unless the did so, and promised them tariff-free access to the US if they toed the line. Now that Trump has whacked Canada with tariffs, Canada should wipe this law off its books.

There's so many good domestic reasons to do this. Without C-11, Canadian companies could defend their fellow Canadians from American data-theft and cash ripoffs by making alternative clients, jailbreaks, and other add-ons that disenshittified America's defective tech:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/10/markets-are-regulations/#carney-found-a-spine

But today, I want to focus on how repealing C-11 would benefit America. You see, America's businesses – large and small – are victims of Big Tech's extraction. The Big Five publishers get screwed by Amazon, as do all the little indie publishers. Every games company gets screwed by Apple and Google, who suck 30 cents out of every dollar their customers spend in an app. Same goes for console games companies, who pay a 30% tax on every dollar they make on Xbox, Nintendo or Playstations (the exception, of course, is the games companies owned by Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo, who don't pay the 30% tax and can therefore always outcompete the independents).

Merchants who sell on Amazon pay a 50-60% junk fee tax. Businesses large and small are locked into cloud products from Microsoft, Oracle, and Google who are training their AIs on their corporate customers' proprietary data. Health providers are locked into Epic, the giant electronic health record monopolist, whose abuses are the stuff of legend:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/02/upcoded-to-death/#thanks-obama

Many (if not all) of these scams could be mitigated with new code. For example, anyone stuck paying the app taxes could offer mobile phone and console owners jailbreaks that install third-party app stores, and then offer discounts to anyone who uses them – if you're saving 30% on every payment, you can split those savings with your customers.

Merchants could list their products for sale directly on Amazon through app and website plugins, and get paid and fulfill them themselves:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/10/view-a-sku/

Performers and content creators could encourage their audiences to escape the platforms' inscrutable algorithms and install jailbroken apps that let users control their recommendations:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/05/tracking-exposed-demanding-gods-explain-themselves

Social media startups could offer alt clients that let users who sign up see the messages posted by their friends on legacy platforms like Twitter and Facebook, and push replies to them:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

Mechanics, farmers and repair depots who are locked out of diagnostics, who can't use generic parts, and can't initialize OEM parts without paying for a license could jailbreak their customers' devices for them and offer independent repair:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/22/vin-locking/#thought-differently

So think back to that corn farmer, currently wondering how to make tractor payments because Canadians are drinking Gretzky's shitty rye instead of delicious bourbon. Rather than pauperizing that blameless farmer, Canada could go into business selling him the tools to escape John Deere's rent-collecting repair racket, to extract all the soil condition data needed for precision agriculture, and to make use of competitors' front-ends (accessories that turn a tractor into a thresher or some other machine).

That farmer is getting screwed by Trump, just like Canadians. He's not a shareholder in Big Tech. He's not gonna be pissed off when Canada turns Big Tech's trillions into Canadian billions – not if he gets lower prices and more reliable technology as a result.

When I talk to Canadians about retaliating against the Trump tariffs by repealing our anti-jailbreaking law, they often express concern that this will make Trump even angrier at us. I mean, of course it will: literally anything that works will make Trump angry. I don't think that means we should only respond to the Trump tariffs with useless gestures.

If Canada goes into business rescuing Americans from their own tech companies, they will become our allies. If those companies depend on selling to the Canadian market to remain profitable, they will become our allies.

Trump is an autocrat, but he's not omnipotent. He's an old, sick man with white matter disease dementia who can't stay awake through a 10-minute briefing or remember what he was talking about from minute to minute. To pursue his agenda, he needs to hold his coalition together, and that's something he's getting progressively worse at as he slides towards his incipient death/permanent incapacity.

All Canada will get if it sticks with its current response to the tariffs is Gretzky's undrinkable novelty booze and the permanent enmity of American businesses. On the other hand, if Canada repeals its anti-circumvention law, we can make billions of dollars, destroy the profits of America's most important technological allies, liberate ourselves from America's defective technology, and forge a durable, powerful anti-Trump alliance with American firms who are preyed upon just as surely as Canadians are.

Let's shoot the hostage. Let's change the rules of the game. Let's break the deadlock. It's what Keanu would tell us to do.

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