POSTS

A Crash-Course in Adversarial Interoperability

Thoughts on The Internet Con by Cory Doctorow

The Internet Con is a book about subverting corporate overreach. More practically speaking, it’s about standards and interoperability, but even I recognize that you can’t lead with that. Whether author Cory Doctorow uses the term “adversarial interoperability” or “competitive compatibility,” he’s describing a set of practices which would deny private firms the technological advantage they currently enjoy over the rest of us. Doctorow writes with relatable explanations, plentiful anecdotes, and approachable prose, doing justice to a cause that’s near-and-dear to my heart.

I don’t mean to strut, though; my ideas on the subject are far from original and certainly informed by Doctorow’s prior work besides. That said, I have been building stuff with web standards for decades (longer even than I recognized why web standards matter), so I can say Doctorow presents the practitioner’s concerns authentically. I’ve also been contributing to standards for some time, so I can add that The Internet Con gives a balanced overview of that more rarefied work. For instance:

I’m not saying that it’s impossible to write good standards. A lot of the time, Facebook will want one thing and Google will want the opposite and the disagreement will go a long way to neutralizing the giants’ attempts to tilt standards to parochial ends. What’s more, the engineers who work on standards for the tech giants enjoy a lot of personal leeway because they have highly specialized skill sets and experience, and are given free rein to do good, solid work on standards where their employer does not have a dog in the fight.

But when the giants all want a standard kinked in a way that benefits them at the expense of the rest of the world, they’re almost certainly going to get their way.

This kind of capture is an important problem for the layperson to understand, and I’m glad Doctorow, Schneier-like, gets readers there in so few words. I’m more grateful for the nuance that’s missing from so much tech journalism, which often imagines the computer programmer as a string-pulling puppeteer. In empathizing with the technologists who actually design the standards, Doctorow correctly focuses the blame on the people who set the course. That gives me a lot of faith in his assessment of less familiar industries.

My only complaints are minor and best relegated to footnotes12.

The book’s subtitle reads, “How to seize the means of computation.” I originally took that as a call-to-action for technologists, so I was pleased to find that it’s actually a vocation-neutral rallying cry. I’m not sure enough people will receive Doctorow’s message, but I’m happy to do my part amplifying it.

  1. Doctorow argues that tech’s cross-cutting nature makes any power differential a problem for all other movements. I buy that, but I’m not convinced by the claim that this makes it imperative to address tech first. Lawrence Lessig makes a much stronger case that money in politics is the linchpin to society’s woes, and Doctorow doesn’t work hard enough to prove that it’s actually tech. ↩︎

  2. The book barely acknowledges free software. That movement has always been about shifting power away from corporations, so I expected Doctorow to say something about it. Finding nothing, I wondered whether he simply considers it necessary but insufficient in an age where so much of our computation happens remotely (hence his focus on protocols). Cory was kind enough to clear things up via e-mail, explaining that his focus in this book is far more “basic”: the legality of writing certain kinds of code. Free software would be meaningless if practitioners’ hands were tied in this way. Contrary to my theory, he believes that adversarial interoperability is the necessary but insufficient component. I agree with this perspective though I still feel its absence in the work as published. ↩︎