All over the world, for all of this decade, governments have been trying to figure out how to rein in America's tech companies.
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@pluralistic
There's a kind of push
All over the world right now
All over the world
You can hear the sound
Of Cory Doctorow telling you to repeal your anti-circumvention laws
During the Biden years, this seemed like a winner - after all, *America* was trying to tame its tech companies, too, with brave trustbusters like Lina Khan, Jonathan Kanter, Rohit Chopra and Tim Wu doing more work in four years than their predecessors had done in forty.
But under Trump, the US government has thrown its full weight into defending its tech companies' right to spy on and rip off everyone in the world (including Americans, of course).
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It's not hard to understand how Big Tech earned Trump's loyalty: from the tech CEOs who personally paid a million dollars each to sit behind Trump on the inauguration dais; to Apple CEO Tim Cook hand-assembling a gold participation trophy for Trump on camera; to Zuckerberg firing all his fact-checkers; to the seven-figure contributions that tech companies made to Trump's Epstein Memorial Ballroom at the White House.
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Trump is defending America's tech companies because they've bribed him, personally, to do so.
Given that these companies are so much larger than most world governments, this poses a serious barrier to the kind of enforcement that world governments have tried. What's the point of fining Apple billions of Euros if they refuse to pay? What's the point of ordering Apple to open up its App Store if it just refuses?
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But here's the thing: most of these enforcement actions have been *redistributive*. In effect, lawmakers and regulators are telling America's tech giants, *We know you've stolen a bunch of money and data from our people. Now we want you to give some of it back.* There's nothing inherently wrong with redistribution, but redistribution will never be as powerful or effective as *predistribution* - that is, preventing tech companies from stealing data and money in the first place.
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Take Big Tech's relationship to the world's news media. All over the world, media companies have been skeletonized by collapsing ad revenues and even where they can get paid subscribers, tech giants rake off huge junk fees from every subscriber payment.
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Reaching new or existing subscribers is also increasingly expensive, as tech platforms algorithmically suppress the reach of media companies' posts, even for subscribers who've asked to see their feeds, and which lets the platforms charge more junk fees to "boost" content.
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Countries all over the world - Australia, Germany, Spain, France, Canada - have arrived at the same solution to this problem: imposing "link taxes" that require tech companies to pay for the privilege of linking to the news or allowing their users to discuss the news. This is pure redistribution: tech stole money from the media companies, so governments are making them give some of that money back.
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It hasn't worked. First of all, the thing tech steals from the news isn't *the news*, it's *money*. Helping people find and discuss the news isn't theft. News you're not allowed to find or discuss isn't news at all - that's *a secret*.
Meanwhile, tech companies have an easy way to escape the link tax: they can just ban links to the news on their platform.
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That's what Meta did in Canada, which means that Canadians on Instagram and Facebook no longer see the actual news, just far-right "influencer" content. Even when tech companies *do* pay the link tax, the results are far from ideal: in Canada, Google has become a *partner* of news outlets, which compromises their ability to report on Google's activities.
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Shortly after Google promised millions to the *Toronto Star*, the paper dropped its award-winning, hard-hitting "Defanging Big Tech" investigative series. Given that Google came within centimeters of stealing most of downtown Toronto just a few years ago, we can hardly afford to have the city's largest newspaper climb into bed with the company:
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