Cory Doctorow , an author, activist, journalist, and blogger, is known for his science fiction works. He serves as the editor of Pluralistic and has written several young adult novels such as "Little Brother" and "Homeland," as well as adult novels including "Attack Surface" and "Walkaway." Additionally, he has served as the former European director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and co-founded the UK Open Rights Group. Originally from Toronto, Canada, he currently resides in Los Angeles. Doctorow has been awarded the Prometheus Prize three times, surpassing the previous record set by George Orwell. He is also the acclaimed author of the New York Times bestseller "Red Team Blues" and the co-author of "Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back."

Let's start with your favorite topic in the last couple of years, the enshitification of the Internet, and why the platform quality is declining?

Cory: So enshitification is the process by which platforms get worse and worse over time. There's a kind of normal life cycle that they go through, especially when they're not disciplined by regulation or competition where first they need to lure in end users and so they offer them some kind of very good deal. But hidden in the deal is some way to lock them in. Maybe they go on to social media and all their friends pile in as well, and then they like their friends. But maybe they don't like the service, but because that's where all their friends are, they can't leave. Or maybe they buy a bunch of media from an app store or an online store that comes locked to the platform through digital rights management.

However, they can get people locked in, they lock them in, and once they're locked in, they can maltreat them. They can take away some of what they've given those end users and they can give it to business customers who show up to in order to sell things to the end users. So maybe that's marketplace sellers on Amazon or drivers on Uber.

And at first they offer those people a really good deal too. But over time those business customers get locked in and then they can withdraw the surplus from those business customers, give them a worse deal, and they can keep all the goodies for themselves, the platform can keep all the good stuff for themselves. And so this is why, you know, the web is worse than it used to be.

This is how we ended up with what Tommy's been called an Internet of five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four. And the answer to how we throw this into reverse is on the one hand, we have to restore competition. We have to stop companies from buying their competitors. We have to stop them from doing anti-competitive pricing and other anti-competitive conduct.

But we also need to limit their ability to change the rules of the game, to deceive end users and business customers about how they're getting paid, about how the service works, about what the rules are. We have to let those business users and end users we need. We have to let them challenge those rules directly by reverse engineering the apps, by making alternative apps and so

And, you know, rather than letting the company decide who to sue and who not to sue for making a third party app or a third party frontend, we trust our regulators to do it by invoking things like the GDPR where we say we don't wait for Facebook to decide what is and isn't a privacy violation. We instead use democratically kind of a law to decide what is and isn't a privacy violation.

In the context of the current discussion, do you consider ChatGPT as a great disruption?

Cory: I mean, it's definitely an interesting party trick there. The plausible sentence generator makes some pretty interesting sentences. I have yet to see ChatGPT do things where I am worried that something very important is going to go away, something that human beings do really well. I think there are a lot of things that human beings hate doing that probably does equally well.

Like if you have a recipe website and you want to make sure that it's the top of the search results. And so every recipe for an omelet has to have a 2000 word essay about the first time you ate an egg. You know, maybe we could get ChatGPT to write that. I mean, it's socially useless activity that nobody enjoys engaging in.

I guess we could have a robot write code so another robot could read the code and they could get into a war with each other. But I don't see I have yet to see anything where I'm like, Well, that's a great novel that that Chad GPT wrote. Um, and certainly when you ask it to do the factual stuff, as is now very famous, it seems incapable of not lying.

The context of the publishers because they're really upset. What's the best remedy as a first step at the moment?

Cory: I think that, that if I were a publisher, the thing I would be agitating for is the bedrock principle in copyright law. That copyright is only available to human creators and that the works of an algorithm shouldn't be eligible for a copyright. And so the firms that want to synthesize conclusions out of a corpus of work can do so, but they can't claim a copyright in it.

Other people can take it, share it, put ads on it, do other things with it. I think those firms will then lose interest and the kind of rampant misappropriation that characterizes the most predatory conduct and instead will get the stuff that I'm quite interested in computational linguistics, creative use of image, prompting services by individuals and so on. Stuff that is not a commercial challenge but is instead work that is fascinating, creative and interesting.

You are in favor of systemic changes in the digital sphere. You're not satisfied what's going on in the last decades. Where to start with? The DMA it's probably a good start, but where to continue?

Cory: Well, there's a couple of interventions that I think we could do that would be quite straightforward and easy. Unlike the DMA, which I agree is a very good piece of legislation, but unlike it would be very easy to administer, would be really easy to figure out if someone's breaking the rules and complying with it wouldn't cost so much that it would stop new market entrants from showing up.

So one of these is the end to end principle, the core of the Internet. The idea that turn made the Internet the Internet instead of just the phone company is this idea of end to end that the job of a carrier is to take data from willing senders and deliver it to willing recipients as efficiently and quickly as they can and as reliably as they can.

This is what makes the Internet the Internet instead of the phone. And when we talk about it on the Internet, we call it net neutrality. We don't have that principle at the service level. If you are a media company that has a million subscribers and you post an update, your subscribers won't necessarily get it. The social media platform decides not to show it to them, even though they asked to see it.

If you have a newsletter with a million subscribers and you send it to them, it's going to end up in the spam folders of your Gmail and your Apple Mail readers who double opted into it. Even if they take it out of the spam folder once, it's still going to end up in the spam folder the next time.

If you are a seller on Amazon who lists a part number faithfully and accurately and a buyer comes along in search for that part number, they're not going to see that at the top of the search result. They're going to get five screens of sponsored results before they reach your item. So we could just say, look, as a platform, you have an obligation to connect willing senders and willing recipients.

If someone has transmitted data that someone else wants to see, you have to deliver it. It’d be really easy to figure out if it's happening. If you want to know whether all the email is being delivered to all the email subscribers, send out an email. See who gets it. If you want to know whether a part on Amazon turns up at the top of a search result, search for it.

If you're a new market entrant, if you're a startup building an e-commerce platform or a search engine or an email service or a social media service, you don't need to do any extra engineering to the end to end. These services start end to end and all the things that break end to end in order to create value extraction, they're extra engineering. And so you're not telling new companies that they have to find a bunch of money,instead, you're just saying if you're going to spend money on ways that make your service worse at the expense of your suppliers and your end users, well, you're going to have to spend enough money to make sure that it's kept honest.

So that's that's end-to-end.

Among the politicians, we are discussing a lot, especially when it comes to the global competitiveness, the issue of European digital sovereignty. Is it a good topic? How do you do perceive the notion of European digital sovereignty?

Cory: So the Europeans are well-situated to do things that the Americans can't do because despite what Nick Clegg says, Facebook is an American company, not a European company, as are the other big tech giants. The Americans treat them with kids gloves. They're just too embedded in the halls of power. And so, yeah, we could definitely have a European environment in which the union curbs the most predatory conduct of the large American firms and opens a space for European firms.

And I think it makes sense to do it. I mean, we saw with the Snowden revelations that the Americans don't just treat their digital firms as a source of soft power abroad. They also treat them as a strategic asset for acquiring the signals intelligence of whole populations, including their elected leaders, including of so-called friendly nations and allies, including Germany.

So I think that there's a damn good reason for Europeans to want to run their own cloud.

Infrastructure: do you believe it is a realistic option to be independent and sovereign. Thinking of the cloud sphere, for instance, currently.

Cory: There is no reason that Europeans could not develop, on the one hand, data centers that host these systems and on the other hand things that provide assurances to cloud users about how their data is being handled. So some of those policy assurances, you know, a strong rule of law framework that limits the ability of law enforcement to access that information, strong privacy frameworks that prevent firms from using that information, but also technical frameworks, right.

Things like remote attestation to allow users of cloud services to secure cryptographically signed assurances about how those servers are configured and whether they permit snooping or interference by the cloud operator, something that the Americans are not doing and something that the Europeans could certainly do.

The interview was conducted by Dr. Pencho Kuzev on 06 July 2023 at the Academy of the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung in Berlin.