TNI – Let’s start with a big open question that is at the heart of TNI’s: Who has digital power today? – Interview with Cory Doctorow – “Cory Doctorow is a prolific writer and a brilliant science fiction novelist, journalist and technology activist. He is a special consultant to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (eff.org (external link)), a non-profit civil liberties group that defends freedom in technology law, policy, standards and treaties. His most recent book is Chokepoint Capitalism (external link) (co-authored with Rebecca Giblin), a powerful expose of how tech monopolies have stifled creative labour markets and how movements might fight back. Nick Buxton, editor of TNI’s State of Power report and Shaun Matsheza, host of the State of Power podcast, chatted to Cory..

Cory: That is an excellent question. As Tom Eastman, a software developer in New Zealand, has observed: the Web has devolved into five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four. A small number of extremely powerful firms, namely Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, have what the European regulators call gatekeeper power – the right to decide who can speak, who can reach one another, how it works. This is a marked departure from the early ethos that birthed these firms, which was characterised by the idea that the internet would be a new kind of network where anyone who wanted to speak to anyone could do so without any third party intervening. We now have any number of ‘chokepoints’ in which speech or similar activities like fundraising can be controlled by one of a very small number of firms. And it’s important to note that the reason those firms were allowed to grow as large as they have, the reason that state regulators turned such a blind eye, is because states view those firms as potential deputies for their own exercises of power. It is highly unlikely, for example, that the US National Security Agency (NSA) could have gotten regulatory authority or convinced us to carry beacons that broadcast our location all over the world. By allowing firms to do that, by failing to step in and demand regulation, the US government has accomplished a future in which the NSA doesn’t need to wiretap us all. It can just ask Facebook or Google or Apple for information that it couldn’t otherwise reach. And so this really needs to be understood as a public–private partnership…”