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Pluralistic: I told you so (13 Nov 2026)
Today's links
- I told you so: Microsoft is too big to live.
- Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
- Object permanence: Canada's corrupt copyright czar; Universal Music CEO v iPod owners; Berlusconi x neo-fascists; Balancing 3,118 coins on a dime; All for-profit healthcare is a problem.
- Upcoming appearances: Folkestone, Oxford, Sheffield, Virtual, Oxford, Santa Barbara, Montreal.
- Recent appearances: Where I've been.
- Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
- Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
- Colophon: All the rest.
I told you so (permalink)
Here's the one weird trick that made it possible for monopolies to conquer the world: the antitrust bar changed the rules so that it was impossible to prove whether a company had formed an illegal monopoly, and then these rules meant that monopolies were almost never challenged, and what challenges did arise were usually unsuccessful, and even the successful challenges resulted in meaningless "penalties" that left monopolists unscathed.
Every policy has three important dimensions: substance, scope and administrability:
- "Substance" is what the policy actually says. For example, the basic substance of copyright law is, "You can't display, transmit or reproduce a copyrighted work without permission."
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"Scope" is when the policy gets applied. When copyright law was formulated, the key activities it regulated all required a bunch of expensive industrial equipment. Every book implied a printing press, every record implied a record-pressing plant, every film implied a film duplication lab. That meant that, by default, pretty much the only people who had to care about what copyright law said were industrial actors – firms that might reasonably be expected to also have access to a lawyer. That matters a lot to administrability.
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"Administrability" is what it takes to actually administer the policy. Can you detect potential violations, and when you do, how hard is it to figure out whether the rule was actually broken? Again, in the pre-digital era, it was pretty easy to spot copyright violations: pirate books, records and movies are tangible, physical objects, and distributing them requires advertisement, delivery and payment.
After detecting an infringement, copyright enforcers must resolve a further question: whether a display, transmission or copy falls under "fair use." Fair use is a "fact intensive" rule, one that requires a lot of evidence and argument to adjudicate. It's almost impossible to categorically rule in or rule out a specific use as "fair":
https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/27/nuke-first/#ask-questions-never
Despite the complexity and expense of determining fair use, pre-digital copyright was still relatively administrable, because fair use questions themselves were relatively rare. Most fair uses (for example, photocopying part of a book for classroom use) were below the threshold for detection by rightsholders, so these questions almost never found their way into court. The fair use questions that did get to court were big, splashy affairs, like whether it's okay to rewrite a famous pro-slavery novel from the enslaved characters' perspective (it is!):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind_Done_Gone
There are a lot of legal questions that require nuance, fact-finding and argumentation to resolve, and that's not necessarily a problem. It's fine to apply these complicated, lengthy processes to things that only happen every once in a while. Take probate: most of us will die one or fewer times, so it's not the worst thing in the world that figuring out what happens to our stuff when that happens can involve some legal complexity.
But as media went digital, copyright's scope expanded dramatically. "Making or handling copies of copyrighted work" stopped being an industrial activity that implied a complex business and access to legal expertise. The only thing a digital computer does is make and handle copies, so every time any ordinary person clicks their mouse, dozens of potentially thorny copyright questions arise. What's more, those questions involve the public internet, which raises the number of potential infringements that a rightsholder can detect (and potentially seek legal redress for) from dozens to millions.
Nearly all of these potential infringements fall under fair use, but fair use is a fact-intensive doctrine suited to resolving occasional disputes between large firms. Fair use is monumentally unsuited to resolving questions that arise hundreds of times every day for nearly every person alive, including small children and other people who almost certainly can't get legal advice:
https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-a-new-deal-for-copyright/
This is how copyright broke: new technology (digital computers) radically expanded its scope, conscripting everyone into using copyright's framework for everyday activities that had nothing to do with the media industry's supply chain. That framework was developed for industrial actors with access to lawyers, and its most important aspect (fair use) is a fact-intensive doctrine that takes serious work to resolve, but now had to be navigated many times every day by every person. So copyright became unadministrable: you can't apply a fact-intensive doctrine to everyday activities undertaken by everyday people. If you try, you will make criminals of everyone. It would be literally impossible to train enough copyright lawyers to advise every person every time they use a computer to do something that might violate copyright law.
Back to antitrust: when the pro-monopoly partisans of the "law and economy" movement set out to neuter antitrust, they deliberately introduced a set of hurdles that were designed to make it impossible to administer competition law.
First, they introduced an "intent" standard: it was no longer enough for a company to have a monopoly, the company must have intended to secure and maintain that monopoly. If you want to be sure a law doesn't get enforced, this is a fantastic standard to apply. After all, how can anyone know what anyone else intended? Ask any anthropologist and they'll tell you: the only way to find out what someone intends by their actions is to ask them, and even that only works if you can trust them to answer honestly:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thick_description#Clifford_Geertz
If antitrust law can only be enforced by mind-readers and advanced philosophers who have solved the intersubjectivity problem, then antitrust law can't be enforced at all:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersubjective_verifiability
But that wasn't all! Antitrust's enemies insisted on another fact-intensive question: "market definition." They made the (seemingly commonsense) point that if a company is said to have a monopoly, we must first determine which thing the company has monopolized. This sounds like a no-brainer, but it's actually a way to introduce unresolvable, show-stopper arguments into any antitrust enforcement action.
Take Amazon: the company's ecommerce monopoly is obvious to anyone who hasn't been in a coma for the past 15 years. But when Amazon gets investigated for this monopoly, they will insist that they don't participate in the "ecommerce" economy, but rather in "the buying and selling of things in general." Then they point out that people still go to the corner store for a pint of milk, still buy a pack of gum from the kiosk at the train-station, and still buy some hair-gel from the barber after a trim, and therefore Amazon can't possibly have a monopoly.
"Market definition" is a playground for bad-faith semanticians. Luckily for the world's monopolists, the very existence of this legal doctrine has conjured up an army of bad-faith semanticians, most of them with expensive Ivy League economics degrees, who make millions coming up with bizarre market definition arguments that can draw out any legal proceeding for years, often to the point where there is a change in government and the federal prosecutors just walk away from the case.
Taken together, these impossible fact-intensive questions would be enough to bury antitrust, but then came the final blow: frequency. Once capital had won the battle to mire antitrust cases in questions that take years and millions to resolve, they embarked on a frenzy of monopolistic mergers. This meant that the kind of antitrust questions that originally arose every few years were suddenly coming up several times per month. This was the killer combo: making antitrust a plodding ball-ache of thorny philosophical and technical questions, and then rigging the system so that these questions arise in a nonstop flurry guaranteed that antitrust would fail.
That's what happened with Microsoft. The company had a 95% desktop OS market-share when Clinton's trustbusters dragged them into court. Nevertheless, the company played all kinds of "market definition" games that dragged the case out for years. They also insisted that they never intended to form a monopoly, despite smoking-gun memos about "sucking up all the market oxygen":
https://web.archive.org/web/20190717023522/https://www.justice.gov/atr/department-justice-7
This dragged on so long that even after Microsoft lost its case, the appeal carried on until after GW Bush stole the presidency, and then his DoJ walked away from the case, letting Microsoft continue to enjoy (and increase) its monopoly:
What happened next should not come as a surprise to anyone. Microsoft got convicted of deliberately setting out to create a monopoly, and then paid no penalty. After an all-too-brief period of post-traumatic good behavior, Microsoft returned to its monopolistic ways. Along the way, Microsoft sucked up to a succession of presidential administrations, culminating in the company's emergence as a de facto wing of the Trump regime. Microsoft's CEO paid $1m to sit on the inaugural dais, and then directed the company to donate millions to the Epstein Ballroom, and then provided the IT services for ICE's ethnic cleansing pogroms:
Microsoft isn't merely the in-house IT shop for Trump's domestic agenda: they've also weaponized foreign reliance on Microsoft's cloud apps and they punish foreign officials who thwart Trump abroad:
When forced, Microsoft candidly admits that no matter where in the world your Microsoft data is stored, when it comes to foreign firms and governments, the company will give warrantless, secret access to their data to Trump's cronies:
All of this raises an urgent digital sovereignty question: what if Microsoft (a monopolist that is entirely dependent on Trump's favor to keep it free of existential legal problems) cuts off your country's Office 365 access? This is the question I raised late last year in my CCC talk about the "Post-American Internet":
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition
(Coming soon in expanded form to a bookstore near you:)
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374623845/thepostamericaninternet/
And now, Microsoft has given the whole world a preview of how this might play out, because their servers have collapsed, shutting the world off from Outlook email, Azure cloud, Copilot, Teams, and other key offerings:
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cq5y10ge3dp3t
The outage lasted for about two days, and around the world, government agencies and businesses large and small ground to a halt. Without Office 365, Outlook and Teams, many organizations could not even convene a meeting or formulate a plan to deal with the outage.
All of this raises an important question: is Microsoft guilty of negligence, and, if so, what should be done about this? Here's my answer: yes, Microsoft is presumptively guilty of negligence, and any response to this must include antitrust breakups of the company.
Here's why I think that. Microsoft has demonstrably underinvested in its IT stability. Any IT plan that results in a global, multi-day outage is, by definition, inadequate. Whether the problem could have been solved by buying more servers, or hiring more people, or changing the management of key divisions is immaterial. Every one of these measures – every single measure that could have prevented this – costs money. By not spending that money, Microsoft definitively underinvested in its products.
But Microsoft doesn't lack for funds! Microsoft is a convicted monopolist, and it has the margins to prove it. In 2025-2026, the company pissed away more than $30b in stock buybacks, a once-illegal (and still sleazy) form of stock manipulation. Over that same period, Microsoft lost nearly $200b on AI ventures that it now admits will not pay off:
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/24/microsoft-reiterates-plan-to-invest-80-billion-in-ai-.html
Then there's the layoffs. 2026 saw Microsoft's first-ever voluntary retirement buyout, which served as the overture to a year that saw a 25% headcount cut – 60,000 employees slated for destruction:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/oct/26/microsoft-buyout-offers-ai-cuts
Ever had a boss who caught you catching your breath and shoved a broom in your hand, barking, "If you have time to lean, you have time to clean?" That goes quintuple for convicted monopolists who bring the global economy to a halt due to a multi-day outage. If you can't manage to keep your servers online, you have no business incinerating tens of billions on stock buybacks, much less hundreds of billions to feed the AI money-furnace. Did Microsoft need the tens of thousands of workers it threw away? Demonstrably so: when they were on the payroll, Microsoft's servers were up. Now they're gone, and so are the servers. It doesn't matter how those workers related to this specific outage: if you can't keep your servers online, you either don't have enough site reliability engineers, or you don't have enough managers to deploy them effectively, or you don't have enough managers to hire the managers and SREs you need.
Q.E.D.
This is all characteristic of the monopolist's pathology. The problem with monopolists is that they have pricing power and market power: the power to foist inferior products on their customers and degraded working conditions on their employees and unfair terms on their suppliers. Microsoft's hundreds of billions in wastage and tens of thousands of layoffs are a massive transfer of value from customers, workers and suppliers to investors. The fact that the company judged (correctly, it seems) that they could make us all eat shit and we'd ask for second helpings is a nice, clean proof of monopoly power.
Here, I think, is a nice, bright-line, administrable test for monopoly power. If your company has a dominant position and if it allocates its surplus capital to its investors and if that precedes a significant degradation of your products, then you have an illegal monopoly and you should be broken up. We don't need to inquire as to whether you have a wicked heart that intentionally set about to create a monopoly, nor do we have to argue endlessly about how many angels can dance on the head of your market definition. If you think you are so powerful that you can fuck up your products and not suffer as a result then you are too big to care, and that is simply too big.
This isn't the only fix we need to antitrust law, but it is a fix that would specifically let us target Big Tech. Microsoft is a living, breathing (limping, gasping) repudiation of the thesis that monopolies are efficient and if we only let them amass endless market share and profits, they will use their "economies of scale" to deliver superior products. It's not that economies of scale don't exist, but for companies to take advantage of these economies of scale, they have to be motivated to expend their capital to do so. The more powerful a company is, the less inclined it will be to apportion capital to workers, suppliers and consumers, and the more it will cheat us all to enrich its shareholders.
We can't afford to let this crisis go to waste. Google was convicted of creating and maintaining a monopoly three times over the past couple years and every single time the judge decided the company should not face any real punishment for that monopoly, on the basis that the monopoly is what lets Google deliver such excellence for us.
Does anyone still think Google is excellent? How about Apple? Google pays Apple an annual bribe of more than $20b to stay out of the search market. Judge Amit Mehta decided to let Google continue paying this bribe to Apple so that Apple would have the capital it needed to deliver excellent products. Apple promptly went on to have a string of catastrophically bad product launches – while throwing away $170b manipulating its share-price with stock buybacks:
Both companies are demonstrably underinvesting in quality in order to divert R&D and product maintenance capital to their shareholders. They are too big to care. In this age of nonstop mergers and acquisitions, we can't afford to make merger approval turn on fact-intensive questions, but we can sure as hell create this administrable, bright-line test for whether a merger should be unwound after the fact. Did your company buy another company and then enshittify both products? Great, now we're breaking you up, and your investors are getting fucked. Maybe next time they'll fire the board when they announce another stupid, anti-competitive merger.
Microsoft is too big in every way. Too big to fail, too big to jail and too big to care. Too big to trust. Too big to rely upon. Too big to foster a corporate culture that cares about reliability, a decent workplace, or product quality. There's a straight line from GW Bush's decision to let Microsoft skate in 2001 and the situation a quarter century later, where Microsoft is a load-bearing piece of the world's most important firms and government agencies, and where this means that Microsoft knows that it can throw away tens of thousands of workers and hundreds of billions of dollars, crash the planet, and wake up tomorrow unscathed, ready to do it all over again.
Hey look at this (permalink)
- Copyright-Strike-for-Hire: Lawsuit Targets Service Over Fake Meta Takedowns https://torrentfreak.com/copyright-strike-for-hire-lawsuit-targets-service-over-fake-meta-takedowns/
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A Tool Built by Election Deniers Said These Voters Were Dead. We Found Them Alive. https://www.propublica.org/article/election-challenge-forsyth-county-georgia
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How to prepare a revolution https://www.absurdintelligence.com/how-to-prepare-a-revolution/
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Watching the Watchers https://watchingthewatchers.github.io/watchingthewatchers/
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College student develops LEGO-like, 3D-printed moon bricks https://www.popsci.com/science/3d-printed-lunar-lego-bricks/?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
Object permanence (permalink)
#20yrsago Canadian copyright minister caught lining pockets https://web.archive.org/web/20061115062027/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/1529/135/
#20yrsago Universal Music CEO: iPod owners are thieves https://web.archive.org/web/20061201014046/https://www.billboard.com/bbcom/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003380831
#15yrsago OccupyLondon members evicted from St Paul’s memorial services https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/nov/13/occupy-london-asked-leave-st-pauls-services
#15yrsago Berlusconi to neo-fascists: “I’ll be back.” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/nov/13/berlusconi-hints-return-italy-government
#15yrsago Balancing 3,118 coins on a dime https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmLjO0Wu3ug
#10yrsago People who voted for Trump knew their shot at the elites was fired through the guts of their neighbors https://web.archive.org/web/20210916183118/https://www.newstatesman.com/spotlight/2016/11/on-the-election-of-donald-j-trump-2
#10yrsago Ontario judge dishonours his court and disgraces himself by presiding in a MAKE AMERICA GREAT hat https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/osgoode-hall-professor-ontario-judge-hamilton-trump-hat-1.3848913
#10yrsago 300 million Adultfriendfinder accounts breached https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/13/13615750/412-million-adultfriendfinder-accounts-exposed-breach
#5yrsago How to be safe(r) online https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/13/opsec-soup-to-nuts/#secured
#1yrago For-profit healthcare is the problem, not (just) private equity https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/13/patients-not-customers/#medicine-vs-markets
Upcoming appearances (permalink)
- Folkestone Writers Festival, Nov 16
https://www.creativefolkestone.org.uk/whats-on/cory-doctorow-the-internet-is-broken-now-what/ -
Oxford: Ministry of the Future, Nov 23
https://ministryforthefuture.co.uk/events.html -
Sheffield: Reverse Centaur at Juno Books, Nov 25
https://www.outsavvy.com/event/40274/cory-doctorow-in-conversation -
Virtual: Enshittification, AI, and the Future of Technology (UBC Master of Educational Technology), Nov 28
https://met.ubc.ca/2026/09/met-speaker-series-cory-doctorow-enshittification-ai-and-the-future-of-technology/ -
Oxford: Bennett Oxford Symposium on Open Code in Science, Dec 9
https://www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/events/2026-bennett-institute-symposium/ -
Santa Barbara: UCSB Reads, Apr 29
https://www.library.ucsb.edu/events-exhibitions/ucsb-reads-2027-presents-author-cory-doctorow -
Montreal: World Science Fiction Convention, Sep 2-6
https://montreal2027.ca/en
Recent appearances (permalink)
- Clint Eastwood (No Gods No Mayors)
https://www.patreon.com/NoGodsNoMayors/posts/clint-eastwood-173008088 -
Life After AI (Brain Bar)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPPa43-n0vI -
Terms of Service with Clare Duffy (CNN)
https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/terms-of-service-with-clare-duffy/episodes/458ce968-af5d-11f0-b539-13ed2afe25f8 -
AI, Work, and Power (Software Engineering Daily)
AI, Work, and Power https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/podcasts/cory-doctorow-on-ai-work-and-power/ -
AI, Corporate Power, and the Fight for Worker Control (Plutopia)
https://plutopia.io/cory-doctorow-ai-corporate-power-and-the-fight-for-worker-control/
Latest books (permalink)
- "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/ -
"Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce
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"Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ -
"Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
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"The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).
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"The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).
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"The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
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"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
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"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
Upcoming books (permalink)
- "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027
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"Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027
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"Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027
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"The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027
Colophon (permalink)
Today's top sources:
Currently writing:
- “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 561 (36083 total).
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"The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.
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A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
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