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16 hours ago
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It’s been 25 years since I started working for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an American nonprofit dedicated to preserving and promoting human rights on the internet. I’ve found myself in dozens of countries working with activists, politicians and civil servants to untangle the complex technical questions raised by the internet, and every one of our discussions ended in the same place. “OK,” they’d say, “you’ve definitely laid out the best way to regulate tech, but we can’t do it.”
Why not? Because – inevitably – the US trade rep had beaten me to every one of those countries and made it eye-wateringly clear that if they regulated tech in a way that favoured their own people, industries and national interests, the US would bury them in tariffs.
But deterrents are a funny thing. If someone demands that you follow their orders or they’ll burn your house down, so you do, and they burn your house down anyway … well, you’re a bit of a fool if you keep on doing what they tell you, aren’t you?
Donald Trump’s tariffs have opened up a new possibility for the technology we have become increasingly dependent on. Today, nearly all of our tech comes from US companies, and it arrives as a prix fixe meal. If you want to talk with your friends on a Meta platform, you have to let Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg eavesdrop on your conversations. If you want to have a phone that works, you have to let Apple’s Tim Cook suck 30p out of every pound you spend and give him a veto over which software you can run. If you want to search the web, you have to let Google’s Sundar Pichai know what colour underwear you’ve got on.
This is a genuinely odd place for digital computers to have got to. Every computer in your life, from your mobile phone to your smart speaker to your laptop to your TV, is theoretically capable of running all programmes, including the ones the manufacturers would really prefer you stay away from. This means that there are no prix fixe menus in technology – everything can be had à la carte. Thanks to the infinite flexibility of computers, every 10-foot fence a US tech boss installs in a digital product you rely on invites a programmer to supply you with a four-metre ladder so you can scamper nimbly over it. However, we adopted laws – at the insistence of the US trade rep – that prohibit programmers from helping you alter the devices you own, in legal ways, if the manufacturer objects. This is one thing that leads to what I refer to as the enshittification of technology.
There is only one reason the world isn’t bursting with wildly profitable products and projects that disenshittify the US’s defective products: its (former) trading partners were bullied into passing an “anti-circumvention” law that bans the kind of reverse-engineering that is the necessary prelude to modifying an existing product to make it work better for its users (at the expense of its manufacturer). But the Trump tariffs change all that. The old bargain – put your own tech sector in chains, expose your people to our plunder of their data and cash, and in return, the US won’t tariff your exports – is dead.
This means digital rights activists who’ve been trying to get rid of the “anti-circumvention” laws have a new potential ally: investors and technologists who’d like to make a hell of a lot of money raiding the margins of the most profitable lines of business of the most profitable companies the world has seen.
In the UK, reverse engineering is restricted under article 6 of the European software directive of 2001. US companies have capitalised on this fact – that British companies cannot modify their products – to spy on us and whack us with sky-high fees. Now, post-Brexit, the UK is uniquely able to seize this moment. Unlike our European cousins, we needn’t wait for the copyright directive to be repealed before we can strike article 6 off our own law books and thereby salvage something good out of Brexit.
What’s more, this is a proven business. US tech platforms extract hundreds of billions in rents and junk fees from all over the world. As Jeff Bezos told publishers when he founded Amazon: “Your margin is my opportunity.” Why shouldn’t we move fast and break Jeff’s things?
Making hundreds of billions of dollars every year is a far superior course of action to building a bunch of datacentres in support of an AI sector that is losing billions of dollars every year and heading for a tremendous crash, and we can do it without destroying what’s left of our water supply and crashing our creaking power grid. There are plenty of technologists who have been forcibly ejected from the US and would jump at the chance to drain their former employers’ billions. There’s also plenty of investors looking for a business opportunity whose success doesn’t hinge on how many $TRUMP coins they buy.
It’s not just digital rights activists, investors and entrepreneurs who have a dog in this fight. Now that Trump has made it clear that the US no longer has allies or trading partners, only rivals and adversaries, everyone in the world is trying to figure out whether they can trust American tech infrastructure with their governments, businesses and personal data.
The answer is a resounding “no”. Just look at the international criminal court, which ditched Microsoft Office for a European alternative after Trump sanctioned its officials for issuing an arrest warrant for the génocidaire Benjamin Netanyahu. Directly after Trump denounced the court, its justices lost access to all their Microsoft accounts – emails, documents, calendar, address book. The court was, in effect, “bricked”. Microsoft denies this, but between the justices of the international criminal court and the US tech monopolist, I know who I trust.
Trump is capable of weaponising the US’s tech companies, and there’s no telling where it will end. Remember that when Russian looters stole millions of dollars’ worth of John Deere tractors and spirited them away to Chechnya, the company was able to push a kill signal to the tractors that rendered them inoperable.
Until we repeal the anti-circumvention law, we can’t reverse-engineer the US’s cloud software, whether it’s a database, a word processor or a tractor, in order to swap out proprietary, American code for robust, open, auditable alternatives that will safeguard our digital sovereignty. The same goes for any technology tethered to servers operated by any government that might have interests adverse to ours – say, the solar inverters and batteries we buy from China.
This is the state of play at the dawn of 2026. The digital rights movement has two powerful potential coalition partners in the fight to reclaim the right of people to change how their devices work, to claw back privacy and a fair deal from tech: investors and national security hawks.
Admittedly, the door is only open a crack, but it’s been locked tight since the turn of the century. When it comes to a better technology future, “open a crack” is the most exciting proposition I’ve heard in decades.
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Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist and journalist. He is the author of dozens of books, most recently Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It
