Doctorow is adamant that no one be allowed to wield as much power as Mark Zuckerberg, who he deems a “feudal warlord” of middling intellect. “We don’t need a better Zuck. We need to abolish Zuck.”
How did these megacorporations do it? With behavior that would have been deemed illegal in other times, and with lawyers and lobbyists who got them laws like the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act. It effectively criminalizes the invention of competing products. And they’re what discourage the kind of reverse-engineering that allows competitors to create products that can seamlessly converse with, say, Facebook Messenger or Apple’s iMessage.
A few apps such as Pidgin still cling to that model of open-platform engineering. It’s enabled by what’s called “interoperability,” something theBack in the day “if you had an account on Yahoo Messenger, AIM and Skype, Pidgin could let you manage them all from one app.” And it had its own super-secure encryption to protect your digital interactions from prying eyes.