To limit the power of Big Tech, regulators should look to mandate interoperability, which will empower users and could spark more competition
summed up brilliantly by Tom Eastman, a New Zealand software developer, as the transformation of the Internet into “a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four” https://cacm.acm.org/... Cory Doctorow / @doctorow : The @CACMmag has just published my editorial, “Competitive Compatibility: Let's Fix the Internet, Not the Tech Giants,” explaining how interoperability was once an engine for competition and user empowerment - and how that ended. https://cacm.acm.org/... 1/ https://twitter.com/... David Weinberger. Blm / @dweinberger : Important op-ed by @doctorow on interoperability: “Let's Fix the Internet, Not the Tech Giants.” (In #EverydayChaos I argue that causality is a subset of interop. Interop lets us make our own conditional, local causal laws.) But nevermind: READ CORY!! https://cacm.acm.org/... Stephen Jones / @jones1618 : As usual, @doctorow nails the biggest technical/social problem we face, “What to do about Facebook, Twitter, YouTube?” Don't regulate them top-down so they are even bigger, open up their privacy/data “plumbing” for DIY & 3rd party innovation. https://cacm.acm.org/... @eff : The web doesn't have to be “five giant sites filled with screenshots of the other four” (h/t @tveastman!) - with interoperability, co-ops, nonprofits and startups can demonopolize the net. https://cacm.acm.org/... Jon Lebkowsky / @jonl : How to fix the Internet and big tech by restoring/promoting interoperability, per @doctorow. https://cacm.acm.org/... @eff : Interoperability is tech's superpower! With it, new tech can unseat powerful incumbents. But decades of pro-monopoly laws have given Big Tech a veto over who can plug into its products. https://cacm.acm.org/... Rob Salmond / @phro : When he drops shit like this I am reminded of what JPB wrote of @doctorow. “Had nature not provided us with a Cory Doctorow when we needed one, it would have been necessary for us to invent a time machine and go into the future to fetch another like him.” https://twitter.com/... Jeffrey Vagle / @jvagle : A fundamental reason why FBs and Googles (and Standard Oils and General Motors etc) are allowed to become such behemoths is the near-blind trust we put in the nominal meritocracy of our systems, which we implicitly tie to our (also flawed) concept of moral desert. https://twitter.com/... Cory Doctorow / @doctorow : Demonopolizing the internet with interoperability: My op-ed in the Communications of the ACM https://twitter.com/... 2/ https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The argument lands amid a crowded field of remedies for platform power. Sen. Klobuchar's CALERA antitrust overhaul proposed rebuilding enforcement capacity, while Foreign Affairs argued for stripping platforms of their role as content gatekeepers and handing curation choices back to users. Cory Doctorow's editorial in Communications of the ACM adds a structural alternative: instead of regulating what platforms host or how they are policed, force them to interconnect so users can leave without losing their networks.
It also extends a diagnosis Doctorow and others have built over years — that Big Tech consolidated by ducking regulation and strangling competitors rather than through software disruption, a decay later labeled the "enshittocene" era in Financial Times coverage of Facebook's decline.
First-order effects
- If regulators adopted interoperability mandates, incumbents like Facebook would have to open their social graphs and interfaces to third parties, ending the lock-in that keeps users captive even as they grow dissatisfied.
Second-order effects
- Competing services could then reach users inside incumbent networks, shifting competition from who owns the audience to whose client experience wins — and blunting the moderation failures that earlier coverage showed regulation alone failed to fix while leaving the platforms stronger.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward an internet where moats come from execution rather than network capture, with antitrust tools like CALERA enforcing conduct standards and interoperability keeping markets contestable — though whether enforcement agencies can keep pace with technical interface design remains an open question.
The trend: Platform policy is moving from policing content on closed networks toward structural fixes — antitrust reform plus mandated interoperability — that make gatekeeper positions contestable.