Even though he's the darkest of clouds, Trump has some deeply weird silver linings, formed out of a combination of his self-owning isolationism and blunt aggression.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/15/freedom-of-movement/#data-dieselgate
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In my quarter-century as a digital activist, I've had cause to work in more than 30 countries. Wherever I went, I'd meet with policymakers about the rules they should be thinking about in order to make their technology work better for their countries. Every single time, they'd agree politely with me, but insist that making any kind of tech-improving rules was impossible, because the US trade representative would kick their teeth in if they tried.
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For all of this century, the USTR has been one of the greatest global impediments to a better world, hopping from country to country, demanding policies that would protect American tech firms from foreign competitors - especially the kind of competitor who would improve on American tech products by protecting users' privacy, consumer rights or labor rights while they used them.
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The most glaring example of this are "anticircumvention laws." Under these laws, it's illegal to modify any technology that has any kind of *anti*-modification defenses. In other words, if the manufacturer draws a kind of virtual dotted line around part of the product's software and labels it, "Do not look inside this box," then it becomes illegal to do so, even if you're trying to do something that's otherwise legal.
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That means that if your printer is designed to reject generic ink, you can't change the code that verifies the ink cartridge. There's no law that says, "You have to buy your ink from the same company that sold you your printer," but if HP adds any kind of anti-modification measure to its ink-checking code, then disabling that code becomes a serious crime.
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Now, these laws are obviously an invitation to mischief. They are used to prevent independent repair of everything from tractors to cars to phones to games consoles to ventilators. They're used to stop you from blocking ads or surveillance on your phone or "smart" TV.
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They keep you locked into manufacturers' app stores, payment systems and other add-ons, which means that you are constantly being ripped off with junk fees, and you can't install the software of your choosing, including software that will help you avoid being kidnapped by masked thugs and sent to a secret torture prison:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/06/rogue-capitalism/#orphaned-syrian-refugees-need-not-apply
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The US passed the first of these laws in 1998, when Bill Clinton signed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. As the ink was still drying on Clinton's signature, the US trade rep started racing around the world, demanding that America's trading partners adopt their own version of the law:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/13/ctrl-ctrl-ctrl/#free-dmitry
As these laws were adopted around the world, US tech giants were given carte blanche to extract more money and data from their global users.
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American users were getting ripped off too, of course (they were the first victims of Big Tech), but at least the US stock market reaped the benefit of Big Tech's incredibly lucrative scams. But for America's trading partners, anticircumvention was an entirely losing proposition: their people got ripped off for their data and their money, and their tech companies couldn't go into business selling products to disenshittify America's cash-and-data extraction machines.
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So why did America's trading partners agree to anticircumvention law? Well, that was down to the tender ministrations of the US trade rep. Countries that didn't pass anticircumvention were threatened with US tariffs.
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I used to occasionally guest-lecture at an international relations grad program at the Central European University in Budapest, and one summer, I had a student who had served as the information minister to a Central American country while the US was negotiating the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA).
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The student described a phone call from their country's chief negotiator who said, "I know you told me not to budge on anticircumvention, but the USTR says if we don't give them this, they'll block our agricultural exports. I'm sorry." Country by country, the world fell into line.
When someone tells you, "You'd better do what I say or I'm going to burn your house down," and *then they burn your house down*, you'd be an absolute sucker if you kept up your part of the bargain.
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I find it absolutely bizarre that the USTR spent decades racing around the world, getting every country on earth to sign up to "America First" policies by threatening them with tariffs, and then Trump actually imposed the tariffs *anyway*, which has opened up the space for every country to get rid of those America First policies.
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Of course, that's not all Trump has done. He's also made it abundantly clear that he considers America's (former) allies to be geopolitical and economic competitors, and that US tech is one of the primary weapons he will use to wage war on the world.
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He got Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to cave on taxing Big Tech, which means that they'll be able to go on cheating on their taxes, while Canadian companies won't be able to, which means Canada's tech sector will never be able to compete:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd0vv2pe7ydo
Trump has also ordered the EU to scrap its new tech antitrust laws, the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act, which aim to open up space for European competitors to US tech:
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But more than that, Trump and US tech have teamed up to attack and deplatform public officials that Trump has beef with. Take Karim Khan, chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in the Hague. Khan swore out a criminal complaint and arrest warrant for the génocidaire Benjamin Netanyahu, and Trump sanctioned Khan. Then, Microsoft cut off Khan's access to his account, nuking his email, calendar, address book and files:
https://apnews.com/article/icc-trump-sanctions-karim-khan-court-a4b4c02751ab84c09718b1b95cbd5db3
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Nearly three months ago, U.S. President Donald Trump slapped sanctions on the International Criminal Court's chief prosecutor, Karim Khan. He has lost access to his email and his bank accounts have been frozen. American staffers at The Hague-based court also have been told that if they travel to the U.S. they risk arrest. In addition, some nongovernmental organizations have stopped working with the ICC. Rights groups say these problems will prevent victims of war crimes from getting justice.
For officials all over the world, the message couldn't be clearer: Trump sees you as the enemy, and he will use American tech companies to cut you off at the knees if you don't roll over for him.
Enter the Eurostack. This is an initiative from the EU that seeks to fund and deploy open source equivalents to the platforms that the European public, its businesses and its governments are currently locked into:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/25/eurostack/#viktor-orbans-isp
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Thus far, Eurostack's focus has been on building those Made-in-the-EU alternatives to the US tech stack, and on financing data-center rollout. But very shortly, Eurostack advocates are going to hit a wall.
Escaping from US Big Tech isn't merely a matter of having another service to move your data and interactions to. You also have to have a way to transition from the old, US service to the new Eurostack equivalent.
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No government ministry, no business, no individual is going to manually copy-and-paste thousands (or millions) of documents out of Microsoft, Apple or Google's cloud into the Eurostack. No one is going to individually move all the edit histories, email chains, and file permissions over. These files and data-structures are essential to the people who created them, and they often contain sensitive information and compliance data that is illegal to delete.
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Sure, the EU *could* try to order American Big Tech companies to create export tools so that Europeans can easily retrieve their data in formats that can be faithfully imported into Eurostack services, but we can already see how that will play out.
Last year's Digital Markets Act contains a modest set of "interoperability" requirements that require big US companies like Apple to open up their platforms to rival app stores and payment processors.
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Apple's monopoly over iPhone apps is a big deal - it lets the company structure the market for software in Europe, without any accountability or limits, and Apple extracts a 30% tax on every euro that changes hands via an iOS app. Globally, Apple makes more than $100b/year from this "app tax."
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This is part of a bigger theme:
"When someone tells you, "You'd better do what I say or I'm going to burn your house down," and then they burn your house down, you'd be an absolute sucker if you kept up your part of the bargain."
Trump burns his own power at every turn in similar ways. You can't believe anything he says, so he has diminishing control over your behavior.
'You're going to shoot the hostages no matter what, so I might as well do what I want.'
sebastian_k
Cory Doctorow
Óscar Vargas
Phosphenes
Thirteenth Worrier
CassandraVert
ferricoxide