40 years ago, a group of right-wing economists decided that this was a feature, not a bug, and convinced the world's governments to stop enforcing competition law, anti-monopoly law, and antitrust law, deliberately encouraging a global takeover by monopolies, duopolies and cartels. Today, virtually every sector of our economy is dominated by five or fewer firms:

https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers

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These neoliberal economists knew that in order to stop us from getting there ("there" being a world where everyday people have economic and political freedom), they'd have to get us "here" - a world where even the most powerful governments find themselves unable to address concentrated corporate power. They wanted to drag us into a oligarchy, and take away any hope of us escaping to a fairer, more pluralistic world.

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They succeeded. Today, rich and powerful governments struggle to do *anything* to rein in Big Tech. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney contemplated levying a 3% tax on America's tax-dodging tech giants...for all of five seconds. All Trump had to do was meaningfully clear his throat and Carney folded:

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/06/30/in-tech-tax-cave-trump-and-carney-may-have-both-gotten-what-they-wanted-00433980

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Canada also tried forcing payments to Canadian news agencies from tech giants, and failed in the most predictable way imaginable. Facebook simply blocked *all* Canadian news on its platforms (this being exactly what it had done in every other country where this was tried). Google paid out some money, and the country's largest newspaper killed its long-running investigative series into Big Tech's sins. Then Google slashed its payments.

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These payments were always a terrible idea. The *only* beneficial part of how Big Tech relates to the news is in making it easy for people to find and discuss the news. News you're not allowed to find or talk about isn't "news," it's "a secret." The thing that Big Tech steals from the news isn't *links*, it's *money*.

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30% of every in-app payment is stolen by the mobile duopoly; 51% of every ad dollar is stolen by the ad-tech duopoly; and social media holds news subscribers hostage and forces news companies to pay to "boost" their content to reach the people who follow them.

In other words, extracting payments for links is a form of *redistribution*, a clawback of some of Big Tech's stolen loot. It isn't *predistribution*, which would block Big Tech from stealing the loot in the first place.

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Canada is a wealthy nation, but only 41m people call it home. The EU is also wealthy, and it is home to *500m* people. You'd think that the EU could get further than Canada, but, faced with the might of the tech cartel, it has struggled to get *anything* done.

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Take the GDPR, Europe's landmark privacy law. In theory, this law bans the kind of commercial surveillance that Big Tech thrives on. In practice, these companies just flew an Irish flag of convenience, which not only let them avoid paying their taxes - it also let them get away with illegal surveillance, by capturing the Irish privacy regulator, who does *nothing* to defend Europeans' privacy:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/finnegans-snooze/#dirty-old-town

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It's hard to overstate just how supine the Irish state is in relation to the American tech giants that pretend to call Dublin their home. The country's latest privacy regulator is an ex-Meta executive!

https://www.article19.org/resources/ireland-adopt-new-transparent-process-to-appoint-data-protection-commissioner/

(Perhaps he can hang out with the UK's newly appointed head of competition enforcement, who used to be the head of Amazon UK:)

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/22/autocrats-of-trade/#dingo-babysitter

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For the EU, Ireland is just part of the problem when it comes to regulating Big Tech. The EU's latest tech regulations are the sweeping, even visionary Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act. If tech companies obeyed these laws, that would go a long way to addressing their monopoly abuses. So of course, they're not obeying the laws.

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Apple has threatened to leave the EU altogether rather than comply with a modest order requiring it to allow third party payments and app stores:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/26/empty-threats/#500-million-affluent-consumers

And they've buried the EU in complex litigation that could drag on for a decade:

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:62025TN0354

And Trump has made it clear that he is Big Tech's puppet, and any attempt to get American tech companies to obey EU law will be met with savage retaliation:

https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/05/tech/google-eu-antitrust-fine-adtech

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When it comes to getting Big Tech to obey the law, if we wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here.

But the fact that it's hard to get Big Tech to do the bidding of publicly accountable governments doesn't mean that those governments are powerless. There's one institution a government has total control over: itself.

The world's governments have all signed up to "anticircumvention" laws that criminalize reverse-engineering and modifying US tech products.

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This was done at the insistence of the US Trade Rep, who has spent this entire century using the threat of tariffs to bully every country in the world into signing up to laws that ban their own technologists from directly blocking American Big Tech companies' scams.

It's because of anticircumvention laws that a Canadian company can't go into business making an alternative Facebook client that blocks ads but restores the news.

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It's because of anticircumvention laws that a Canadian company can't go into business with a product that lets media companies bypass the Meta/Google ad-tech duopoly.

It's because of anticircumvention laws that a European company can't go into business modifying your phone, car, apps, smart devices and operating system to block *all* commercial surveillance. If companies can't *get* your data, they can't violate the GDPR.

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It's because of anticircumvention laws that a European company can't sell you a hardware dongle that breaks into your iPhone and replaces Apple's ripoff app store with a Made-in-the-EU alternative.

Anticircumvention law is the reason Canada's only response to Trump's illegal tariffs is *more* tariffs, which make everything in Canada more expensive.

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Get rid of anticircumvention law and Canada could get into the business of shifting billions of dollars from American tech monopolists to Canadian startups and the Canadian people:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/15/beauty-eh/#its-the-only-war-the-yankees-lost-except-for-vietnam-and-also-the-alamo-and-the-bay-of-ham

Anticirumvention law is the reason the EU can't get its data out of the Big Tech silos that Trump controls, which lets Trump shut down any European government agency or official that displeases him:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/15/freedom-of-movement/#data-dieselgate

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American monopolists like John Deere have installed killswitches in every tractor in the world - killswitches that can't be removed until we get rid of anticircumvention laws, which will let us create open source firmware for tractors. Until we do that, Trump can shut down all the agriculture in any country that makes him angry:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/20/post-american-internet/#huawei-with-american-characteristics

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For a decade, we've been warned that allowing China to supply our telecoms infrastructure was geopolitical suicide, because it would mean that China could monitor and terminate our network traffic. That's the threat that Trump's America now poses for the whole world, as Trump makes it clear that America doesn't have allies or trading partners, only rivals and competitors, and he will stop at nothing to beat them.

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And if you are worried about China, well, perhaps you should be. The world's incredible rush to solarization has left us with millions of solar installations whose inverters are *also* subject to arbitrary updates by their (Chinese) manufacturers, including updates that could render them inoperable. The only way around this?

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Get rid of anticircumvention law and replace all the software in these critical systems with open source, transparent, owner-controlled alternatives:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/23/our-friend-the-electron/#to-every-man-his-castle

Getting Big Tech to do your government's bidding is a big lift. The companies are too big to jail, especially with Trump behind them. That's why each of America's Big Tech CEOs paid $1m out of their own pockets to sit behind him on the dais at the inauguration:

https://apnews.com/article/trump-inauguration-tech-billionaires-zuckerberg-musk-wealth-0896bfc3f50d941d62cebc3074267ecd

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Even America can't bring its tech companies to heel. When Google was convicted of being an illegal monopolist, the judge punished the company by sentencing it to...*nothing*:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/03/unpunishing-process/#fucking-shit-goddammit-fuck

But ultimately, breakups and fines and interoperabilty mandates are all forms of redistribution - a way to strip the companies of the spoils of their decades-long looting spree.

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That's a laudable goal, but if we want to get there, we must start with *predistribution*: halting the companies' ongoing extraction efforts, by getting rid of the laws that prevent other technologists from unfucking their products and halting their cash- and data-ripoffs.

Do that long and hard enough and we stand a real chance of draining off so much of their power that we *can* get moving on those redistributive moves.

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And getting rid of anticircumvention laws only requires that governments control their *own* behavior - unlike taxing or fining companies, which only works if governments can control the behavior of companies that have proven, time and again, to be more powerful than any country in the world.

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