Long thread/11
Members of the public are critical to this fight - we're the ones who tip the scales from one side to the other. That's why rentiers go to such great lengths to convince policymakers that they have the public on their side, whether that's Amazon trotting out "small businesses" that depend on (and get viciously fucked by) Amazon's ecommerce platform:
https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/4760357-amazon-basics-antitrust/
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Long thread/12
Or leaders of groups like the NAACP who've been bribed to front for the phone companies and cable operators in the fight against Net Neutrality:
https://www.techdirt.com/2017/12/19/naacp-fought-net-neutrality-until-last-week-now-suddenly-supports-idea/
All other things being equal, policymakers will simply side the deepest-pocketed, most unified corporate lobby in any fight (which is how the media companies won the Napster Wars).
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Long thread/13
But when the public and one side of the corporate world is one side of an issue, policymakers understand that siding with them will get them votes and money, which is much better than just getting money (which is how we won the SOPA/PIPA fight):
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/01/everyone-made-themselves-hero-remembering-aaron-swartz
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Long thread/14
We can really see this in the EU, where the new Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act are going after Big Tech with both barrels, with the enthusiastic support of the EU's tech industry. That's because the EU's tech industry barely registers when placed alongside of US Big Tech, which has sucked up nearly 100% of the market oxygen by cheating (on privacy, taxes, wages, etc).
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Long thread/15
Despite the farcical efforts of US tech shills like Nick Clegg (former UK Deputy Prime Minister turned Meta shill, who insisted that Facebook was "defending European cyberspace from Chinese communism"), everyone knew that US tech companies were extracting (billions of euros and the personal information of 500m Europeans) from the bloc and siphoning it off to America, after first cleansing it of any tax obligations by laundering it through Ireland and the Netherlands.
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Long thread/16
If Europe still had thriving tech "national champions" - Olivetti, Nokia, Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson, etc - these companies might plausibly mount an opposition to muscular tech regulation in the EU. But these companies were crippled by predatory capital and then mostly absorbed into US Big Tech (or ground into dust).
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Long thread/17
Back when I was having a friendly blog-argument with my comrades about whether tech antitrust was a Big Telco plot, I averred that it didn't really matter, because Big Tech really was terrible, and because once we'd roused antitrust enforcement from its 40-year slumber, we could wrest control of it from the telecoms monopolists who'd helped us dig it up and reanimate it.
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Long thread/18
In other words: the war against the corruption brought about by corporate concentration is hard to kindle, but it's even harder to extinguish. The corporations that are fanning the flames are focused - as corporations inevitably are, to the detriment of our planet and politics - on the short term gains they stand to reap from their actions. But we can - we must - take the long view.
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Long thread/19
Smashing corporate power is the key to destroying fascism and ensuring our species' survival, so our focus needs to be on building the blaze, and if some of those adding fuel to the fire happen to aspire to building monopolies of their own, then our job is to give 'em a nasty surprise when that day comes.
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Cory Doctorow