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Received — 5 September 2026 ⏭

Pluralistic: Google skates (05 Sep 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
5 September 2026 at 10:04


Today's links

  • Google skates: Another federal judge loses a game of peek-a-boo.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: Memory-hacking ads; "Dzur"; NZ Ministry of DRM; Canadians v looking at the internet; Advice for self-publishers; Advice for writers; Why Wikipedia works.
  • Upcoming appearances: Dąbrowa Górnicza, Warsaw, Brighton, London, Budapest, Edmonton, South Bend, Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa.
  • Recent appearances: Where I've been.
  • Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Colophon: All the rest.


A woodcut engraving of a courtroom scene in which the divorcee has thrown herself into the arms of one of the lawyers and they are about to kiss. The image has been altered: the heads of the judge, the court clerk and both lawyers have been replaced by green Android 'droid' mascots in judicial powdered wigs. The judge's bench sports a pixelated, 1998-era 'I'm feeling lucky' Google button.

Google skates (permalink)

Rome wasn't overthrown in a day. Oligarchies are stubborn, and by the time they've established and entrenched themselves, they have resources, power blocs and even mercenaries they can deploy to repel would-be dethroners.

The USA got its first antimonopoly law, the Sherman Act, in 1890, but it took 22 years before that law could be used to crush John D Rockefeller's corrupt, sprawling empire. Senator John Sherman promoted his law as a way of preventing monopolies from emerging, warning the Senate that they would struggle to overthrow the "autocrats of trade" that monopolies created:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/

The Senate passed his law and Harrison signed it, but then successive administrations left the Sherman Act to gather dust on a shelf as Rockefeller went on a spree, accumulating the kind of power that made him a true "autocrat of trade," so powerful that he and the US government were practically evenly matched.

Allowing Rockefeller to create, expand and consolidate his monopoly power was a terrible tactical blunder, giving him decades in which he was able to loot America and its trading partners, pauperizing ordinary people and smashing anyone who got in his way. No one was willing to admit that Rockefeller was a threat to democracy and prosperity until he had amassed all that power, and once he had all that power, it took heroic effort to break him.

The Rockefeller story is like the punchline of that joke: "When it doesn't rain, the roof don't leak; and when it's raining, it's too wet to fix it." Alternatively, there's my other favorite punchline: "If you wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here."

The Rockefeller blunder wasn't a one-off. The Apple ][+ hit the shelves the same year Reagan hit the campaign trail, and the tech industry's rise occurred simultaneously with the dismantling of competition law enforcement. Tech companies were the first "post-antitrust" industry, and it wasn't until these companies became palpable, terrifying, undeniable, existential civilizational risks that we remembered that we had all these laws on the books that were designed to curb excessive corporate power.

Under Biden, a group of generationally talented, visionary trustbusters were given access to those dormant enforcement powers: Lina Khan at the FTC; Rohit Chopra at the CFPB, Tim Wu in the White House, and Jonathan Kantor at the DOJ Antitrust Division. Together with a staff of canny and skilled lawyers and economists, these people scored incredible victories against Big Tech. During the Biden years, Google lost three federal antitrust cases. Three!

But if we wanted to get there, we wouldn't start from here. After a series of stinging defeats in the US and abroad, after watching the EU, the UK, Japan, Singapore and South Korea make common cause with Biden's enforcers, Big Tech threw everything it had into Trump, who promised them a system of regulatory forbearance in exchange for low-cost bribery, backstopped by a xenophobic, belligerent geopolitics that would rain down punishments on any country that dared to regulate or tax Big Tech:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62553ywn77o

And then the other shoe dropped: the federal judges who convicted Google of operating an illegal monopoly handed down their "remedy" decisions. In an antitrust case, the "remedy" phase is like sentencing – the stage of the legal proceeding where the judge decides what punishment the company should face for breaking the law.

The first of these remedies came out a year ago, in September 2025. Judge Amit Mehta had presided over Google's "search" case, where we learned that Google had deliberately made search worse so that you'd have to search more than once in order to get your answer, which would allow the company the chance to show you more ads:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

Google was able to do this because it had cornered the market on search. The company had spent years paying a $20b annual bribe to Apple to stay out of the search market, and they'd bought the default search placement for every operating system, browser and carrier. If you encountered a search box in the wild, it was almost certainly wired into Google's servers. They knew that there was approximately zero chance that you'd ever stumble upon another search engine, which meant they could make their own search as shitty as they wanted and keep your business.

Confronted with these proven findings, Mehta decided that Google's punishment should be…nothing. They wouldn't be forced to delete the personal data they'd taken from billions of people. They wouldn't be forced to spin off Chrome or Android – two of the key tools Google uses to keep people from discovering other search engines. They wouldn't even be forced to halt the $20b annual bribe to Apple – the judge fretted that without that $20b annual bribe, Apple wouldn't be able to pay researchers to come up with cool new iPhone features (never mind that Apple spends all that money – and more – on stock buybacks, a recently illegal form of stock manipulation):

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

Then, a year later, another federal judge – Leonie Brinkema, who presided over the Google "ad-tech" case – decided that Google's penalty for monopolizing the ad market should also be…nothing:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/09/us-court-rules-google-will-not-have-to-sell-ad-exchange-after-losing-antitrust-case/

Oh, maybe not exactly nothing. We don't actually know the full extent of Judge Brinkema's "remedy," because it's sealed for two weeks. What we do know is that Google will not be forced to take the most obvious, effective and necessary step to prevent it from abusing its monopoly: Google will not be forced to sell off part of its ad-tech stack.

Let me unpack that for you, because unless you're an ad-tech weirdo, chances are you have no idea how any of this works and don't think it affects you. But the reality is that this is costing you money. It's one of the dirtiest, most profitable scams in the entire tech economy, which is saying something, because that is an economy that is made of scams:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/04/cheating-at-fraud/#absentee-rentier

Unlike older ads, which were targeted based on content (say, an ad for a hotel might run next to a newspaper article about a beachside town) modern ads are built on surveillance. Companies like Google amass vast, nonconsensual dossiers on the personal characteristics and behavior of billions of people, supplemented with information purchased from the unregulated data-broker sector.

When you visit a website, the site fires off a piece of software called "sell-side agent" to message a server called an "ad exchange" in order to announce your visit, soliciting bids for the right to show you an ad: "I am about to serve a web-page to a 18-34 year old man-child from New York's outer boroughs, who owns an Xbox and has been recently searching for information about gonorrhea: who wants to cram some ads into this guy's eyeballs?"

That ad-exchange server is haunted by "demand-side agents" – these are pieces of software fired off by advertisers that monitor all these advertising opportunities announced on the ad exchange and bid for the right to show you an ad. The highest bidder gets to show you an ad, and the fee is remitted to the exchange, which takes a cut and passes the remainder on to the sell-side platform, which also takes a cut and gives the balance to the website publisher.

So the ad-tech stack has three main components: the "sell-side platform" (SSP), which lets web publishers announce auctions for the right to advertise to their visitors; the "demand-side platform" (DSP) that lets advertisers bid to show those visitors ads; and the "ad exchange" – the marketplace where the sell-side and demand-side agents meet to collect bids, finalize the sale, and exchange ads for money.

When this all started, there were lots of companies in all three roles. Publishers and advertisers had their choice of SSPs, DSPs and exchanges, and all three types of middleman competed to offer the best deals to advertisers and publishers.

Then, Google and Facebook started buying up the leading DSPs, SSPs and exchanges. They used contracts and technical countermeasures to force anyone who used any part of their "stack" to use them for all parts of the transaction. The CEOs of Google and Facebook personally colluded to rig the market, dividing it up between them so that publishers would get less, advertisers would pay more, and Googbook would pocket the difference. The codename for this conspiracy was "Jedi Blue":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue

Jedi Blue was just the icing on the cake. The reality is they didn't need the conspiracy: once Google was selling services to advertisers and publishers on an exchange that Google owned, they created an entire universe of ways to rip off both advertisers and publishers. Now consider that Google is also an advertiser and also a web publisher, and the opportunities to cheat are just wild.

The numbers tell the story. Before Googbook captured 80% of the display advertising business, the total share of the advertising industry's revenues that went to "intermediaries" (middlemen like ad agencies, ad buyers, etc) was about 15%. Today, that number is 51%. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been moved out of publishers' and advertisers' bank accounts and onto Google and Facebook's balance sheets.

This isn't hard to understand. Google runs an ad business that locks in buyers and sellers on a marketplace Google owns and controls, where it also competes with those buyers and sellers. Buying or selling an ad through Google is like going to court to get a divorce, only to discover that you and your soon-to-be-ex- are both represented by the same lawyer, who promptly ascends the bench and dons a judge's wig, and then spends the whole trial trying to match with both of you on Tinder, and who concludes the trial by banging their gavel and announcing that they've decided that the family house will be awarded to…the judge!

The most absurd part of this whole farce is the lawyers who defend it on behalf of companies like Google. If a Google lawyer ever showed up to defend the company in a trial where the judge was working for the plaintiff, they would scream blue murder and refuse to proceed until the judge was removed from the case. But when Google operates a business where it presides over transactions where it has nothing but conflicts of interest, these same lawyers argue that Google would never cheat a seller or a buyer.

The fucking absurdity of this arrangement is so obvious that a bill to force a halt to it was co-sponsored…by Elizabeth Warren and Ted Cruz:

https://gizmodo.com/google-facebook-america-act-ads-break-up-cruz-warren-1850287725

Why would Warren and Cruz care about this? Because the hundreds of billions that have been moved from publishers and advertisers to Google and Facebook are hundreds of billions of dollars that are no longer paying for news and entertainment production, and they're hundreds of billions of dollars that businesses have to recoup by raising prices on you to pay their advertising bills.

Google (and, apparently, Judge Leonie Brinkema) dispute this. They say that "larger forces" have "changed the dynamic" that "restructured the industry." But, I mean, come on! This is a situation where hundreds of billions of dollars are divided up by a thrice convicted monopolist who is mysteriously hundreds of billions of dollars richer, while the other parties to the transaction are mysteriously hundreds of billions of dollars poorer. Anyone who can't draw the obvious causal inference from these facts has so little object permanence that they would lose a fucking game of peek-a-boo.

This is so goddamned demoralizing. For a couple years there, it really looked like the tide was turning. Then Judges Brinkema and Mehta came along to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

The only thing that's keeping me going is object permanence. I know my history. I know it took decades from the passage of the Sherman Act until the defeat of John D Rockefeller. Our forebears brought down Rockefeller because they didn't give up, despite setbacks as bad as this one, and worse. Stein's Law of finance holds that "anything that can't go on forever eventually stops," and MLK told us that "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." This can't go on forever, and despite Dr King's phrasing, I know he understood that the arc doesn't just "bend" – it is bent – by people like us, hauling on it with all our might.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Advertisers claim they can hack your childhood memories https://web.archive.org/web/20010921022846/http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/science/story.jsp?story=92386

#25yrsago Wind-up cellphone charger https://web.archive.org/web/20011031122531/http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,2-2001310179,00.html

#20yrsago Steven Brust’s Dzur: witty and exciting heroic fantasy https://memex.craphound.com/2006/09/05/steven-brusts-dzur-witty-and-exciting-heroic-fantasy/

#20yrsago America to US gov’t: kill the Broadcast Treaty! http://www.cptech.org/ip/wipo/bt/jointletter5sep06usptoforum.pdf

#20yrsago New Zealand wants a Ministry of DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20070108042834/http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/soa/NZ_draws_line_on_DRM_and_trusted_computing/0,130061733,339270846,00.htm

#20yrsago Is it legal to look at the Web in Canada? https://web.archive.org/web/20061010120919/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/1411/135/

#15yrsago Advice for self-publishers: why should anyone care about your book? https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-why-should-anyone-care/

#5yrsago A letter to a discouraged young writer https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/05/why-bother/

#1yrago Why Wikipedia works https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/05/be-the-first-person/#to-not-do-something-that-no-one-else-has-ever-thought-of-not-doing-before

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Saturday's words: 504 (12397 total).

  • "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

Received — 7 July 2026 ⏭

Pluralistic: How US states and international trustbusters can beat Big Tech (07 Jul 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
7 July 2026 at 14:24


Today's links

  • How US states and international trustbusters can beat Big Tech: Their common enemies are Trump and his tech giants.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: Sex work synonyms; Carthedral; French pirates; Suffragette surveillance; Hidden library apartments; "The Meaning of July the Fourth for the Negro" x James Earl Jones; Farage quits; Peak indifference; Self publishing; Pepsi spies try to buy Coke formula; Steal this wiki; SF is the only lit people care enough about to steal; HP Lovecraft's commonplace book; "7th Sigma"; Conspiracy fantasy; PalmOS beampoints; Copyright poetry; Abandoned NOLA themepark; Life in Indian call-centers; "Rule 34"; Unpleasant design; WEB du Bois infographics; Drone v South African racism; Escobar's hippos; Brexit nihilism; UK Iraq War inquiry; Copyright reversion; Paperclip traded for house; Pen with shredder; Broadcast Treaty is back; "Influencing Machine"; ANSI x paid sex; Biden x Right to Repair; Technological self-determination.
  • Upcoming appearances: London, Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend.
  • Recent appearances: Where I've been.
  • Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Colophon: All the rest.


A titan, chained and sunk to the waist in a stone-lined pit. He has the head of Mark Zuckerberg's Metaverse avatar. A group of Sisyphean men roll boulders towards him, up a skeleton-strewn hillside. Behind him, atop a high cliff, writhe many naked figures entwined with choking serpents.

How US states and international trustbusters can beat Big Tech (permalink)

For a minute there, it looked like Big Tech was on the ropes. Over the past decade, countries all over the world have gotten antitrust fever, from South Korea to Singapore, Europe to Australia, and even China:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/28/mamdani/#trustbusting

Even more important: these international trustbusters shared a common enemy with Biden's antitrust enforcers, like Lina Khan (FTC), Rohit Chopra (CFPB) and Jonathan Kanter (DoJ Antitrust Division), who pursued the most aggressive antitrust agenda America has seen since Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan killed antitrust enforcement a half century ago.

This international collaboration was an especially rich and productive one. Today's global trustbusters have opportunities for collaboration that their Gilded Age predecessors could only dream of.

That's because modern monopolies are likewise global, running the same scam in every country that they operate in. It wasn't like this during the era of the first Robber Barons. John D Rockefeller's Standard Oil had many of the world's economies in chokeholds, but each country got its own, national chokehold. In the US, Standard Oil monopolized pipelines and refineries, but it found different chokepoints in other countries. For example, in Germany, Rockefeller monopolized the ports:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/24/shithole-billionaires/#tarbells-everywhere

This meant that American and German enforcers had very little to say to one another. Sure, they had a common enemy, but even if US and German authorities commandeered a fleet of zeppelins and used them to ferry documents back and forth between their respective agencies, it wouldn't have done them any good. The fact patterns about German ports had nothing much in common with the cases being built in relation to America's captured oil refineries.

That's not how companies like Google, or Meta, or Apple, or Microsoft, or Oracle work. Like Standard Oil, these companies are planet-girding extraction machines that are strangling the world's economies. But unlike Standard Oil, these companies run the same playbook in every country, meaning that the facts that establish Google or Apple's guilt in Brussels can be translated and used to run cases in the UK, South Korea and Japan.

The opportunities for international cooperation don't stop there! It's been more than a century since the Gilded Age, and the intervening years saw the US enact the Marshall Plan, through which it redesigned the legal systems of countries shattered by WWII and the Korean War. The technocrats who oversaw the Marshall Plan understood that large, monopolistic firms played a key role in the rise of fascist governments in Europe and Japan, and so they transposed America's landmark antitrust laws – like the Sherman Act and the Clayton Act – onto lawbooks around the world:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/08/competition-is-killing-us/#borked

That means that it's not just that the same companies are committing the same crimes everywhere around the world – it also means that most of these countries have substantively similar statutes establishing those crimes. A successful case in South Korea will likely be successful in the UK – providing that the company engages in the same conduct in both countries (which, again, it does).

During the Biden years, the UK Competition and Markets Authority ran these international tech antitrust summits in London where US enforcers and their UK, European, Singaporean, South Korean and Japanese counterparts met to plan a shared strategy to take down US Big Tech:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/cma-data-technology-and-analytics-conference-2022-tickets-308678625077

The presence of America's trustbusters at these meetings was key. Not only were they running a string of wildly successful cases against US Big Tech in America, but just by being there, they signaled that the US government would help foreign governments enforce their judgments against US tech giants. That's key, because – as the Marshall Plan's architects could tell you – giant national monopolies often become a de facto, private, unaccountable arm of the state in the countries where they are born, and can call upon the governments they've colonized to protect them from other countries' attempts to enforce their laws.

Which brings me to the Trump election, and the subsequent fusion of Big Tech with Trump's government. It started before Trump took office, when he traveled to Davos to warn the world's governments not to try to enforce their laws over his tech companies. Then there was the inauguration, where tech CEOs paid $1m each out of their pockets for a seat on the dais behind Trump. Big Tech ponied up millions for the Epstein Ballroom, and they also provide key material support to Trump's ethnic cleansing program. If you end up in a concentration camp thanks to one of Trump's ICE chuds, you can blame Microsoft for providing the administrative software; Google for providing the location data used to track you down; and Apple for blocking apps that warn you if you're about to get snatched by masked thugs:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/06/rogue-capitalism/#orphaned-syrian-refugees-need-not-apply

All over the world, tech antitrust has gone into retreat. In Canada, ex-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau created sweeping new powers for the country's Competition Bureau, but now his successor Mark Carney is making equally sweeping cuts to the agency's funding. In the UK, PM Keir Starmer fired the devastatingly effective head of the Competition and Markets Authority and replaced him with the CEO of Amazon UK:

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

And in Ireland – the place where European tech regulation goes to die – they've just appointed an ex-Meta lobbyist named Niamh Sweeney to regulate the privacy practices of the US tech giants that pretend to be headquartered in Ireland in order to evade their taxes:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/01/erin-go-blagged/#big-tech-omerta

This is especially worrying because Meta has a history of binding its former executives with nondisclosure and nondisparagement clauses that forbid them from ever saying a mean word about Meta, or discussing anything they learned while working at the company. There are no ends to the lengths the company will go to in their war on their ex-employees. Take Sarah Wynn-Williams, who has been fined $111m by the company's arbitrator as punishment for her #1 NYT bestselling whistleblower memoir, Careless People. Meta has told Wynn-Williams that she may not appear in public to discuss anything, not just her book, and now they've sued her for standing motionless and silent for an hour on a stage at a literary festival:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/27/zuckerstreisand-2/#autodisparagement

When Sweeney was given the job of regulating her former employers, it naturally raised questions about whether she would be legally allowed to criticize – or even talk about – Meta. Sweeney declined to comment on this at all for seven months, and now, at last, she has issued a heavily lawyered statement that seems to affirm that she will be allowed to do her job:

https://www.independent.ie/business/irish-business/no-legal-gag-from-meta-and-no-tech-shares-data-protection-commissioner-niamh-sweeney-on-regulating-her-former-employers/a/158097549.html

But a close read of her words tells a different story: Sweeney has affirmed that she's not bound by the same gag order as Wynn-Williams, but not whether she has any restrictions on her conduct in respect of Meta. This shouldn't be complicated: if Sweeney is indeed free to vigorously enforce the law against Meta, then she could have published a statement the day her appointment was made public: "I do not have any contractual restrictions on my ability to discuss Meta or its current or former personnel." If she is truly able to do this job, then it shouldn't take her half a year to issue a weasel-worded, heavily caveated statement.

Having narrowly escaped the existential crisis of democratic and legal accountability, Big Tech has captured a string of states: Ireland and the UK, and (especially) the USA. The fears of the Marshall Plan technocrats have been realized: Big Tech is Trump and Trump is Big Tech, and together, they are executing an authoritarian takeover of the USA and countries around the world.

Without the US as a willing partner, other countries have precious little chance of enforcing their laws (which were originally American laws). Just look at how Apple has point-blank refused to follow Europe's new tech regulations:

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

(Worse: Trump has blacklisted the EU officials who worked on those laws and has permanently barred them from entering the USA, and has now requisitioned more official EU correspondence from Big Tech companies so he can locate and punish more of Big Tech's official enemies:)

https://www.euractiv.com/news/eu-urges-us-tech-firms-to-follow-rules-on-handling-staff-data/

Now that the US state has merged with US tech, every country around the world has motive, means and opportunity to build a "post-American internet" of open source apps running at local data centers:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition

But don't write US enforcers out of the picture just yet! Writing for The Sling, Tyler Clark calls for "regionalized enforcement" by US states against Big Tech companies:

https://www.thesling.org/regionalizing-enforcement-agencies/

You see, it's not just international governments whose lawbooks were rewritten through the Marshall Plan that have access to America's antitrust laws. When Congress wrote the Clayton Act, Sherman Act and other US federal antitrust laws, they explicitly wrote in the power of state Attorneys General to enforce them. That means that 50+ state AGs all have the ability to wield antitrust against US tech giants.

It seems Congress foresaw this moment, when federal enforcers partnered with American monopolists, trading open bribes for approval for corrupt mergers and other illegal conduct:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/13/khanservatives/#kid-rock-eats-shit

But where the Feds fail, the states can pick up the slack. When states fine US companies and order their breakup, it's a lot harder for those companies to flout those orders – unlike the EU or Canada or the UK, America's state governments are first class actors in the US judicial system.

That's where Clark comes in: he calls for coalitions of state enforcers to take on US Big Tech, filling the void created by Trump's pay-to-play fed enforcers. A (future) federal statute could enshrine this system through "regional FTC enforcement centers":

https://www.ftc.gov/reports/collaboration-act-report-congress

I like Clark's idea, but I think he's missing a trick: US regional antitrust enforcement doesn't need to lean on the US government for resources and collaboration. There are national governments all over the world whose antitrust laws were created by the Marshall Plan, and those are the same laws that state AGs have at their disposal. And of course, tech companies' crimes aren't just the same in France and Japan – they're also the same in New York State and California.

The US government isn't the only game in town. American state enforcers have a global buffet of enforcement partners, and those international enforcers need American collaborators who can collect the fines they levy and enforce the breakup orders they issue. It's a win-win (for the people, for international enforcers, and the states) and a big loss (for Trump's tech companies and his corrupt antitrust dingo babysitters).

One place this could start: joint hearings that call ex-Big Tech employees as key witnesses, daring companies like Meta to invoke their gag orders. It's one thing to tell Sarah Wynn-Williams she can't talk to a crowd at a book festival, but Meta has taken the position that she cannot speak before a legislature or regulator, either.

Wynn-Williams isn't alone. The Big Tech companies are laying off employees by the thousands, thanks to their failed 11-figure AI bets. Those ex-employees know where every body is buried. They know where to find the memos that establish their ex-bosses' intent to create and maintain monopolies and the hardest part of any antitrust case is establishing intent.

Together, US states and foreign enforcers have the opportunity of the century – a chance to shatter the power of Trump's tech giants, who are so key to Trump's authoritarian takeover.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Prohibited synonyms for sex work https://web.archive.org/web/20010803205316/https://www.ci.sparks.nv.us/municode/Title_5/66/100.html

#25yrsago Carthedral https://web.archive.org/web/20010803104957/http://www.carthedral.com/FAQ.html

#25yrsago How solar is decentralizing power in the Domincan Republic https://web.archive.org/web/20010802180254/https://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,44784,00.html

#25yrsago PalmOS streetlamp beam-points https://web.archive.org/web/20010723042420/http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2001/07/05/BU239233.DTL

#25yrsago Poignant story of a dotcom’s death https://web.archive.org/web/20010703095832/http://www.oreilly.com/news/deathofdotcom_0601.html

#20yrsago Haunted house build-notes https://web.archive.org/web/20060710081617/https://www.dragons-eye.com/watch_us_build!.htm

#20yrsago US copyright law in verse https://jergames.blogspot.com/2006/07/us-copyright-code-in-verse.html

#20yrsago Indie band pulls out of iTunes, cites DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20060708093512/https://www.technozid.de/2006/07/06/bodenstandig-2000-are-opting-out-of-itunes/

#20yrsago Coke employees busted for trying to sell formula to Pepsi https://web.archive.org/web/20060712112019/https://edition.cnn.com/2006/LAW/07/05/coke.secrets.ap/index.html

#20yrsago Sf is the only literature people care enough about to steal on the Internet https://www.locusmag.com/2006/Issues/07DoctorowCommentary.html

#20yrsago Steal This Book, the wiki https://web.archive.org/web/20060707015922/https://stealthiswiki.nine9pages.com/index.php?title=Table_of_Contents

#20yrsago Canadian artists call for less copyright https://web.archive.org/web/20060706205719/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20060705.COPYRIGHT05/TPStory/

#20yrsago Pirate Party launches in France https://web.archive.org/web/20060706141024/http://www.parti-pirate.info/?page_id=17

#20yrsago Guy successfully trades paperclip for house https://web.archive.org/web/20060806194814/http://oneredpaperclip.blogspot.com/2006/07/interesting.html

#20yrsago Woman gamer voice-changer for impersonating men https://web.archive.org/web/20060711114727/http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=65946

#20yrsago Collection of publishing industry statistics https://web.archive.org/web/20060704112005/http://parapublishing.com/sites/para/resources/statistics.cfm

#20yrsago Pen with built-in shredder and FM radio https://web.archive.org/web/20061027190059/http://www.radicauk.com/product/instructions/74011

#15yrsago Women football players half as likely to fake an injury as men https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/07/110706195906.htm)

#15yrsago WIPO’s Broadcast Treaty is back: copyright nuts want to steal the public domain, kill Creative Commons, and give copyright over your videos to YouTube and other streamers https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/07/its-back-wipo-broadcasting-treaty-returns-grave

#15yrsago Influencing Machine: Brook Gladstone’s comic about media theory is serious but never dull https://memex.craphound.com/2011/07/07/influencing-machine-brook-gladstones-comic-about-media-theory-is-serious-but-never-dull/

#15yrsago Suffragette surveillance photos from 1912 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/3153024.stm

#15yrsago Steampunk thinking helmet https://tombanwell.blogspot.com/2011/07/tauruscat-final-photos.html

#15yrsago RIP, Len Sassaman: cypherpunk and anonymity hacker https://web.archive.org/web/20110707065058/https://www.cso.com.au/article/392338/young_cryptographer_ends_own_life/

#15yrsago Italian telco regulator grants itself power to censor Internet; Obama administration approves https://hyperorg.com/2011/07/04/obama-admin-backs-berlusconis-unfettered-anti-piracy-regs/

#15yrsago Massive science fiction encyclopedia’s third edition will be digital https://web.archive.org/web/20110709072721/http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/

#15yrsago HP Lovecraft’s commonplace book https://web.archive.org/web/20110706091953/https://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2011/07/h-p-lovecrafts-commonplace-book/

#15yrsago America’s copyright scholars speak out against PROTECT-IP bill https://volokh.com/2011/07/04/and-speaking-of-the-inalienable-right-to-the-pursuit-of-happiness/

#15yrsago Little Brother stage adaptation in San Francisco, Jan 2012 https://web.archive.org/web/20130803164337/https://littlebrotherlive.wordpress.com/

#15yrsago Steven “Jumper” Gould’s new novel 7TH SIGMA: genre-busting science fiction/western kicks ass https://memex.craphound.com/2011/07/05/steven-jumper-goulds-new-novel-7th-sigma-genre-busting-science-fiction-western-kicks-ass/

#15yrsago Rotting, abandoned New Orleans theme-park https://www.flickr.com/photos/uelaphantom/sets/72157625672417251/comments/

#15yrsago Spanish anti-piracy execs busted for ripping off artists https://web.archive.org/web/20120510175030/https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/07/police-raid-spanish-collecting-society-in-embezzlement-case/

#15yrsago Following the money: how spammers do their banking https://krebsonsecurity.com/2011/07/which-banks-are-enabling-fake-av-scams/

#15yrsago Life in an Indian call center https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/07/indian-call-center-americanization/

#15yrsago Stross’s Rule 34: pervy technothriller about the future of policing https://memex.craphound.com/2011/07/06/strosss-rule-34-pervy-technothriller-about-the-future-of-policing/

#10yrsago Unpleasant Design: design that bullies its users https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/unpleasant-design-hostile-urban-architecture/

#10yrsago 2016’s Illusion of the Year will make you cover your screen with fingerprints https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jri0del_6t4

#10yrsago WEB Du Bois’s infographics on black life, from the 1900 Exposition Universelle https://hyperallergic.com/w-e-b-du-boiss-modernist-data-visualizations-of-black-life/

#10yrsago “Security is what happens to people, not machines” https://www.oreilly.com/content/eleanor-saitta-on-security-as-a-product-of-shared-human-outcomes/

#10yrsago Drone’s eye view photos reveal the racism of South African neighbourhoods https://web.archive.org/web/20160706105856/https://edition.cnn.com/2016/07/06/africa/south-africa-apartheid-drone-photography-unequal-scenes/index.html

#10yrsago Man builds giant, discrete-component-based computer that can play Tetris https://www.megaprocessor.com/

#10yrsago Epipens have more than quintupled in price since 2004 https://inthesetimes.com/article/anaphylactic-sticker-shock

#10yrsago Let’s check in with Pablo Escobar’s herd of feral hippos https://web.archive.org/web/20160706160442/https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/opinion/1028733/legacy-of-drug-lord-escobars-pet-hippos

#10yrsago UK Tory leadership race: “a sort of X Factor for choosing the antichrist” https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/05/tory-leadership-election-x-factor-choosing-antichrist-brexit-frankie-boyle

#10yrsago UK Tories want 10-year prison sentences for watching TV the wrong way https://torrentfreak.com/uk-bill-introduces-10-year-prison-sentence-for-online-pirates-160706/

#10yrsago Brexit’s other shoe drops: austerity, deregulation, climate nihilism https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/04/disaster-capitalism-tory-right-brexit-roll-back-state

#10yrsago After 7 years, UK’s Iraq War inquiry releases 2.6M word report damning Tony Blair and the invasion https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jul/06/chilcot-report-crushing-verdict-tony-blair-iraq-war

#10yrsago IS CELL PHONE DO BAD TO CHILD IN CLASSROOM?!11? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JdyABt6Ldo

#10yrsago UK cops routinely raided police databases to satisfy personal interest or make money on the side https://www.bigbrotherwatch.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Safe-in-Police-Hands.pdf

#10yrsago New York’s stately libraries sport hidden apartments for live-in caretakers https://www.6sqft.com/life-behind-the-stacks-the-secret-apartments-of-new-york-libraries/

#10yrsago Russia’s ghastly Children’s Rights Commissioner finally quits https://globalvoices.org/2016/07/04/russias-childrens-rights-commissioner-is-stepping-down-but-well-remember-him-for-these-7-things/

#10yrsago Frederick Douglass’ “The Meaning of July the Fourth for the Negro,” read by James Earl Jones https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2YYEceo1HI

#10yrsago Sanders supporters are the least racist https://web.archive.org/web/20160705084803/https://blogs.reuters.com/talesfromthetrail/2016/07/01/belatedly-what-sanders-supporters-say-about-race/

#10yrsago Hidden “anti-crime” mics are proliferating on US public transit, recording riders’ conversations https://web.archive.org/web/20160704073920/https://www.csoonline.com/article/3090502/security/big-brother-is-listening-as-well-as-watching.html

#10yrsago Nigel “Brexit” Farage, having tanked the UK economy, retires to “get his life back” https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-36702468

#10yrsago Peak indifference: privacy as a public health issue https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-peak-indifference/

#10yrsago ANSI board member thinks we should all pay for sex (and also pay to read the law) https://www.techdirt.com/2016/07/07/standards-body-whines-that-people-who-want-free-access-to-law-probably-also-want-free-sex/

#10yrsago Post-Brexit, EU Commission plan to ram through disastrous Canada-EU trade deal dies https://wolfstreet.com/2016/07/02/to-save-canada-eu-trade-pact-ceta-eu-assaults-democratic/

#10yrsago Claude Shannon, MOOCs, and nanoassembly: what 3D printing is really about https://www.edge.org/conversation/neil_gershenfeld-digital-reality

#5yrsago Comic book store files comic-book lawsuit https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/07/instrumentalism/#legal-funnies

#5yrsago Biden delivers Right to Repair via executive order https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/07/instrumentalism/#r2r

#5yrsago Technological self-determination https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/07/instrumentalism/#self-determination

#5yrsago Self-publishing https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/04/self-publishing/

#5yrsago Conspiracy fantasy https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/05/ideomotor-response/#qonspiracy

#5yrsago Quantifying copyright reversion https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/06/backsies/#take-backs

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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