Thread by @doctorow

This week on my podcast, I read my recent @Medium column, "View a SKU: Let’s Make Amazon Into a Dumb Pipe," about how interop can help us demonopolize Amazon and tame its market power:

doctorow.medium.com/view-a-sku-327… 1/

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:

pluralistic.net/2022/08/01/dum… 2/

To explain this proposal, I need to start with an axiom: there are lots of problems with Amazon (lots!) but the fact that Amazon is really convenient is *not* one of those problems. 3/

Your use of Amazon isn't a mark of your "laziness" anymore than your consumption of plastics is a mark of your indifference to the planet.

As @ZephyrTeachout writes in her stupendous book *Break 'Em Up*:

"I like supporting local retail for shopping whenever possible. 4/

us.macmillan.com/books/97812502…

"But I will not shame people for buying from Amazon the magic markers they use to write 'Break up Bezos’ power' on a big poster they parade outside their state attorney general’s office." 5/

The drive to "shop local" is great, but it shouldn't become a hairshirt. If you buy something from Amazon, it doesn't necessarily mean that you support union-busting, monopolization and creepy surveillance doorbells. 6/

It might just mean that you are out of time and live in a place where Amazon killed most of the retail that survived Walmart. 7/

If you've enjoyed @MattBors's work, you understand this. It's the essence of the #MrGotcha gag. A downtrodden peasant says, "We should improve society somewhat" and Mr Gotcha replies, "Yet you participate in society, curious! I am very intelligent."

pluralistic.net/2020/09/13/the… 8/

The fact that Amazon has given us a single database in which you can search for a large slice of all the objects of retail commerce, read reviews, and explore alternatives is good, actually. 9/

The *problem* is in how Amazon abuses its workforce, crams its suppliers, self-preferences its own goods, and shifts wealth from taxpaying local businesses to its tax-evading coffers. 10/

The same politics and economics that have made it so hard *not* to use Amazon have also made working people much poorer, both in terms of money and time. 11/

It's not reasonable to expect people who are piecing together a living from three or four casualized jobs and paying sky-high pump prices to spend hours driving around looking for a local merchant to buy a specific widget at. 12/

But what if we could make shopping locally - where a local alternative existed - *easier* than shopping at Amazon? What if we could actually turn Amazon into a tool for finding goods at local merchants? 13/

That's where my proposal comes in. It was inspired by #LibraryExtension, a browser plugin that notices if you're looking at a book on Amazon and adds a "Reserve at your local library" button to the page, over the "Add to your cart" button.

libraryextension.com 14/

Library Extension is an example of #AdversarialInteroperabitlity (or what we at @EFF call #ComCom, short for "competitive compatibility"). 15/

That's when someone adds features to an existing product or service without permission from the company that made it - like an ad-blocker that changes the websites you look at to make them better for you.

eff.org/deeplinks/2019… 16/

Library Extension works as well as it does because books all share a common set of unique identifiers: the #ISBN, which is easy to detect on a webpage and also easy to look up in a database of library books. Shared identifiers make cross-referencing easy. 17/

As it happens, Amazon has assigned unique identifiers to virtually anything you might want to buy: the #ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number). What if a co-op created a database that cross-referenced ASINs with other inventory numbers (like UPCs and SKUs)? 18/

We could offer inventory control system plug-ins to merchants that automatically listed their inventory in a central, co-operatively managed database of what was for sale, where. 19/

Then, users who wanted to shop locally could install a Library Extension-like browser plugin that did a quick lookup whenever they browsed an Amazon product page. 20/

If the product was for sale locally, replace the "Add to Cart" button with a "Buy from local store" one, which would automatically process a payment to the local merchant using a payment method stored in your browser (no need to set up a separate account for every merchant). 21/

Likewise, we could expand Library Extension to add a "Buy from @bookshop_org" button to every book page, and a "Buy from @librofm" button to every audiobook page.

In other words, we could turn Amazon into a dumb pipe: a commodity catalog with reviews and recommendations. 22/

The conversion of centralized services into dumb pipes is a time-honored tradition, as @DavidIsen wrote in his classic 1998 @TheOfficialACM paper:

isen.com/papers/Dawnstu… 23/

Now, *could* we do this? As a technical matter, sure. A lot would depend on adapting small businesses' inventory control systems, but the vendors behind those systems would benefit from participating in those adaptations, as would their customers. 24/

What about as a legal matter? Well, #IANAL, but...

* Your browser is yours. Adapting the pages you're served to suit you is unambiguously lawful, as are the tools to do so. Hence the rise of ad-blockers, "the biggest boycott in world history":

blogs.harvard.edu/doc/2015/09/28… 25/

* The ASIN database is a collection of factual identifiers; the USA has (wisely) not adopted the #DatabaseRight that the EU got suckered into, so databases of factual identifiers are not copyrightable:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Pub…. 26/

* Amazon's terms of service ban you from doing this kind of thing, but US federal judges are increasingly skeptical of attempts to block scraping public information through terms of service:

fenwick.com/insights/publi… 27/

Note that executing this plan won't solve *the* Amazon problem, but it will solve *an* Amazon problem. 28/

It's no substitute for other forms of antitrust enforcement (bans on self-preferencing, forced selloffs of anticompetitive acquisitions, merger scrutiny) but it is *faster* than those things, and will deliver immediate relief to shoppers and small businesses. 29/

That's the kind of #TechExceptionalism I'm completely here for. The breakup of the Bell System took 69 years, all told. We don't want to wait 69 years before we blunt Amazon's monopoly power:

onezero.medium.com/jam-to-day-46b… 30/

This is why #BigTech is the natural starting place for antitrust: because Big Tech is built atop general purpose computers that can be rendered interoperable, regulators seeking to limit Big Tech power have unique, powerful additions to their to toolkits. 31/

I know that some of my comrades-in-arms are skeptical of Big Tech antitrust, correctly asserting that other monopolies (like telecoms and entertainment companies) are also corrupt monopolies in sore need of antitrust attention. 32/

I want to break those companies' corporate power, too! In fact, my next book is all about limiting the power of tech and entertainment judges to screw creative workers:

beacon.org/Chokepoint-Cap… 33/

But these fast-acting interoperability remedies make Big Tech the natural place to start - the vanguard for the anti-monopoly fights we'll have to bring to every sector, from cheerleading uniforms to beer, from finance to international shipping:

openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly… 34/

Taming Big Tech is where we start, not where we end. It's the orchard with the most low-hanging fruit. Racking up victories against Big Tech will create the political will and the movement power to go after all those other monopolies:

eff.org/deeplinks/2019… 35/

Here's the podcast episode:
craphound.com/news/2022/07/3…

Here's a direct link to the MP3 (hosting courtesy of the @InternetArchive; they'll host your stuff for free, forever):

archive.org/download/Cory_…

And here's a link to my podcast feed:
feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podca… 36/