Adversarial Interoperability

a post by Cory Doctorow for the Boing Boing blog



“Interoperability” is the act of making a new product or service work with an existing product or service: modern civilization depends on the standards and practices that allow you to put any dish into a dishwasher or any USB charger into any car’s cigarette lighter.

But interoperability is just the ante. For a really competitive, innovative, dynamic marketplace, you need adversarial interoperability: that’s when you create a new product or service that plugs into the existing ones without the permission of the companies that make them. Think of third-party printer ink, alternative app stores, or independent repair shops that use compatible parts from rival manufacturers to fix your car or your phone or your tractor.

(Crossposted from EFF Deeplinks)

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Structural Separation: antitrust's tried-and-true weapon for monopolists who bottleneck markets

a post by Cory Doctorow for the Boing Boing blog



Back in 2017, a law student named Lena Khan made waves in policy circles with the publication of her massive, brilliant, game-changing 24,000-word article in the Yale Law Journal, Amazon's Antitrust Paradox, which revisited the entirety of post-Ronald-Reagan antitrust orthodoxy to show how it had allowed Amazon to become a brutal, harmful monopoly without any consequences from the regulators charged with ensuring competition in our markets.

Now, Khan (who is now a Columbia Law fellow) is back with The Separation of Platforms and Commerce – clocking in at 61,000 words with footnotes! – that describes the one-two punch of contemporary monopolism, in which Reagan-era deregulation enthusiasts took the brakes off of corporate conduct but said it would be OK because antitrust law would keep things from getting out of control, while Reagan-era antitrust “reformers” (led by Robert Bork and the Chicago School) dismantled antitrust).

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