The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation (2023) is Doctorow's most focused nonfiction policy argument: a book-length case for mandatory interoperability as the central regulatory intervention needed to address platform monopoly power. Published by Verso Books — a shift from his previous nonfiction publisher, signaling the book's explicitly political orientation — it extends the enshittification analysis to a concrete prescription, arguing that interoperability-mandates are the mechanism through which users can reclaim exit rights from platforms that have locked them in.
The Argument: Interoperability as Liberation
The book's central claim is that the fundamental problem with dominant platforms is not that they are too large in the abstract but that they have engineered switching-costs so high that users cannot leave even when those platforms degrade their service. The platform-decay-cycle — platforms being good to users until they have achieved lock-in, then extracting value at users' expense — depends entirely on users having no realistic exit option.
Mandatory interoperability-mandates would change this calculus. If platforms were required by law to allow third-party clients to connect to their services using open protocols, users could leave a platform without losing access to their social graph, their data, or their connections. A user on Facebook could switch to a competing service while still being able to communicate with friends who remain on Facebook. This exit right would discipline platform behavior: a platform that degrades its service would face actual user exit rather than merely user complaints.
This argument builds directly on the adversarial-interoperability framework Doctorow had developed in blog posts and the pluralistic-blog, extending it from a descriptive account of how tech competition has historically worked to a prescriptive argument for what regulation should require.
Competitive Compatibility
competitive-compatibility — the practice of building interoperable products without the incumbent's permission — is the book's historical baseline. Doctorow traces how previous generations of technology competition worked: email clients could access any email server because SMTP was a public standard; web browsers could render any website because HTML was open; early social platforms were threatened by interoperable clients that offered better interfaces to the same underlying network. This history demonstrates that interoperability-by-default was the norm before platforms achieved sufficient market power to suppress it.
The book argues that contemporary platforms have used a combination of legal tools (DMCA anti-circumvention provisions, Terms of Service enforced via computer fraud statutes) and technical tools (API restrictions, protocol opacity) to prevent the kind of competitive compatibility that once disciplined market incumbents. The regulatory ask is to restore what was once the default: the right to build compatible tools.
"Seize the Means of Computation"
The subtitle's deliberate invocation of Marxist phrasing ("seize the means of production") signals the book's political framing: the question of who controls the computational infrastructure through which social and economic life is increasingly organized is a question of political power, not merely market efficiency. This framing aligns with lina-khan's structural approach to antitrust — the problem is not that Facebook charges users too much (it charges them nothing) but that it has captured a position of social infrastructure control that enables extraction and forecloses alternatives.
The Verso imprint reinforces this framing. Verso is a left political publisher; the choice to publish The Internet Con there rather than with a mainstream business press signals that the book's audience is people already sympathetic to structural critiques of capitalism, particularly as applied to technology platforms.
Relationship to the Broader Regulatory Moment
The book appeared at a moment when interoperability regulation was actively under discussion in multiple jurisdictions. The EU's Digital Markets Act, enacted in 2022, included interoperability requirements for dominant platforms; US proposals for similar legislation were moving through Congress. Doctorow engaged actively with these policy debates, and The Internet Con functioned as a policy document as well as a trade book — a clear, accessible argument for a specific regulatory intervention that policymakers and advocates could cite.
The book's brevity (it is short for a policy argument, closer to a long essay than a comprehensive treatise) is deliberate: it aims to make the interoperability case accessible to a general political audience, not just specialists. This distinguishes it from chokepoint-capitalism-book, which is longer, more heavily researched, and more oriented toward the economics of specific industries.
Connection to Enshittification
The Internet Con is best read as the prescriptive companion to the enshittification analysis. Enshittification describes what happens; mandatory interoperability describes what could prevent or reverse it. The book makes explicit what pluralistic-blog posts had developed incrementally: that the mechanism of platform capture is lock-in, and the antidote to lock-in is structural exit rights enforced by regulation rather than relying on voluntary platform behavior or the hope of spontaneous market competition.