The Post-American Internet (A Once-in-a-Century Chance to Free Our Devices and Our Future)

From the author of Enshittification, a call to break Big Tech's stranglehold on how we use our devices and rebuild the deeply flawed Internet that America has imposed on the world.

The enshittification of our technology is a chronic condition that afflicts us all. We pay a 30 percent “Apple tax” every time we use the App Store. Our printers brick themselves if we use generic ink. Our cars sell our whereabouts to data brokers, then refuse to start if we miss a payment.

In spite of this catalog of misery, the cure for enshittification was always worse than the disease —until now. For years, American Big Tech has forced “anti-circumvention” legislation on the rest of the world, laws that make it illegal to modify our devices so they stop surveilling us and ripping us off. Whenever other countries refused to fall in line, the United States threatened them with sanctions, or worse. But now that Donald Trump has indiscriminately tariffed and menaced America's allies, there's no longer any reason to play by the rules of the United States.

Simply put, if Europe and the rest of the world unshackle their citizens’ devices from the dictates of America's corporate behemoths, foreign entrepreneurs will be able to turn Big Tech’s trillions into billions of dollars in profit for their own domestic companies. And those companies will give people all over the world—including Americans—the software and hardware they need to live better lives: to run whatever apps they choose on smartphones that don’t spy on them, to use cheap aftermarket parts and software that doesn’t suck, and to connect with their friends on platforms that don’t serve up algorithmic slop.

In The Post-American Internet, Cory Doctorow says that it's time to dismantle the hegemony of Big Tech and usher in the new, good Internet that years of enshittification have taken away from us. Let’s go!