The Internet Con by Cory Doctorow

"This is a call to arms about how to bring the big online platforms to their knees. It concerns the question of interoperability: the way that Facebook, Twitter etc make it very difficult for you to move and own your data. Doctorow shows that this is not a problem of technology but of law, business and apathy in face of growing monopolies. He covers ground such as anti-trust, and how the platforms deal with take down orders. Through this he shows how the FANGS became too powerful - and show us what we can do about it!"--

Pretty good and makes a compelling and important argument about what to do about the direction technology is developing.

My only complaints:
- The tone felt akin to an armchair-expert uncle telling you about something
- It entirely lacked citations. Maybe that's standard for this kind of book, and I doubt he had many/any inaccuracies, but he made a lot of statements about things that happened or how things are that could use references.

I've been questioning myself about Big Tech and its impact on our world for some time now. Growing up I was fascinated by antitrust laws and its possibilities. Getting older, I realized slowly how we removed those vital barriers one by one in our societies and how we let enormous monopolies to existence, threatening the fragile equilibrium of our democracies.

Big Tech have been a danger for society for some years now, each year that passes is another step further into having no control over them anymore. This book is an absolute mandatory read if we want to be able to accomplish anything in the coming future.

It’s not a book for people who want to get rid of technology itself. Technology isn’t the problem. Stop thinking about what technology does and start thinking about who technology does it to and who it does it for.