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 whole world is stuck on the enshitternet, a Made-in-America nightmare. We’re charged a 30 percent “Apple tax” every time we use the App Store. Our enshittified printers cost us $10,000 a gallon for brand-name ink, and brick themselves if we install a generic cartridge. Our cars sell our whereabouts to data brokers, then refuse to start if we miss a payment.

Despite this catalog of misery, the cure for enshittification has always been worse than the disease—until now. For years, America forced “anticircumvention” laws on the rest of the world, making it illegal to modify our devices so they stop surveilling us and ripping us off. Countries around the world have been kept in line by the United States and its looming threat of tariffs for noncompliance. But now that Donald Trump has indiscriminately tariffed and menaced America’s allies and trading partners, there’s no longer any reason to play by the United States’ rules.

When Europe and the rest of the world finally decide to liberate their citizens from Big Tech’s corporate control, the world’s entrepreneurs will be able to profit in exchange for ending the tech sector’s plunder of billions of people’s money and data. And those companies will give people all over the world—including Americans—the software and hardware they need to live better lives.

In The Post-American Internet, Cory Doctorow says that it’s time to seize the means of computation and usher in the new, good internet that enshittification has kept from us for decades. Let’s go!