Cory Doctorow has been making the same argument for years. But lately, people in power have started listening.
The science fiction author, digital rights activist, and longtime critic of concentrated technology power has emerged as one of the most influential voices in a growing movement to reshape how software platforms interact with each other — and with the people who depend on them. His weapon of choice isn’t antitrust litigation or breakup orders. It’s interoperability: the principle that systems should be designed, or compelled, to work with other systems.
In a detailed conversation published by IEEE Spectrum, Doctorow laid out his case that interoperability — particularly what he calls “adversarial interoperability” — is the single most powerful tool available to check the dominance of a handful of technology giants. The argument goes beyond technical architecture. It’s fundamentally about power, competition, and who gets to decide the terms under which billions of people communicate, work, and transact online.
And it’s gaining traction at a moment when regulators on both sides of the Atlantic are searching for mechanisms that actually work.
The Case for Adversarial Interoperability
Doctorow draws a sharp distinction between two forms of interoperability. The first is cooperative — when companies voluntarily agree to let their products talk to each other. Think of USB cables or email protocols. The second is adversarial: when a new entrant forces compatibility with an incumbent’s system without asking permission. This is the kind of interoperability that built much of the modern internet.
The history is instructive. As Doctorow told IEEE Spectrum, early tech competition was defined by adversarial interoperability. Third-party printer ink cartridges. Aftermarket parts for agricultural equipment. Browser extensions that modified how websites appeared to users. Companies routinely reverse-engineered competitors’ products to offer compatible alternatives, and courts generally allowed it.
That era is over, Doctorow argues. A thicket of intellectual property laws, anti-circumvention statutes, terms of service agreements, and aggressive litigation has made adversarial interoperability legally perilous. The 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, in particular, created broad criminal penalties for circumventing digital locks — even when the underlying use would otherwise be legal. Computer fraud laws added another layer of risk. The result: incumbents can effectively veto competition by wrapping their products in legal barriers that have nothing to do with genuine innovation.
“We’ve created a system where the people who got big are allowed to stay big,” Doctorow has argued repeatedly, “not because they’re better, but because they’ve pulled up the ladder behind them.”
This isn’t an abstract concern. Consider social media. If you’re unhappy with how Facebook moderates content, or how X handles algorithmic recommendations, your options are limited. You can leave — but you can’t take your social graph with you. You can’t use a third-party client that applies different filtering rules to the same underlying network. The platform’s control over the interface and the data creates what economists call switching costs so high that they function as a moat.
Doctorow’s proposed solution is to legally protect adversarial interoperability. Let competitors build bridges into dominant platforms. Let users move their data, their connections, their histories. Not as a favor from incumbents. As a right.
The idea has obvious appeal to anyone frustrated with the status quo. But it also raises hard questions about security, privacy, and liability — questions that Doctorow’s critics are quick to raise and that he doesn’t always answer to everyone’s satisfaction.
Regulation Is Catching Up — Slowly
The policy world hasn’t ignored these arguments. The European Union’s Digital Markets Act, which took full effect in 2024, includes interoperability mandates for messaging platforms. Under the DMA, designated “gatekeepers” — including Apple, Google, and Meta — must allow third-party messaging services to interoperate with their own. Apple’s iMessage and Meta’s WhatsApp are both affected.
Implementation has been rocky. Meta has moved slowly on compliance. Apple has resisted aspects of the DMA with an aggressiveness that drew formal charges from the European Commission. Messaging interoperability, in particular, has raised genuine technical challenges around end-to-end encryption — if messages must flow between systems with different security architectures, maintaining encryption guarantees becomes significantly harder.
Doctorow acknowledges these challenges but frames them as engineering problems, not fundamental objections. The internet itself, he points out, was built on interoperability between radically different systems. Email works across thousands of server implementations. The web works across dozens of browsers. The technical obstacles to messaging interoperability are real but solvable — if the will exists.
In the United States, legislative progress has been slower. The ACCESS Act, introduced in Congress in 2021 and reintroduced since, would mandate data portability and interoperability for large platforms. It has bipartisan co-sponsors but has not advanced to a vote. The American Innovation and Choice Online Act, which targeted self-preferencing by dominant platforms, stalled in the last Congress after intense lobbying from the tech industry.
The current political environment is mixed. There’s bipartisan frustration with Big Tech — but for different reasons. Republicans tend to focus on content moderation and alleged political bias. Democrats emphasize market power and consumer protection. Interoperability mandates could theoretically appeal to both camps, since they don’t require the government to dictate content policies. They simply force platforms to allow competition on the interface layer.
But lobbying pressure is immense. And the technical complexity of implementation gives opponents plenty of ammunition for delay.
Meanwhile, the broader debate over platform power continues to intensify. Recent reporting from multiple outlets has tracked ongoing antitrust actions against Google and Apple, with the Department of Justice pursuing remedies in the Google search monopoly case that could include structural changes to how the company distributes its products. A federal judge ruled in August 2024 that Google had illegally maintained a monopoly in search — a landmark decision whose remedies are still being litigated.
Doctorow sees interoperability as complementary to, not a replacement for, antitrust enforcement. Break up a monopoly and you get two or three large companies that may still resist interoperability. Mandate interoperability and you create the conditions for genuine competition regardless of market structure. The two approaches work best together.
There’s a historical parallel he likes to invoke: the Bell System. AT&T’s monopoly over telephone service in the United States was sustained in part by its refusal to allow third-party devices to connect to its network. The 1968 Carterfone decision forced AT&T to allow interoperable equipment, and the answering machine, the fax machine, and the modem followed. The 1984 breakup then introduced competition among carriers. Neither remedy alone would have been sufficient.
The analogy isn’t perfect. Today’s platforms are more complex than a telephone network, and the data flows involved raise privacy concerns that didn’t exist in the analog era. But the structural logic holds: when incumbents control the interface, competition withers. Open the interface, and new entrants have a chance.
What the Critics Get Right — and Wrong
The most serious objection to mandatory interoperability comes from security and privacy advocates. If a platform is required to open APIs to third-party developers, how do you prevent bad actors from exploiting those APIs to harvest user data? The Cambridge Analytica scandal — in which a third-party app on Facebook collected data from millions of users without meaningful consent — is the cautionary tale that platform companies invoke constantly.
Doctorow’s response is that the Cambridge Analytica problem wasn’t caused by too much interoperability. It was caused by too little accountability. Facebook chose to open its platform to developers under terms that allowed massive data extraction, then failed to enforce even the weak rules it had. A well-designed interoperability mandate would include privacy protections, data minimization requirements, and enforcement mechanisms. The answer to bad interoperability isn’t no interoperability. It’s better interoperability.
This is where the debate gets genuinely complicated. Designing interoperability mandates that protect privacy, maintain security, and still enable meaningful competition is a hard regulatory problem. It requires technical expertise that legislatures often lack. And it requires ongoing oversight, since platforms and third parties will both try to game the rules.
But difficulty isn’t impossibility. The financial sector has grappled with similar challenges through open banking mandates in the UK and EU, which require banks to share customer data with authorized third parties through standardized APIs. The implementation has been imperfect. But it has produced genuine competition in financial services — new budgeting apps, payment processors, and lending platforms that couldn’t have existed when banks controlled all access to account data.
The tech industry’s other major objection is that interoperability mandates will stifle innovation. If a platform can’t control its own interface, the argument goes, it can’t iterate quickly or maintain quality. Doctorow finds this argument self-serving. The companies making it are the same ones that benefited from adversarial interoperability in their early days. Google built its search engine by crawling and indexing other people’s websites without asking permission. Facebook grew by scraping contacts from users’ email accounts. Apple built its early market position partly on compatibility with IBM’s PC architecture.
Now that they’re incumbents, these companies want to close the door. Doctorow calls this “the drawbridge theory of innovation” — you use interoperability to get in, then pull up the drawbridge once you’re inside the castle.
There’s a deeper philosophical question embedded in all of this. Who owns the relationship between a user and a platform? If you’ve spent a decade building a social network on Instagram — followers, posts, messages, connections — do you have a right to take that with you if you leave? Or does Instagram own the infrastructure and therefore the data?
Doctorow’s answer is unequivocal. Users should own their relationships. Platforms are intermediaries, not landlords. And interoperability is the mechanism that makes that ownership real rather than theoretical.
Not everyone agrees. Some technologists argue that the network effects that make platforms valuable are inherently tied to the platform itself — that a social graph extracted from Facebook and imported into a competitor would lose most of its value in translation. Others worry that mandated interoperability could lead to a lowest-common-denominator experience, where platforms can’t differentiate because they’re all required to support the same interfaces.
These are legitimate concerns. But they’re also speculative. And they need to be weighed against the concrete, measurable harms of the current system: markets dominated by a handful of companies, users locked into platforms they can’t leave, and startups that can’t compete because they can’t connect.
Doctorow’s argument isn’t that interoperability will solve everything. It’s that it’s a necessary precondition for competition — and that the legal and regulatory barriers to it have been deliberately constructed by the companies that benefit from their absence. Tear down those barriers, he says, and you don’t guarantee a better outcome. But you make one possible.
For an industry that prides itself on disruption, that should be an easy sell. The fact that it isn’t tells you everything about where the power actually lies.
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