t's national security hawks who are worried about Trump bricking their ministries or their tractors, and who are also worried – with just cause – about Xi Jinping bricking all their solar inverters and batteries. Because, after all, the post-American internet is also a post-Chinese internet!

But most of all, enshittification is the result of anticircumvention law's ban on interoperability.

Polish hackers from the security research firm Dragon Sector presented on their research into this disgusting racket in this very hall, and now, they're being sued by Newag under anticircumvention law, for making absolutely true disclosures about Newag's deliberately defective products

that's the Polish train company Newag. Newag sabotages its own locomotives, booby-trapping them so that if they sense they have been taken to a rival's service yard, the train bricks itself. When the train operator calls Newag about this mysterious problem, the company "helpfully" remotes into the locomotive's computers, to perform "diagnostics," which is just sending a unbricking command to the vehicle, a service for which they charge 20,000 euros

Congress just killed a military "right to repair" law. So now, US soldiers stationed abroad will have to continue the Pentagon's proud tradition of shipping materiel from generators to jeeps back to America to be fixed by their manufacturers

Then there's Medtronic, a company that pretends it is Irish. Medtronic is the world's largest med-tech company, having purchased all their competitors, and then undertaken the largest "tax-inversion" in history, selling themselves to a tiny Irish firm, in order to magick their profits into a state of untaxable grace, floating in the Irish Sea.

From Mercedes, which rents you the accelerator pedal in your luxury car, only unlocking the full acceleration curve of your engine if you buy a monthly subscription; to BMW, which rents you the automated system that automatically dims your high-beams if there's oncoming traffic.

Anticircumvention law is the reason that Volkswagen could get away with Dieselgate.

But what if European firms want to go on taking advantage of anticircumvention laws? Well, there's good news there, too. "Good news," because the EU firms that rely on anticircumvention are engaged in the sleaziest, most disgusting frauds imaginable.

It used to be that countries that depended on USAID had to worry about losing food, medical and cash supports if they pissed off America. But Trump killed USAID, so now that's a dead letter.

Besides, we don't need Europe to lead the charge on a post-American internet by repealing anticircumvention. Any country could do it! And the country that gets there first gets to reap the profits

We wouldn't tolerate secrecy in the calculations used to keep our buildings upright, and we shouldn't tolerate opacity in the software that keeps our tractors, hearing aids, ventilators, pacemakers, trains, games consoles, phones, CCTVs, door locks, and government ministries working.

also the national security hawks who are 100% justified in their extreme concern about their country's reliance on American platforms that have been shown to be totally unreliable.

Step one of tearing down that wall is killing anticircumvention law, so that we can run virtual devices that can be scripted, break bootloaders to swap out firmware and generally seize the means of computation.

Just think of how Apple responded to the relatively minor demand to open up the iOS App Store, and now imagine the thermonuclear foot-dragging, tantrum-throwing and malicious compliance they'll come up with when faced with the departure of a plurality of the businesses and governments in a 27-nation bloc of 500,000,000 affluent consumers.

We need scrapers and headless browsers to accomplish the adversarial interoperability that will guarantee ongoing connectivity to institutions that are still hosted on US cloud-based services, because US companies are not going to facilitate the mass exodus of international customers from their platform.

But Eurostack is heading for a crisis. It's great to build open, locally hosted, auditable, trustworthy services that replicate the useful features of Big Tech, but you also need to build the adversarial interoperability tools that allow for mass exporting of millions of documents, the sensitive data-structures and edit histories.

As Jeff Bezos said to the publishers: "Your margin is my opportunity." With these guys, it's always "disruption for thee, but not for me." When they do it to us, that's progress. When we do it to them, it's piracy, and every pirate wants to be an admiral. Well, screw that. Move fast and break Tim Cook's things. Move fast and break kings!

But there's a third possible response to tariffs, one that's just sitting there, begging to be tried: what about repealing anticircumvention law

The alternative was tariffs. Well, I don't know if you've heard, but we've got tariffs now!

every other country in the world has passed a law just like this in the years since. Here in the EU, it came in through Article 6 of the 2001 EU Copyright Directive.

This is a law that Jay Freeman rightly calls "Felony Contempt of Business Model." Anticircumvention became the law of the land in 1998 when Bill Clinton signed the DMCA

USA: Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 establishes a felony punishable by a five year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for a first offense for bypassing an "access control" for a copyrighted work.

It's also a felony to disclose information about how to bypass that access control, which means that pen-testers who even describe how they access a device or system face criminal liability.

Under anticircumvention law, it's a crime to alter the functioning of a digital product or service, unless the manufacturer approves of your modification, and – crucially – this is true whether or not your modification violates any other law.