End to End

Willing speakers should reach willing listeners.

Today (Mar 7), I’m doing a remote talk for TU Wien.

On Mar 9, you can catch me in person in Austin at the UT School of Design and Creative Technologies, and remotely at U Manitoba’s Ethics of Emerging Tech Lecture.

On Mar 10, Rebecca Giblin and I kick off the SXSW reading series.

In “End to End,” my new column for Locus Magazine, I propose a policy framework for a better internet: the “End to End” principle (E2E), a bedrock of the original design for the internet, updated for the modern, monopolized web, as a way of disenshittifying it:

https://locusmag.com/2023/03/commentary-cory-doctorow-end-to-end/

The original E2E marked the turning point from telco-based systems where power was gathered at the center, controlled by carriers, to the packet-switched internet, where power moved to the edges. Under the old model, only the network operator could add new features. If you wanted to create, say, Caller ID, you needed to convince the phone company to update its switches to support a new signaling system (and you probably had to rent a Caller ID box from the carrier, too).

But packet-switching made it possible for new services to be created by people at the edges of the network. Once your device…