When it comes to vetoing your decisions about which programs your Android device can run, Google has an irreconcilable conflict of interest. Google, after all, is a thrice-convicted monopolist who have an interest in blocking you from installing programs that interfere with its profits, under the pretense of preventing you from coming to harm.

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And - like Apple - Google has a track record of selling its users out to oppressive governments. Apple blocked all working privacy tools for its Chinese users at the behest of the Chinese government, while Google secretly planned to release a version of its search engine that would enforce Chinese censorship edicts and help the Chinese government spy on its people:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfl…

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Google's CEO Sundar Pichai, *personally gave one million dollars to Donald Trump* for a seat on the dais at this year's inauguration (so did Apple CEO Tim Cook). Both men are in a position to help the self-described dictator make good on his promise to spy on and arrest Americans who disagree with his totalitarian edicts.

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All of this makes Google's announcement extraordinarily reckless, but also very, very wilhoitian. After all, Google jealously guards *its* property rights from *you*, but insists that your property rights need to be subordinated to its corporate priorities: "in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."

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We can see this at work in the way that Google treats open source software and free software. Google's software is "open source" - for us. We have the right to look at the code and do free work for Google to identify and fix bugs in the code. But only Google gets a say in how that code is deployed on its cloud servers. They have software freedom, while we merely have software transparency:

pluralistic.net/2025/07/14/pol…

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Big companies love to both assert their own property rights while denying you yours. Take the music industry: they are required to pay different royalties to musicians depending on whether they're "selling" music, or "licensing" music. Sales pay a fraction of the royalties of a licensing deal, so it's far better for musicians when their label licenses their music than when they sell it.

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When you or I click the "buy" button in an online music store, we are confronted with a "licensing agreement," that limits what we may do with our digital purchase. Things that you get automatically when you buy music in physical form - on a CD, say - are withheld through these agreements. You can't re-sell your digital purchases as used goods.

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You can't give them away. You can't lend them out. You can't divide them up in a divorce. You can't leave them to your kids in your will. It's not a sale, so the file isn't your property.

But when the label accounts for that licensing deal to a musician, the transaction is booked as a sale, which entitles the creative worker to a fraction of the royalties that they'd get from a license.

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Somehow, digital media exists in quantum superposition: it is a licensing deal when we click the buy button, but it is a sale when it shows up on a royalty statement. It's Schroedinger's download:

pluralistic.net/2022/06/21/ear…

Now, a class action suit against Amazon over this very issue has been given leave to progress to trial:

hollywoodreporter.com/business…

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Amazon Sued By Users Over Movie, TV Show Purchases Involving Licenses

A suit challenges Prime Video telling people they can "buy" a movie when they're purchasing a license to watch it for a period of time.

^{Winston Cho (The Hollywood Reporter)}

The plaintiffs insist that because Amazon showed them a button that said, "Buy this video" but then slapped it with licensing conditions that take away all kinds of rights (Amazon can even remotely delete your videos after you "buy" them) that they have been ripped off in a bait-and-switch.

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Amazon's defense is *amazing*. They've done what any ill-prepared fifth grader would do when called on the carpet; they quoted *Webster's*:

> Quoting Webster’s Dictionary, it said that the term means “rights to the use or services of payment” rather than perpetual ownership and that its disclosures properly warn people that they may lose access.

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People are increasingly pissed off with this bullshit, whereby things that you "buy" are not yours, and your access to them can be terminated at any time. The Stop Killing Games campaign is pushing for the rights of gamers to own the games they buy forever, even if the company decides to shut down its servers:

stopkillinggames.com/

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I've been pissed off about this bullshit since forever. It's one of the main reasons I convinced my publishers to let me sell my own ebooks and audiobooks, out of my own digital storefront. All of those books are sold, not licensed, and come without any terms or conditions:

craphound.com/shop/

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The ability to change the terms after the sale is a major source of enshittification. I call it the "Darth Vader MBA," as in "I am altering the deal. Pray I do not alter it any further":

pluralistic.net/2023/10/26/hit…

Naturally the ebooks and audiobooks in the Kickstarter for pre-sales of my next book, *Enshittification* are also sold without any terms and conditions:

kickstarter.com/projects/docto…

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Look, I don't think that personal consumption choices can fix systemic problems. You're not going to fix enshittification - let alone tyranny - by *shopping*, even if you're *very careful*:

pluralistic.net/2025/07/31/uns…

But that doesn't mean that there isn't a connection between the unfair bullshit that monopolies cram down our throat and the rise of fascism.

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It's not just that the worst enshittifiers also the biggest Trump donors, it's that Wilhoit's Law *powers* enshittification.

Wiloitism is shot through the Maga movement. The Flu Klux Klan wants to ban *you* from wearing a mask for health reasons, but they will defend to the death the right of ICE brownshirts to run around in gaiters and Oakleys as they kidnap our neighbors off the streets.

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Conservative bedwetters will donate six figures to a Givesendgo set up by some crybaby with a viral Rumble video about getting 86'ed from a restaurant for wearing a Maga hat, but they literally want to *imprison* trans people for wearing clothes that don't conform to their assigned-at-birth genders.

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They'll piss and moan about being "canceled" because of hecklers at the speeches they give for the campus chapter of the Hitler Youth, but they experience life-threatening priapism when students who object to the Israeli genocide of Palestinians are expelled, arrested and deported.

Then there's their abortion policies, which hold that personhood begins at conception, but ends at birth, and can only be re-established by forming an LLC.

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It's "in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect" all the way down.

I'm not saying that bullshit terms of service, wage theft, binding arbitration gotchas, or victim complexes about your kids going no-contact because you won't shut the fuck up about "the illegals" at Thanksgiving are the same as the actual fascist dictatorship being born around us right now or the genocide taking place in Gaza.

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But I am saying that they come from the same place. The ideology of "in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect" underpins the whole ugly mess.

After we defeat these fucking fascists, after the next installment of the Nuremburg trials, after these eichmenn and eichwomenn get their turns in the dock, we're going to have to figure out how to keep them firmly stuck to the scrapheap of history.

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For this, I propose a form of broken windows policing; zero-tolerance for any activity or conduct that implies that there are "in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."

We should treat every attempt to pull *any* of these scams as an inch (or a yard, or a mile) down the road to fascist collapse.

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