Interop/Adversarial
Adversarial Interoperability
- Adversarial interoperability is a term Person/Cory Doctorow helped popularize in a 2019 series of Electronic Frontier Foundation Deeplinks essays (often under his EFF byline): it names compatibility achieved without an incumbent platform or product maker’s permission—often over their active opposition—and treats that practice as structurally important for competition and user agency. [1] [2] [3]
How Doctorow defines it
- Against plain interoperability. In the October 2019 roundup, interoperability is “the act of making a new product or service work with an existing product or service,” while adversarial interoperability is when you “create a new product or service that plugs into the existing ones without the permission of the companies that make them.” Doctorow illustrates that contrast with third-party printer ink, alternative app stores, and independent repair shops using compatible parts. [1]
- Against cooperative interoperability. In the July 2019 taxonomy, “cooperative interoperability” covers standards and interfaces vendors want others to use; by contrast, adversarial interoperability is when “an add-on comes along that connects to a product whose manufacturer is outright hostile to it.” The piece defines it explicitly: “When a manufacturer builds a new product that plugs into an existing one despite the latter’s manufacturer’s hostility, that’s called ‘adversarial interoperability’.” Examples given there include third-party inkjet ink, unauthorized iPhone apps, homebrew console games, and DVRs that record cable content on the user’s terms. [3]
- Wrested compatibility, not a handshake. In the June 2019 historical essay, Doctorow distinguishes a merely interoperable product from an adversarially interoperable one: Apple’s iWork succeeded because Pages, Numbers, and Keynote could exchange files with Microsoft Office through “diligent reverse-engineering and reimplementation,” with compatibility “wrested from the incumbent” and kept current despite Microsoft’s updates—not because Microsoft cooperated. [2]
- Dominance as liability. The same essay gives Doctorow’s macro-level slogan: “Adversarial interoperability converts market dominance from an unassailable asset to a liability.” The mechanism is that a rival can turn the incumbent’s installed base into a reachable audience (his example arc: Facebook interoperating with MySpace users so messages back to MySpace advertised Facebook). [2]
- Ongoing access vs one-off export. Doctorow argues adversarial interoperability goes beyond typical “data portability” (bulk export once): users need “the ability to have ongoing access to a service that you’re in the process of migrating away from,” not only a snapshot export. [2]
- Users’ counteroffer. He frames tools like ad blockers and independent repair as users exercising adversarial interoperability as a “bargaining chip” in coercive take-it-or-leave-it “negotiations” over surveillance and lock-in—making a market where rival firms cannot yet discipline the platform. [2]
Relation to other interoperability (Doctorow’s taxonomy)
- Doctorow groups interoperability into indifferent (the vendor does not care), cooperative (the vendor welcomes or standardizes attachment), and adversarial (the vendor opposes attachment but third parties plug in anyway). The October hub colloquially glosses that ladder as moving from “I don’t care if you plug your thing into my product” to “please plug your thing” to “dang it, stop plugging your thing into my product!” with pointers back to the July taxonomy piece. [1] [3]
Legal and technical friction (as Doctorow narrates it)
- The same EFF series ties the decline of routine adversarial interoperability to a “thicket” of law and policy—Doctorow and EFF point to the CFAA, DMCA §1201, software patents, DRM, and contract terms—as tools incumbents use after “climbing the adversarial ladder” to “pull it up behind them.” [1] [2] [3]
See also
Footnotes