Doctorow's sovereignty test for Canada is a statute, not a strategy

Cory Doctorow, the author whose most recent nonfiction book, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, came out earlier this summer, told BetaKit editor-in-chief Douglas Soltys that Canada's digital sovereignty ambitions are inert until Parliament repeals the anti-circumvention law it passed in 2012 ^[1][2][3]. That moves the file from procurement and capital spending, where Ottawa likes to work, to copyright statute, where it does not.

His diagnosis has three parts ^[4]. The first is loss of control over privacy and over the functionality of the tools Canadians use, with the Facebook news episode as the example: Canada tried to make Facebook pay for news and ended up with no news on Facebook ^[5]. The second is forgone revenue. Doctorow's contention is that a jailbroken Facebook app could deliver everything Facebook offers without Facebook, and that plenty of Americans and plenty of people elsewhere would pay for it ^[6]. The third is dependency risk in its bluntest form: Microsoft could switch off M365 for a ministry or a structurally important firm and brick it ^[7].

The reason none of this gets fixed, on his account, is the 2012 law, which he describes as wildly unpopular and which makes it illegal for Canadians to modify American technology carrying digital rights management, with no exception for otherwise lawful purposes ^[3]. The consumer-grade illustration is Apple, which he says will not let you replace a screen or add RAM unless you go Apple-certified, and may refuse even then ^[10].

The load-bearing argument is about migration, not principle. Canada can build equivalents to M365, Doctorow said, but nobody is going to copy and paste a million documents and data structures into a Canadian cloud ^[8]. Getting the data out at scale means something like virtualizing a phone and iterating through the records to extract them, and that is only legal if the law goes ^[9]. Without the repeal, a sovereign cloud is an empty building.

He also frames this as the commercial alternative to retaliation. Citing Jeff Bezos's line to suppliers that "your margin is my opportunity," Doctorow argues that when Bezos does it it is not progress, and when Canadians do it to him it is not piracy ^[11]. The export version is customers, including American customers, rather than boycotts of American goods and collateral damage to a corn farmer ^[12].

Asked what he would do as AI minister, he told the story of a sysadmin ordered to hit a flops target within ten years who waits nine years for Moore's Law and then builds the data centre for ten percent of today's cost ^[13] - a 90 percent saving for doing nothing ^[17]. His stated policy: no investment in GPUs, data centres, or AI, except to find efficiencies in open-source models and to do scientific research, until and unless the bubble bursts ^[14]. "I'm not buying Aeron chairs in March of 2020 because I'm not dumb," he said ^[15].

Watch whether anyone in government engages the repeal question directly. BetaKit said it would sit down with AI minister Evan Solomon around the time the episode ran ^[16]; the tell is whether sovereignty there means new capacity or restored legal permission to interoperate.