Silicon Valley didn’t ruin the internet on its own; it just magnified a culture of deregulation and quick profit that has shaped U.S. policy for decades.

It’s worth asking what might have happened if the web had started somewhere else, in a place that treated it as a public utility instead of a private marketplace.

Would we still have ended up with the same mess of ads, data collection, and walled gardens?

Maybe America’s real contribution to the web wasn’t technology at all, but the story that innovation excuses everything.

I recommend reading Mark Carney’s writings before taking Doctorow’s stuff at face value.