The web you can fix, and the apps you can't

Cory Doctorow’s latest Pluralistic post runs through the browser-side ways a user can push back on a site that’s gotten hostile — blockers, overrides, extensions, small acts of taking your experience back. Then comes the catch that makes the whole thing worth reading: these measures only work in a browser. They don’t work on apps, because, as he puts it, an app is a web page wrapped in enough intellectual property law to make it a felony to change how it works.

That’s the cleanest statement we’ve seen of why “please use our app” is so often a request to give something up. The open web is the last widely-deployed platform where the person on the receiving end still has real leverage — where “I’ll just fix that myself” is a sentence you’re allowed to finish. Wrap the same page in an app shell and DRM, and modifying it becomes a legal question instead of a technical one.

It’s a value we hold as a default: the machine, and what runs on it, should belong to its owner. Software that respects that doesn’t need a wrapper of law to keep users from adjusting it — it lets them, and trusts that good tools earn their place anyway.