The government should repeal laws that prevent users or rival firms from circumventing digital locks to strike back at U.S. tech companies and lower costs for Canadians, Cory Doctorow told the Attention Forum on internet regulation staged by the Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy in Montreal. (The Logic)

Talking point: Doctorow, a longtime journalist and tech critic—and a Canadian who now lives in California—said countries that signed on to anti-circumvention laws like Canada’s 2012 Copyright Modernization Act did so under threat of U.S. tariffs. Now that U.S. President Donald Trump has levied massive tariffs anyway, he said, those countries would be “suckers” to maintain those laws. Repealing them would let firms outside the U.S. reverse-engineer ways to migrate users over to sovereign tech stacks to rival American giants, for example. It would also let Canada focus its tariff response on some of America’s largest, most profitable companies, he said.