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Cory Doctorow on how we lost the internet [LWN.net]

#politics #internet #freeSoftware

Cory Doctorow wears many hats: digital activist, science-fiction author, journalist, and more. He has also written many books, both fiction and non-fiction, runs the Pluralistic blog, is a visiting professor, and is an advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF); his Chokepoint Capitalism co-author, Rebecca Giblin, gave a 2023 keynote in Australia that we covered. Doctorow gave a rousing keynote on the state of the "enshitternet"—today's internet—to kick off the recently held PyCon US 2025 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

He began by noting that he is known for coining the term "enshittification" about the decay of tech platforms, so attendees were probably expecting to hear about that; instead, he wanted to start by talking about nursing. A recent study described how nurses are increasingly getting work through one of three main apps that ""bill themselves out as 'Uber for nursing'"". The nurses never know what they will be paid per hour prior to accepting a shift and the three companies act as a cartel in order to ""play all kinds of games with the way that labor is priced"".

In particular, the companies purchase financial information from a data broker before offering a nurse a shift; if the nurse is carrying a lot of credit-card debt, especially if some of that is delinquent, the amount offered is reduced. ""Because, the more desperate you are, the less you'll accept to come into work and do that grunt work of caring for the sick, the elderly, and the dying."" That is horrific on many levels, he said, but ""it is emblematic of 'enshittification'"", which is one of the reasons he highlighted it.
Platform decay

Enshittification is a three-stage process; he used Google to illustrate the idea. At first, Google minimized ads and maximized spending on engineering to produce a great search engine; while it was doing that, however, it was buying its way to dominance. ""They bribed every service, every product that had a search box to make sure that that was a Google search box."" No matter which browser, phone carrier, or operating system you were using, Google ensured that you were using its search by default; by the early 2020s, it was spending the equivalent of buying a Twitter every 18 months to do so, he said. That is the first stage of the process: when the provider is being good to its users, but is finding ways to lock them in.

[Cory Doctorow]

The second phase occurs once the company recognizes that it has users locked in, so it will be difficult for them to switch away, and it shifts to making things worse for its users in order to enrich its business customers. For Google, those are the publishers and advertisers. A growing portion of the search results page is shifted over to ads ""marked off with ever-subtler, ever-smaller, ever-grayer labels distinguishing them from the organic search results"". While the platform is getting better for business customers—at the expense of the users—those customers are also getting locked in.

Phase three of enshittification is when the value of the platform is clawed back until all that is left is kind of a ""homeopathic residue—the least value needed to keep both business customers and end users locked to the platform"". We have gained a view into this process from the three monopoly cases that Google has lost over the last 18 months. In 2019, the company had 90% of the world's search traffic and its users were loyal; ""everyone who searched on Google, searched everything on Google"".

But that meant that Google's search growth had plateaued, so how was the company going to be able to grow? It could ""raise a billion humans to adulthood and make them Google customers, which is Google Classroom, but that's a slow process"". From the internal memos that came to light from the court cases, we can see what the company chose to do, he said: ""they made search worse"".

The accuracy of the search results was reduced, which meant that users needed to do two or three queries to the get the results they would have seen on the first page. That increased the number of ads that could be shown, which is obviously bad for searchers, but the company was also attacking its business customers at the same time. For example, ""Google entered into an illegal, collusive arrangement with Meta, called Jedi Blue"" that ""gamed the advertising market"" so that publishers got paid less and advertisers had to pay more, he said.

So that's how we have ended up at the Google of today, where the top of the search results page is ""a mountain of AI slop"", followed by five paid results ""marked with the word 'Ad' in eight point, 90% gray-on-white type"", ending with ""ten spammy SEO [search-engine optimization] links from someone else who's figured out how to game Google"". The amazing thing is ""that we are still using Google because we're locked into it"". It is a perfect example of the result of the ""tragedy in three acts"" that is enshittification.
Twiddling

The underlying technical means that allows this enshittification is something he calls "twiddling". Because the companies run their apps on computers, they can change a nearly infinite number of knobs to potentially alter ""the prices, the cost, the search rankings, the recommendations"" each time the platform is visited. Going back to the nursing example, ""that's just twiddling, it's something you can only do with computers"".

Legal scholar Veena Dubal coined the term "algorithmic wage discrimination" to describe this kind of twiddling for the "gig economy", which is ""a major locus for enshittification""; the nursing apps, Uber, and others are examples of that economy. ""Gig work is that place where your shitty boss is a shitty app and you're not allowed to call yourself an employee.""

Uber invented a particular form of algorithmic wage discrimination; if its drivers are picky about which rides they accept, Uber will slowly raise the rates to entice those drivers—until they start accepting rides. Once a driver does accept a ride, ""the wage starts to push down and down at random intervals in increments that are too small for human beings to readily notice"". It is not really ""boiling the frog"", Doctorow said, so much as it is ""slowly poaching it"".

As anyone with a technical background knows, ""any task that is simple, but time-consuming is a prime candidate for automation"". This kind of ""wage theft"" would be tedious and expensive to do by hand, but it is trivial to play these games using computers. This kind of thing is not just bad for nurses, he said, its bad for those who are using their services.

Do you really think that paying nurses based on how desperate they are, at a rate calculated to increase their desperation so that they'll accept ever-lower wages, is going to result in us getting the best care when we see a nurse? Do you really want your catheter inserted by a nurse on food stamps who drove an Uber until midnight the night before and skipped breakfast this morning so that they could pay the rent? 

It is misguided to say ""if you're not paying for the product, you're the product"", because it makes it seem like we are complicit in sustaining surveillance capitalism—and we are not. The thinking goes that if we were only willing to start paying for things, ""we could restore capitalism to its functional non-surveillance state and companies would treat us better because we'd be customers and not products"". That thinking elevates companies like Apple as ""virtuous alternatives"" because the company charges money and not attention, so it can focus on improving the experience for its customers.

There is a small sliver of truth there, he said; Apple rolled out a feature on its phones that allowed users to opt-out of third-party surveillance—notably Facebook tracking. 96% of users opted out, he said; the other 4% ""were either drunk or Facebook employees or drunk Facebook employees"".

So that makes it seem like Apple will not treat its customers as products, but at the same time it added the opt-out, the company secretly started gathering exactly the same information for its ""own surveillance advertising network"". There was no notice given to users and no way to opt out of that surveillance; when journalists discovered it and published their findings, Apple ""lied about it"". The ""$1000 Apple distraction rectangle in your pocket is something you paid for"", but that does not stop Apple from ""treating you like the product"".

It is not just end users that Apple treats like products; the app vendors are also treated that way with 30% fees for payment processing in the App Store. That's what is happening with gig-app nurses: ""the nurses are the product, the patients are the product, the hospitals are the product—in enshittification, the product is anyone you can productize"".

While it is tempting to blame tech, Doctorow said, these companies did not start out enshittified. He recounted the ""magic"" when Google debuted; ""you could ask Jeeves questions for a thousand years and still not get an answer as crisp, as useful, as helpful as the answer you would get by typing a few vague keywords"" into Google. Those companies spent decades producing great products, which is why people switched to Google, bought iPhones, and joined their friends on Facebook. They were all born digital, thus could have enshittified at any time, ""but they didn't, until they did, and then they did it all at once"".

He believes that changes to the policy environment is what has led to enshittification, not changes in technology. These changes to the rules of the game were ""undertaken in living memory by named parties who were warned at the time of the likely outcomes""—and did it anyway. Those people are now extremely rich and respected; they have ""faced no consequences, no accountability for their role in ushering in the Enshittocene"". We have created a perfect breeding ground for the worst practices in our society, which allowed them to thrive and dominate decision-making for companies and governments ""leading to a vast enshittening of everything"".

That is a dismal outlook, he said, but there is a bit of good news hidden in there. This change did not come about because of a new kind of evil person or the weight of history, but rather because of specific policy choices that were made—and can be unmade. We can consign the enshitternet to the scrap heap as simply ""a transitional state from the old good internet that we used to have and the new good internet that we could have"".

All companies want to maximize profits and the equation to do so is simple: charge as much as you can, pay suppliers and workers as little as you can, and spend the smallest amount possible on quality and safety. The theoretically "perfect" company that charges infinity and spends nothing fails because no one wants to work for it—or buy anything from it. That shows that there are external constraints that tend to tamp down the ""impulse to charge infinity and deliver nothing"".
Four constraints

In technology, there are four constraints that help make companies better; they help push back against the impulse to enshittify. The first is markets; businesses that charge more and deliver less lose customers, all else being equal. This is the bedrock idea behind capitalism and it is also the basis of antitrust law, but the rules on antitrust have changed since the Sherman Antitrust Act was enacted in 1890. More than forty years ago, during the Reagan administration in the US, the interpretation of what it means to be a monopoly was changed, not just in US, but also with its major trading partners in the UK, EU, and Asia.

Under this interpretation, monopolies are assumed to be efficient; if Google has 90% of the market, it means that it deserves to be there because no one can possibly do search any better. No competitor has arisen because there is no room to improve on what Google is doing. This pro-monopoly stance did exactly what might be expected, he said, it gave us more monopolies: ""in pharma, in beer, in glass bottles, vitamin C, athletic shoes, microchips, cars, mattresses, eyeglasses, and, of course, professional wrestling"", he said to laughter.

Markets do not constrain technology firms because those firms do not compete with their rivals—they simply buy their rivals instead. That is confirmed by a memo from Mark Zuckerberg—""a man who puts all of his dumbest ideas in writing""—who wrote: ""It is better to buy than to compete"". Even though that anti-competitive behavior came to light before Facebook was allowed to buy Instagram in order to ensure that users switching would still be part of Facebook the platform, the Obama administration permitted the sale. Every government over the past 40 years, of all political stripes, has treated monopolies as efficient, Doctorow said.

Regulation is also a constraint, unless the regulators have already been captured by the industry they are supposed to oversee. There are several examples of regulatory capture in the nursing saga, but the most egregious is that anyone in the US can obtain financial information on anyone else in the country, simply by contacting a data broker. ""This is because the US congress has not passed a new consumer privacy law since 1988."" The Video Privacy Protection Act was aimed at stopping video-store clerks from telling newspapers what VHS video titles were purchased or rented, but no protections have been added since then.

The reason congress has not addressed privacy legislation ""since Die Hard was in its first run in theaters"" is neither a coincidence nor an oversight, he said. It is ""expensively purchased inaction"" by an industry that has ""monetized the abuse of human rights at unimaginable scale"". The coalition in favor of freezing privacy law keeps growing because there are so many ways to ""transmute the systematic invasion of our privacy into cash"".

Tech companies are not being constrained by either markets or governments, but there are two other factors that could serve to tamp down ""the reproduction of sociopathic, enshittifying monsters"" within these companies. The first is interoperability; in the non-digital world, it is a lot of work to, say, ensure that any light bulb can be used with any light socket. In the digital world, all of our programs run on the same ""Turing-complete, universal Von Neumann machine"", so a program that breaks interoperability can be undone with a program that restores it. Every ten-foot fence can be surmounted with an 11-foot ladder; if HP writes a program to ensure that third-party ink cannot be used with its printers, someone can write a program to undo that restriction.

DoorDash workers generally make their money on tips, but the app hides the amount of the tip until the driver commits to taking the delivery. A company called Para wrote a program that looked inside the JSON that was exchanged to find the tip, which it then displayed before the driver had to commit. DoorDash shut down the Para app, ""because in America, apps like Para are illegal"". The 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) signed by Bill Clinton ""makes it a felony to 'bypass an access control for a copyrighted work'"". So even just reverse-engineering the DoorDash app is a potential felony, which is why companies are so desperate to move their users to apps instead of web sites. ""An app is just a web site that we have wrapped in a correct DRM [digital rights management] to make it a felony to protect your privacy while you use it"", he said to widespread applause.

At the behest of the US trade representative, Europe and Canada have also enacted DMCA-like laws. This happened despite experts warning the leaders of those countries that ""laws that banned tampering with digital locks would let American tech giants corner digital markets in their countries"". The laws were a gift to monopolists and allowed companies like HP to continually raise the price of ink until it ""has become the most expensive substance you, as a civilian, can buy without a permit""; printing a shopping list uses ""colored water that costs more than the semen of a Kentucky-Derby-winning stallion"".

The final constraint, which did hold back platform decay for quite some time, is labor. Tech workers have historically been respected and well-paid, without unions. The power of tech workers did not come from solidarity, but from scarcity, Doctorow said. The minute bosses ordered tech workers to enshittify the product they were loyally working on, perhaps missing various important social and family events to ship it on time, those workers could say no—perhaps in a much more coarse way. Tech workers could simply walk across the street ""and have a new job by the end of the day"" if the boss persisted.

So labor held off enshittification after competition, regulation, and interoperability were all systematically undermined and did so for quite some time—until the mass tech layoffs. There have been half a million tech workers laid off since 2023, more are announced regularly, sometimes in conjunction with raises for executive salaries and bonuses. Now, workers cannot turn their bosses down because there are ten others out there just waiting to take their job.
Reversing course

Until we fix the environment we find ourselves in, the contagion will spread to other companies, he said. The good news is that after 40 years of antitrust decline, there has been a lot of worldwide antitrust activity and it is coming from all over the political spectrum. The EU, UK, Australia, Germany, France, Japan, South Korea, ""and China, yes, China"" have passed new antitrust laws and launched enforcement actions. The countries often collaborate, so a UK study on Apple's 30% payment-processing fee was used by the EU to fine the company for billions of euros and ban Apple's payment monopoly; those cases then found their way to Japan and South Korea where Apple was further punished.

""There are no billionaires funding the project to make billionaires obsolete"", Doctorow said, so the antitrust work has come from and been funded by grassroots efforts.

Europe and Canada have passed strong right-to-repair legislation, but those efforts ""have been hamstrung by the anti-circumvention laws"" (like the DMCA). Those laws can only be used if there are no locks to get around, but the manufacturers ensure that every car, tractor, appliance, medical implant, and hospital medical device has locks to prevent repair. That raises the question of why these countries don't repeal their versions of the DMCA.

The answer is tariffs, it seems. The US trade representative has long threatened countries with tariffs if they did not have such a law on their books. ""Happy 'Liberation Day' everyone"", he said with a smile, which resulted in laughter, cheering, and applause. The response of most countries when faced with the US tariffs (or threats thereof) has been to impose retaliatory tariffs, making US products more expensive for their citizens, which is a weird way to punish Americans. ""It's like punching yourself in the face really hard and hoping someone else says 'ouch'.""

What would be better is for the countries to break the monopolies of the US tech giants by making it legal to reverse-engineer, jailbreak, and modify American products and services. Let companies jailbreak Teslas and deliver all of the features that ship in the cars, but are disabled by software, for one price; that is a much better way to hurt Elon Musk, rather than by expressing outrage at his Nazi salutes, since he loves the attention. ""Kick him in the dongle.""

Or, let a Canadian company set up an App Store that only charges 3% for payment processing, which will give any content producer an immediate 25% raise, so publishers will flock to it. The same could be done for car and tractor diagnostic devices and more. ""Any country in the world has it right now in their power to become a tech-export powerhouse."" Doing so would directly attack the tech giants in their most profitable lines of business: ""it takes the revenues from those rip-off scams globally from hundreds of billions of dollars to zero overnight"". And ""that is how you win a trade war"", he said to more applause.

He finished with a veritable laundry list of all of the ills facing the world today (the ""omni-shambolic poly-crisis""), both on and off the internet, and noted that the tech giants would willingly ""trade a habitable planet and human rights for a 3% tax cut"". But it did not have to be this way, ""the enshitternet was not inevitable"" and was, in fact, the product of policy choices made by known people in the last few decades. ""They chose enshittification; we warned them what would come of it and we don't have to be eternal prisoners of the catastrophic policy blunders of clueless lawmakers of old.""

There once was an ""old good internet"", Doctorow said, but it was too difficult for non-technical people to connect up to; web 2.0 changed that, making it easy for everyone to get online, but that led directly into hard-to-escape walled gardens. A new good internet is possible and needed; ""we can build it with all of the technological self-determination of the old good internet and the ease of web 2.0"". It can be a place to come together and organize in order to ""resist and survive climate collapse, fascism, genocide, and authoritarianism"". He concluded: ""we can build it and we must"".

His speech was well-received and was met with a standing ovation. Some of his harshest rhetoric (much of which was toned down here) may not have been popular with everyone, perhaps especially the PyCon sponsors who were named and shamed in the keynote, but it did seem to resonate within the crowd of attendees. Doctorow's perspective is always interesting—and he certainly pulls no punches.

lwn.net/Articles/1021871/