Those of us old enough to remember BBS servers or even rainbow banners often go down the nostalgia hole about how the internet was better “back in the day” than it is now as a handful of middlemen with a stranglehold on the way we interact with information, commerce, and even other people. Where’s the disintermediated future we were promised? More importantly, can we make a “new good web” that puts users first? [Cory Doctorow] has a plan to reverse what he’s come to call enshittification, or the lifecycle of the extractionist tech platform, and he shared it with us as the Supercon 2023 keynote.
As [Doctorow] sees it, there’s a particular arc to every evil platform’s lifecycle. First, the platform will treat its users fairly and provide enough value to accumulate as many as possible. Then, once a certain critical mass is reached, the platform pivots to exploiting those users to sell them out to the business customers of the platform. Once there’s enough buy-in by business customers, the platform squeezes both users and businesses to eke out every cent for their investors before collapsing in on itself.
Doctorow tells us, “Enshittification isn’t inevitable.” There have been tech platforms that rose and fell without it, but he describes a set of three criteria that make the process unavoidable.
- Lack of competition in the market via mergers and acquisitions
- Companies change things on the back end (“twiddle their knobs”) to improve their fortunes and have a united, consolidated front to prevent any lawmaking that might constrain them
- Companies then embrace tech law to prevent new entrants into the market or consumer rights (see: DMCA, etc.)
Given the state of things, should we just give up on the internet and go back to the good old days of the paleolithic? [Doctorow] tells us all is not lost, but that it will take a concerted effort both in the tech and political spheres to reverse course. The first tactic to take back the internet he examines is antitrust law.
For the last 40 years or so, antitrust has been toothless in the United States and most of the world. We’re finally seeing this change in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, EU, and China as these governments have turned their eyes to the decades of damage caused by rubber stamping mergers and breaking up monopolies is back on the table. This is a slow process, but a necessary one to regain control of the internet. That said, we don’t want to wait on the slow wheels of the justice system to be our only recourse.
When we stopped enforcing antitrust law, we ended good fire, we accumulated fire debt, and now we have wildfires. Our tech companies have terminal gigantism, and they’re on fire all the time. It’s time to stop trying to make the tech giants better. It’s time to start evacuating them so they can burn. In your heart, you know we could have a better internet than this one, and a better tech industry too.
Interoperability is how we “seize the means of computation.” First up is limiting the twiddling by companies behind closed doors without legal recourse for users. Comprehensive privacy laws with a private right to action are a good start. This lets you sue a company if you’re privacy is violated instead of hoping that a prosecutor somewhere thinks that enough people have been harmed to bring a case from the government end of things.
A couple other things that could help are ending worker misclassification through the “gig economy” so that workers are treated as actual employees instead of “independent contractors,” and applying existing consumer protection standards to search engines and platforms so that results are what you’re looking for instead of deceptive ads masquerading as the item or information you want.
Laws like the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) are another step in the right direction, forcing platforms to have APIs that allow other platforms to connect to them. This makes switching costs low for leaving these platforms that mostly get big based on network effects. What if a platform builds the API then shuts it down either for “security” or lets it deprecate to not working again? We have to make sure that Big Tech’s incentives are aligned so that their APIs running well is preferable to the status quo of behind-the-scenes twiddling. In addition to the mandatory APIs, we need to make it legal again to tinker and hack the services ourselves.
By restoring the right to mod a service to restore a broken API, then the platform has the choice to “keep the API and lose my discontented users or, nerf the API and get embroiled in unquantifiable risk from guerilla warfare with all of you. Against engineers who have the attackers’ advantage, meaning I have to be perfect and make no mistakes, and they only have to find one mistake that I’ve made and exploit it.” Since tech giants are driven by investors, and the only thing investors hate more than losing money is surprises, this gives companies a strong incentive to make sure their APIs are operating adequately. The largest stock sell off in history was after a Facebook investor meeting where they announced users had grown more slowly than expected. The uncertainty was enough to start a fire sale despite continued growth.
Another way to encourage interoperability is to use the government to hold out a carrot in addition to the stick. Through government procurement laws, governments could require any company providing a product or service to the government to not interfere with interoperability. President Lincoln required standard tooling for bullets and rifles during the Civil War, so there’s a long history of requiring this already. If companies don’t want to play nice, they’ll lose out on some lucrative contracts, “but no one forces a tech company to do business with the federal government.”
If you think this is all too fringey to ever topple the current regime, [Doctorow] reminds us that the current economic order seemed far fetched in the post-war US, but neoliberal economist [Milton Friedman] was ready. He’s often quoted as saying, “Some day, there will be a crisis, and when crisis comes, ideas that are lying around can move from the fringe to the center in an instant.” [Doctorow] exhorts us to be spreading ideas of how to build a better world around, so that as we flit from crisis to crisis they can move to the center of the Overton window and succeed.
Be sure to checkout the full talk for more examples and colorful descriptions of what we need to do to build a “new good web.”
