How to save the internet

What – and I cannot stress this enough – the fuck happened? I’m talking about enshittification. Here’s what enshittification looks like from the outside.

First, you see a company that’s being good to its end users. Google when it  puts the best search results at the top; Facebook when it shows you a feed of posts from people and groups you follow; Uber when it charges small dollars for a cab; Amazon when it subsidises goods and returns and shipping, and puts the best match for your product search at the top of the page.

That’s stage one, being good to end users. But there’s another part of this stage, call it stage 1a). That’s figuring out how to lock in those users.

There’s so many ways to lock in users.

If you’re Facebook, the users do it for you. You joined Facebook because there were people there you wanted to hang out with, and other people joined Facebook to hang out with you.

That’s the old “network effects” in action, and with network effects come “the collective action problem”. Because you love your friends and you all agree that Facebook sucks, but can you all agree on when it’s time to leave? No way. Can you agree on where to go next? Hell no. So you’re stuck.

Now, sometimes companies lock you in with money, like Amazon getting you to prepay for a year’s shipping with Prime, or to buy your Audible books on a monthly subscription, which virtually guarantees that every shopping search will start on Amazon. After all, you’ve already paid for it.

Or sometimes, like HP, they sell you a printer with four ink cartridges filled with fluid that retails for more than $10,000/gallon and stop you from refilling any of those ink cartridges or using a third-party cartridge. 

And as for Apple: without Apple hardware you can’t run any IOS apps, that is, apps designed for iPhones or iPads; you can’t run your Apple Music, Books and Movies on anything except an IOS app; you can’t use third-party parts to fix your iPhone; and the US Customs and Border Service can seize any shipment of refurb iPhone parts as trademark violations.

Getting you locked in completes phase one of the enshittification cycle and signals the start of phase two: making things worse for you to make things better for business customers.

For example, a platform might poison its search results, like Google selling more and more of its results pages to ads. Or Amazon selling off search results and calling it an “ad” business. They make $38bn a year on that scam. The result is that the first result for your search is, on average, 29% more expensive than the best match for your search. The first row is 25% more expensive than the best match. On average, the best match for your search is likely to be found 17 places down on the results page.

Other platforms sell off your feed, like Facebook, which started off showing you the things you asked to see. But now, the quantum of content from the people you follow has dwindled, leaving a void that Facebook fills with things that people pay to show you: boosted posts from publishers you haven’t subscribed to, and, of course, ads.

Now, at this point you might be thinking “sure, if you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product”.

Bullshit!

Your iPhone isn’t an ad-supported gimme. You paid 800 quid for that distraction rectangle in your pocket, and you’re still the product. What’s more, Apple has rigged its operating system to make sure you can’t modify it to block its spying. If you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product, and if you are paying for the product, you’re still the product – so that’s phase two of enshittification.

Phase three of enshittification is to screw everybody and take all the value for yourself. Leave behind the absolute bare minimum of utility so that everyone stays locked in to your pile of shit.

Enshittification: a tragedy in three acts.

That’s what enshittification looks like from the outside, but what’s going on inside the company? What is the pathological mechanism that converts an excellent and useful service into a pile of shit? That mechanism is called twiddling. Twiddling is when someone alters the back end of a service to change how its business operates, changing prices, costs, search ranking, recommendation criteria and other foundational aspects of the system.

Digital platforms are a twiddler’s utopia. A grocer would need an army of teenagers with pricing guns on rollerblades to reprice everything in the building when someone arrives who’s extra hungry.

Whereas the McDonald’s Investments portfolio company Plexure advertises that it can use surveillance data to predict when an app user has just been paid, so the seller can raise the price of their breakfast sandwich. With digital shelf tags, grocers can change prices whenever they want, like the grocers in Norway, whose e-ink shelf tags change the prices 2,000 times per day.

Every Uber driver is offered a different wage for every job. If a driver has been picky lately, the job pays more. But if the driver has been desperate enough to grab every ride the app offers, the pay goes down, and down, and down.

The law professor Veena Dubal calls this “algorithmic wage discrimination”. It’s a prime example of twiddling.

Twiddling can also work in some users’ favour, of course. Sometimes platforms twiddle to make things better for end users or business customers.

For example, Emily Baker-White from Forbes revealed the existence of a back-end feature that TikTok’s management can access which they call the “heating tool”.

When a manager applies the heating tool to a performer’s account, that performer’s videos are thrust into the feeds of millions of users, without regard to whether they might enjoy that video.

Why would they do this? Well – I used to go to this travelling fair that would come to Toronto at the end of every summer, the Canadian National Exhibition. If you’ve been to a fair like that, you know that you will always spot some guy lugging around a comedically huge teddy bear.

Nominally, you win that teddy bear by throwing five balls in a peach basket, but to a first approximation, no one has ever got five balls to stay in that peach basket.

That guy “won” the teddy bear when the person running the game singled him out and said, “fella, I like your face. Tell you what I’m gonna do: you get just two balls in the basket and you can have one of these galactic-scale teddy bears.”

That’s how the guy got his teddy bear, which he now has to drag around for the rest of the day.

Why the hell did that stallholder give away the teddy bear? Because it turns the guy into a walking billboard for his game. If that dopey-looking guy can get five balls into a peach basket, then so can you.

Except you can’t.

TikTok’s heating tool is a way to give away tactical giant teddy bears. When someone in the TikTok brain trust decides they need more sports bros on the platform, they pick one bro out at random and make him king for the day, heating the shit out of his account.

That guy gets a bazillion views and he starts running around on all the sports bro forums trumpeting his success: “I am the Louis Pasteur of sports bro influencers!”

The other sports bros pile in and start retooling to make content that conforms to the idiosyncratic TikTok format. When they fail to get giant teddy bears of their own, they assume that it’s because they’re doing TikTok wrong, because they don’t know about the heating tool.

Giant teddy bears are all over the place: those Uber drivers who were boasting to the New York Times 10 years ago about earning $50 per hour? The Substackers who were rolling in dough? Joe Rogan and his $100m Spotify payout? Those people are all the proud owners of giant teddy bears, and they’re a steal.

Because every dollar they get from the platform turns into five dollars’ worth of free labour from suckers who think they’re just internetting wrong.

That’s how the platforms do the trick where they are good to users, then lock users in, then maltreat users to be good to business customers, then lock in those business customers, then take all the value for themselves.

So now we know what is happening, and how it is happening, all that’s left is why it’s happening.

Now, on the one hand, the why is pretty obvious. The less value that end-users and business customers capture, the more value there is left to divide up among the shareholders and the executives.

That’s why, but it doesn’t tell you why now. Companies could have done this at any time in the past 20 years, but they didn’t. Or at least, the successful ones didn’t. The ones that turned themselves into piles of shit got treated like piles of shit. We avoided them and they died. Remember Myspace? Yahoo Search? Livejournal? Sure, they’re still serving some kind of AI slop or programmatic ad junk if you visit those sites, but they’re gone.

And there’s the clue: it used to be that if you enshittified your product, bad things happened to your company. Now, there are no consequences for enshittification, so everyone’s doing it.

What stops a company from enshittifying? There are four forces that discipline tech companies. The first one is, obviously, competition. If your customers find it easy to leave, then you have to worry about them leaving.

Many factors can contribute to how hard or easy it is to depart a platform, like the network effects that Facebook has going for it. But the most important factor is whether there is anywhere to go.

Back in 2012, Facebook bought Instagram for $1bn, a big sum in those innocent days, and it was an especially big sum to pay for Insta. The company only had 13 employees and a mere 25 million registered users.

But what mattered to Zuckerberg wasn’t how many users Insta had, it was where those users came from – that’s right, they had left Facebook and joined Insta. They were sick of Facebook. Even though they liked the people there, they hated creepy Zuck, they hated the platform, so they left and they didn’t come back.

So Zuck spent a cool billion to recapture them, a fact he put in writing in a midnight email to then-chief financial officer David Ebersman, explaining that he was paying over the odds for Insta because his users hated him, and loved Insta. So even if they quit Facebook (the platform), they would still be captured by Facebook (the company).

But the Barack Obama-era regulators let that one go through. Indeed, for 40 years, starting with Jimmy Carter, and accelerating through Ronald Reagan, the US has encouraged monopoly formation as an official policy, on the grounds that monopolies are “efficient”.

If everyone is using Google Search, that’s something we should celebrate. It means they’ve got the very best search and wouldn’t it be perverse to spend public funds to punish them for making the best product?

But as we all know, Google didn’t maintain search dominance by being the best. They did it by spending. More than $20bn per year to Apple alone to be the default IOS search, plus billions more to Samsung, Mozilla, and anyone else making a product or service with a search box on it, ensuring that you never stumble on a search engine that’s better than theirs.

Which, in turn, ensured that no one smart invested big in rival search engines, even if they were visibly, obviously superior. Why bother making something better if Google’s buying up all the market oxygen before it can kindle your product to life? Which is why Google Search is a pile of shit.

It takes a special kind of smooth-brained asshole – that is, an establishment economist – to insist that the collapse of every industry from eyeglasses to vitamin C into a cartel of five or fewer companies has nothing to do with policies that officially encouraged monopolisation.

Antitrust didn’t slip down that staircase and fall spine-first onto that stiletto: they stabbed it in the back and then they pushed it.

And when they killed antitrust, they also killed regulation, the second force that disciplines companies. Regulation is possible, but only when the regulator is more powerful than the regulated entities. When a company is bigger than the government, it gets damned hard to credibly threaten to punish that company, no matter what its sins.

That’s what protected IBM for all those years when it had its boot on the throat of the American tech sector. Do you know, the Department of Justice fought to break up IBM in the courts from 1970 to 1982, and that every year, for 12 consecutive years, IBM spent more on lawyers to fight the government than the DOJ Antitrust Division spent on all the lawyers fighting every antitrust case in the entire USA?

IBM outspent Uncle Sam for 12 years. People called it “Antitrust’s Vietnam”. All that money paid off, because by 1982, the president was Ronald Reagan, a man whose official policy was that monopolies were “efficient”. So he dropped the case, and Big Blue wriggled off the hook.

A new, good internet is one that has the positive aspects of the old, good internet: an ethic of technological self-determination, where users of technology (and hackers, tinkerers, startups and others serving as their proxies) can reconfigure and modify the technology they use so that it does what they need it to do, and so that it can’t be used against them.

But the new, good internet will fix the defects of the old, good internet, the part that made it hard to use for anyone who wasn’t us. And hell yeah we can do that. Tech bosses swear that it’s impossible, that you can’t have a conversation with a friend without sharing it with Zuck; or search the web without letting Google scrape you; or have a phone that works reliably without giving Apple a veto over the software you install.

They claim that it’s a nonsense to even ponder this kind of thing. It’s like making water that’s not wet. But that’s bullshit. We can have nice things. We can build for the people we love, and give them a place that’s worthy of their time and attention.

To do that, we have to install constraints.

The first constraint is competition. We’re living through an epochal shift in competition policy. After 40 years with antitrust enforcement in an induced coma, a wave of antitrust vigour has swept through governments all over the world. 

Last summer, Judge Amit Mehta, ruled in the case of United States v. Google LLC, that “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly”, and ordered Google and the DoJ to propose a schedule for a remedy, like breaking the company up. So that was pretty epic.

In the US, the UK, in the EU, in Australia, in Canada, in Japan, in South Korea, even in China, we are seeing more antitrust action over the past four years than over the preceding 40 years.

The EU’s Digital Markets Act is a law requiring dominant platforms to allow third parties to offer interoperable services.

So a nonprofit, a hobbyist, a startup, or a local government agency will eventually be able to offer, say, a social media server that can interconnect with one of the dominant social media silos, and users who switch to that new platform will be able to continue to exchange messages with the users they follow and groups they belong to, so the switching costs will fall to zero.

That’s a very cool rule, but what’s even cooler is how it’s gonna be enforced. Previous EU tech rules were “regulations” as in the GDPR – the General Data Privacy Regulation. EU regulations need to be “transposed” into laws in each of the 27 EU member states, so they become national laws that get enforced by national courts.

For Big Tech, that means all previous tech regulations are enforced in Ireland, because Ireland is a tax haven, and all the tech companies fly Irish flags of convenience.

With the Digital Markets Act, the European Commission has changed things up: it gets enforced in the EU’s federal courts, bypassing the national courts in crime havens like Ireland.

And what about Donald Trump? Well, consider this – the Google antitrust case that the DoJ just won started under the last Trump administration. Trump also sued to block the absolutely terrible merger between Warner and AT&T.

I think it’s safe to say that Trump will selectively target businesses based on whether they oppose him or suck up to him. I think American business leaders know it, too, which is why every tech boss lined up at the inauguration.

Trump killed the AT&T-Time Warner merger to punish CNN. He went after Google to punish “woke” tech firms. That doesn’t make AT&T, Time Warner or Google good. They’re terrible monopolists and the US government should be making their lives miserable.

Trump will not need to falsify evidence against corporations that are disloyal to him. All of America’s big businesses are cesspits of sleaze, fraud and predation. Every merger that is being teed up now for the coming four years is illegal under the antitrust laws that we stopped enforcing in the Reagan era and only dusted off again for four years under Biden. They’re all guilty, which means that Trump can bring a valid case against any of them.

Also, in the US, the dam is breaking on federal consumer privacy law – at last! There’s a lot of people who are angry about stuff that has some nexus with America’s piss-poor privacy landscape. Worried that Facebook turned grampy into a Qanon? That Insta made your teen anorexic? That TikTok is brainwashing millennials into quoting Osama bin Laden? Or that cops are rolling up the identities of everyone at a Black Lives Matter protest or the January 6 riots by getting location data from Google? 

A federal privacy law with a private right of action – which means that individuals can sue companies that violate their privacy – would go a long way to rectifying all of these problems.

There’s a pretty big coalition for that kind of privacy law, which is why we have seen a procession of imperfect (but steadily improving) privacy laws working their way through Congress.

It’s time to stop being defensive. It’s time to go on the offensive. To restore competition, regulation and tech worker power so that we can create the new, good internet we’ll need to fight fascism, the climate emergency, and genocide – to build a digital nervous system for the 21st century.