Enshittification is all around us, says the man who coined the term, Cory Doctorow. This decline in the quality and value of services follows a predictable pattern: platforms start out great, lock users in, shift value to business customers, then drain the value from everyone to feed shareholders. This cycle now shapes search, social media, mobile ecosystems, Cloud apps, and every digital sector touched by automation and data.
Join author, activist, and journalist Cory Doctorow in this hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often hilarious CloudFest keynote to explore some important questions: What policy choices can we make from within the Cloud industry? What path can get us to those choices? How do we end the enshittocene and build a new, good internet, whose Clouds and endpoints are safe and friendly for human habitation?
This replay walks through how concentrated power, weakened competition law, regulatory capture, and restrictions on interoperability created an environment where bad behavior thrives, and is even rewarded. Google and Facebook feel the wrath along with many other examples from across the digital landscape.
More importantly, Cory shows how antitrust, right-to-repair, and interoperability can reverse the decay—and how Cloud leaders can play an active role.
Five Takeaways for Cloud Professionals
• Digitalization enables manipulation at scale. Companies can constantly alter pricing, rankings, and access because Cloud systems make such “twiddling” effortless.
• Lock-in drives decline. When users and businesses can’t leave, platforms shift value away from them.
• Competition and regulation have eroded. Monopolies buy rivals, shape policy, and ignore rules meant to restrain them.
• Interoperability is the most powerful corrective. Open systems let users escape, weaken monopolies, and create space for innovation.
• A new, better internet is achievable. With modern antitrust, right-to-repair, and legalized reverse-engineering, Cloud ecosystems can become open, fair, and resilient again.
Enshittification explained by Cory Doctorow himself
This transcript gives a taste of Cory’s insight from the start of his talk (or watch the whole thing above):
“So, a couple of years ago, I coined this term enshitiffication to describe how online platforms decay. And it describes a three-stage process.
First, you have platforms that are good to their end users, but find a way to lock those end users in.
Think of Google, which initially minimized ads and maximized the spend on engineering for high-quality search results. But as they were doing that, they were also buying their way to dominance.
So that no matter which browser you used, no matter what mobile operating system you were using, no matter which carrier you had, you would always be searching on Google by default, spending tens of billions of dollars every year to make sure that no one would ever try a search engine that wasn’t Google, thus locking their users in.
That is stage one in which a platform is good to its end users but also locks in those users. In stage two, platforms start to abuse their users in order to tempt in business customers.
For Google, obviously that’s advertisers and web publishers. So today, an ever-larger fraction of a Google results page is given over to ads and those ads are marked out with ever subtler ever smaller type that says the word ‘ad’ next to it.
Google uses commercial surveillance to target ads to us. So that’s stage two making things better for business customers while making things worse for end users.
But those business customers also become dependent on the platform just like the users are locked into the platform.
After all, as soon as a business is getting like 10% of its customers or its revenue from one source it becomes very vulnerable to that source. Very few businesses can stand a 10 or 20% reduction overnight in their gross revenue.
And so, once the business customers are locked into the platform, you get stage three of enshitiffication. This is where Google claws back all the value in the platform, both from business customers and from end users leaving behind just like a homeopathic residue of value just enough to keep everyone locked in while the rest of the value is gathered in for shareholders and executives. And Google becomes enshitiffied.
And you’ve probably noticed this. Google search results suck these days…”
