In the last two years, iPhone customers may have been pleasantly surprised to see a standardized USB-C charger port, allowing them to dispose of Apple’s custom Lightning wires. The world’s 1.5 billion iPhone users can thank Europe for forcing Apple’s change. The tech giant decided to switch all its new iPhones, determining it too costly to produce the USB-C port just for Europe.
It’s only in recent years that consumers have woken up to Big Tech’s power over our attention, moods, privacy, stock market, economy, and wallets—over us. It’s fortunate then that with our heads buried in our phones scrolling through social media, consumer advocates, regulatory agencies, and litigators have been sounding the alarm on surveillance and monopoly power and delving into the drier nuts-and-bolts details of right-to-repair and interoperability regulations, like the one that led to Apple standardizing its charging port.
Prolific tech critic Cory Doctorow, whose pronouncements make him akin to a town crier in the digital square, is among those leading the charge. After coining and popularizing the term “enshittification” to mean how tech platforms degrade over time, Doctorow has bestowed his latest book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, with the title.
His book, derived mainly from his blog Pluralistic, will be eye-opening to consumers and those like me who are already familiar with Big Tech’s bullying methods. (I’m the editorial director of the Open Markets Institute, a think tank that seeks to regulate Big Tech monopolies and curb corporate power.)
Enshittification is a ride through all the bait-and-switch tactics, financial trickery, and gatekeeping to which Big Tech platforms subject users. A prime example is how Google began degrading its always reliable workhorse of a product, search, in the mid-aughts, once there was no more room for its flagship segment, which had captured a 90 percent global market share, to grow. In a strategy laid bare in internal memos and emails in the Department of Justice exhibits in one of its two monopoly cases against the corporation, Google made users input more queries into the search bar to get the answers, leading to more ads and more revenue for Google. “After all, even if Google couldn’t find more people to search, or more ways to use search, they could certainly find new ways to charge for search,” Doctorow observes. “In other words, once Google stopped growing, it started squeezing.”
Doctorow takes us through the how and why of enshittification. How tech companies enshittify proceeds in four steps: 1) first, platforms are good to their individual customers, 2) they abuse their individuals to improve things for their business customers, 3) next, they undercut their business customers to keep more profit, and 4) finally, they have turned into a giant pile of shit.
Both Amazon and Facebook have turned on their once-prized business customers, Facebook, by raising the price of ad targeting and failing to show its users the ads advertisers paid for. News outlets, in particular, were hurt badly when the platform began downranking short excerpts of news articles in favor of longer ones, effectively cannibalizing the news business. Similarly, Amazon started to shaft the merchants who sell on its marketplace by effectively forcing them to pay to be included in Amazon Prime, forbidding them to sell their product at a lower price on any other website, including their own, and, perhaps most galling, ripping off merchants’ ideas to make its own Amazon-branded copycat products.
According to Doctorow, the enshittifier’s “credo” is, “Your job is to create as much value on that platform as possible. Our job is to harvest all of that value, leaving behind the smaller quantum of utility that will keep the platform from imploding.”
But it’s not just the well-known platforms. Tech companies, in general, have gotten into the game. In one of the book’s most brazen examples, Unity, a company that offers tools for video game developers, announced a change to its pricing policy: it would start charging game developer customers a fee every time they sold a video game, claiming it wanted “shared success” with its customers, the developers who used their tools.
Unity’s customer base of video game developers balked. Doctorow likens the scheme to selling hammers to build a lemonade stand and expecting a nickel from each drink sold. “Unity is an avatar of the attitudes that produce enshittification,” he writes. “Enshittification is what happens when the executives calculate that they can force you to go along with their schemes, and when they’re right about it.” In Unity’s case, its plan to fleece its customers didn’t work
Part of the reason is that the law allows them to get away with things traditional companies never could, owing to underregulation, copyright law, and regulatory capture. Having an app allows tech companies to break the law and then claim they didn’t because the crime was committed with an app, for instance, app-based lending platforms that ignore usury law or cryptocurrency apps that illegally trade in unregistered securities.
Regulation hasn’t kept pace with technology, as we see most vexingly in the case of AI, which has sent government regulators worldwide scrambling. Add to underregulation the billions of dollars the tech industry has funneled into lobbying, and you have regulatory capture that has helped tech companies weaponize intellectual property laws. For instance, IP laws for apps ban “circumvention,” which means technology companies can destroy rivals that have developed anti-features allowing users to skirt the app’s undesirable features: “In other words, tech companies don’t stop with ‘It’s not a crime if we do it with an app.’ They also say, ‘It’s a crime if you fix our app to defend yourself from our crimes.’”
Enshittification also describes the waning counterbalancing influence of the tech industry’s white-collar workforce, an aspect of Big Tech’s exceptionalism that gets little attention. Doctorow notes that Google’s way of sorting web pages came from an academic research paper on citation analysis by its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, giving the company its scholarly atmosphere. Technologists were recruited from top universities worldwide, offered generous pay with stock options, and given one day a week to work on side projects.
For years, Google deferred to its technical staff, who remained a bulwark against enshittification. It believed deeply in Google’s mission statement to “Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Yet, letting engineers run the show exasperated investors, whose greed won out over workers’ idealism as we saw with the corporation’s strategy to degrade search quality.
Google wasn’t the only giant to rein in its high-minded workers; it was among the most prominent. The rupture with their workforce, which began when Big Tech corporations ramped up their enshittificatory (yes, Doctorow uses this form of the word, too) ways over the past decade, became a chasm in 2023 when a quarter of a million tech workers were fired—despite the industry’s record profits. In 2025, the unspoken covenant was severed with tech executives’ embracing Donald Trump at his inauguration.
Big Tech may have outfoxed regulators and its workforce, but Doctorow sees a reckoning coming. Absent U.S. regulation, as the Trump administration protects the tech platforms, we may have to rely on Europe to check the tech industry’s power.
We saw this dissonance between the U.S. and Europe this autumn when a federal judge imposed a modest penalty on Google for its illegal search market dominance. That stood in sharp contrast to the much larger, albeit affordable for Google, $3.5 billion fine levied by the European Commission for its digital advertising monopoly.
Enshittification may seem outdated amid the surge of AI, which is barely mentioned. It’s not that Doctorow hasn’t been thinking and talking about AI—he considers it a bubble—it’s that we have to wait for his AI book to be released next year, by which time his predictions might already have come true.
Sneak preview: He’s not optimistic. In a recent post, Doctorow warns, “I firmly believe the (economic) AI apocalypse is coming. These companies are not profitable. They can’t be profitable. They keep the lights on by soaking up hundreds of billions of dollars in other people’s money and lighting it on fire. Eventually, those other people are going to want to see a return on their investment, and when they don’t get it, they will halt the flow of billions of dollars. Anything that can’t go on forever eventually stops.”
Doctorow’s Enshittification is an indispensable guide to understanding how we got here. If Part 1 is a must-read, Part 2 will be epic.
