An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet’s Enshittification and Throw It Into Reverse
But more than anything, they were able to merge with major competitors and buy out small ones. Google made one good product, search, a quarter of a century ago. That opened conduit to the capital markets that gave Google an effectively limitless budget to buy competitors.So it didn’t matter that everything Google made in-house failed — videos, social media, wifi balloons, smart cities, they couldn’t even keep an RSS Reader alive!Because they were able to buy other peoples’ companies — mobile, ad tech, videos, maps, documents, satellites, server management. Google isn’t Willy Wonka’s magic idea factory, they’re Rich Uncle Pennybags, spending other peoples’ money to buy the products they themselves are too ossified and lumbering to create.
They were able to sell goods below cost, which let the deepest-pocketed companies bankrupt their competitors, and prevent new companies from entering the market. Think of Amazon, which tried to buy diapers.com, got rejected, and then lit $100m on fire selling diapers below cost, until diapers.com went bankrupt.
When Apple reversed Office and built iWork, Microsoft just had to suck it up. In the ensuing decades, Apple — and Microsoft, Facebook, Google and other tech giants — have secured changes to law, regulation and their interpretations that make doing unto them as they did unto others radioactivelyillegal.
Tech companies can twiddle the knobs whenever they want, without explanation or transparency, and we can’t get a law passed to make them stop compulsively touching their knobs, because in the world of five giants websites each filled with screenshots of the other four, they can easily agree that these rules are bad, and they can mobilize their monopoly casino winnings to make sure they never pass.
Step one: consolidated industries eliminate competition through predatory pricing and acquisitions. Step two: tech companies play a high-speed shell-game on the back end, and use their consolidation to bigfoot any attempt to constrain their twiddling (like privacy, labor, or fair trading laws). Now we come to step thre: where tech companies embrace tech laws, laws that make it illegal to twiddle back at them, the IP laws that create felony contempt of business-model, criminalizing the adversarial interoperability, that once acted as garbage collection for enshittified, bloated, top-heavy companies, letting nimble, innovative players drain off their users, eat their lunch and dance on their graves.Put these three factors together — consolidation, unrestricted twiddling for them, a total ban on twiddling for us — and enshittification becomes inevitable.
We don’t want to wait that long for a new good internet, and we don’t have to. Because tech is different: it is universal. It is interoperable, and that means we have options we’ve never had before.Interoperability options: options that devolve control over technology from giant companies to small companies, co-ops, nonprofits, and communities of users themselves.Interop is how we seize the means of computation.
First things first: we need to limit twiddling.Pass comprehensive federal privacy laws with private right of action, meaning that you can sue if your privacy is violated, even if the local public prosecutor doesn’t think you deserve justice.End worker misclassification through the so-called gig economy, meaning that every worker is entitled to minimum wages, a safe workplace, and fair scheduling.Apply normal consumer protection standards to ecommerce platforms and search engines, banning deceptive advertising, fake reviews, and misleading search results that put fake businesses and products ahead of the best matches.
Then we need to open the walled gardens. Laws like the EU’s Digital Markets Act will force tech platforms to stand up APIs that allow new platforms to connect to them. This interop will make switching costs low. So you can leave Facebook or Twitter and go to Mastodon, Diaspora — or Bluesky or some new platform — and still exchange messages with the people you left behind, and participate in the communities that matter to you, and connect with the customers you rely on.
To make mandatory APIs work, we need to make robust interoperability preferable to behind-the-scenes fuckery, we need to align tech giants’ incentives so they encourage competition, rather than sabotaging it.
in addition to the mandatory interop that’s already coming down the pike, we need to restore the right to mod, tinker, reverse and hack these services.
If we have the right to mod existing service to restore busted API functionality, then any company that’s tempted to nerf its API has to consider the possibility that you are going to come along and scrape its site or reverse its apps to make the API work again.That means that the choice for tech giants isn’t “Keep the API and lose my discontented users or nerf the API and screw my competitors.” It’s: “Keep the API and lose my discontented users or, nerf the API and get embroiled in unquantifiable guerilla warfare against engineers who have the attackers’ advantage, meaning I have to be perfect, and they only have to find and exploit a single error I make.”
Governments should require that every tech company that sells them a product or service has to promise not to interfere with interop.That’s just prudent public administration. Lincoln insisted that every rifle-supplier for the Union army used interoperable tooling and ammo. Of course he did! “Sorry boys, war’s cancelled, our sole supplier decided not to make any more bullets.”
Every digital system procured by every level of government should come with a binding covenant not to impede interop — from the cars in government motor-pools to Google Classroom in public schools to iPhones in public agencies.
Your shareholders’ priorities are your problem. Public agencies are charged with doing the people’s business.
It’s frankly surreal that the way we keep Facebook’s partners from abusing your info is by asking Facebook to decide what is and isn’t acceptable.Remember: Cambridge Analytica was a Facebook partner. So whether you’re using an API or you’re fielding an interoperable app that relies on scraping and reversing, you will be bound by those same laws, passed by democratically accountable lawmakers in public proceedings, not by shareholder accountable corporate executives in closed-door meetings.
They’re just able to buy their way to dominance, merging with competitors, until they have the money and the unity of purpose to capture our laws, to give them the freedom to abuse us without limit, and to criminalize anything we do to defend ourselves.To stop them we need to block new merger, and unwind existing ones, limit their ability to twiddle the back end to keep their users and business customers in a constant state of confusion, and restore our ability to twiddle back, to give ourselves an internet operated by and for the people who use it: the new, good internet that is the worthy successor to the old, good internet.
Remember when tech workers dreamed of working for a big company for a few years, before striking out on their own to start their own company that would knock that tech giant over?Then that dream shrank to: work for a giant for a few years, quit, do a fake startup, get acqui-hired by your old employer, as a complicated way of getting a bonus and a promotion.Then the dream shrank further: work for a tech giant for your whole life, get free kombucha and massages on Wednesdays.And now, the dream is over. All that’s left is: work for a tech giant until they fire your ass, like those 12,000 Googlers who got fired six months after a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next 27 years.
“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.”
Niche Internet