For Google Search to increase its profits, it must shift value from web publishers, advertisers and/or users to itself. The only way for Google Search to grow is to make itself worse.

Google’s product managers are each charged with finding ways to increase the profitability of their little corner of the googleverse. That increased profitability can only come from enshittification. Every product manager on Google Search spends their workdays figuring out how to remove a Jenga block. What’s worse, these princelings compete with one another. Their individual progression through the upper echelons of Google’s aristocracy depends as much on others failing as it does on their success. The org chart only has so many VP, SVP and EVP boxes on it, and each layer is much smaller than the previous one. If you’re a VP, every one of your colleagues who makes it to SVP takes a spot that you can no longer get. Those spots are wildly lucrative. Each tier of the hierarchy is worth an order of magnitude more than the tier beneath it. The stakes are so high that they are barely comprehensible. That means that every one of these Jenga-block-pulling execs is playing blind: they don’t — and can’t — coordinate on the ways they’re planning to lower quality in order to improve profits. The exec who decided to save money by reducing the stringency of phone number checking for business accounts didn’t announce this in a company-wide memo. When you’re eating your seed-corn, it’s imperative that you do so behind closed doors, and tell no one what you’ve done. Like any sleight-of-hand artist, you want the audience to see the outcome of the trick (the cost savings), not how it’s done (exposing every searcher in the world to fraud risk to save a buck).

Google/Apple’s mobile duopoly is more cozy than competitive. Google pays Apple $15–20 billion, every single year, to be the default search in Safari and iOS. If Google and Apple were competing over mobile, you’d expect that one of them would drop the sky-high 30 percent rake they charge on in-app payments, but that would mess up their mutual good thing. Instead, these “competitors” charge exactly the same price for a service with minimal operating costs.

your bank, your insurer, your beer company, the companies that make your eyeglasses and your athletic shoes — they’ve all run out of lands to conquer, but instead of weeping, they’re taking it out on you, with worse products that cost more.

Netflix could buy 10 top quality screenplays per year with the cash they’ll spend on that one job.  They must have big plans for AI.There are also a half dozen AI job openings at Disney. And the tech-based streamers (Apple, Amazon) already have made big investments in AI. Sony launched an AI business unit in April 2020—in order to “enhance human imagination and creativity, particularly in the realm of entertainment.”

When Spotify launched on the stock exchange in 2018, it was losing around $30 million per month. Now it’s much larger, and is losing money at the pace of more than $100 million per month.

But the real problem at Spotify isn’t just convincing people to pay more. It runs much deeper. Spotify finds itself in the awkward position of asking people to pay more for a lousy interface that degrades the entire user experience.

Boredom is built into the platform, because they lose money if you get too excited about music—you’re like the person at the all-you-can-eat buffet who goes back for a third helping. They make the most money from indifferent, lukewarm fans, and they created their interface with them in mind. In other words, Spotify’s highest aspiration is to be the Applebee’s of music.

They need to prepare for a possible royalty war against record labels and musicians—yes, that could actually happen—and they do that by creating a zombie world of brain dead listeners who don’t even know what artist they’re hearing. I know that sounds extreme, but spend some time on the platform and draw your own conclusions.