{"id":203499,"date":"2025-10-16T05:33:09","date_gmt":"2025-10-16T05:33:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/203499\/"},"modified":"2025-10-16T05:33:09","modified_gmt":"2025-10-16T05:33:09","slug":"is-the-internet-getting-worse-and-what-can-we-do-about-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/203499\/","title":{"rendered":"Is the internet getting worse \u2014 and what can we do about it?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"STYLE\"<\/p>\n

The internet isn\u2019t what we were promised. In its infancy, Google\u2019s <\/a>stated ambition was to \u201corganise the world\u2019s information and make it universally accessible and useful\u201d; today, you\u2019ll have to wade through adverts to complete a simple search. Paid-for subscription services, such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, continue to build paywalls around ad-free viewing, marketing them as \u201cplus\u201d or \u201cpremium\u201d accounts. You\u2019re not imagining it \u2014 things have been getting worse.<\/p>\n

For the past decade, Cory Doctorow \u2014 blogger, digital rights activist, and Big Tech giant slayer \u2014 has dedicated his work to chronicling the decline in quality of the internet and digital platforms. He\u2019s even given it a name: enshittification.<\/p>\n

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Cory Doctorow has 34 books to his name, spanning fiction, non-fiction and graphic novels<\/p>\n

Supplied<\/p>\n

His new book, The Age of Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It, charts in granular detail the monopolisation of the tech space. He argues that Big Tech <\/a>no longer faces significant competition in the market \u2014 a key driver of improvement and innovation \u2014 so standards have dropped, prioritising shareholder value over user experience.<\/p>\n

More than this, he argues, these companies \u2014 Apple<\/a>, Microsoft<\/a>, Google, and others \u2014 have developed multifaceted levels of skulduggery and corporate bullying, such as the weaponisation of IP law and the manipulation of interoperability standards, all to rip people off and squash competition. This, he says, doesn\u2019t just affect the consumer \u2014 everyone is getting a poor deal, including businesses, publishers and advertisers.<\/p>\n

Coined in a blog post in 2022, enshittification tapped into a vein of widespread discontent and was popularised in a way that no one could have predicted, becoming the American Dialect Society\u2019s word of the year in 2023. \u201cI just used the term in a throwaway tweet once when I was having a strop about TripAdvisor,\u201d Doctorow tells me \u2014 the Canadian author, who wrote nine books in lockdown, is never short of words.<\/p>\n

Good, to bad, to worse…<\/p>\n

His theory of enshittification follows a clear formula. First, the product is genuinely good, meaning users become reliant on it, and quitting the service would be a pain. Then, the platform prioritises its business customers through mass advertising, worsening the user experience. Next, it exploits the business partners who, like the users, have become dependent on the platform for revenue.<\/p>\n

The book\u2019s most fascinating revelation is Big Tech\u2019s use of interoperability. Ever noticed how difficult it is to run PC games on a Mac? That\u2019s a lack of interoperability \u2014 the control and monetisation of alternative software and programmes that aren\u2019t native to the device. This, Doctorow argues, subverts hundreds of years of ownership law. Despite buying your iPhone <\/a>or Windows computer, you still don\u2019t really have control over your device.<\/p>\n

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Who cares if I can\u2019t run an alternative programme on my iPhone? \u201cWhat if I tell you that everything you buy on your iPhone is drastically more expensive, because Apple takes a 30 per cent cut of everything sold on the App Store,\u201d says Doctorow. \u201cNobody cares, in abstract, about whose shoelaces are in their shoes, but if you tell them they can only use the Nike shoelaces in their Nikes \u2014 and they\u2019ll cost an extra tenner \u2014 they might take issue.\u201d <\/p>\n

This is one of the central tenets of enshittification: once you\u2019re on the platform or device, you\u2019re locked in. So, is there any way of minimising our exploitation by these vast forces controlling cyberspace? <\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s pretty limited stuff we can do as individuals,\u201d Doctorow says. \u201cIn the same way it doesn\u2019t really matter how carefully you sort your recyclables \u2014 there are still going to be floods and wildfires. These aren\u2019t individual problems; they\u2019re systemic.\u201d For Doctorow, the answer to enshittification lies in government action.<\/p>\n

Is regulation the answer?<\/p>\n

With Joe Biden\u2019s presidency having begun to place limits on companies like Amazon and Microsoft\u2019s market control \u2014 through bodies such as the FTC \u2014 Donald Trump\u2019s re-election marked a setback for regulatory ambitions. Lina Khan, the former head of the FTC, whom Doctorow extensively praises in the book, promptly resigned after Trump\u2019s return to office.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Tech bosses including Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk attended Donald Trump\u2019s inauguration<\/p>\n

AP<\/p>\n

Led by the Department of Commerce, Trump 2.0 has embarked on a deregulating mission to assert the US\u2019s dominance over China in the race for AI <\/a>\u2014 symbolised by the phalanx of tech bigwigs surrounding him at his inauguration. If you want a flavour of what Silicon Valley thinks of regulation, earlier this month Peter Thiel<\/a>, founder of Palantir and co-founder of PayPal, equated regulators to the \u201canti-Christ\u201d.<\/p>\n

With America\u2019s position clear, the onus is now on other governments to limit Big Tech\u2019s reach and stimulate competition in the market. Despite setbacks, Doctorow thinks public opinion is shifting: \u201cWe are starting to have this collective feeling that there\u2019s something rotten with Big Tech.\u201d<\/p>\n

Doctorow is an activist who focuses so wholeheartedly on the negatives of tech that it\u2019s easy to forget the remarkable achievements of companies such as OpenAI and SpaceX. At times, the book can feel more like a scattered list of gripes than an all-encompassing thesis.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s difficult to argue that many of the platforms we use every day haven\u2019t got worse. Just last week, AI-generated fake copies of Doctorow\u2019s new book were found to be available on Amazon. <\/p>\n

The irony was not lost on Doctorow, who posted on X: \u201cLove that the slop merchants are using my book to (further) enshittify Amazon, and that Amazon\u2019s terrible QA standards are letting \u2019em do it.\u201d If that doesn\u2019t prove enshittification, I don\u2019t know what will.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The internet isn\u2019t what we were promised. In its infancy, Google\u2019s stated ambition was to \u201corganise the world\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":203500,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[844,1638,13934,227,86,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-203499","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-internet","8":"tag-google","9":"tag-internet","10":"tag-musk","11":"tag-tech","12":"tag-technology","13":"tag-uk","14":"tag-united-kingdom","15":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203499","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=203499"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203499\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/203500"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=203499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=203499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=203499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}