All internet platforms are similar to each other, especially in the way they decline. According to Canadian journalist and digital activist Cory Doctorow, the sequence repeats itself over and over again: first they are good to users, offering the best search results (Google), the most effective way to connect with friends without being spied on (Facebook), or the cheapest products (Amazon). Secondly, they forget about users and start concentrating on the interests of their business clients, trafficking our data to sell them advertising spaces that drastically worsen our user experience. Until their monopolistic power and network effects allow them to also mistreat these clients, unilaterally altering their contracts with increases in rates and reductions in services provided. Doctorow has been writing about the process since 2022, when to describe it he coined the term enshittification – a term that could be translated as shit -, declared word of the year by the American Dialect Society in 2023. The neologism also gives the title to Doctorow’s latest book, shortlisted by the Financial Times for the list of the best business publications of 2025, where it analyzes the reasons that lead platforms to comply with this decadent sequence. It is not something that depends on the virtue or evil of the people in charge of these platforms, he explains to EL PAÍS during a telephone interview, «but something that happens again and again because the rules of the game that we have created allow it, we invite them to do things wrong, and they respond to our invitation by doing things wrong.» Among the rules of the game that according to Doctorow allow this decline are the laws that veto any attempt to improve applications or devices that include software under the pretext that doing so violates the intellectual property of the creator. It is these intellectual property laws that make it illegal to modify a smartphone to accept apps from alternative stores to the official monopoly, those that prevent delivery drivers from adapting the application so that it does not take advantage of their vulnerability by offering them less and less money per delivery, or those that prohibit hacking the Facebook app to remove annoying advertising. As the headquarters of the main technology companies, the United States has also been the great promoter of these intellectual property laws, imposing them on the partners with which it has signed treaties. commercials. But in a situation where these trade agreements are being unilaterally altered by the Trump Administration, the validity of these intellectual property laws could be the next thing to fall, says Doctorow, who links it to the Putin moment that the European Union experienced after the large-scale invasion of Ukraine. “In the European Union there were also a lot of rules that made the transition to solar energy difficult, but when the invasion occurred [y se redujo drásticamente la llegada de hidrocarburos por gasoductos] «It became clear that those rules were less important than guaranteeing energy independence, so many regulations were lifted and now Europe is 10 years ahead of what it had predicted in its energy transition goals,» he explains. «In the United States we now have Trump, who can use American technology companies to put pressure on European governments and companies that he sees as rivals, and that creates an opportunity to boost Europe’s technological sovereignty.» In Doctorow’s opinion, technological dependence on the United States is an increasingly risky bet. The station France Info radio published a report in October about French judge Nicolas Guillou, who presides over a chamber on Palestine at the International Criminal Court (ICC) and has lost access to his personal accounts on Amazon, Airbnb, Netflix, and Paypal, due to the sanctions that the Trump Administration imposed on the ICC following the arrest warrant against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Before that, the Associated Press news agency had already published an article about the interruption of Microsoft’s email service to Karim Khan, the prosecutor. head of the ICC. “This is an implicit threat to all governments: if you do not submit to Trump, his technology companies will cut off your legs,” says Doctorow. Of course, to get out of that dependence, the first thing to do is create instruments that allow the export of content, currently on the servers of those same technology companies, which in many cases could only be done by violating intellectual property laws. «You are going to realize that it is impossible to have digital sovereignty if we maintain them,» he explains. Another rule that, according to Doctorow, has spurred the enshittification of platforms is the forgetting of the laws that protected us against the formation of large monopolies. Since the time of Ronald Reagan, the vision of maximizing consumer profit has prevailed, tolerating monopolies as long as they result in a drop in prices (popularized by Robert Bork in his 1978 book The antitrust paradox). The problem, says Doctorow, is that monopolies cause other harm, even if the price of their product is zero, as is the case with many internet services.
Leonine conditions
One of them is that these monopolies tend to become monopsonies, almost sole buyers that exert excessive pressure on the companies and freelancers who need the platforms to access their users. From the leonine margins they charge to companies that want to participate on the platform (advertisers and those who offer products or services, for example) to the enslaving conditions they impose on their freelancers (riders and drivers). In Doctorow’s opinion, focusing only on the price of goods and services is forgetting that consumers are also workers or owners of small businesses and need the platforms to survive. “If salaries and income stagnate, when debt-financed consumption ends, you will end up having a consumption problem as well.” The good news, he says, is that this laxity in the exercise of competition law could also be ending. “In the EU as a whole, in South Korea, in Japan, in Singapore and in Canada, vigorous actions are beginning to be seen to defend competition law,” he explains. “This is a movement that has not been led by politicians, but rather that politicians have simply followed,” he concludes.
