Breaking Digital Shackles 1

Separating the Baby from the Bathwater

Background: Enshittification

In the circles I travel in, there’s a lot of talk of enshittification (thanks, Cory Doctorow) and various related framings: technofeudalism, rot economy, etc.

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market", where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

Cory Doctorow

Doctorow is a prolific and tireless drum beater for the cause. I think, for the most part, he and fellow travelers like Ed Zitron and Paris Marx have valid grievances and highlight real problems. There are a few main issues I have with their perspective.

I think they are generally too cavalier in dismissing the very real benefit that these platforms still provide, and how even in a deteriorated state, they represent a tangible benefit to users and a genuine improvement over the pre-existing status quo; more arguable for Google, Apple, and Amazon perhaps than Meta.

More concretely, I find Doctorow et al.’s solutions blunt and technically lacking. To his credit, Doctorow has proposed a wide variety of options, some with more nuance than others. Let’s briefly summarize these.

1. Break Up Big Tech: Advocate for antitrust enforcement to dismantle large tech conglomerates and restore competition in the market.

2. Promote Interoperability: Implement laws and regulations that require tech platforms to be interoperable. This would allow users to switch services without losing access to their networks, thereby lowering switching costs and encouraging competition.

3. Adversarial Interoperability: Encourage and legalize the practice of adversarial interoperability, where competitors can legally create compatibility with dominant platforms to offer alternative services without being blocked or sued.

4. Comprehensive Privacy Legislation: Push for strong privacy laws that give individuals the right to sue if their privacy is violated, ensuring that platforms cannot exploit user data without consequence.

5. Labor and Consumer Protection: Enforce stricter labor laws to prevent gig economy abuses and establish consumer protection standards that prevent deceptive practices by digital platforms.

6. Government Procurement Standards: Use government procurement as a tool to require that tech products and services purchased are compatible with interoperability standards, thus promoting open access and competition.

7. Encourage and Support Smaller Entities: Support the development and sustainability of smaller tech companies, co-ops, and non-profits that can offer alternatives to the major platforms, diversifying the market and reducing the risk of monopolistic behaviors.

Analysis of Prescriptions

So right out of the gate, we could easily add adversarial in front of all of these options. Everything presented here is all stick and no carrot. While I share the root concern of enshittification, the prospect of solving technical problems through legislation is a terribly blunt and has a very mixed track record, often combining sensible and insensible aims with breathtakingly ignorant implementations, e.g. GDPR.

Break Up Big Tech, Comprehensive Privacy Legislation, Labor and Consumer Protection

I’m not going to address Break Up Big Tech, Comprehensive Privacy Legislation, Labor and Consumer Protection at length because they are all legalistic mechanisms, and, I’d argue misplaced.

Should the US be working to find a better balance in antitrust? Absolutely.

Do I think focusing on Google and Amazon who provide real value to consumers over LiveNation, Comcast, and the airline oligopoly is the right priority? Not really, and while it need not be an either/or question a clear analysis of potential costs and benefits is necessary.

There are legitimate concerns about what this break up would mean, users are big beneficiaries of Google/Apple ecosystems. And the recent preferred strategy of using the trustbuster’s toolkit to stop acquisitions of start ups as a method of inhibiting further growth is questionable at best, for instance, see this interesting take by John Carmack.

Should we work out a better system for taxing and providing healthcare to non-full time employees? Definitely.

Should the US do more to combat deceptive advertising practices and implement a real consumer data protection standard? Again, yes.

But I would argue these again aren’t big-tech-only or even big-tech-first fixes. As much hatred as it gets from the cognoscenti, the free products for advertising data business model has been both palatable and a tremendous boon to consumers and provided a viable revenue model to businesses. This is not an argument against guardrails. But strangling the golden goose should be a real concern. A fractured landscape of paid products would be a poor replacement to the status quo.

Government Procurement Standards

Government Procurement Standards are a total rat’s nest and a topic deserving of their own post, for another day. But given the absolute self-inflicted pain of how the US government currently does this tacking on an interoperability requirement to somehow halt enshittification seems both unclear, counterproductive, and at best some weak tea.

Getting governments to rely on common platforms and standards at all rather than focusing on bespoke dumpster fires would be a huge win with or without interoperability built in. In my experience building technical solutions for governments and seeing their procurement, the issue they face is far more often treating their problems as unique snowflakes requiring specific narrow solutions than choosing to leveraging broad commercial platforms and standards.

The original sin of government procurement belongs to the governments who created these rules not the Microsoft solution architects who worship at their altar.

Encourage and Support Smaller Entities

Encourage and Support Smaller Entities feels like it belongs in a special category for pleasant sounding but horrible. The truth is I’d much rather, in general, have my data and my money with a few, large, and well-established entities. While data breaches, leaks, deletions, and outages at big tech understandably consume disproportionate media space, big tech companies have the time, money, bandwidth, skills, and incentives to care a lot about financial and data security.

Also, in the case of big tech, consumers, particularly less technically savvy ones, are often quite happy with the trade-off. IPhone users have a beautiful curated garden where everything works and integrates. While third-party integrations are possible and should certainly be encouraged, first-party integrations have a lot to recommend them in terms of quality of integration and convenience.

Imagine fragmenting the Google and Apple ecosystems. How would these smaller entities interoperate? Would there be the need to set up explicit integrations and data syncing? Would we see a proliferation of OAuth providers? How about device and identity integration?

The model of a few large players delivers real synergies to consumers. I like that Google is my one stop shop for: payment, email, passwords, documents, calendar, subscriptions, photos, etc. Apple ecosystem members probably like it even more. There is a lock-in cost to be sure; ask anyone who has ever switched from Apple to Google. But the idea of fragmenting all of the different Google products and services into smaller entities just seems like a data, security and compliance nightmare that is a recipe to throw into reverse generally beneficial market forces— leaving users worse off. It’s the old kill Walmart argument in new clothes; Higher prices and less accessibility, no thank you. And, as we’ll discuss later I think there are ways to nurture smaller entities without dismembering giants. Fungi growing amidst the trunks and roots of trees.

Promote Interoperability and Adversarial Interoperability

That leaves us with: Promote Interoperability and Adversarial Interoperability. There’s really something here, and we’ll use following pieces to make our own detailed proposal for how to leverage these approaches.

But in his desire to twist the screws on Big Tech and uphold his a techno-leftist ideals, Doctorow throws out the baby with the bath water.

You can shear a sheep a hundred times, but you can skin it only once.

Amarillo Slim

These concepts of Doctorow’s can be developed and refined into something more valuable, less adversarial, more pragmatic, and more achievable. We want to shear the golden rams not slaughter them.

A quick note on interoperability. When people talk about interoperability in the social network space they generally reference the ActivityPub protocol. First off, hats off to the folks in the open source community who put together work like this and move these sorts of open standards forward. It’s noble and demanding work. A nod to Meta as well for pushing for Threads to, eventually, adopt the ActivityPub protocol. However, interoperability is a floor not a ceiling.

Post, like, super like, heart, comment, thread, repost, remix, filter, GIF respond, reblog— we are constantly inventing new verbs and methods to present and interact with content. Interoperability must lag behind innovation because it represents a base, lowest-common-denominator integration between multiple competing and collaborating entities with disjoint functionalities.

Conclusion

In the browser wars, one of the main things that led to Internet Explorer’s dominance was its tight integration with Windows and the ability to offer superior experiences on top of interoperable protocols. Interoperability is beneficial but interoperability with extension allows the creation of bespoke and superior experiences for users.

However, this comes with an important caveat: without a commitment to eventual interoperability, the end result is decay and death. This is the second half of Internet Explorer’s story. While Internet Explorer initially pushed the web forward for a decade by extending beyond interoperability, it subsequently retarded progress for another decade by failing to embrace interoperability and web standards. This failure led to Internet Explorer’s fall into irrelevance and obsolescence as web standards evolved and more standards-compliant browsers such as Firefox and Chrome emerged to replace it. We’ll take this lesson forward with as we aim to develop our own model for an interoperability which nurtures innovation and frees us from the cycle of enshittification.

Next Time

The scene is set. We’ve provided background on enshittification, reviewed Doctorow’s recommendations, found them lacking, and distilled a focus on promoting interoperability as the foundation for our own approach to breaking the digital shackles of enshittification, separating the baby from the bathwater in Doctorow’s argument.

By focusing on interoperability, which nurtures innovation, we aim to create a diverse and healthy digital biome. Subsequent posts in this series will outline the goals of our proposed solution and dive into our recommendations for implementation.