How to stop Enshittification: Cory Doctorow’s Bold Blueprint for a Better Internet

It’s easy to look back on the early days of the internet and feel a wave of nostalgia. Cory Doctorow, in his DEF CON 31 talk, puts it bluntly: “I am now old. I turned 52 last month… I have two artificial hips, cataracts in both my eyes. I am old as dirt.” He jokes about receiving his AARP “complaint card,” claiming that the card gives him permission to gripe about how things used to be better. But in this case, his complaints about the internet’s past ring true.

The “old good internet” was filled with promise: open spaces, genuine discoveries, connections that felt organic. Now, many people feel stuck in a web dominated by a handful of massive platforms, all playing by their own rules. Doctorow asks: How did we get here, why do things feel so broken, and what would it take to build a better internet for everyone?

What Is “Enshittification”? The Platform Death Spiral

“Enshittification” isn’t just a funny word—it’s Doctorow’s term for the predictable path that online platforms take as they grow. First, platforms lure us in by being great for users. Then, they begin to exploit us for the benefit of businesses. Last, they squeeze those businesses in favor of shareholder profits, leaving a hollow shell of what once was.

Here’s how the cycle plays out:

1. Be great to users. Platforms invest cash in making things delightful, often at a loss.
2. Exploit users for business customers. User experience drops as the platform pivots to please advertisers and vendors.
3. Exploit businesses for shareholders. Prices go up, access gets restricted, and all remaining value flees to shareholders. Pretty soon, nobody’s happy, and the platform decays.

Tom Eastman sums it up perfectly: “We live in a world of five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four.” Everything starts to feel the same, and the joy drains out.

What Is a Platform? Understanding the Internet’s New Gatekeepers

A platform is a business that stands between two groups. It connects end users (like you and me) with business customers (advertisers, vendors, publishers). Facebook, for example, bridges users with advertisers and publishers. Uber links drivers with riders. Amazon connects buyers and sellers.

Originally, the internet promised to disintermediate—to push out middlemen, letting people connect directly. But instead, new digital giants stepped in. Now, everything is re-intermediated through a handful of powerful platforms.

Key Terms

• Platform: The company in the middle—think Facebook, Google, Amazon.
• End users: The regular folks using the platform daily.
• Business customers: Advertisers, merchants, or content publishers trying to reach users.

This layer of control gives platforms power over both groups, shaping what’s possible online.

How Platforms Die: The Process of Insidification

Doctorow calls the decline of a platform “insidification.” Once a platform is big enough, things start to rot from the inside out:

• First phase: The platform is good to users, often thanks to investor money.
• Second phase: It begins to abuse users, shifting surplus value toward business customers (like advertisers and content publishers).
• Third phase: Now, business customers get squeezed. Less value, more fees, less control—all so platform owners can rake in maximum profit.

When the value’s gone, people move on. The platform turns into a pile of junk. This isn’t just theory—it’s a story many of us have lived, from fading social sites to e-commerce platforms losing their spark.

Facebook: The Poster Child of Insidification

Facebook’s Early Days

Facebook began as a closed social network for Harvard students, eventually opening up to everyone in 2006. It promised privacy and control—everything MySpace wasn’t—with the assurance: “We will never spy on you, just tell us who matters to you.” The dream? A personal feed filled only with updates from people you chose.

Network Effects and Lock-In

Network effects made Facebook stronger as more joined. If your friends were there, you wanted to be too. But leaving wasn’t easy. Switching costs were high: quitting Facebook meant losing touch with your circle and communities.

Try getting even six friends to agree on dinner plans—now try moving 200 Facebook friends to another platform. Almost impossible. This “mutual hostage situation” glued users (and their friends) to the site.

From Hostage to Exploitation

As Facebook’s user base stabilized, the platform shifted focus:

• Advertisers: Facebook secretly tracked user data for targeted ad sales, betraying initial privacy promises.
• Publishers: Publishers were enticed to share content, getting a “free traffic funnel.” But soon, only full-text posts got reach; click-throughs to their own sites were suppressed. Publishers now depended on Facebook, with little control.
• Mutual Hostage-Taking: Users were stuck because friends were stuck. Publishers and advertisers were stuck because users were there.

The Final Phase: Squeezing Everyone Dry

• Users saw their feeds shrink, packed with ads and paid posts instead of content they actually wanted.
• Advertisers paid more for diminishing results—seeing ad prices soar and quality fall, thanks to rampant fraud and algorithmic confusion.
• Publishers lost the ability to reach their own subscribers unless they played Facebook’s ever-changing game (often providing free full articles with no external links).

All were trapped, and the only real winner was Facebook’s shareholders. But this delicate balance could collapse overnight. Scandals like Cambridge Analytica, live-streamed tragedies, or whistleblowers caused mass exodus events, proving that even the strongest network effect can break.

When people finally get fed up, the moment from “I can’t quit” to “get me out of here now” is razor thin.

Why Network Effects and Switching Costs Keep Us Stuck

Network effects mean the more people who join a service, the better it gets—for a while. But the knife cuts both ways. When a critical mass leaves (or wants to), everyone suddenly has a reason to follow. That’s why platforms can be stable for years, only to collapse quickly once momentum shifts.

Switching costs—social connections, access to history, and community memory—make moving away feel impossible. This “hostage situation” prevents users and businesses from escaping, feeding the cycle of enshittification.

It’s like a party where everyone wants to leave, but nobody wants to be first out the door.

Why Lack of Competition Makes Enshittification Inevitable

For decades, government antitrust enforcement kept companies, especially monopolies, from getting out of control. But since the Carter and Reagan years, those rules have weakened. This led to industry consolidation not only in tech, but everywhere: pharma, airlines, appliances, retail.

With fewer competitors, platforms can treat users and business customers however they like—because, honestly, where else are you going to go? Monopolies aren’t just a bug in tech. They’re a feature of modern capitalism, enabled by lax rules.

How Money Becomes a Weapon: Predatory Pricing and Acquisitions

Big tech doesn’t always win because it’s better. Often, it just has deeper pockets. Predatory pricing lets giants like Amazon sell products below cost, running competitors into the ground. When Amazon tried to buy diapers.com and was refused, it sold diapers at a loss until the startup collapsed, then scooped it up.

Meanwhile, companies like Google stopped building things in-house and started buying them:

• Bought Android for mobile.
• Acquired YouTube for video.
• Snapped up DoubleClick for ads.
• Picked up Waze for maps.

Apple buys about 90 companies per year. These giants snuff out newcomers and buy potential rivals before they become a threat, shrinking the space for real competition.

Adversarial Interoperability: How Hackers Fueled and Fought Monopoly

Computers are universal—they can run any software you dream up. This made adversarial interoperability possible: hackers using reverse engineering, scraping, or bots to link or move data between systems, often against the wishes of the original platform.

A classic example: When Facebook wanted users to leave MySpace, it provided a bot for users to import MySpace messages into Facebook inboxes. This sort of tool—built by hackers or companies themselves—helped break open silos and keep the web vibrant.

Adversarial interoperability once allowed rivals to thrive by draining off users and revenue from dominant players. But once these giants were established, they worked—often together—to shut these practices down.

Why Big Tech Criminalizes User “Twiddling”

Once the tech giants grew, they worked to make it illegal for others to do what they’d done: connect, reverse engineer, or modify their platforms. The legal arsenal includes:

• DMCA Section 1201: Outlaws bypassing digital lockouts, with severe penalties.
• Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA): Criminalizing many forms of data scraping and hacking.
• Intellectual Property Law: Used to block competitors, critics, and even users from modding or extending products.

Editing your browser to block ads is legal, since browsers are still open. But modding an app for the same purpose is often a felony. The result is one-sided: Companies can tweak their systems at will, while users risk lawsuits or jail for trying to take back control.

Platforms as Rigged Casinos and Skinner Boxes

Today’s platforms operate like slot machines or Skinner boxes, constantly adjusting what you see and how rewards are distributed. They manipulate feeds, boost some posts, bury others, and change the payout levels for content, all on a whim.

No one but the platform knows what’s really happening behind the scenes. It’s impossible for users, advertisers, or even big publishers to tell if they’re getting a fair deal. This confusion and opacity keep us coming back, hoping for a win—even when the house always wins.

The Three Steps to Inevitable Enshittification

Doctorow explains that enshittification happens when three conditions hit at once:

1. Consolidation: A few firms dominate, often through predatory pricing and mergers.
2. Unrestricted twiddling: Companies can tweak their algorithms and features without oversight.
3. Criminalization of user-side tweaks: Laws ban scraping, modding, hacking—adversarial interoperability dies.

When these three combine, platforms inevitably decay into junk, draining value from users and businesses alike.

Breaking Up Big Tech: New Hope on the Horizon

The good news? Antitrust enforcement is making a comeback. For the first time in decades, the US government and agencies like the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) are taking real action. FTC Chair Lina Khan, along with others, is pushing hard to block mergers, break up monopolies, and foster competition. The bipartisan America Act—co-sponsored by Senator Ted Cruz and Senator Elizabeth Warren—aims to split up giants like Facebook and Google.

Legal and regulatory timelines are long (AT&T took 69 years to break up), but the movement is gathering steam. For once, Big Tech is on the defensive.

Tech’s Interoperability: The Hidden Key to a New Internet

Unlike 19th-century oil barons, the tech world is built on universal, programmable machines. This makes it uniquely suited to openness—if policy allows.

• Users could switch services more easily if platforms allowed interoperability.
• Small companies, co-ops, and user communities could compete directly with giants.
• Innovation would accelerate, and users could choose services that actually serve them.
• Open protocols, APIs, and mod-friendly designs can restore choice and reduce lock-in.

Interoperability would lower barriers, spark competition, and let us build a “new good internet.”

The Policies We Need: Limiting Corporate Twiddling

How do we stop enshittification in its tracks? Doctorow lays out a clear path forward.

Federal Privacy Laws with Private Right of Action

Give people the power to sue for privacy breaches, instead of relying on overwhelmed public prosecutors. Let individuals have real teeth against abuse.

End Worker Misclassification in the Gig Economy

Ban tricks that allow companies to deny gig workers fair pay and workplace protections. Every worker should have basic rights—including a living wage, safe conditions, and fair scheduling.

Enforce Real Consumer Protections for E-commerce and Search

End deceptive advertising, fake reviews, and misleading search results that let scams outrank honest businesses. Put real consumer protection back into online commerce.

Opening Up Walled Gardens: The Case for Mandatory Open APIs

Laws like the European Union’s Digital Markets Act are now forcing big platforms to open up APIs (application programming interfaces). This means users could leave platforms like Facebook or Twitter for alternatives like Mastodon or Bluesky, but still keep up with contacts who stay behind.

The benefits:

• Easier switching for users and businesses.
• Open competition that breaks the stranglehold of walled gardens.
• More innovation and diversity in online spaces.

But there are risks. Platforms may claim “security concerns” or invent emergencies to cut off rivals’ access. Since only insiders truly understand a platform’s infrastructure, it can take years to resolve disputes when platforms cheat.

Making Interoperability Robust and Honest

To curb sabotage and foster real openness, incentives must change:

• Penalize platforms that cheat or weaponize security claims to deny fair access.
• Use regulatory agencies and courts to enforce compliance, appointing independent supervisors where needed.
• Press governments to require interoperability from any vendor hoping to win public contracts.

Some specific strategies:

• Impose fines for false claims or unjustified API shutdowns.
• Mandate transparency in algorithmic and security decisions.
• Prioritize user choice and empowerment in enforcement decisions.
• Hold platform executives directly accountable for bad decisions that harm users or partners.

This isn’t just theory—it’s a plan for action.

User Modding and Adversarial Interoperability: The People’s Hidden Power

When companies know that users and hackers can restore lost features or APIs, they think twice before slashing support or cheating competitors. This “guerrilla warfare” means a company has to be perfect in its defenses—while a single hacker mistake can undo them.

• Adversarial interoperability is the process of modding, scraping, or reverse engineering to make platforms work better for users.
• User modding helps restore lost freedoms, support, or features intentionally crippled by platform owners.

When clubs, companies, or regulators protect user civil rights to mod, platforms become more accountable and less likely to “enshittify” their products.

Legal Reforms: Bringing Balance Back

Rolling back laws that criminalize user tinkering is a long project, but urgent:

• Reform or repeal DMCA Section 1201 and overly broad CFAA statutes.
• Narrow IP laws so they can’t be used to squash honest competition and innovation.
• Ensure new antitrust and privacy-focused policies keep up with rapid technological change.

This isn’t just for hackers and nerds. It’s a shift back toward a world where users, not just companies, shape their digital experiences.

Enforcing Interoperability: How to Keep Platforms Honest

Independent oversight can make a difference:

• Special masters: Court-appointed experts who review platform claims about security or API shutdowns, ensuring they act in good faith.
• Government procurement requirements: Any product sold to a government must promise not to block or sabotage interoperability.

This approach flips the script—forcing platforms to prove necessity, rather than letting them block innovation by default.

Using Public Procurement to Drive Change

Governments, as massive customers, have leverage. They can demand that tech vendors supply products designed for interoperability, just as Abraham Lincoln’s administration once standardized rifles for reliability during the Civil War.

Government contracts should stipulate interoperability as a requirement—for cars, phones, school systems, and more. If vendors balk, they can find another line of work.

Procurement isn’t just about price—it’s about values. Enforcing interoperability through government buying power can change the entire ecosystem.

Keeping Interoperators Accountable

Opening up platforms and APIs isn’t just about unleashing everyone to do whatever they want. Privacy, labor, and fair trading rules should still apply. Interoperators—even hackers and scrapers—must abide by these protections, just like platforms.

The difference? These rules should come from democratically accountable lawmakers, not corporate boardrooms. No more letting platforms alone decide who’s “good” or “bad” based on their own interests.

It’s Not About Evil Tech Leaders—It’s About Weak Rules

Enshittification isn’t because of uniquely wicked CEOs. It happens when weak laws fail to constrain ordinary people with a lot of power. Previous generations of tech leaders might have acted the same way if they’d been allowed. Instead, we’re called to fix the system before the next generation repeats the same errors.

Doctorow says it best: “When tech companies had to contend with the implosive contraction of low switching costs, they were dynamic—springing up and disappearing all the time. When we stopped enforcing antitrust law, we ended good fire, and we got wildfire.” The result is a tech industry in a state of near-permanent crisis.

Building a New Good Internet Starts Now

A healthy, innovative, and user-friendly internet isn’t a fantasy. It’s within reach if we take real action:

• Stop new mergers and unwind existing monopolies.
• Set hard limits on platform “twiddling,” requiring transparency and fairness.
• Restore users’ right to modify, reverse engineer, and adapt the tools they depend on.
• Push for real, robust privacy and labor protections that serve everyone, not just shareholders.
• Insist that public money is only spent on technology that’s open, interoperable, and accountable.

Conclusion: A Better Internet Is Possible—If We Choose It

Doctorow closes with a call for both urgency and optimism. For years, tech workers dreamed of striking out on their own, making something better than the incumbents. That dream shrank over time—first to “getting acqui-hired” by your old company, then just sticking it out for some free snacks and a steady job, and now, often, working until you’re laid off.

It’s time to dream bigger again. As crisis mounts, the solutions are ready. As economist Milton Friedman once said (though Doctorow can’t help but enjoy the irony): “When a crisis comes, ideas that are lying around can move from the fringe to the center in an instant.” The next crisis is always coming. Let’s make sure the right ideas are ready to move.

Cory Doctorow is fighting for these changes at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). If you care about the future of the internet, it’s worth seeing why so many hackers and tech workers support their # How to Stop Enshittification: Cory Doctorow’s Plan for Saving the Internet

If you’ve ever looked back on the early internet with fondness, you’re not alone. Cory Doctorow, renowned author and EFF activist, opens his DEF CON 31 talk by joking about turning 52, sporting two artificial hips, and earning his “AARP complaint card.” It’s more than a personal milestone—it’s Doctorow’s way of underscoring just how much the internet has aged alongside him. Back in the day, the web felt wide open and full of promise. Things felt better. Now, many people feel stuck in a web dominated by a handful of tech behemoths, longing for something better.

What Is “Enshittification”? The Platform Death Spiral

Doctorow coined the term enshittification to describe the life cycle of online platforms as they grow and decay. At first, platforms shower users with value—community, connection, and handy features. But over time, they start shifting gears:

1. Great to users: Surplus investor cash is spent making things wonderful for users.
2. Squeeze users for business customers: User experience tanks as the platform pivots to please advertisers, sellers, or publishers.
3. Exploit businesses for shareholders: All the leftover value is scraped away to feed company profits, leaving users and business customers worse off.

Eventually, there’s nothing left: the platform is a shell and begins to die. As Tom Eastman put it, we end up with “five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four.”

What Is a Platform?

A platform is just a middleman that connects two sides—for example, drivers and riders (Uber), buyers and sellers (Amazon), or users, publishers, and advertisers (Facebook, Google). Platforms mediate transactions, messages, and content.

In the internet’s early days, many hoped it would “disintermediate”—remove barriers between people. In practice, most things are now re-intermediated: big companies wedge themselves in the middle of nearly every online interaction, locking everyone into their systems.

Platform, end users, and business customers are the three linchpins here. Users enjoy the platform, business customers pay for access to them, and the platform holds the keys.

Insidification: Why and How Platforms Rot

Insidification is Doctorow’s term describing the process of platform decay and collapse:

• Step 1: The platform is great for users. All energy goes to delighting them.
• Step 2: The platform starts favoring business customers, eroding the user experience.
• Step 3: Finally, platforms squeeze business customers too, extracting anything that’s left. Morale and satisfaction plummet until only the shareholders smile.

At this point, the platform offers no real value to anyone who uses or relies on it, and its decline accelerates.

Facebook: The Case Study of Insidification

Facebook’s Early Days

Facebook started in the dorms at Harvard, then opened to all US students before becoming global in 2006. It promised a safe haven from MySpace, boasting better privacy and providing feeds filled only with what you wanted from people you actually cared about.

Network Effects and Lock-In

Platforms grow more valuable as more people join—a phenomenon called network effects. You join Facebook because your friends are there, and they join for you. Leaving becomes hard. Switching costs—giving up connections and group memories—are high. Moving a group en masse to a new network is nearly impossible. This mutual hostage situation locks in both users and, eventually, business customers too.

Exploiting the “Hostages”

Once Facebook had amassed a massive user base, it flipped the script:

• Advertisers: Promised privacy but then secretly surveilled everyone for targeted ads. Early on, ads were cheap, and Facebook cracked down on fraud, making it a great deal.
• Publishers: Asked to upload content directly to Facebook for “free” exposure, only to find themselves forced to submit longer and longer articles while links to their own sites were suppressed.
• Mutual Hostage-Taking: Everyone’s locked in: users can’t leave because their friends won’t, and publishers/advertisers can’t leave because their customers won’t.

The Final Phase: Extraction Overload

As the platform’s value is drained:

• Users see their feeds degraded to homeopathic doses of what they want, lost in a sea of ads and clickbait.
• Advertisers face rising costs, more fraud, and worse metrics.
• Publishers become entirely dependent on Facebook’s audience and ad machine, losing both control and revenue.

That fragile balance can shatter with a major controversy or user exodus—a few scandals, leaked algorithms, or public uproar can suddenly cause the mass exodus everyone was postponing.

Network Effects, Lock-In, and Hostage Taking end up hurting everyone except the shareholders, at least until the platform’s inevitable collapse.

How Network Effects and Switching Costs Control Platform Users

When more people join a service, it becomes even harder for anyone to leave. Network effects lock you in—you need the platform because everyone else does.

But the same reason you stayed becomes the reason to leave if everyone jumps ship. High switching costs (lost social graphs, group history, and content) keep users trapped. It’s like a hostage scenario: you can’t leave because nobody else will, creating a vicious cycle that benefits only the platform.

Lack of Competition: Why Enshittification Is Hard to Avoid

After the Carter and Reagan administrations, US antitrust enforcement was steadily weakened. This allowed massive industry consolidation, not just in tech but everywhere—pharma, airlines, retail, appliances, and more.

Without serious competition, big companies can treat users and business customers however they want. If there’s nowhere else to go, monopolies win. That’s when enshittification hits hardest.

• 1970s-80s: Antitrust laws begin eroding
• 1990s-present: Consolidation accelerates across industries
• Now: Only a handful of giants rule each sector

How Big Tech Uses Money to Crush Competition

Winning in tech isn’t always about building a better product—it’s often about having deeper pockets.

• Predatory pricing: Amazon torched $100M selling diapers below cost to kill diapers.com, then acquired what remained.
• Endless acquisitions: Big firms like Google and Apple snatch up startups and direct competitors before they can become threats. Google famously bought Android, YouTube, Waze, DoubleClick, and scores more.
• Market dominance: When giants own everything, innovation stalls and users lose.

Major acquisitions have included WhatsApp and Instagram (Facebook), Beats and Shazam (Apple), and DeepMind and Nest (Google).

Adversarial Interoperability: How Hackers Once Kept Platforms Honest

Computers can run any software—this is their universality. Adversarial interoperability describes using reverse engineering, scraping, and bots to connect things that aren’t supposed to work together.

• Example: When Facebook wanted MySpace users, it gave them a bot to bring inbox messages from MySpace to Facebook. That competitive hacking fueled growth.
• Benefit: This lets new players siphon off users, push innovation, and keep incumbents in check.
• Paradox: After using such tactics to become giants, the same companies then worked to make them illegal for everyone else.

Why Big Tech Criminalizes User “Twiddling”

“Twiddling” means tinkering with, modding, scraping, or reverse engineering platforms—anything users do to change how platforms work.

To stop competition, tech companies use legal clubs like:

• DMCA Section 1201: Felony for bypassing digital restrictions.
• Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA): Criminalizes broad classes of hacking.
• IP laws: Patent, copyright, and trademark used to threaten or sue interoperators.

If you tweak your browser (e.g., ad block), that’s still safe; but mod an app or bypass DRM, and you could be fined or jailed.

The rules favor big tech: companies can tweak at will, but users face prison for the same.

Platforms as Rigged Casinos and Skinner Boxes

Modern platforms operate with as much transparency and fairness as a rigged casino. Or worse—like a Skinner box, “twiddling knobs” behind the scenes to keep you addicted, confused, and dependent.

Whether you’re a user, an advertiser, or a publisher, you’re guessing at how the game is being played. Platforms never fully explain their rules. This confusion is part of the business model; it cements user dependency.

The Three Steps That Guarantee Enshittification

1. Consolidation: Market domination through purchases, mergers, and price wars.
2. Unrestricted Twiddling: Platforms change the system whenever they want, with no oversight.
3. Criminalization: User hacks and mods get outlawed; interoperability becomes a crime.

Triangulate these and enshittification is inevitable.

Breaking Up Big Tech: The Winds of Change

For the first time in decades, regulators are taking action. With Lina Khan as chair, the FTC is fighting back, blocking anti-competitive mergers, and even pursuing breakups.

The America Act in Congress (co-sponsored by Ted Cruz and Elizabeth Warren) targets Facebook and Google for antitrust action. It’s not easy—undoing decades of inaction takes time. But there’s movement, and that matters.

Learn more about current US antitrust efforts.

Tech’s Universal Software: The Secret Weapon for a Better Internet

Unlike railroads or oil pipelines, tech products are built on universal machines—computers that, in theory, can talk to anything.

• Openness can allow users and small companies to compete fairly with giants.
• Interoperability (open APIs, open protocols) would bring switching costs down, making innovation and competition possible again.
• Communities or co-ops could run services tailored to their own needs.

The upside is huge: more competition, lower prices, and services that work for you.

Interoperability brings:

• Freedom to move between platforms
• Competition on merit, not lock-in
• Tailored services and customization
• Greater user control and privacy choices

The Policies We Need: Putting Users and Workers First

1. Federal Privacy Laws with Private Right of Action

For real privacy, individuals must be able to sue violators—not wait for government prosecutors to step in.

2. Ending Worker Misclassification in the Gig Economy

Every worker deserves a fair wage, safe workplace, and predictable schedule. Gig platforms shouldn’t be able to dodge labor laws by pretending workers are “contractors.”

3. Strong Consumer Protection for E-commerce and Search

Deceptive ads, fake reviews, and misleading rankings must go. Honest results and genuine businesses should always take priority.

Breaking Down Walled Gardens with Open APIs

New laws like the European Union’s Digital Markets Act force major platforms to open up, letting other services connect through APIs. That means you could switch from Facebook to Mastodon or Bluesky and still message your friends on Facebook—without losing touch.

Platforms might try to cheat—faking security “emergencies” to block rivals. Only strong regulation and effective enforcement can stop this.

Making Interoperability Real—Not Just a Promise

• Platforms must face fines or penalties for fake shutdowns of APIs.
• Regulators should use special overseers (“special masters”) to judge platform claims.
• Governments should only buy tech that allows full interoperability—their buying power can move the market.

Ways to keep platforms honest:

• Impose significant penalties for noncompliance
• Demand transparency in all back-end “twiddling”
• Make false emergencies costly for platforms’ executives

The Power of Adversarial Interoperability and Modding

Giving users the right to fix or extend their own platforms keeps companies from sabotaging open APIs.

• If a service is “nerfed” (limited or disabled), hackers and users can step in to restore functionality.
• Companies then face a risk: cut features, and they could end up in an unwinnable war against modders—shareholders don’t like that uncertainty.
• This provides real leverage for consumers.

Legal Reforms Needed to Protect Hackers and Invite Innovation

• Repeal or reform DMCA 1201, CFAA, and other laws used to block interoperability.
• Narrow overly broad terms in copyright and patent that block fair use and competition.
• Make sure competition and innovation are encouraged, not criminalized.

These aren’t just “hacker” issues—they’re common sense rules for a fair digital economy.

Enforcing Interoperability: Preventing Cheating

Regulators need bite, not just bark:

• Special Masters: Court-appointed experts make sure any API shutdown is justified and not a pretext.
• Government Procurement Requirement: Only buy tech products that promise not to block interoperability for users or other platforms.

Public Procurement—A Tool for Change

Just as President Lincoln insisted on standard rifles, governments should only buy digital products that guarantee interoperability.

Imagine every public school, agency, or local government demanding this. It would push vendors toward openness and fair competition, raising the bar for everyone.

Ensuring Interoperators Play Fair and Follow the Rules

Not every platform modder or hacker has pure intentions. Privacy, labor rights, and fair trading rules should apply to all—even those building on open APIs or scraping content.

These must be real, public laws—made by democratically accountable governments, not decided secretly inside boardrooms.

Insidification Isn’t About Evil Leaders—It’s About Weak Systems

We don’t live with enshittification because today’s tech leaders are uniquely evil. The real problem is weak regulation—letting monopolies capture regulators and write their own rules.

Earlier generations of companies would’ve done the same if we let them. Today’s leaders just happen to be in the right (or wrong) place at the right time.

Conclusion: Build the Better Internet Now

The window to fix the internet isn’t closed. Cory Doctorow’s message is clear: We can halt enshittification, but only with bold action.

• Block and undo harmful mergers.
• Limit platform “twiddling” with strong public rules.
• Restore user rights to mod, reverse-engineer, and scrape for a better digital world.
• Demand that every publicly funded tech product be interoperable and user-friendly by law.

As economic shocks and platform chaos continue, we need to put good ideas front and center. With smart policy, open code, and user activism, we can create a new good internet—one where users, not monopolists and shareholders, hold the power.

Want to stay involved? Support organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) that fight every day to protect your rights and shape the future of the web.