How Silicon Valley enshittified the internet

October 30, 2025·1 hr 10 min·5 clips

Cory Doctorow explains how platforms decay by first locking in users, then exploiting them, and finally harvesting all value.

Cory Doctorow explains that he coined the term enshittification in a bad-tempered tweet about TripAdvisor before realizing it captured a broader analytical framework about platform decay that he later formalized in writing. The framework describes three stages: platforms attract users with genuine value and use lock-in to trap them, then degrade user experience to profit business advertisers and partners, then degrade business customers to harvest maximum surplus for shareholders and executives, leaving just enough residual value to keep everyone stuck. He distinguishes this from pessimistic accounts of inevitable corporate decline by grounding it in specific, reversible policy failures. The key inflection point he identifies is 2017, when the World Wide Web Consortium was pressured by Netflix and major studios to add digital rights management to browsers, which Doctorow frames as the first capitulation of a major open internet standards body to corporate capture. He explains that the laws protecting DRM, specifically the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's anti-circumvention provisions, are so broad that they criminalize legitimate accessibility modifications and security research, with penalties of five years in prison and a $500,000 fine. He connects this to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which he argues has been widely misunderstood, and to the collapse of antitrust enforcement against big tech from the 2000s through the 2010s that allowed platforms to acquire potential competitors rather than compete with them. Doctorow argues that the same dynamic now applies to generative AI, where companies use AI to generate vast quantities of low-quality content that crowds out human creators, while simultaneously arguing that copyright does not apply to AI training so they can scrape existing content without payment. The solution he proposes is structural rather than behavioral: restore meaningful antitrust enforcement, fix interoperability mandates so users can leave platforms without losing connections and data, and reverse the overreach of intellectual property law that prevents legitimate user control of software and devices. The tone is polemical, technically grounded, and occasionally funny.

As heard by us

A sharp Decoder conversation about how unchecked platform power made the internet worse.

Guest host Sarah Jong brings Cory Doctorow onto Decoder for a blunt argument about how the internet got worse once dominant tech companies no longer had to compete on the merits.

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