Team Partners Telecommunications

Stopping enshittification!

Posted on Feb 27, 2025

We’ve spent the last couple of months considering the charmingly titled process of ‘enshittification’, whereby tech-giants go through a three, or maybe four, stage process that, in essence, describes their rise, life, fall and death. In December’s blog we looked at the whole process, using Facebook as an example. In January we dived deeper to study how four factors should, could and have so far failed to play vital roles in controlling big-tech’s world take-over, these being government regulation, competition, our own ability to make choices as consumers, and the once impressive but now non-existent power of the big-tech workforce.

This month we’re going to take this rather depressing state of affairs and see what can be done about it. Again, as a reminder, the four constraints that should, but have so far failed, to prevent enshittification are competition, regulation, self-help and the work-force. Each of these must be reinforced and brought back into play to reverse things. We’re already seeing regulation fighting back, especially in the EU and UK, but also in the US, Canada, Australia, Japan and China. Anti-competition mergers are being blocked and predatory pricing questioned. We’re also seeing regulatory bodies moving into action; In the EU the main body of the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act have gone into effect, meaning that anyone who considers they’ve been cheated by big-tech can appeal straight to the European court without having to appeal first to the toothless enforcement agencies of their own country. Ireland, for instance. After decades of total inaction (since the Video Privacy Protection Act of 1988) as far as privacy laws are concerned, the US more recently saw action towards a new national privacy law that would allow individuals to sue companies that violate this, which would curb a great deal of the operating power of big-tech.

Sadly, self-help isn’t doing so well. Yes, the EU’s Digital Markets Act is forcing interoperation onto Facebook et al, so you’ll be able to use Bluesky to message folk on WhatsApp, and so on but don’t try and reverse engineer a big-tech product or you’ll find yourself in deep water before you know it.

Lastly, the work force. Here in Europe, we have a greater unionised effectiveness than in the States (the Nordic response to Tesla is an education, especially to Tesla), but even there we’re seeing workers being emboldened to take action, with Amazons’ workforce taking a bit of a lead. And not a moment too soon, because the process of enshittification isn’t limited to digital platforms…think of this, if you have a product with a computer in it then whoever determines the software determines how that product works for you, and how much it costs to operate. Remember, at present, Apps are unregulated, you can be charged whatever they want, and as the originator of the word ‘enshittification’ says, “Software doesn’t eat the world, it just enshittifies it.”

Enough doom! There is an upside to all this, which is that we’re all involved, we all have a stake and an interest. 20, 30 or however many years ago it was, the internet was the bright new child holding so much promise that we allowed big tech capitalism to take control of it for its own ends. Now what’s important is the climate and justice for all, in whatever shape its lack presents itself, and the internet has become the vehicle we all use to articulate these priorities. Without it being fair and free and open we’ve lost this next battle before we've even joined. It was Martin Luther King who said, “It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important.” Acting together, ‘we the people’, together with the law operating on our behalf’s, may not be able to make big-tech do the right thing, but it can make it concerned enough about your actions that it will be treat you fairly. We need to flex our internet muscles, make our voices heard, choose our digital platforms wisely and in all actions, act for the greater good!