Cory Doctorow on how we lost the internet
lwn.net
lwn.net
> Europe and Canada have passed strong right-to-repair legislation, but those efforts ""have been hamstrung by the anti-circumvention laws"" (like the DMCA). (...) That raises the question of why these countries don't repeal their versions of the DMCA.
> The answer is tariffs, it seems. The US trade representative has long threatened countries with tariffs if they did not have such a law on their books. ""Happy 'Liberation Day' everyone"", he said with a smile, which resulted in laughter, cheering, and applause. The response of most countries when faced with the US tariffs (or threats thereof) has been to impose retaliatory tariffs, making US products more expensive for their citizens, which is a weird way to punish Americans. (...)
> What would be better is for the countries to break the monopolies of the US tech giants by making it legal to reverse-engineer, jailbreak, and modify American products and services. (...)
> Or, let a Canadian company set up an App Store that only charges 3% for payment processing, which will give any content producer an immediate 25% raise, so publishers will flock to it. The same could be done for car and tractor diagnostic devices and more.
Europe should do this now; it would be incredibly good -- and incredibly fun.
They should stop the anti-competitive practices that prevent third-party app stores and so on though.
Furthermore, this whole discussion began with claiming it's impossible to undo anti-circumvention/reverse-engineering, without abandoning copyright entirely, because international treaties. Yet these treaties were modified multiple times, as well as new ones entered into. If it's possible to change these treaties to further encroach IP laws into our lives, why would it not be possible to change them in the other direction?
that sir, is a strawman argument
No laws against removing the region lock on your DVD player.
No laws against fixing your tractor with 3rd party parts.
When Amazon deletes Nineteen Eighty-Four from your Kindle, you can put it right back.
When a games company "turns off" the game you bought, turn it right back on again.
If you invent a new engine you can patent it. But if you make an engine that works like any other engine, why should society help you prevent your customers from tinkering with it?
Slightly off topic, but aren't we in the process of "throwing out copyright law" for the purposes of LLMs a.k.a the "automated" version of enshitification anyway? We've stretched "fair use" so much already, it won't be too big of a challenge to fit reverse engineering (removing DRM) into it.
No it isn't.
Like literally, the US and it's tariff madness has literally nothing to do with it. The EU and Canada are both signatories to the WIPO Copyright Treaty, and signatories of the WTO provisions that include continued operation to it. They are international treaties with a wide degree of international support, not US inventions. Christ, Europe had a lot more to do with the wording of the anticircumvention provisions in the WIPO treaty than the US did.
People should stop taking Doctorow seriously. He has a long track record of making shit up that is what his audience wants to hear.
But what we do know is that the EU has recently put regulations in place that allow them to curtail the IP privileges given to companies in countries that they feel economically threatened by.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Coercion_Instrument
It will be interesting to see them use this or if the mere existence of the law is and the mere possibility of use is them using it.
I think this should be made illegal.
But I also think judging from how bad people are at making laws, what we will get is something that will make it worse for everyone.
It probably already happens where it's already acceptable to request financial checks such as the finance industry.
Even when the UK was in the EU sympathy strikes were illegal (to a much greater extent than the US).
And there is no real EU (did you mean EU by "Europe"?) wide labour law
A similar thing happened with the Working Time Directive - almost all contracts in my country make you agree to opt-out and that's been like that for over 15 years
AFAIK the company must make it opt-in, non-mandatory and provide a way to change your mind at any moment.
Honestly it's hilarious how some people view GDPR. They think CEOs lose sleep at night worrying about it, that they might go to jail for it, or have to pay 100M Euro fine for a breach of it. It's simply not the case.
The reality of EU directives and regulations are very different to how they are sold. Many people fall prey to the marketing
It seems you did fall prey to the anti-GDPR marketing. It's being actually enforced [0] and doesn't allow "all or nothing" pseudo-consent [1].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39813801
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39272861; (upd:) an even better link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40974361
The big headline fines serve as a nice bit of PR for the EU
> It seems you did fall prey to the anti-GDPR marketing.
Nice retort but I have not. Being critical of EU regulations and not an EU sycophant is not falling prey to "anti-GDPR" marketing.
I'm actually generally pro EU; I'm just tired of people (especially non-Europeans) implying we have absolute privacy, zero privacy issues, total wins against corporations etc.
This is not "being critical":
>> Yes, as I said, by putting it in the employment contract when applying for a job.
It's a plain wrong interpretation of GDPR, as my links explain.
> I'm just tired of people (especially non-Europeans) implying we have absolute privacy, zero privacy issues, total wins against corporations etc.
Where did I (or somebody else) imply that?
> That's not how European courts have been interpreting it
Any particular relevant cases I can lookup?
In the UK, to pick a specific example, it is a combination of some workers not being allowed a choice of opt-out (e.g. healthcare workers, self-employed, "gig workers"), some union workers derogating that right to their unions collective bargaining... but for every other worker, the 48 hours is the law. You cannot mandate it in a contract. You can't advertise a job where you set the hours and those hours are on average over 48 hours per week. It's not a valid job and you are immediately in breach of statutory law.
https://www.acas.org.uk/working-time-rules/the-48-hour-weekl...
https://www.acas.org.uk/working-time-rules/jobs-with-differe...
> Any particular relevant cases I can lookup?
You'll have to look at member states cases, it's on them to define how the opt-out works.
One example: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/61123e81e90e0... "In respect of the 48 hour week the claimant had not signed an opt out and as such if the claimant was working in excess of 48 hours average across the week then her right was being infringed. It is not in dispute that this is a statutory right capable of protection."
UK's Employment Rights Act 1996 section 101A: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1996/18/section/101A
Let's stop cherry picking. These CAN be altered by an employment contract:
> the 20-minute rest break for those who expect to work more than 6 hours in a day
> the daily rest of 11 hours in 24 hours
> the weekly rest of 24 hours in every 7 days or 48 hours in every 14 days
> the 17-week reference period for night work
> the average hours for night workers working with special hazards
> The reference period for working out the 48-hour average maximum working week can be changed from 17 weeks to 52 weeks
This is exactly my issue with these big EU directives and regulations. The EU gets massive press about the headline issue, and the nuance, opt-outs etc get swept under the rug
They CANNOT in a regular employment contract UNLESS it can be justified that the job specifically needs it. Even when employer is justified, the rest entitlement still exists and must be compensated for, and the employer requires appropriate justification if they cannot give that compensatory rest. And if they put themselves in this situation (where employees go beyond normal working time limits), they need to keep good records of time they did make their employees work, so they can confirm they haven't broken the law to the HSE when it comes knocking.
https://www.acas.org.uk/working-time-rules/the-48-hour-weekl...
Every UK job I have ever seen has the opt out clause in the contract. And they always say "well you can just tell us and we'll remove it" but it's there by default, and they make it clear that they have 800 other applicants for every position so do you really want to risk it?
> Every UK job I have ever seen has the opt out clause in the contract
Ditto.
Is an example where GDPR consent is not considered free if the alternative is paying money.
If you do not get a job, this seems fairly analogous.
Edit: their very last entry was on GDPR: https://wayback.archive-it.org/11980/20200131184218/https://...
...Oh, you are worried about power asymmetry? What are you, a communist?
If you were in a communist country you are definitely worried about the power asymmetry, and rushing to go to West Germany or just out of the USSR, or to the USA from Cuba or out of pre-capitalist China if you could.
Socialist the same in practice. Still state-controlled economy in the name of fairness and starvation soon following.
Worker rights only exist in free societies.
Seems to me that the illegal part would be the cartel of the 3 apps that cornered the whole market.
An app that doesn’t do this could eat their lunch.
Nurses work at hospitals, the supply of which is constrained artificially by the state, so once you sell all of the ones in a region on your app, you have a monopoly. It is a type of regulatory capture.
The lowballing should be counteracted by competition. There isn’t any competition because the number of hospitals is artificially constrained by the state and a cartel can go to all of them in a region (usually a single digit number) and capture all of them, cornering the market for purchasing labor in that field.
The problem is not that the bidders have the information. The problem is that there is effectively only one bidder: the cartel.
An app that doesn’t do this (and thus pays more) would quickly have access to the entire labor pool by offering higher wages. It doesn’t exist because of illegal activity. That’s not caused by the cartel having access to, or using, information.
You are addressing the symptoms of the cartel, not the root cause.
However, I am curious to know how you think we can avoid the problem of cartels.
Plus I think your diagnosis is simplistic.
> The final constraint, which did hold back platform decay for quite some time, is labor. Tech workers have historically been respected and well-paid, without unions. The power of tech workers did not come from solidarity, but from scarcity, Doctorow said. The minute bosses ordered tech workers to enshittify the product they were loyally working on, perhaps missing various important social and family events to ship it on time, those workers could say no—perhaps in a much more coarse way. Tech workers could simply walk across the street ""and have a new job by the end of the day"" if the boss persisted.
> So labor held off enshittification after competition, regulation, and interoperability were all systematically undermined and did so for quite some time—until the mass tech layoffs. There have been half a million tech workers laid off since 2023, more are announced regularly, sometimes in conjunction with raises for executive salaries and bonuses. Now, workers cannot turn their bosses down because there are ten others out there just waiting to take their job.
Because the employer has power and the employee doesn’t.
Of course they should, but they have much more influence on the law so they don’t.
Maybe we should not 'democratize' some technologies and keep a bit of difficulty as a gatekeeper.
(Yes, I know this is not really a moral position to hold)
"A ship in harbor is safe, but that's not what ships are built for"
This is the root cause, and as it looks, there is no cure.
The cure is to make so much new engineering talent that this is simply impossible
> Or, let a Canadian company set up an App Store that only charges 3% for payment processing, which will give any content producer an immediate 25% raise, so publishers will flock to it.
It's amazing that merely learning about how items that we own work (so-called "reverse-engineering") and exercising control over them (jailbreaking - this time the term is apt) has been made illegal. A heinous overreach by corporations into the lives of people that own their products, and a ridiculous expansion of IP rights - as if patents weren't enough, they want to treat as trade secrets products with mass-market availability.
Expanding patents to software, in Europe they replaced the 2005 software patent directive by the Unified Patent Court, which will ignore the exclusion of 'computer programs', like the EPO did, with no way for the question to be escalated to the CJEU:
https://ffii.org/unified-patent-court-has-an-eu-treaty-legal...
Multinational corporations also became part time judges, because rubberstamping software patents is easier when you can also corrupt the judicial system:
https://ffii.org/nokia-and-airbus-elected-as-judges-at-the-k...
Is anywhere in EU reverse-engineering, jailbreaking, and modifying any products illegal?
Not that that makes Doctorow's argument any better or make any more sense.
Strange, my country (Poland) has a law that allows reverse engineering to allow given software to work on given hardware. If (and only if) consumer has bought given software.
So e.g. I could reverse engineer MS Word to make it work on Linux and that is within my legal right, any EULA prohibiting that is void.
Same probably applies for jailbreaking - all withing legal right of customer.
I think there is something in EU law also about that, considering SAS Institute Inc. versus World Programming Ltd.
Enshittification sounds like an immature bad joke.
If you want laws to be passed, you need senators and judges and legal scholars to engage with your ideas. None of those people are going to take the idea of “enshittification” seriously with a name like that, nor are they going to put their name on a bill referencing it. There are plenty of examples of citizen activism that lead to a bill, and these bills often are name directly after the activist/movement name.
I’ll say it again: if you want political change, accept that you need to care about the names of concepts.
The terminology is irrelevant. Senators and judges won't deal with this because they're being paid not to, not because there's a rude word in the name.
Government itself has been enshittified, clearly and comprehensively.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/14/pearl-clutching/
"just use one of the dozens of words that failed to gain public attention over the past 25 years".
I'm also not super interested in his rant about people criticizing his approach are just "pearl clutchers."
Other people have written more comments in this thread explaining a different opinion. It doesn't really matter how many times you've explained yours. For what it's worth, I think an ancestor comment to this one poignantly addresses a particular perspective:
> The terminology is irrelevant. Senators and judges won't deal with this because they're being paid not to, not because there's a rude word in the name.
It might help to tailor your arguments to this perspective as I suspect it is the most common one. I also get the feeling that's how Doctorow figures it's "pearl clutching": it's less about the "bad word" and more about the "profits".
Seriously, can you back up this claim?
Then also notice the total lack of major legislation with vulgar, offensive, or immature words in the name.
It's all political theater and a real political will to end enshittification will end it. That is what's missing, not a positive-sounding name.
This is a non issue
It's not about communication, since for communication sake it's much more easily understood by a larger cohort of people if colloquial terms are used, it's simply the need for seriously-sounding jargon to be taken seriously, which is just a play in appearances.
If you want political change you need political action, the name of concepts is just one avenue for that.
Yes, and that class of people are the ones actually making the laws. The ones that could solve the problems discussed in the article (like nursing apps) legally.
Which is, I assume, actually the point.
It’s not because some underlying physical law.
decay, decline, rot, degradation, etc. all sound like the poor companies couldn’t do anything about it
Doctorow himself I think has a weak sense of disgust (a lot of his writing, and the site he used to run (boingboing) serve the market of people for whom disgusting things are entertaining or funny, so I think he has a blind spot here.
...as evidenced by the responses to my comment – the sheer hostility to the idea that maybe it's not a great idea to use the word shit in an activist project that aims at political change.
And so you're really not going to get any real change here, because it's easier to complain online and do nothing, while simultaneously shouting away anyone that suggests some minor changes would be more productive. The exact same conversation happens in the open source / free source movement.
Then again, look how the term has taken off, perhaps it's we who are the shit-marketers.
Eh. Either they weren't going to do so anyway, because doing so goes against the money, or they can come up with a more public-friendly term.
Everyone knows that synonyms exist, and them not having found the more "polite term" in Wikipedia — platform decay — says more about them and their reluctance to engage with the subject and the proposed solutions.
The name of a political movement matters. Always has, always will. It's no different for adjacent concepts that describe a phenomenon the movement is organizing against.
Is Australia not big enough to count?
Plenty of terms are used in senate hearing transcripts. Hearings are a completely different thing from actual laws being passed.
As I said, this is a fundamental misunderstanding of how the government operates.
Is that the argument? I understood your argument to mean that the term "enshittification" is holding back the movement because nobody will use it. As others are saying, I don't think there's any issue people take with some drop-in term being used if actual laws are passed discussing the topic.
Plenty of movements involving vulgar language, however, did result in laws being passed - "Fuck the Draft" comes to mind, the attitude surrounding which led to the draft ending (after all, why else would it end?), but also was a central fixture in a supreme court ruling that furthered defined 1st amendment rights in the USA.
So again, I just don't understand how one intellectual describing one aspect of the digital rights movement could negatively impact the movement as a whole, which I interpret as your argument.
There is a phenomenon that is very clearly happening. Doctorow and others use a vulgar term to describe this phenomenon.
Because this vulgar term is used, it limits the ability of lawmakers, academics, and other "serious" people to care about, discuss, or pass laws that aim to address this phenomenon.
As an analogy: imagine if the concepts of inequality or social injustice were primarily described by a vulgar term. Instead of discussing, "democratic backsliding" or "failure of democracy" we said "democracy shit the bed." This would limit the range of the critique, which if one is interested in actually solving the issue, is an immensely impractical move.
Financial Times: The enshittification of apps is real. But is it bad? https://www.ft.com/content/acaf3fb1-d971-48ad-8efb-c82787cdd...
Not in the title, but Warzel uses the term in his Atlantic article, "Streaming Has Reached Its Sad, Predictable Fate" https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/09/strea...
ABC Radio National interviewed Professor Inger Mewburn, Director of Researcher Development at the Australian National University, and titled the interview "'Enshittification' and social media for academics" https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/saturdayextra/enshitt...
Bonus: The Italians are using the term. "Anche TikTok sta andando in malora (il fenomeno dell'enshitting)" https://www.repubblica.it/tecnologia/blog/stazione-futuro/20...
So I guess I'm just not seeing how this is limiting anyone's abilities in any way.
> it limits the ability of lawmakers, academics, and other "serious" people to care about, discuss, or pass laws that aim to address this phenomenon.
Now, to be fair, I don't think the word is going to sink the whole attempt. But I think it's just juvenile and unhelpful. Why pick a word that is deliberately impractical, and then critique anyone that says, "I agree with your ideas, but maybe pick a more political-friendly name, so it's easier to do something about it?"
Giving something a derogatory name that the yellow press (or rather some Telegram group) can sling around to vent their frustration and fear could be a win in this place. Of course, leadership persons of such groups are usually just demagogues looking out for their personal gain, so it might just as well be another rallying cry leading to really bad policies hitting those that vote in favor the most. But such is the world today ;)
Like shit.
The word spread in common usage about as fast as wildfire because everyone immediately knew what he meant. And the companies are too polite to even be able to say the word! If you can't swear in response to being degraded, pissed on, pissed off, used and thrown away, then you're the kind of sheep they want that they can abuse more and more and more and more and more and more and more without ever facing any consequence.
God forbid that rudeness is involved in collecting the power to stand up to it
But Cory's a polemicist. He'd absolutely prefer the memorable word he coined himself to the acceptable, drab one that already exists.
(Plus value engineering is only one way to enshittify a product. There's also subscription models, selling data, jamming ads in everywhere... the advantage of Cory's word is that it captures everything).
> Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is a pattern in which two-sided online products and services decline in quality over time. [...]
> platforms squeezing market participants on both sides.
Wasn't that chokepoint capitalism? [1] (i.e. controlling supply and demand IIRC)
From Cory Doctorow's original article [2], one might say that enshittification is the degradation of a platform that transforms it from being customer-centric to prioritizing profit extraction at the expense of user experience. I think that the definition has expanded to include other things non-platform, but I feel that that isn't too far a stretch. Nowadays, I might say that enshittification is just unchecked capitalism doing its thing (and we need to be protected from exploiting us).
But I do concede that Cory was indeed exploring some ideas on his original post [2] that may have made it to his book (and thus, are related to your definition):
> Amazon's monopoly (control over buyers) gives it a monopsony (control over sellers), which lets it raise prices everywhere, at Amazon and at every other retailer, even as it drives the companies that supply it into bankruptcy.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
[1]: https://chokepointcapitalism.com/
[2]: https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittificaiton/#relentl...
I guess my concern is that the term is broad enough to shift this way, from a very precise (and important!) issue to a more broad concept. I feel like picking a more specific term (such as indeed, platform decay), would have made it easier to keep the concepts apart and discuss them. Alas, it is good that the term was coined at all, as it gives a word to something that many of us clearly experience.