All Internet platforms are similar to each other, especially in the way they decline. According to Canadian journalist and digital activist Cory Doctorow, the sequence repeats itself again and again: first they do good for users, offering the best search results (Google), the most effective way to connect with friends without being spied on (Facebook), or the cheapest products (Amazon). Secondly, they forget about users and start focusing on the interests of their corporate clients, trafficking our data to sell them advertising space which drastically worsens our user experience. Until their monopoly power and network effects allow them to mistreat these customers too, unilaterally changing their contracts with increases in rates and reductions in services provided.
Doctorow has been writing about the process since 2022, when he coined the term to describe it enshittification —a term that could be translated as shit—, declared word of the year by the American Dialect Society in 2023. The neologism also gives the title to Doctorow’s latest book, selected by Financial times for the list of the best business publications of 2025, where he analyzes the reasons that lead platforms to conform to this decadent sequence. It is not something that depends on the virtue or wickedness of those responsible for these platforms, he explains to EL PAÍS in a telephone interview, “but something that happens continuously because the rules of the game we have created allow it, we invite them to do the wrong things and they respond to our invitation by doing the wrong things.”
Among the rules of the game that Doctorow believes enable this decline are laws that veto any attempt to improve applications or devices that include software under the pretext that doing so violates the creator’s intellectual property. It’s those intellectual property laws that make it illegal to modify a smartphone to accept it app of alternative shops to the official monopoly, which prevent bus drivers from accessing delivery adapt the application so that it does not take advantage of their vulnerability by offering them less and less money per shipment, or by banning them hack THE app from Facebook to remove annoying ads.
As the headquarters of major technology companies, the United States has also been a major promoter of these intellectual property laws, imposing them on partners with whom they have signed trade agreements. But in a situation where these trade agreements are unilaterally changed by the Trump administration, the validity of these intellectual property laws could be the next thing to fall, says Doctorow, who links it to the Putin moment that the European Union experienced after the large-scale invasion of Ukraine.
“Even in the European Union there were many rules that made the transition to solar energy difficult, but when the invasion occurred (and the arrival of hydrocarbons through pipelines was drastically reduced) it became clear that those rules were less important than guaranteeing energy independence, so many rules were revoked and now Europe is 10 years ahead of what it had envisaged in its energy transition goals,” he explains. “In the United States we now have Trump, who can use American technology companies to put pressure on European governments and companies that he sees as rivals, and this creates an opportunity to strengthen Europe’s technological sovereignty.”
According to Doctorow, the technological dependence of the United States is an increasingly risky gamble. Radio station France Info published a report in October on French judge Nicolas Guillou, who chairs a chamber on Palestine at the International Criminal Court (ICC) and who lost access to his personal accounts on Amazon, Airbnb, Netflix and Paypal, due to sanctions that the Trump administration imposed on the ICC following the arrest warrant against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Before that, the Associated Press news agency had already published an article about the disruption of Microsoft’s email service addressed to Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor of the ICC.
“This is an implicit threat to all governments: If you don’t submit to Trump, his technology will cut you off,” Doctorow says. Naturally, to get out of this dependence, the first thing to do is to create tools that allow the export of content currently present on the servers of those same technologies, which in many cases could only happen by violating intellectual property laws. “That’s why I believe that in the very near future there will be an opportunity to roll back these laws, people will realize that it’s impossible to have digital sovereignty if we keep them,” he explains.
Another rule that, according to Doctorow, stimulated the enshittification of platforms is the oblivion of the laws that protected us from the formation of large monopolies. Since the days of Ronald Reagan, the view of maximizing consumer profit by tolerating monopolies as long as they result in lower prices has prevailed (popularized by Robert Bork in his 1978 book The Antitrust Paradox). The problem, Doctorow says, is that monopolies cause other harm, even if the price of their product is zero, as is the case with many Internet services.
Leonine conditions
One of them is that these monopolies tend to become monopsonic, almost sole buyers that put undue pressure on the companies and freelancers who need the platforms to access their users. From the leonine margins they charge to companies that wish to participate in the platform (advertisers and those who offer products or services, for example) to the slavery conditions they impose on their freelancers (riders and drivers).
According to Doctorow, focusing only on the price of goods and services means forgetting that consumers are also workers or small business owners and need platforms to survive. “If wages and income stagnate, when debt-financed consumption ends, you will also end up with a consumption problem.” The good news, he says, is that this laxity in the exercise of competition law may also be coming to an end. “Across the EU, in South Korea, Japan, Singapore and Canada, we are starting to see vigorous action to defend competition law,” he explains. “This is a movement that was not led by politicians, but that politicians simply followed,” he concludes.
