Or, as Cory Doctorow puts it, “ensh-ttified.”
Listen to the full sessions on the weekly Cascade PBS Ideas Festival podcast.
“The thesis of ensh-ttification is whether or not you’re paying for the product, you’re the product,” said Doctorow, a journalist and tech activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation who coined the term in a 2022 article and has expanded his analysis into a forthcoming book of that name.
Doctorow spoke with Micah Loewinger for an episode of the WNYC podcast On the Media, recorded live as part of last Saturday’s Cascade PBS Ideas Festival. The event was held, ironically, inside the heart of big tech at the Amazon Meeting Center.
There’s a simple reason companies like Amazon, Google and Facebook can get away with making their platforms worse on purpose, Doctorow said: market power.
“They’re too big to care,” he said, paraphrasing former Federal Trade Commission head Lina Khan.
Doctorow described how companies like Facebook systematically neutralized competitors like Instagram by buying them and shutting them down or making them worse.
“That’s how large firms grow,” he said. “It’s not by being better.”
One of the solutions Doctorow advocates is enforcement of antitrust laws, which have “been in a coma for 40 years,” but have awoken to a revival he likes to call “antitrust Woodstock.”
Earlier this year, two federal judges ruled that Google had acted illegally to build a monopoly and engaged in anticompetitive behavior to protect its market control over search engines. The federal government is also litigating similar cases against Amazon, Apple and Facebook.
Breaking up big tech companies seems to garner bipartisan interest: The Trump administration has continued lawsuits against big tech filed by the FTC and Justice Department under the Biden administration.
Doctorow highlighted another potential tool for fighting ensh-ttification that might seem counterintuitive: tariffs. The United States has long used the threat of tariffs to coerce other countries into privileging American tech companies at the expense of users’ data privacy and freedom to use alternative products, he said. Now that tariffs are here to stay, some countries may feel emboldened to buck the U.S. and promote a freer internet.
Doctorow offered one example of how this might look: A group of teenagers made an app called OG Instagram, a version of Instagram stripped of its targeted advertisements and promoted content. It quickly shot to the top 10 in the app store, but the tech companies agreed to shut it down.
“We have this kind of felony contempt-of-business model,” Doctorow said, “where doing things that displease shareholders, but have never been prohibited by any legislature, become a crime.”
A potential solution? “We just undo a lot of mischief if we made this legal,” he said.
