Why the Internet Is Worse Than Ever

I’ve been a digital-rights activist for half my life. Up until the late 2000s, I was fighting for privacy and against censorship on what I call the “old, good internet,” as a UN delegate, lobbyist, writer and community organizer. But since then, as the online world became more surveilled, manipulative and worse in every way, my mission shifted drastically. I began railing against “enshittification,” the crude (and surprisingly popular) word I coined to describe the decay of the internet we all rely on—and the subject of my forthcoming book.

It’s not your imagination: social media sucks. Online dating sucks. E-commerce sucks. It would be neat if there was a single precipitating incident at which the websites we rely on dramatically disqualified themselves from being fit for purpose. But, rather, they have all steadily declined, in ways large and small. Take Google, a search engine with 90 per cent market share that gets worse every day, as the company chases an AI-slop strategy that obscures links to the best websites with error-ridden chatbot-generated pablum. Then there’s giant, terrible Meta, which diluted content posted by friends and trusted news sources with engagement bait and scammy ads. Twitter (now X), the formerly fun public square, has been turned into a Nazi-propaganda mill. Every corner of the web has been redesigned by inches to extract value from end-users and business customers, to the benefit of a tech cartel that’s repeatedly proven it’s not only too big to fail and jail, but too big to care.

Enshittification follows a characteristic three-stage process. In stage one, a platform is good to its end-users, while finding ways to lock them in. Take Facebook, for example. At its inception, it showed you a feed-full of the things you’d asked to see: content posted by friends and family, artists, publications and participants in the groups you’d joined. Lots of us took Mark Zuckerberg up on this deal, and we users proceeded to take each other hostage. (In other words, it became really hard to convince your friends to leave Facebook at the same time and migrate to another site all together.) Once we were hooked, it was time for stage two, in which a platform makes things worse for users, in order to make them better for business-customers. In Facebook’s case, that meant reaching out to advertisers with offers to spy on us with targeted ads. 

Then came stage three: clawing back all available surpluses in order to enrich shareholders and investors. On Facebook, advertising rates went up, even as the fidelity of ad-targeting plummeted and ad fraud exploded. Website publishers (like businesses and publications) also discovered they had to post ever-longer excerpts to reach audiences—even their subscribers—and were more or less reduced to commodity back-end content providers for Facebook. Thus, we reached the end-stage of enshittification: when a platform becomes a pile of shit, but we still can’t leave it. People love each other more than they hate Facebook (or Google, or Tinder, or X), so the zombie platforms, drained of value and vitality, shamble on long after they should have been planted in shallow graves.

Enshittification wasn’t inevitable. It is the result of specific policy choices, made by named individuals, even after they were warned that it was the likely outcome. Starting in the Reagan and Mulroney years, countries all over the world began halting their anti-monopoly enforcement, under the “consumer welfare” theory, which holds that monopolies are efficient. (If everyone shops at Loblaw, that must mean that Loblaw is the best—and wouldn’t it be perverse to punish it for excellence?) The ensuing corporate consolidation shifted control of most of the world’s economy to industries dominated by five or fewer global firms: in sea-freight, eyeglasses, beer, finance, et cetera. But a handful of incestuously merged firms—so inbred they sport corporate Habsburg jaws—are a cozy conspiracy in waiting, and they can and do capture their regulators. Shriven of competition and regulation, companies of all kinds have felt free to materially worsen their services, as anyone who has recently flown Air Canada can attest.

There is one counter-enshittification measure inherent in technology itself: if one company locks your phone or games console to its app store, for example, another tech company could sell or give you a tool to jailbreak that device, and let you switch to a competitor. But since the early 2000s, the Office of the US Trade Representative has forced every trading partner of America’s to pass “anti-circumvention” laws that prohibit breaking codes designed to prevent you from changing how a device you own works. 

Canada’s own anti-circumvention effort arrived with Bill C-11, the Copyright Modernization Act, passed by Stephen Harper’s Tories in 2012. Ministers James Moore and Tony Clement consulted on the matter, receiving 6,138 opposing comments; just 53 people wrote in support of the measure. (Moore and Clement eventually discarded the results of their own consultation, with Moore publicly dismissing the opposition as “babyish” and “radical extremists.”) Harper’s digital locks were even worse than the Americans’ version, dispensing with the minimal safeguards Americans enjoy. Bill C-11 outlaws bypassing a digital lock even if doing so doesn’t violate anyone’s copyright. This expansive ban is why Canadians can’t so much as modify a printer to use generic ink or install a plugin that restores news to their Facebook and Instagram apps. These activities aren’t copyright violations, but because you have to bypass a digital lock to engage in them, C-11 deems it illegal to do so.

To consign the “enshitternet” to history’s scrapheap, Canada needs to restore the discipline that kept enshittification at bay. Last year, parliament gave the Competition Bureau new, muscular powers, including broader latitude to put conditions on mergers and the explicit right to block ones that are bad for workers. This is a good start—or will be, once they start to use them. Passing and enforcing meaningful privacy laws would be a great follow-up. That way, platforms could only show you the stuff you asked to see and be barred from selling your attention. Companies shouldn’t be allowed to deny Canadians services because they opted out of data collection, nor should Canadians have to do anything in order to use a service in privacy (e.g. click an “I do not consent” nag-box).

Canada has one other historical opportunity before us, thanks (ironically) to Donald Trump. Harper, Clement and Moore originally crammed Bill C-11’s anti-circumvention agreement down Canadians’ throats under threat of U.S. tariffs. The deal was, if we passed C-11, the Americans wouldn’t slap us with them, a promise Trump obviously eventually broke. Well, happy Liberation Day, everyone: now is the moment to sever our devices’ ties with the extractive, data-hungry U.S. tech companies that have climbed into bed with The Donald. There’s now no reason to keep C-11 on our books. The federal government should repeal it, and unshackle Canadians from a bad policy that stops us from fixing, adapting, improving and liberating the technology we depend on. 

With these policies out of the way, it’s possible to build a new, good internet: a place where users can leave one service for another, like Instagram for BlueSky, without having to abandon their conversations and communities. Canada could impose requirements on every social media service to link users’ access with their competitors. App companies and games publishers would no longer have 30 cents out of every dollar earned skimmed by Google, Sony or Microsoft; instead, Canadian companies could reverse-engineer Android, Playstation and Xbox to create new, homegrown app stores for them.

In fact, Canada could one day be known everywhere as the country that makes the tools of technological liberation. We could export them to help users in other countries start app stores, modify printers to accept generic ink and extract their data from Big Tech’s American silos. But the mission is bigger still: to coordinate our global response to threats of climate catastrophe, authoritarianism and genocide, we will need a pluralistic, dis-enshittified internet. It won’t only be Canadian, but the building blocks for it could be created here.

Cory Doctorow is a blogger, journalist and the author of Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It, due out in October.