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Cory Doctorow on how we lost the internet

By Jake Edge
May 27, 2025

PyCon US

Cory Doctorow wears many hats: digital activist, science-fiction author, journalist, and more. He has also written many books, both fiction and non-fiction, runs the Pluralistic blog, is a visiting professor, and is an advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF); his Chokepoint Capitalism co-author, Rebecca Giblin, gave a 2023 keynote in Australia that we covered. Doctorow gave a rousing keynote on the state of the "enshitternet"—today's internet—to kick off the recently held PyCon US 2025 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

He began by noting that he is known for coining the term "enshittification" about the decay of tech platforms, so attendees were probably expecting to hear about that; instead, he wanted to start by talking about nursing. A recent study described how nurses are increasingly getting work through one of three main apps that "bill themselves out as 'Uber for nursing'". The nurses never know what they will be paid per hour prior to accepting a shift and the three companies act as a cartel in order to "play all kinds of games with the way that labor is priced".

In particular, the companies purchase financial information from a data broker before offering a nurse a shift; if the nurse is carrying a lot of credit-card debt, especially if some of that is delinquent, the amount offered is reduced. "Because, the more desperate you are, the less you'll accept to come into work and do that grunt work of caring for the sick, the elderly, and the dying." That is horrific on many levels, he said, but "it is emblematic of 'enshittification'", which is one of the reasons he highlighted it.

Platform decay

Enshittification is a three-stage process; he used Google to illustrate the idea. At first, Google minimized ads and maximized spending on engineering to produce a great search engine; while it was doing that, however, it was buying its way to dominance. "They bribed every service, every product that had a search box to make sure that that was a Google search box." No matter which browser, phone carrier, or operating system you were using, Google ensured that you were using its search by default; by the early 2020s, it was spending the equivalent of buying a Twitter every 18 months to do so, he said. That is the first stage of the process: when the provider is being good to its users, but is finding ways to lock them in.

[Cory Doctorow]

The second phase occurs once the company recognizes that it has users locked in, so it will be difficult for them to switch away, and it shifts to making things worse for its users in order to enrich its business customers. For Google, those are the publishers and advertisers. A growing portion of the search results page is shifted over to ads "marked off with ever-subtler, ever-smaller, ever-grayer labels distinguishing them from the organic search results". While the platform is getting better for business customers—at the expense of the users—those customers are also getting locked in.

Phase three of enshittification is when the value of the platform is clawed back until all that is left is kind of a "homeopathic residue—the least value needed to keep both business customers and end users locked to the platform". We have gained a view into this process from the three monopoly cases that Google has lost over the last 18 months. In 2019, the company had 90% of the world's search traffic and its users were loyal; "everyone who searched on Google, searched everything on Google".

But that meant that Google's search growth had plateaued, so how was the company going to be able to grow? It could "raise a billion humans to adulthood and make them Google customers, which is Google Classroom, but that's a slow process". From the internal memos that came to light from the court cases, we can see what the company chose to do, he said: "they made search worse".

The accuracy of the search results was reduced, which meant that users needed to do two or three queries to the get the results they would have seen on the first page. That increased the number of ads that could be shown, which is obviously bad for searchers, but the company was also attacking its business customers at the same time. For example, "Google entered into an illegal, collusive arrangement with Meta, called Jedi Blue" that "gamed the advertising market" so that publishers got paid less and advertisers had to pay more, he said.

So that's how we have ended up at the Google of today, where the top of the search results page is "a mountain of AI slop", followed by five paid results "marked with the word 'Ad' in eight point, 90% gray-on-white type", ending with "ten spammy SEO [search-engine optimization] links from someone else who's figured out how to game Google". The amazing thing is "that we are still using Google because we're locked into it". It is a perfect example of the result of the "tragedy in three acts" that is enshittification.

Twiddling

The underlying technical means that allows this enshittification is something he calls "twiddling". Because the companies run their apps on computers, they can change a nearly infinite number of knobs to potentially alter "the prices, the cost, the search rankings, the recommendations" each time the platform is visited. Going back to the nursing example, "that's just twiddling, it's something you can only do with computers".

Legal scholar Veena Dubal coined the term "algorithmic wage discrimination" to describe this kind of twiddling for the "gig economy", which is "a major locus for enshittification"; the nursing apps, Uber, and others are examples of that economy. "Gig work is that place where your shitty boss is a shitty app and you're not allowed to call yourself an employee."

Uber invented a particular form of algorithmic wage discrimination; if its drivers are picky about which rides they accept, Uber will slowly raise the rates to entice those drivers—until they start accepting rides. Once a driver does accept a ride, "the wage starts to push down and down at random intervals in increments that are too small for human beings to readily notice". It is not really "boiling the frog", Doctorow said, so much as it is "slowly poaching it".

As anyone with a technical background knows, "any task that is simple, but time-consuming is a prime candidate for automation". This kind of "wage theft" would be tedious and expensive to do by hand, but it is trivial to play these games using computers. This kind of thing is not just bad for nurses, he said, its bad for those who are using their services.

Do you really think that paying nurses based on how desperate they are, at a rate calculated to increase their desperation so that they'll accept ever-lower wages, is going to result in us getting the best care when we see a nurse? Do you really want your catheter inserted by a nurse on food stamps who drove an Uber until midnight the night before and skipped breakfast this morning so that they could pay the rent?

Paying and products

It is misguided to say "if you're not paying for the product, you're the product", because it makes it seem like we are complicit in sustaining surveillance capitalism—and we are not. The thinking goes that if we were only willing to start paying for things, "we could restore capitalism to its functional non-surveillance state and companies would treat us better because we'd be customers and not products". That thinking elevates companies like Apple as "virtuous alternatives" because the company charges money and not attention, so it can focus on improving the experience for its customers.

There is a small sliver of truth there, he said; Apple rolled out a feature on its phones that allowed users to opt-out of third-party surveillance—notably Facebook tracking. 96% of users opted out, he said; the other 4% "were either drunk or Facebook employees or drunk Facebook employees".

So that makes it seem like Apple will not treat its customers as products, but at the same time it added the opt-out, the company secretly started gathering exactly the same information for its "own surveillance advertising network". There was no notice given to users and no way to opt out of that surveillance; when journalists discovered it and published their findings, Apple "lied about it". The "$1000 Apple distraction rectangle in your pocket is something you paid for", but that does not stop Apple from "treating you like the product".

It is not just end users that Apple treats like products; the app vendors are also treated that way with 30% fees for payment processing in the App Store. That's what is happening with gig-app nurses: "the nurses are the product, the patients are the product, the hospitals are the product—in enshittification, the product is anyone you can productize".

While it is tempting to blame tech, Doctorow said, these companies did not start out enshittified. He recounted the "magic" when Google debuted; "you could ask Jeeves questions for a thousand years and still not get an answer as crisp, as useful, as helpful as the answer you would get by typing a few vague keywords" into Google. Those companies spent decades producing great products, which is why people switched to Google, bought iPhones, and joined their friends on Facebook. They were all born digital, thus could have enshittified at any time, "but they didn't, until they did, and then they did it all at once".

He believes that changes to the policy environment is what has led to enshittification, not changes in technology. These changes to the rules of the game were "undertaken in living memory by named parties who were warned at the time of the likely outcomes"—and did it anyway. Those people are now extremely rich and respected; they have "faced no consequences, no accountability for their role in ushering in the Enshittocene". We have created a perfect breeding ground for the worst practices in our society, which allowed them to thrive and dominate decision-making for companies and governments "leading to a vast enshittening of everything".

That is a dismal outlook, he said, but there is a bit of good news hidden in there. This change did not come about because of a new kind of evil person or the weight of history, but rather because of specific policy choices that were made—and can be unmade. We can consign the enshitternet to the scrap heap as simply "a transitional state from the old good internet that we used to have and the new good internet that we could have".

All companies want to maximize profits and the equation to do so is simple: charge as much as you can, pay suppliers and workers as little as you can, and spend the smallest amount possible on quality and safety. The theoretically "perfect" company that charges infinity and spends nothing fails because no one wants to work for it—or buy anything from it. That shows that there are external constraints that tend to tamp down the "impulse to charge infinity and deliver nothing".

Four constraints

In technology, there are four constraints that help make companies better; they help push back against the impulse to enshittify. The first is markets; businesses that charge more and deliver less lose customers, all else being equal. This is the bedrock idea behind capitalism and it is also the basis of antitrust law, but the rules on antitrust have changed since the Sherman Antitrust Act was enacted in 1890. More than forty years ago, during the Reagan administration in the US, the interpretation of what it means to be a monopoly was changed, not just in US, but also with its major trading partners in the UK, EU, and Asia.

Under this interpretation, monopolies are assumed to be efficient; if Google has 90% of the market, it means that it deserves to be there because no one can possibly do search any better. No competitor has arisen because there is no room to improve on what Google is doing. This pro-monopoly stance did exactly what might be expected, he said, it gave us more monopolies: "in pharma, in beer, in glass bottles, vitamin C, athletic shoes, microchips, cars, mattresses, eyeglasses, and, of course, professional wrestling", he said to laughter.

Markets do not constrain technology firms because those firms do not compete with their rivals—they simply buy their rivals instead. That is confirmed by a memo from Mark Zuckerberg—"a man who puts all of his dumbest ideas in writing"—who wrote: "It is better to buy than to compete". Even though that anti-competitive behavior came to light before Facebook was allowed to buy Instagram in order to ensure that users switching would still be part of Facebook the platform, the Obama administration permitted the sale. Every government over the past 40 years, of all political stripes, has treated monopolies as efficient, Doctorow said.

Regulation is also a constraint, unless the regulators have already been captured by the industry they are supposed to oversee. There are several examples of regulatory capture in the nursing saga, but the most egregious is that anyone in the US can obtain financial information on anyone else in the country, simply by contacting a data broker. "This is because the US congress has not passed a new consumer privacy law since 1988." The Video Privacy Protection Act was aimed at stopping video-store clerks from telling newspapers what VHS video titles were purchased or rented, but no protections have been added since then.

The reason congress has not addressed privacy legislation "since Die Hard was in its first run in theaters" is neither a coincidence nor an oversight, he said. It is "expensively purchased inaction" by an industry that has "monetized the abuse of human rights at unimaginable scale". The coalition in favor of freezing privacy law keeps growing because there are so many ways to "transmute the systematic invasion of our privacy into cash".

Tech companies are not being constrained by either markets or governments, but there are two other factors that could serve to tamp down "the reproduction of sociopathic, enshittifying monsters" within these companies. The first is interoperability; in the non-digital world, it is a lot of work to, say, ensure that any light bulb can be used with any light socket. In the digital world, all of our programs run on the same "Turing-complete, universal Von Neumann machine", so a program that breaks interoperability can be undone with a program that restores it. Every ten-foot fence can be surmounted with an 11-foot ladder; if HP writes a program to ensure that third-party ink cannot be used with its printers, someone can write a program to undo that restriction.

DoorDash workers generally make their money on tips, but the app hides the amount of the tip until the driver commits to taking the delivery. A company called Para wrote a program that looked inside the JSON that was exchanged to find the tip, which it then displayed before the driver had to commit. DoorDash shut down the Para app, "because in America, apps like Para are illegal". The 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) signed by Bill Clinton "makes it a felony to 'bypass an access control for a copyrighted work'". So even just reverse-engineering the DoorDash app is a potential felony, which is why companies are so desperate to move their users to apps instead of web sites. "An app is just a web site that we have wrapped in a correct DRM [digital rights management] to make it a felony to protect your privacy while you use it", he said to widespread applause.

At the behest of the US trade representative, Europe and Canada have also enacted DMCA-like laws. This happened despite experts warning the leaders of those countries that "laws that banned tampering with digital locks would let American tech giants corner digital markets in their countries". The laws were a gift to monopolists and allowed companies like HP to continually raise the price of ink until it "has become the most expensive substance you, as a civilian, can buy without a permit"; printing a shopping list uses "colored water that costs more than the semen of a Kentucky-Derby-winning stallion".

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.

Reversing course

Until we fix the environment we find ourselves in, the contagion will spread to other companies, he said. The good news is that after 40 years of antitrust decline, there has been a lot of worldwide antitrust activity and it is coming from all over the political spectrum. The EU, UK, Australia, Germany, France, Japan, South Korea, "and China, yes, China" have passed new antitrust laws and launched enforcement actions. The countries often collaborate, so a UK study on Apple's 30% payment-processing fee was used by the EU to fine the company for billions of euros and ban Apple's payment monopoly; those cases then found their way to Japan and South Korea where Apple was further punished.

"There are no billionaires funding the project to make billionaires obsolete", Doctorow said, so the antitrust work has come from and been funded by grassroots efforts.

Europe and Canada have passed strong right-to-repair legislation, but those efforts "have been hamstrung by the anti-circumvention laws" (like the DMCA). Those laws can only be used if there are no locks to get around, but the manufacturers ensure that every car, tractor, appliance, medical implant, and hospital medical device has locks to prevent repair. 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. "It's like punching yourself in the face really hard and hoping someone else says 'ouch'."

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. Let companies jailbreak Teslas and deliver all of the features that ship in the cars, but are disabled by software, for one price; that is a much better way to hurt Elon Musk, rather than by expressing outrage at his Nazi salutes, since he loves the attention. "Kick him in the dongle."

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. "Any country in the world has it right now in their power to become a tech-export powerhouse." Doing so would directly attack the tech giants in their most profitable lines of business: "it takes the revenues from those rip-off scams globally from hundreds of billions of dollars to zero overnight". And "that is how you win a trade war", he said to more applause.

He finished with a veritable laundry list of all of the ills facing the world today (the "omni-shambolic poly-crisis"), both on and off the internet, and noted that the tech giants would willingly "trade a habitable planet and human rights for a 3% tax cut". But it did not have to be this way, "the enshitternet was not inevitable" and was, in fact, the product of policy choices made by known people in the last few decades. "They chose enshittification; we warned them what would come of it and we don't have to be eternal prisoners of the catastrophic policy blunders of clueless lawmakers of old."

There once was an "old good internet", Doctorow said, but it was too difficult for non-technical people to connect up to; web 2.0 changed that, making it easy for everyone to get online, but that led directly into hard-to-escape walled gardens. A new good internet is possible and needed; "we can build it with all of the technological self-determination of the old good internet and the ease of web 2.0". It can be a place to come together and organize in order to "resist and survive climate collapse, fascism, genocide, and authoritarianism". He concluded: "we can build it and we must".

His speech was well-received and was met with a standing ovation. Some of his harshest rhetoric (much of which was toned down here) may not have been popular with everyone, perhaps especially the PyCon sponsors who were named and shamed in the keynote, but it did seem to resonate within the crowd of attendees. Doctorow's perspective is always interesting—and he certainly pulls no punches.

A YouTube video of the talk is available.

[I would like to thank LWN's travel sponsor, the Linux Foundation, for supporting my travel to Pittsburgh for PyCon.]


Index entries for this article
ConferencePyCon/2025


to post comments

Tariff threats

Posted May 27, 2025 18:27 UTC (Tue) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (12 responses)

As a Canadian, I think Trump's actions have made the tariff threats meaningless. Basically, he capriciously decides to impose tariffs or not, whatever we do.

Therefore, I think our government should start to act in Canadians' interests and repeal our DRM-protection laws, ignoring protests from the US and US-based companies.

After all, what more crappy things will the Trump regime do to us that it isn't already doing?

Tariff threats

Posted May 27, 2025 18:56 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (4 responses)

I met a friend outside a cafe over the weekend and, while discussing all this, I jokingly said that Canada should offer to annex Alaska so they could escape trump. After all, you're both north of the 49th parallel, aren't you :-)

"Free the 49th parallel!" :-)

Cheers,
Wol

Tariff threats

Posted May 28, 2025 9:55 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (3 responses)

This misses the detail that Alaska is a very red state and (by voting records) prefers Trump.

Tariff threats

Posted May 28, 2025 12:03 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

It was very tongue-in-cheek. I don't have a clue about US politics ... :-)

Cheers,
Wol

Tariff threats

Posted May 30, 2025 9:44 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (1 responses)

And? By voting records, Canada doesn't like Trump but that doesn't seem to put him off the idea of annexing Canada.

Tariff threats

Posted Jun 6, 2025 11:41 UTC (Fri) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

I was more reacting to the "escape Trump" part. Trump is threatening to annex Canada for glory/"look how much land I added to the US"/bragging rights/mineral rights. I doubt there is anything amounting to consideration for the existing residents of the land (much the same with Greenland).

Tariff threats

Posted May 28, 2025 15:21 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (5 responses)

> After all, what more crappy things will the Trump regime do to us that it isn't already doing?

He may annex Alberta and other parts that are interesting for US, e.g.

Just find group of people who would proclaim “an independent Alberta” and enter US troops to “protect them”… would Canada be able to stop US?

I still think people underestimate the scale of changes that are happening in the world right now.

Tariff threats

Posted May 28, 2025 17:09 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (4 responses)

A very healthy majority (something like 80%) of Albertans do not want to join the US.

If Trump did actually invade Canada, that would be a doomsday scenario. I suspect there'd very likely be a civil war in the USA before that happens.

Canada would obviously not be able to stop the US from invading. But there wold be a very nasty insurgency once the initial invasion was over.

Tariff threats

Posted May 28, 2025 17:21 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (3 responses)

> A very healthy majority (something like 80%) of Albertans do not want to join the US.

Then they would be left in a Canada, Gambia-style.

Trump doesn't want or need these people who don't to join US. He could just take these parts that have interesting resources and leave the rest alone… to do whatever they want, essentially.

No need to even officially annex anything, really: just put military to ensure that part that provides oil to US is separated from the rest of Canada.

> But there wold be a very nasty insurgency once the initial invasion was over.

Only if invasion would occupy places where people leave. But it would be stupid for Trump to occupy these regions.

Few inuits that live in places where mineral resources reside can be bought relatively cheaply.

Tariff threats

Posted May 28, 2025 17:28 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (1 responses)

The whole Canada thing, IMO, is a distraction; people yell about that rather than pay attention to all of the unpleasant things that are actually happening.

It is a bit of a distraction here, too, so I would like to suggest that it is time to wind this subthread down.

Tariff threats

Posted May 28, 2025 19:39 UTC (Wed) by Phantom_Hoover (subscriber, #167627) [Link]

That’s ascribing too much competence, you’re best off applying the ‘brainfart model’ to things like this. Which made the preceding thread discussing it seriously, in an LWN comments section, even more bemusing.

Tariff threats

Posted May 28, 2025 17:33 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

I think you underestimate the will of Canadians to preserve our sovereignty and our territorial integrity, much like Putin underestimated Ukraine.

Tariff threats

Posted May 30, 2025 3:55 UTC (Fri) by backerman (guest, #103085) [Link]

Also ISDS and whatever the last copyright term extension was.

Unintended consequences

Posted May 27, 2025 19:41 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (18 responses)

> There is a small sliver of truth there, he said; Apple rolled out a feature on its phones that allowed users to opt-out of third-party surveillance

I asked an app developer why they are not doing a website. The answer was: "ads". Everyone and their dog now has adblockers installed, and the ad revenue for websites cratered long ago.

But apps completely control the presentation, and can show ads even without tracking information available. It's still valuable enough. Plus you get the "pay for premium version to avoid ads" income stream.

The way to fix it? Some kind of a microtransaction system. The content can't be free, and someone has to ultimately pay for it.

Unintended consequences

Posted May 28, 2025 9:26 UTC (Wed) by Karellen (subscriber, #67644) [Link] (17 responses)

I have to point out the slight irony of your comment, on a site where we are happily paying macrotransaction-level amounts, for access to articles that we would be able to read for free in just over a week anyway :-)

Unintended consequences

Posted May 28, 2025 17:07 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (14 responses)

I think this speaks to the high quality of LWN.

If we had to pay for content, 99.9% of sites would go bankrupt.

I don't think that's a bad thing. There's no law that says "Thou shalt be able to make money on the Internet" and I'd be happy if those few really good sites like LWN survived, and passion or hobby sites survived, and all the other slop disappeared off the Internet.

Unintended consequences

Posted May 28, 2025 18:19 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (13 responses)

I don't think enthusiasm is sustainable long-term. Content creators need to eat, have families, etc. A good blog article can easily take days to write, and when you have a full-time job and family, they just tend to stop.

Heck, I even miss the good old "20 facts about <something>, number 14 will shock you!" sites. They were a fun way to relax and waste 5-10 minutes.

It's so bad, that now "content creator" almost automatically means "YouTuber". Because YouTube videos are still reasonably profitable.

Unintended consequences

Posted May 28, 2025 19:00 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (12 responses)

Content creators need to eat, have families, etc. A good blog article can easily take days to write, and when you have a full-time job and family, they just tend to stop.

Yes? That's fine. I'd rather many fewer people be able to make a living at content creation than have the crappy Internet we do now.

I did standup comedy for about 8.5 years. I'd say 99.9% of comedians either have day jobs, are extremely poor, or both. C'est la vie. You're either in the 0.1% who are good enough and lucky enough to make a decent living at it, or you do it out of passion.

Unintended consequences

Posted May 29, 2025 3:12 UTC (Thu) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

> I did standup comedy for about 8.5 years

Woah, that's cool, tough business I bet.

> I'd rather many fewer people be able to make a living at content creation than have the crappy Internet we do now.

I think that some of the problems are from trying to build monopolies, from trying to make a 10x rate of return on investment which leads to enshitification. There is plenty of room for a bunch of small journalistic sites, like LWN or 404media that have their niche and make a living selling their reporting and analysis, retail. Industry trade rags, local news from someone who goes to _all_ the local city council meetings, etc. can be sustainable, but not if bought up by VC or equity trying to make a fast buck. It's big sites which have trouble, with advertising, they want to be "free" to drive viewers, but they want to get paid so enshitification. I think there is room too for people to share their own thoughts who don't need to get paid, on others sites and by creating their own sites, what I miss is stuff like to Cobalt Qube, although Nextcloud is pretty close where people could host low-volume services like personal email/web from their own hardware in their own home, with minimal ongoing cost and minimal surveillance, just the occasional search crawler to make the content discoverable.

A bunch of this kind of stuff is still out there, like Nebula as an alternate distribution platform for professional documentaries than YouTube, but it's not as discoverable as the all-signing-all-dancing *large* services, and I don't think there is a way to have small-scale search to make things discoverable, any search service is by definition highly capitalized.

Unintended consequences

Posted May 29, 2025 3:56 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (10 responses)

Then quirky, niche cultural activities will just die out. And will be replaced by corporate content from just a few large oligopolies.

This has happened with radio (Sinclair), video (Fox/CNN), and it will happen with the Internet.

Unintended consequences

Posted May 29, 2025 9:30 UTC (Thu) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (8 responses)

It hasn't, however, happened in models and games, magazine or book publishing; the quirky, niche cultural activities have continued to happen.

The difference is that the up-front cost of providing radio and video is relatively high - just the application fees for an FCC licence to run a station are going to run to $4,000 or so, and that's ignoring the cost of equipment to get going, and your annual fee (at $500 or so per year for a service area of under 10,000 people, going up to $20,000 for large areas). Including a transmitter, a tower, an antenna etc (and assuming someone donates the land for the tower for free), you're looking at at least $10,000 to set up a radio or TV station, and that only serves a small area.

For niche books and magazines, in contrast, I can do a print run of 1,000 copies of a 32 page magazine for under $500 (50 copies would be about $100), or spend the same to get 100 copies of a 300 page book (from a commercial print shop). It's then about $5 per copy to mail it out via USPS or similar.

That's a huge difference in both scale and costs; as an enthusiast about a niche, you can spend $500 to have your book or magazine printed and ready for you to post out, assuming that you can put the time in to produce the content yourself. While that's not cheap, it's within the reach of an enthusiast, and can be supported by other enthusiasts nationwide (if you can get 1,000 people in the entire US willing to pay $20/month for a magazine, you can pay your costs of production in full). In contrast, radio, or TV has start-up costs (assuming you're putting the time in to make the content for free) in the tens of thousands of dollars range for a small area, and you've got to hope that there are enough enthusiasts locally to make it worthwhile.

I suspect that the Internet is much more like the books + magazines situation; $50/month gets you quite a lot of hosting, nowadays (for video as well as for text), and that's the sort of cost that's low enough for an enthusiast to pay to get their content out there - and if there's enough similar enthusiasts around the world, pooling their funds to pay $50/month in total isn't implausible.

Unintended consequences

Posted May 29, 2025 16:50 UTC (Thu) by excors (subscriber, #95769) [Link] (1 responses)

Why would you make a broadcast radio show when you can make a podcast or a Twitch channel instead? Basically zero up-front cost, total creative freedom, no scheduling limitations, access to a global audience, etc. The quirky, niche, unprofitable activity hasn't died out, it's just moved to a better medium. And the same with broadcast TV and YouTube.

Discoverability is poor because the social platforms are designed to promote popular content, and strongly incentivise producing popular content (because popularity is on an exponential curve, and one provocative clickbaity viral video with 10M views will pay way more than 100 decent videos with 10K views each), so that's most of what you see there. But the niche content still exists, if you can find it somehow amongst the garbage.

Unintended consequences

Posted May 29, 2025 17:23 UTC (Thu) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

For the same reason that Sinclair Broadcast Group used to put out quirky, niche radio shows, and for the same reason that you used to get quirky local TV - the Internet didn't exist back then.

The difference I'm calling out is that with radio and TV, the degree of investment needed to do it yourself, bypassing corporate gatekeepers, was huge, and thus when the corporate gatekeepers took control of local stations, you were pushed out, because you couldn't afford to keep your quirky niche going as a sideline.

In contrast, with print media, it's been possible for an enthusiast to bankroll a "fanzine" or similar since at least the 1960s, spending the sort of money that a hobbyist can afford to spend from disposable income (and that another person would spend on wrenching on cars, following their favourite team, or other hobbies).

I expect that, even if there was no advertising money at all (for artists or platforms) that Internet video, podcasts, blogs etc are closer to print media than to broadcast radio stations; yes, the big names have huge advantages over you (just as the official Star Trek magazine had huge advantages over fanzines in the 1960s), but $50/month gets you a lot of video, podcast, or blog hosting platform for your hobby content, and $50/month feels like it's in the "disposable income" category, not the "unaffordable for a hobby" category.

Unintended consequences

Posted Jun 1, 2025 21:08 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (5 responses)

> It hasn't, however, happened in models and games, magazine or book publishing; the quirky, niche cultural activities have continued to happen.

It has happened in games. The websites and forums are mostly dead, and even professional review magazines are more dead than alive. Most of the new independent content is on Youtube. It's pure natural selection: authors who publish on Youtube can actually get some income stream going. And so they produce more content, as a result. Some of them even become professional Youtube content creators.

And it's terrible. Youtube has content guidelines and will gladly fuck up your channel for any reason (or no reason whatsoever). To give an example, there was a channel RZXArchive that contained playthroughs of ZX-Spectrum games. Its author passed away, and a couple of years later the channel got nuked by Youtube, presumably as a result of a copyright strike.

So yeah, I think that the way forward is to make it possible for websites to accept micropayments. Ads had served as a way to do that for a while, but they are now completely useless.

Unintended consequences

Posted Jun 2, 2025 16:34 UTC (Mon) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (4 responses)

You say it's happened in games - but you then tell me about magazines and forums, and not games. As far as I can tell, looking at my shelf of board games, while Hasbro does indeed dominate, there's plenty of smaller publishers still out there, from people like Asmodee and their various brands, down to small companies that still keep putting out games (some of which have only put out a single game so far).

And yes, the content put out by enthusiasts currently goes to YouTube, because it's the cheap way to do it - you can even get paid. But when that goes away, enthusiasts can, and will, go elsewhere - even if they have to pay to get their message out. They did in the 1960s, they did in the 1990s, and they will in future, as long as the cost of doing so isn't prohibitive ($100/month is doable, $1,000/month is not).

Unintended consequences

Posted Jun 2, 2025 17:14 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (3 responses)

I meant "computer games".

> They did in the 1960s, they did in the 1990s, and they will in future, as long as the cost of doing so isn't prohibitive ($100/month is doable, $1,000/month is not).

I don't think so. Younger people will just not be interested in it. In 1960-s there was no other alternative, now there is.

Unintended consequences

Posted Jun 2, 2025 17:20 UTC (Mon) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (2 responses)

Even computer games seem fairly healthy to me; yes, Sony, EA, Microsoft and Valve (Steam) control a lot of the market, but I'm seeing plenty of indie devs putting stuff out on itch.io, on their own websites (with their own payment mechanisms) etc. It's not gone away - it's just that (for now) Valve is being a good corporate citizen, so everybody's using them.

If Steam, YouTube, TikTok et al go away, or start charging insane amounts to host with them, or put in restrictions that are too painful to comply with, people will move.

After all, in the 1960s, there absolutely were corporate-controlled alternatives on offer; there was even an official Star Trek magazine. It's just that the enthusiasts wanted to get their stuff out, didn't want to comply with the corporate restrictions, and could afford to find an alternative. And that last bit is crucial to what enthusiasts will do when the corporate platforms lock down - they will find alternatives, and as long as affordable (hobby price grade) alternatives exist, they'll move.

Unintended consequences

Posted Jun 2, 2025 18:57 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

Sorry, I keep being unclear. I mean magazines and sites that are _about_ games and gaming. Not the games themselves.

The sites still exist, but they have only a small percentage of the overall gaming population and are clearly in decline. While YouTube channels are flourishing (e.g. "Linus Tech Tips").

Unintended consequences

Posted Jun 3, 2025 9:24 UTC (Tue) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

From my perspective, that's just the normal shifts in the marketplace, and if YouTube becomes unviable as a place for content creators to put up content (e.g. demands $1,000/month just to keep your content available, plus subscriptions from viewers, too), the content will move elsewhere. It happens to be focusing in on YouTube right now because that's a platform that will pay you to provide content, whereas you'd have to pay to host it ad-free on Vimeo or similar.

I don't however, see that this means that the content will remain on YouTube forever; for now, YouTube offers a great deal for hosting content (it pays you a considerable amount), so that's where the creators of interesting content are congregating, but as YouTube puts limits on creators, they'll sort out things like Nebula, or even just paying for private video hosting from platforms like Vimeo. Thus, I'm not concerned about the risk of everything congregating on YouTube; people can, and do, move away from platforms where the alternative is better value to them.

Unintended consequences

Posted May 29, 2025 14:33 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

On the contrary, the earlier Internet was relatively much richer in quirky, niche content that today's internet full of vacuous influencers and AI-generated slop.

People who make quirky, niche content are not typically in it for the money, and if they are, they'll soon learn something called "reality". If there were fewer slop sites drowning them out, they might be able to attract a bit more financial support.

Unintended consequences

Posted May 28, 2025 17:42 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

I actually try to support creators on Patreon (blergh) and some other sites because I believe that people should be paid for good work. I even switched to paid Kagi from Google for search.

But I won't subscribe to a random website's Patreon if I just want a couple of articles from there. On the other hand, I would be delighted to allow my web browser to pay a couple of cents to view an article.

The exception that proves the rule

Posted Jun 1, 2025 16:06 UTC (Sun) by jmalcolm (subscriber, #8876) [Link]

LWN has had decades of high-quality content on which to build its niche and very easy to target audience. And it is barely able to support itself with subscriptions.

If anything, that tells us how hard it is to create a subscription content business on the web.

terminology: "capitalism" versus "commerce"

Posted May 28, 2025 1:26 UTC (Wed) by jokeyrhyme (subscriber, #136576) [Link] (24 responses)

> The first is markets; businesses that charge more and deliver less lose customers, all else being equal. This is the bedrock idea behind capitalism ...

happy to bikeshed, but my understanding is that capitalism and socialism are opposing ends of the same spectrum, with the socialism end preferring more people having influence over the economy and wealth being distributed across more people, compared to the capitalism end which prefers less people controlling the economy and wealth being distributed across fewer people

so, if that's an acceptable definition, then the "market" force here seems more like trade/commerce, and less like a phenomenon that only happens under capitalism, indeed it's feasible for trade/commerce to exist under any system on the capitalism<->socialism spectrum

terminology: "capitalism" versus "commerce"

Posted May 28, 2025 9:29 UTC (Wed) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link] (8 responses)

Capitalism is where ownership of the means of production is by individuals and businesses. Socialism is that the means of production are owned by the community. Democratic socialism is where the areas that are community owned are determined democratically. Mostly applied to natural monopolies like water/electricity distribution and infrastructure.

The market forces are the same in all cases. Notably, community owned does not mean funded by taxes. The main difference is that community owned businesses don't need to maximize profit because the dividends are returned to the community anyway so you may as well just reduce prices instead. The only market force that reduces prices is competition, which is why all monopolies and oligopolies, natural or otherwise, are a problem.

Explicit wealth sharing is really an orthogonal issue, more like communism which wants all property to be community owned, which is an entirely different kettle of fish. Wealth sharing is better done via progressive taxation. Socialism by itself doesn't prevent wealth disparity.

terminology: "capitalism" versus "commerce"

Posted May 28, 2025 23:44 UTC (Wed) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link] (7 responses)

> Capitalism is where ownership of the means of production is by individuals and businesses. Socialism is that the means of production are owned by the community. Democratic socialism is where the areas that are community owned are determined democratically. Mostly applied to natural monopolies like water/electricity distribution and infrastructure.

Right with you up to the last sentence.
If you understand "owned" to mean a combination of "has control" and "receives the profits" then every single enterprise (in a modern liberal democracy) is part individual owned and part community owned. The tax rate shows precisely the ownership ratio WRT profits and the regulatory framework show the control ratio less precisely.

Good government is finding the most productive and liberating balance between the two types of ownership.

terminology: "capitalism" versus "commerce"

Posted May 29, 2025 17:58 UTC (Thu) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link] (6 responses)

Considering "receiving of profits" as a decisive part of "ownership" doesn't seem useful, since the owners decide whether or not there are even profits. It seems the reduce the meaning of "ownership" to something meaningless.

Ownership is being able to direct the future of the business (as a shareholder) and taxation doesn't do that.

Better examples are the water utility owned by the local councils of the area it serves. Or the Port of Rotterdam owned by the municipality of Rotterdam. Some things are too important to leave to the whims of outsiders.

terminology: "capitalism" versus "commerce"

Posted May 29, 2025 19:13 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> Considering "receiving of profits" as a decisive part of "ownership" doesn't seem useful, since the owners decide whether or not there are even profits. It seems the reduce the meaning of "ownership" to something meaningless.

You're also missing out (a) vulture capitalism, where the owners convert equity into debt then bail out leaving a once-solid company teetering on the edge of bankruptcy with excessive debt.

And (b) management extraction where, in the absence of owners who take an interest (investment funds etc cough cough) the managers overpay themselves, produce shiny reports on how well they're doing, help themselves to big bonuses, and bail before anybody realises what's going on.

Modern capitalism seems all about making the concept of ownership meaningless so the rich and powerful can plunder the corporations. America has benefited immensely plundering everywhere else, but they've also plundered their own - which is how and why the Far East is doing so well ...

Cheers,
Wol

terminology: "capitalism" versus "commerce"

Posted May 30, 2025 8:55 UTC (Fri) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link] (4 responses)

Taxation doesn't do that but regulation does. Which is why wealthy owners do not like regulation, it reduces their own control.

terminology: "capitalism" versus "commerce"

Posted May 30, 2025 12:07 UTC (Fri) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (1 responses)

>Which is why wealthy owners do not like regulation, it reduces their own control.

Unless they arrange for the regulations to favor them.

terminology: "capitalism" versus "commerce"

Posted Jun 6, 2025 4:23 UTC (Fri) by fest3er (guest, #60379) [Link]

[replying to pizza and taladar]

People start out being satisfied with having 'enough plus a small cushion'. A small portion of them want more. And more. And greed sets in and they start wanting everything: all the voice, all the money, all the control. It's the nature of the beast.

In unfettered capitalism, greed reigns supreme. Greedy capitalists spend inordinate amounts of money buying regulation that benefits them. It really comes down to, "I got mine. Gitcher own." Governance has failed when capitalism has removed its own fetters.

My philosophy is that any internet host that tries something nefarious on my network or gateway is to be blocked completely. I currently block 1.25M domains and (sometimes) up to 50 000 IP addresses. They are all hosts that I don't want to have any contact with anything on my private internet (internetwork of LANs), in or out. I'll soon be adding snort/suricata alerts to block more IP addresses. I recently blocked a number of Vietnamese and Chinese netblocks (which were possibly hijacked); they were the source of most of the constant 5 000 guests on my forum hammering away doing whatever they were doing; normal guest count is less than 5. The count is recently back up to 500; time for me to scrape the logs again. From the other side, cloud and virtual host providers should also identify and prevent scammer, spammers, fishers and other miscreants from accessing the internet.

My conclusion is that the enshitternet is broken. Anything goes as long as the goal is profit. It is not possible to identify most hosts or domains on the worldwide net. DNS is wholly insufficient. RDAP/whois is inconsistent around the world (thus broken). We need a relational database of domains, owners/operators, and assigned addresses and netblocks (from the top all the way down to end users) and a freely accessible UI so we, the people, can verify who is (trying to) accessing our systems. We need to shut down all stolen netblocks and prevent further hijackings (fix BGP management). We need to be able to mark unused (or idle) netblocks as such so those addresses cannot be routed. We need to identify and shut down access from businesses who cry, "We're port-scanning your networks and services for your own good!" when it's really only for *their* profit. End-to-end encryption precludes private internetwork owners from performing their required duties to prevent malware, bots, malcontents and others from crossing their perimeter firewalls; it should be replaced with host-to-host, host-to-gateway and gateway-to-gateway encryption (OE). Network protection must be a multi-level undertaking. It is a grave mistake to reduce that task to operate only on end hosts. Otherwise, the only solution will be for groups of like-minded people to set up their own virtual internets and block out all who are not part of their group. And that will only further the interests of the chaotics (communists, fascists, atheists, anarchists, national socialists, capitalists and news media) who strive to prevent us from discussing issues among ourselves and deciding for ourselves.

These are my opinions. I may be right. Or wrong. But that's for all y'all to decide.

terminology: "capitalism" versus "commerce"

Posted May 30, 2025 15:14 UTC (Fri) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link] (1 responses)

Right, but if you're ending up in the situation where you're microregulating a specific business, you're better off just being the owner. For example the Port of Rotterdam: you could as government preemptively try to regulate what kinds of (dangerous) goods can be stored where relative to residential neighbourhoods, and potential environmental impacts, or as owner you can simply require all projects of certain risk to be bumped to the owner (the municipality) for a check. Saves loads of time and effort.

Or for example water utilities, as owner you can require the obeying regulations is more important than profits. So you don't get UK-style issues. Instead, the investment vs safety trade-offs are handled democratically.

This is getting quite far from Cory's ideas though. None of the monopolies in the tech space are natural.

terminology: "capitalism" versus "commerce"

Posted May 30, 2025 17:21 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> Or for example water utilities, as owner you can require the obeying regulations is more important than profits. So you don't get UK-style issues. Instead, the investment vs safety trade-offs are handled democratically.

Selling off our utilties was one of daftest things Thatcher's government did. Create regional infrastructure companies, OWNED BY THE CUSTOMERS. Yes you'll need some regulations, but customers can then buy from suppliers, who compete on price, delivered over the communal network. And yes they needed to do something, but converting municipal companies unable to work because of political interference, into private companies unable to work because of shareholder pressure, was NOT a good move.

Investment should be funded mostly out of revenue, so you might need a mutual bank to smooth cash flow, but the major expense will be upgrading infrastructure - new infrastructure would be expected to be paid for by developers.

By the way, what do you mean by "UK Style Issues"? Do you mean climate-change storms overwhelming our treatment facilities? Do you nean hot summers overwhelming our ability to supply drinking-quality water for people to water their gardens with? Do you mean farming run-off polluting our rivers? Do you mean new roads and the associated pollution ending up where it shouldn't? Do you mean government interference where companies are not allowed to fix aging equipment because "it's too expensive"? I'm not saying all of our water industry problems are external to the industry, but there's a lot of focus on management failings when - in many cases - those failings are because the management is hamstrung trying to deal with external influences.

Cheers,
Wol

Cheers,
Wol

terminology: "capitalism" versus "commerce"

Posted May 28, 2025 9:52 UTC (Wed) by Phantom_Hoover (subscriber, #167627) [Link] (6 responses)

Well you can have the Soviet system where all production is state-controlled and prices are centrally planned. But this collapsed spectacularly in the 90s, ushering in a world where you can blame every ill in the world on ‘capitalism’ and look smart because there’s no counterexample to test your claim against.

terminology: "capitalism" versus "commerce"

Posted May 30, 2025 8:57 UTC (Fri) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link] (5 responses)

We can easily see that the more capitalist countries like the US are just all out worse for their population (except the ultra-wealthy) in pretty much every way.

terminology: "capitalism" versus "commerce"

Posted May 30, 2025 13:20 UTC (Fri) by edgewood (subscriber, #1123) [Link] (1 responses)

Right, which is why we see large amounts of out migration from the US, driving the current border enforcement, so that we keep all the poor oppressed people here.

Hmm, wait, is that right?

terminology: "capitalism" versus "commerce"

Posted May 30, 2025 13:36 UTC (Fri) by daroc (editor, #160859) [Link]

I think this thread of conversation has been slowly drifting away from topicality; there's nothing wrong with it up to this point, but we should probably stop here.

terminology: "capitalism" versus "commerce"

Posted May 30, 2025 22:21 UTC (Fri) by jverce (subscriber, #170539) [Link] (1 responses)

Quite the contrary. Countries with freer markets improve their citizens with better quality of life.

https://capx.co/the-compelling-case-for-increased-economi...

terminology: "capitalism" versus "commerce"

Posted May 31, 2025 9:14 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Haven't read the article, but given the shenanigans with aid and all sorts of stuff, how much of that is "free market for rich countries, exploitation for the poor".

Never confuse cause and effect. I strongly suspect that wealth leads to power leads to free markets, not the other way round.

Just look at pretty much any empire you care to name. It's all about using their wealth to provide a security force (army) to protect their trade routes - to *their* advantage, not the other side ...

Cheers,
Wol

terminology: "capitalism" versus "commerce"

Posted Aug 9, 2025 23:10 UTC (Sat) by Rudd-O (guest, #61155) [Link]

yep, the american government starved twenty million people.

oops, no, that was the soviets.

(and the chinese even more)

terminology: "capitalism" versus "commerce"

Posted May 29, 2025 11:18 UTC (Thu) by rbranco (subscriber, #129813) [Link] (4 responses)

Socialism itself is a spectrum of failed experiments. National, international, democratic socialism have all been tried and failed. Tito tried to put it a human face and failed. Latin America tried socialism of the 21st century and also failed. Then you have morons telling you that it hasn't been tried yet.

terminology: "capitalism" versus "commerce"

Posted May 29, 2025 12:59 UTC (Thu) by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958) [Link] (2 responses)

That latin america's socialism failed is only proof that the CIA are good at their jobs. But I am not sure what information we can get about socialism from that.

terminology: "capitalism" versus "commerce"

Posted May 29, 2025 14:56 UTC (Thu) by rbranco (subscriber, #129813) [Link] (1 responses)

The CIA did a crappy job. The failed at Bay of Pigs and let Fidel Castro live long enough to spread this cancer on the whole continent.

terminology: "capitalism" versus "commerce"

Posted May 29, 2025 15:09 UTC (Thu) by jzb (editor, #7867) [Link]

At this point, this discussion has gotten way off-topic for LWN. Let's end this thread here, please. Thanks.

terminology: "capitalism" versus "commerce"

Posted Aug 9, 2025 23:14 UTC (Sat) by Rudd-O (guest, #61155) [Link]

People who defend communism / socialism have never read these books:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_of_Communism

https://www.amazon.com/Socialism-Failed-Idea-That-Never/d...

If someone had read any one of these two books, or even one chapter, they would not defend it.

terminology: "capitalism" versus "commerce"

Posted May 31, 2025 11:05 UTC (Sat) by smitty_one_each (subscriber, #28989) [Link] (2 responses)

For a competing model, consider socialism as an RDBMS table with a relatively rigid schema and tidy rows.

Capitalism is a no-SQL key-value store full of JSON documents in very ragged glory.

While I don't personally "believe" this analogy in a final sense, I think that it helps get at the strengths/weaknesses of both systems to a useful degree.

terminology: "capitalism" versus "commerce"

Posted May 31, 2025 13:03 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

> For a competing model, consider socialism as an RDBMS table with a relatively rigid schema and tidy rows.

To nitpick - that's closer to communism. But the Americans seem unable to distinguish between socialism and communism - there is a VERY big difference (and probably both bear little resemblance to marxism - these words have had their meanings mangled, messed up, and generally screwed over by people with vested interests).

I'd liken socialism to Not-Only-SQL - free-format within a structured framework (or a structured framework over a free format). Ownership for the employees by the employees - not the state or the rich entrepreneur.

Most of Western Europe has been pretty died-in-the-wool socialist since the century before last. Unfortunately a lot of that structure has been trashed since Reagan, and we're all the worse off for it.

Cheers,
Wol

terminology: "capitalism" versus "commerce"

Posted May 31, 2025 13:32 UTC (Sat) by smitty_one_each (subscriber, #28989) [Link]

Excellent feedback. Thank you.

To your point, from a certain American view, the difference between, say, National Socialism and Communism was the overt racism of the former. Lenin was basically arguing an authoritarian midwife in the form of a "revolutionary vanguard" to help birth the Marxist worker's paradise, only that midwife morphed into Communism. I say this to sketch a certain point of view, not to pretend that a century of development an nuance can be crammed into a sentence.

A refinement on my point would be to posit an architectural spectrum. Real individuals/places/history acquire all sorts of architectural cruft en route to (at least two) overarching tasks:

- stability

- resolving the tension between the individual and the group

My RDBMS/no-SQL analogy may be considered the ends of that spectrum.

Cheers,
Chris

"old good internet"

Posted May 28, 2025 8:32 UTC (Wed) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]

The "old good internet" still exist and LWN.net is part of it. Sure, that is not where there is money to be made and where cool kids hang out, but for my part I stick to it.

Interoperability can be aided through enshittification too

Posted May 28, 2025 10:10 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (8 responses)

> The first is interoperability; in the non-digital world, it is a lot of work to, say, ensure that any light bulb can be used with any light socket.

Ironically, we have a standard light socket because the Phoebus cartel[1] required compatible sockets for *their* enshittification enforcement mechanism: a rig that kept lights on and, if the bulb lasted too long, would trigger fines for the manufacturer.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel

Interoperability can be aided through enshittification too

Posted May 28, 2025 12:21 UTC (Wed) by excors (subscriber, #95769) [Link] (5 responses)

Hmm, I looked into that and I don't think it's true. According to a book from 1927 (only 2 years after Phoebus formed), the Edison lamp base was already 70% of the (US?) market in 1900, and became pretty much universal within 5 years thanks to a marketing campaign and adapters being sold at cost: https://bulbs.2yr.net/porcelain-th-socket.php (quoting from https://archive.org/details/historyofincande00howe/page/182)

It's also *not* standard in the UK, even though Phoebus included most UK lamp manufacturers. (The 1951 report at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/report-on-the-... has some details on the companies). The B22 bayonet fitting is the most common in the UK today, and as far as I can tell that's been the case since before the 1920s (though I can't find good evidence for that). There must have been some cooperation between lamp manufacturers to standardise on that, as with the Edison base in the US, but they evidently weren't aiming for a global standard (despite there being a lot of overlap and cooperation between the US/UK/EU manufacturers) and it was long before Phoebus.

It seems like they simply recognised that incompatible fittings were a pain for both consumers and manufacturers, and were holding back the industry, so standardising on the most common fitting within each market would help everyone.

(Bayonet isn't universal in the UK though, now that markets have become more international - it's easier for manufacturers to have one design for the whole UK+EU market, so E27 is quite widely available too, and many houses will have a mixture. And now we have expensive long-life LED smart bulbs, it's even harder to adopt a new standard, so I guess we'll be stuck in this transitional state forever.)

Interoperability can be aided through enshittification too

Posted May 28, 2025 14:20 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (2 responses)

> (Bayonet isn't universal in the UK though, now that markets have become more international - it's easier for manufacturers to have one design for the whole UK+EU market, so E27 is quite widely available too, and many houses will have a mixture. And now we have expensive long-life LED smart bulbs, it's even harder to adopt a new standard, so I guess we'll be stuck in this transitional state forever.)

And it now gets worse because both Bayonet and Edison have their "small" equivalent so that's four ... and we have spotlights which are becoming more common which also come in two versions, GU10 and MR12 (plus, I believe, a bunch of minor players).

I'm trying to standardise my house on Edison (because I think it's better/safer than Bayonet), and GU10 (because I'm fed up with the grief of 12v transformers for MR12). More and more lamps and wall lights are ES or SES now, although it's still hard to find non-Bayonet pendant light fittings.

Cheers,
Wol

Interoperability can be aided through enshittification too

Posted May 30, 2025 9:28 UTC (Fri) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link] (1 responses)

E27 means it’s not too hard to find a bulb with good CRI and white point choice. GU10 is second and E14 even further. If you make the mistake of buying anything with built-in led or any other kind of micro socket you’re condemned to 80 (or even 75) CRI and yellowish 2700K white.

Stable standard API/sockets trump “better” experiments that lack the reach to form a diverse ecosystem.

Interoperability can be aided through enshittification too

Posted May 30, 2025 14:26 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> E27 means it’s not too hard to find a bulb with good CRI and white point choice.

The number of people who don't even realise there is a white point choice (and why it's important), though ...

Our study had "cold white" bulbs, until we re-purposed it as a bedroom (at which point I was scrounging around for warm white bulbs to swap it with). Now it's pretty much just the room I use as an office that has cold white bulbs.

So I don't think most people would notice the lack of choice. But when you need it, you most definitely need it ...

Cheers,
Wol

Interoperability can be aided through enshittification too

Posted Jun 6, 2025 3:09 UTC (Fri) by zahlman (guest, #175387) [Link] (1 responses)

The cartel definitely existed, but the common narrative about conspiring to lower light bulb lifetimes is incomplete and not entirely fair. The short version is that incandescent light bulbs more or less directly trade off durability against the quality and amount of light produced; they can last more or less forever if they glow a dull orange that still lets you stare at the rest of the bulb, but even tungsten will eventually fail under the temperatures needed to make the light appear nearly pure white - and a bulb that produced the same amount of light at a lower temperature would still be orange (the concept of "colour temperature" comes directly from here) and would be much less efficient (drawing higher wattage and producing more waste heat).

As far as I'm aware, nobody ever came up with any meaningful improvements to the technology once we settled on tungsten filaments and argon (IIRC) filling the bulb; we had to move to completely different technologies (CF and then LED).

Technology Connections has a detailed video about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb7Bs98KmnY

Interoperability can be aided through enshittification too

Posted Aug 9, 2025 23:16 UTC (Sat) by Rudd-O (guest, #61155) [Link]

Veritasium also has another video on it, also very interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5v8D-alAKE

Interoperability can be aided through enshittification too

Posted May 28, 2025 18:08 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

This is not what happened. And Technology Connections (I also support them) has a video about that, of course: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb7Bs98KmnY

The TLDR; version - classic tungsten spiral incandescent lightbulbs were perfected in the early 1920-s, and the relationship between the lamp longevity and energy use became established. So the Phoebus association picked a reasonable compromise between them.

There is no magical pixie dust technology to make tungsten lamps last longer. The only way to do that is to run them at a cooler temperature, wasting more energy as invisible infrared.

Here's a nice article with numbers: https://pubs.aip.org/aip/adv/article/12/10/105116/2819829... - it's a recent one, Google Scholar isn't too great for articles from around 1920.

Interoperability can be aided through enshittification too

Posted Jun 6, 2025 13:27 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

tl;dr in order to get brighter better light, you need to run more current which makes the wire glow hotter.

Smaller radiuses (thinner wire) glow hotter which means any defects in the wire will glow hotter than the rest.

Hotter wires evaporate tungsten, which will condense on the cooler (thicker) parts making them even thicker.

So the brighter the light, the hotter the wire, the quicker the defects grow, and the quicker it breaks.

Cheers,
Wol

add -noai on firefox

Posted May 28, 2025 10:30 UTC (Wed) by kenmoffat (subscriber, #4807) [Link] (1 responses)

On firefox, adding -noai seems to work although it also offers search results with ai.

add -noai on firefox

Posted May 28, 2025 13:07 UTC (Wed) by patrick_g (subscriber, #44470) [Link]

To have clean results with Google it's useful to appends udm=14 at the end of the search string in order to only return the web results. You can even install a Firefox extension to do this automatically.
See the difference :

https://www.google.com/search?q=grothendieck
https://www.google.com/search?q=grothendieck&udm=14

Isn’t his proposal to fix it basically just modern China?

Posted May 29, 2025 14:01 UTC (Thu) by psadauskas (subscriber, #46534) [Link] (1 responses)

Oh good, another example to add to my collection of “Reagan made everything worse”.

> 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. Let companies jailbreak Teslas and deliver all of the features that ship in the cars, but are disabled by software, for one price;

Isn’t that basically China? Zero regard for IP law, so they clone any interesting and useful thing and sell it? Like the US at the turn of the last century (1900s), if you had an interesting idea for a bicycle or automobile, in any decent sized-town there’d be a dozen machine or tool-and-die shops that could make it for you. Now, if you have an idea for a gadget with an OLED screen and Bluetooth, any city in China will have a dozen electronics factories that can make it, plastic enclosure included.

Isn’t his proposal to fix it basically just modern China?

Posted May 29, 2025 16:03 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> Isn’t that basically China? Zero regard for IP law, so they clone any interesting and useful thing and sell it?

Actually, from what I can make out, they have a LOT of regard for IP law. They just BUY any interesting thing, and then sell it.

> Like the US at the turn of the last century (1900s)

I think you're a century too early. That era only came to a nominal close with Berne (the US joined in the 1980s?) and Lemuelson (again the 1980s?) who made a career copying Edison. Who's patent claiming to invent the lightbulb post-dated a visit to a lightbulb factory !!!

Cheers,
Wol

If it's free, you really are the product

Posted May 30, 2025 6:33 UTC (Fri) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (2 responses)

> It is misguided to say "if you're not paying for the product, you're the product", because it makes it seem like we are complicit in sustaining surveillance capitalism—and we are not. The thinking goes that if we were only willing to start paying for things, "we could restore capitalism to its functional non-surveillance state and companies would treat us better because we'd be customers and not products".

No, that's absolutely not "how the thinking goes".

From:

it's free (A) => you are the product (B)

... it does NOT follow that

not A => not B

That's a surprisingly basic mistake.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contraposition

If it's free, you really are the product

Posted May 30, 2025 8:32 UTC (Fri) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link] (1 responses)

I agree with your logic but I think you are in violent agreement with Cory there.

If it's free, you really are the product

Posted May 30, 2025 14:10 UTC (Fri) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

Likely agreeing on the "real" issues, yes. My comment was only about the expression. Very minor disagreement compared to the actual issues discussed but I think it's a very good expression, especially about (a)social media and information/propaganda in general. Most of the world population now believes they're getting "information" when we are being literally drugged with dopamine, brainwashed and distracted from real issues, all at the same time. One of the most potent weapons ever invented. Propaganda has existed since forever but this last stage is on another level. Apparently this even affects fertility and population size! https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/29/opinion/dating-marriag...

I don't think there is any better catchphrase to describe this problem. You do need something very short because you're going against dopamine shots and Tiktok attention times, that is: seconds-long attention times.

Of course paying for information (or anything) does not automagically make it neutral and great, far from it, funding is only the first requirement. But the expression does not say otherwise.

On the breakability of DRM

Posted May 31, 2025 17:51 UTC (Sat) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]

enshittification of lwn

Posted Jun 3, 2025 22:11 UTC (Tue) by hubcapsc (subscriber, #98078) [Link] (6 responses)

>> a much better way to hurt Elon Musk...

I didn't come here for that garbage.

-Mike

enshittification of lwn

Posted Jun 4, 2025 14:58 UTC (Wed) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link] (5 responses)

If you don't want to learn about Cory Doctorow's opinions, you should avoid articles covering Cory Doctorow's talks. Agree with him or not, he's a newsworthy figure in tech, and PyCon (and it's keynote address) is certainly something LWN should cover.

enshittification of lwn

Posted Jun 4, 2025 19:12 UTC (Wed) by hubcapsc (subscriber, #98078) [Link] (4 responses)

If I want to learn about the kind of scum who want to "hurt Elon Musk", I should wait outside a Tesla dealership for a firebomber.

If I want to keep up-to-date on Linux, I should read lwn.

-Mike "that's what I thought, anyway"

enshittification of lwn

Posted Jun 4, 2025 19:27 UTC (Wed) by daroc (editor, #160859) [Link] (2 responses)

As madscientist noted, I do think this article is topical for LWN. We've covered PyCon for many years, and faithfully reporting what is said at the many conferences dedicated to open-source software is something that many of our readers rely on. I'm sorry that you found this article objectionable; I hope you'll enjoy the rest of our upcoming coverage of the conference.

I would also like to draw your attention to the guidelines above the comment submission form — calling people scum is not particularly polite.

enshittification of lwn

Posted Jun 4, 2025 21:08 UTC (Wed) by hubcapsc (subscriber, #98078) [Link] (1 responses)

Though I'm just some whackadoodle comment poster, I have to point out that this article and the comments are full of impolite content. The "hurt Musk" guy is the focus of a featured article edited by one of the main editors. The "hurt Musk" guy seems endorsed by LWN.

enshittification of lwn

Posted Jun 5, 2025 22:30 UTC (Thu) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link]

"Covered by" LWN is not the same as "endorsed by" LWN. Also it's irrelevant what position in LWN the author of the article holds: it's not the case that the more senior the editor, the more you can assume that LWN endorses it.

The only mentions I find ANYWHERE in either the article OR the comments when I search for "Musk" are (a) the one reference in the article that you quoted, and (b) your comment and the replies. It feels to me like you're reaching here.

enshittification of lwn

Posted Jun 4, 2025 19:51 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

It is pretty clear to me (and to you, I strongly suspect) that Cory Doctorow means to hurt Musk financially and not physically.

We lost the Internet earlier

Posted Jun 5, 2025 10:33 UTC (Thu) by rbranco (subscriber, #129813) [Link] (2 responses)

Wish he'd gone deeper. Lots of platitudes, self-serving and complacency of having coined a new term.

We lost the Internet earlier. There was a time when plain HTTP webpages were cool and we didn't have cookie popups literally everywhere.

We lost the Internet about the same time people started creating webpages for overhyped bugs. At first it was fun but at some point we were overdoing it.

When we can't wish a return to the old-school ethos anymore because old is obsolete and everything must be new and shiny.

We lost the Internet earlier

Posted Jun 6, 2025 7:39 UTC (Fri) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link] (1 responses)

If you blame cookie popups you are shooting the messenger. Cookies used for tracking purposes are the actual problem, the law just made it visible and companies could easily avoid the popup by getting rid of their tracking cookies. Technically necessary cookies such as the ones for login or to remember some preference are not required to show a popup. Companies just value their ability to track you more than making their website easy to use for their users.

We lost the Internet earlier

Posted Jun 6, 2025 10:02 UTC (Fri) by rbranco (subscriber, #129813) [Link]

The problem is that not only companies are using them, but also open-source projects and official EU websites. We poopups everywhere. This is also enshittification.

Alternate App Stores are hard

Posted Jun 8, 2025 6:02 UTC (Sun) by dvdeug (guest, #10998) [Link]

> 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.

Except, no, that's not the way it works. Android lets you have alternate App Stores. It's nice, but who uses them? I have F-Droid installed, but I'm also commenting on LWN. Amazon shut theirs down. Samsung has one, because they ship the phones with Samsung junk preinstalled, but I don't think anyone actually uses it. Publishers will stay on Google Play Store or Apple App Store because that's where the money is.

Amazon had a long fight about whether they had to pay the Google tax for Kindle books sold through Amazon and Kindle apps; they have come to some sort of agreement where you can't buy Kindle books on the Amazon app, but you can through the Kindle app. Amazon of all companies could have told people just install the Amazon app store, and saved 100% of payment processing, but they didn't even try.

As a consumer: does this new company App Store offer me anything the Google Play store doesn't? Is it cheaper? Can I trust it to protect me from malware? (As a computer professional, I can talk about Google Play's problem with malware, but I suspect the average Android user just thinks of it as 100% safe. Even as a computer professional, either the company is spending money and time to vet every program, which cuts into their margins and reduces the number of programs they have, or they're tossing it to an automated system that Google, with a decade of experience and a lot more manpower, probably have done much better.) What happens if they start fighting over some program? (Samsung and Google Play and Amazon App Store sometimes do.) What happens if I buy a program from there and they close shop? (Again, cf. Amazon App Store.) Are they going to be secure with my credit card details? Etc.

Term stolen

Posted Aug 9, 2025 22:57 UTC (Sat) by Rudd-O (guest, #61155) [Link]

He did not coin the term "enshittification". The term was coined by a mutual on Twitter many, many years ago. Doctorow just stole the credit for that one.


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