You’re not just imagining it. The internet really has transformed, and the magic has faded.
Think back to when a Google search felt like conjuring answers out of thin air, Amazon was a shopper’s wonderland, and Facebook was just a cozy stream of your friends’ updates.
These platforms once felt like sleek tools built for us. But somewhere along the line, the soul was sucked out of the internet. Now, search results are a noisy marketplace of ads, Amazon’s shelves are jammed with paid placements, and Facebook’s feed is so choked with spam and scams it barely passes for a social network.
This downward spiral has a name: enshittification. The word might sound blunt, but it nails the phenomenon. Technology critic Cory Doctorow, in his book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, coined the term “Enshittification” to describe how lively online communities slowly morph into joyless machines that drain their users dry.
What is “enshittification”?
Doctorow’s cycle starts with generosity: a new platform launches and is “great to end users,” drawing them in with useful features, few obstacles and not many ads. Once enough people are using it, the company finds ways to keep them from leaving: things like making it hard to switch, using contracts, and adding restrictions on digital content. Once users are stuck, the company starts making the product worse to get more money—usually by adding more ads, fees, or tracking. The extra money is then used to attract business customers by giving them special access to the audience. In the end, the platform squeezes both users and business customers, and everyone’s experience gets worse.
What makes the recent wave of enshittification different isn’t just companies wanting more money or investors wanting bigger returns. Those things have always been around. What has changed, Doctorow argues, is that there are fewer limits. Antitrust law has weakened, letting companies buy up competitors and make themselves harder to challenge.
Digital platforms have a “superpower”: they can change the experience for each user—showing you a different price or result than they show someone else—while laws like the DMCA make it illegal for outsiders to look at or change the software. When there’s nowhere else to go and no easy way to see what’s really happening, taking advantage of users becomes the norm.
Google: When Search Becomes Advertising
Google used to feel like a digital oracle: type in a question and the perfect answer would appear. Of course, that magic was always a bit of a trick. Search rankings have always been about control. But back then, good results brought in more users, which meant more ad dollars.
Once Google’s grip on the market tightened to 90 percent, the game changed. In 2019, some executives even floated the idea of making search worse on purpose, so people would click more and see more ads. That cynical approach now seems to be the company’s playbook.
Today, search results often blur the line between answers and ads.
Google’s search page is similar: for many queries, the “results” page is dominated by ads, shopping boxes, and “AI overviews.” A recent study by analytics firm Authoritas, submitted to the UK’s competition watchdog, found that when Google’s AI summaries appear above the links, websites that used to rank first can lose up to 79 percent of their traffic. Users get quick answers, but publishers get strangled, and the searcher is steered toward Google’s own properties, such as YouTube.
Why do we keep searching if the experience is deteriorating? Because the alternatives aren’t much better. Bing and DuckDuckGo exist, but they haven’t cracked Google’s dominance. Network effects make switching costly: our habits, bookmarks, and devices are tied to Google, and rival search engines often rely on Google’s index anyway. As Doctorow puts it, “things got worse, and we stayed”.
Amazon: From Marketplace to Payola Machine
Amazon started out as a scrappy little bookstore on the web. It won hearts with rock-bottom prices, fast shipping, and a relentless focus on customers. As it ballooned, Prime memberships lured millions with free shipping and streaming, locking households in. Sellers rushed in too, drawn by the crowds. But once everyone was hooked, Amazon started tightening the screws on both shoppers and sellers.
Doctorow’s book notes that Amazon’s ad business, once a side hustle, is now north of $50 billion. Its search results have become a pay‑to‑play system. An analysis in his book shows that the first result on Amazon is about 29 percent more expensive than the actual best deal, and the whole top row is about 25 percent more expensive.
Sellers trick the system by offering four-packs instead of ten-packs to look cheaper for each item, but actually charge more. Amazon could let you sort by price per item, but it doesn’t. Even if you find a better deal somewhere else, rules called “most-favored nation” clauses make sellers raise prices on their own websites if they raise them on Amazon, so Amazon’s pricing affects other stores too.
But the trap isn’t just about price. Digital items like Kindle books, Audible audiobooks, and Prime Video are locked in; if you leave Amazon, you lose your whole library. Prime’s prepaid shipping and tricky auto-renewals make quitting feel like you’re giving something up. Special deals keep other stores empty. In the end, sellers pay more to get attention, shoppers pay more without knowing it, and Amazon takes a share from both.
Facebook/Meta: The Platform as a Scam Farm
Facebook began as a simple social network: just your friends’ posts, no ads, no snooping. It became a lifeline for billions. But like the others, its next chapter was all about advertisers: targeted ads brought in piles of cash, while organic reach for pages and publishers withered. Now, we’ve entered the third act.
A Reuters investigation based on internal documents revealed that Meta (Facebook’s parent company) projected that roughly 10 percent of its 2024 revenue—about $16 billion—would come from advertising for scams and banned goods. Meta estimated that it shows its users 15 billion scam ads per day, and it earns about $7 billion annually from this high‑risk category.
The documents show that Meta often fails to remove advertisers unless its automated systems are 95 percent sure they are scammers; if the probability is lower, Meta charges higher ad rates as a penalty. Users who click on scam ads are then shown more of them.
Now, Facebook’s feed is a messy mix of computer-made videos, scam ads, and random suggestions. The computer programs focus on getting clicks, not quality, which spreads anger and false information.
Even honest advertisers are frustrated: targeting is less accurate, scams are everywhere, and costs keep going up. Still, leaving is hard. Our friendships, group chats, and photo albums are all stuck in Facebook and Instagram, and other options just don’t seem to work as well.
Underlying Forces: Capitalism, Competition, and Law
It’s tempting to blame users for “shopping wrong” or to repeat the saying that “if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.” Doctorow calls this a big distraction. The real problem is that there are fewer limits. When there is nowhere else to go, platforms can change prices and experiences however they want.
Antitrust enforcement has focused narrowly on consumer prices, embracing a Chicago School idea that monopolies are efficient and should be punished only if prices rise. That logic allowed Facebook to acquire Instagram even after Mark Zuckerberg wrote that buying the photo‑sharing app would keep users in Facebook’s ecosystem even if they never used the site again.
Digital law makes the problem worse. Rules like DMCA §1201 make it illegal to look at or change the software on your devices, even for good reasons like comparing prices or making things easier to use. That stops independent developers from making new ways to use these services or bringing back features that were removed. A new feature, AI overviews in Google search, shows how the law is unfair: the feature can copy information from news sites without permission, summarize it for the user, and hide the original link. Publishers have already complained to the UK competition watchdog after seeing traffic drop by up to 80 percent when their results appear below these AI summaries.
Regulators are starting to push back. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is investigating whether Amazon and Google misled advertisers about the pricing and terms of their search ads. Another case accuses Amazon of enrolling users in Prime without consent and making cancellation difficult.
At the same time, the Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating Meta for running ads for financial scams, and a British regulator found that Meta’s products were involved in 54 percent of all payment-related scam losses.
Why Leaving Isn’t Enough
A natural response to enshittification is to opt out. Delete your Facebook account, shop at a local bookstore, use DuckDuckGo. Those individual choices matter, but Doctorow warns against moralizing your shopping cart. If you spend all your time avoiding Amazon while skipping a labor rally, Jeff Bezos still wins. Structural problems need structural fixes.
Platforms are more like basic services than just fun websites: they handle our communication, shopping, and communities. The way users and business customers interact creates a “collective-action trap.” You care about your friends, you dislike the platform, but you can’t get everyone to leave at once.
Even if you leave, the other options may already be ruined: Uber made rides cheaper to beat taxis, then raised prices; now, in many cities, there are only a few cabs left, and bus service has been cut. The trap is also in our minds. We have made these services part of our daily lives. The hassle of switching and the fear of missing out make staying the easiest choice.
What Would a Better Internet Look Like?
Doctorow and other critics suggest four main ways to fix things: antitrust, regulation, interoperability, and worker power. Breaking up big platforms would make it harder for them to take advantage of users and would give people more real choices. Stronger rules—like the European Union’s Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act—could set clear limits against favoring their own products and require openness about how search results are ranked.
Making services work together would let users move their data and contacts between services and “jailbreak” their devices, so they could use different app stores and interfaces. Worker power matters because tech workers are not just future company founders but employees who can demand fair practices and refuse to build harmful features.
On the user side, there are small but important actions: support open-source software, pay for independent journalism, and use a variety of digital services. Maybe the most overlooked step is to see our frustrations as signs of the same problem.
Doctorow’s colleague James Boyle compares it to the environmental movement: before “ecology” became a common word, people cared about owls or the ozone layer, but didn’t realize they were fighting the same battle. Today, the shared goal is to push back against big corporate power. Your bad search results, locked e-books, expensive rides, and spam-filled social feeds all come from the same root problem.
The Philosophical Question
Enshittification makes us think more deeply about our relationship with technology. The early internet promised to give everyone more access to knowledge, markets, and speech. We dreamed of easy shopping and endless connection.
Those dreams were not foolish; they were taken advantage of. The platforms gave us convenience and connection, but they also set traps: making it hard to leave, locking up our data, and using tricks to keep us hooked.
None of this has to happen. Technology is not fate; it is built by laws, rules, and our choices. We could have enforced antitrust laws; we could have given users control over their data; we could have stopped platforms from copying and profiting from content without permission. We can still make those choices. The real question is not just “why did our favorite sites get worse?” but “what kind of online public space do we want?”
In 1984, George Orwell wrote that “Who controls the past controls the future.” In our age of enshittification, it may be more apt to say: Who controls the infrastructure controls the experience. We can resign ourselves to the steady decline, or we can demand an internet that serves people rather than squeezing them. The decline of Google, Amazon, and Facebook is not an act of God; it is a policy choice. And policy choices can be changed.
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