cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/5431344
The enshittification of the internet follows a predictable trajectory: first, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. It doesn’t have to be this way. Enshittification occurs when companies gobble each other up in an orgy of mergers and acquisitions, reducing the internet to “five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four” (credit to Tom Eastman!), which lets them endlessly tweak their back-ends to continue to shift value from users and business-customers to themselves. The government gets in on the act by banning tweaking by users - reverse-engineering, scraping, bots and other user-side self-help measures - leaving users helpless before the march of enshittification. We don’t have to accept this! Disenshittifying the internet will require antitrust, limits on corporate tweaking - through privacy laws and other protections - and aggressive self-help measures from alternative app stores to ad blockers and beyond!
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Out of interest - which tool(s) did you use to generate this outline?
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Claude is my boy. So pleasant.
Oh we have to fix the laws? Yep this is a non starter.
Best bet is to just create Internet2.
Also remember that companies like Google are working hard to make it impossible to create anything outside of the walled garden.
The best idea I saw in his book in this regard was to have the government require open specs and interoperability for all government contracts.
Internet2 actually has existed since 1997. It’s like a series of private connections between universities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet2
And we’re basically entirely dependent on the EU to enact laws to enforce the interoperability required to reduce switching costs to allow for reverse network effects to break up tech/platform monopolies.
Regulatory capture is so deeply entrenched in American politics that it will take decades to unwind.
What was the prompt?
