1280: Cory Doctorow | Why Everything Got Worse and What to Do About It

What It Covers

Corey Doctorow explains enshitification, his term for how tech platforms systematically degrade user experience. The conversation examines how companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple use monopoly power, switching costs, and legal barriers like Section 1201 of the DMCA to trap users while extracting maximum value through junk fees, surveillance, and predatory pricing strategies.

Key Questions Answered

• •Google Search Degradation: In 2019, Google deliberately made search worse to increase revenue. Internal memos show executives turned off features like auto spell-check, context awareness, and query stemming to force users to search two to three times per query, generating multiple ad impressions. The top search result now costs 29% more than the best match, which typically appears 17 places down.
• •Amazon Junk Fees: Amazon charges merchants 50-60% of every sale in junk fees, up from 45-51% when Doctorow wrote his book. This includes payola-style auction fees for search placement, where sellers bid to appear in top results. These costs get passed to all consumers through most-favored-nation clauses that prevent merchants from offering lower prices elsewhere, creating an economy-wide Amazon tax.
• •Apple-Google Search Deal: Google pays Apple over $20 billion annually to not create a competing search engine, making it the largest deal either company does. This payment ensures Google maintains 90% search market share by preventing the only company with resources to compete from entering the market. The deal is negotiated directly between CEOs and effectively purchases Apple's non-competition.
• •Digital Rights Management as Felony: Section 1201 of the DMCA makes bypassing access controls a felony with five-year prison sentences and $500,000 fines. This prevents security researchers from auditing devices like Medtronic ventilators and pacemakers for vulnerabilities, blocks consumers from using purchased products as they wish, and enables manufacturers to create new felonies simply by adding DRM.
• •Switching Cost Engineering: Companies deliberately engineer high switching costs to trap users. Facebook bought Instagram and WhatsApp to eliminate competition after Zuckerberg wrote that it's better to buy than compete. Number portability regulations for phone carriers demonstrate how policy can lower switching costs, but similar protections don't exist for social media or most tech platforms.
• •Growth Stock Paradox: Tech companies maintain artificially high price-to-earnings ratios by signaling growth potential, allowing them to create stock by typing zeros into spreadsheets rather than earning cash. When Facebook experienced slightly lower growth in 2022, the company lost $260 billion in market value in one day, explaining why companies desperately pivot to metaverse, AI, and other adjacencies.
• •Alternative Search Solutions: Kagi, a $10 monthly search service, delivers dramatically better results than Google by using Google's index through API access and resorting results. This proves Google deliberately surfaces poor results for revenue rather than technical limitations. The existence of superior results from a small startup using the same underlying data demonstrates intentional degradation.