Fearing enshittification is one reason I want to keep my company private. If I have to answer to stockholders, then I’m not answering to customers, and that’s shitty.
The real cost of enshittification is that they make it impossible for others to run honest business.
Who will pay a subscription for privacy respecting services when there are a dozen free alternatives. True cost of running online business has been completely hidden from users and for so long that they will never accept those that want to cover the costs upfront.
e.g. how many of you remain on Lemmy if instance owners asked for a monthly fee to cover their server costs?
Cory Doctorow coins the term "enshittification" to describe how platforms start out benefiting users but eventually abuse users and business customers to extract all value.
Facebook started by prioritizing user privacy over ads but now prioritizes profits over all else.
Network effects are a double-edged sword - they lock users in but also make platforms vulnerable if users leave en masse.
Low switching costs due to universality and interoperability allow competitors to reverse engineer platforms and plug in competing services.
Mandatory interoperability and limiting data control can curb platform power by distributing control to users and smaller companies.
Recent antitrust actions aim to roll back decades of lax merger policy that let platforms consolidate power.
Breakups will take a long time so interoperability is a faster way to restore competition.
Laws should limit abusive behavior rather than rely on platforms to self-regulate.
Federated open services fail gracefully and encourage migration to better platforms.
Political will is growing but change will be gradual - focus should be on harm reduction in the near term.
I watched the video yesterday and I couldn't really understand what the plan is. What I got was something like "the corps are too big for the consumers to do anything and laws are very slow to made".
Did I miss something about the "audacious(?)" plan?
Lets kill off the damned cookie popups. Nobody cares, its literally the most useless 5 seconds of every persons life to have to dismiss and never read what it says