The thesis of the show is straightforward: the internet wasn't killed by ideological failings like "greed," nor by economic concepts like "network effects," nor by some cyclic force of history that drives towards "re-intermediation." Rather, all of these things were able to conquer the open, wild, creative internet because of *policies* that meant that companies that yielded to greed were able to harness network effects in order to re-intermediate the internet.

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My enshittification work starts with the *symptoms* of enshittification, the procession of pathological changes we can observe as platform users and sellers. Stage one: platforms are good to their end users while locking them in. Stage two: platforms worsen things for those captive users in order to tempt in business customers - who they *also* lock in.

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Stage three: platforms squeeze those locked-in business customers (publishers, advertisers, performers, workers, drivers, etc), and leave behind only the smallest atoms of value that are needed to keep users and customers stuck to the system. All the value except for this mingy residue is funneled to shareholders and executives, and the system becomes a pile of shit.

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This pattern is immediately recognizable as one we've all experienced and continue to experience, from eBay taking away your right to sue when you're ripped off:

valueaddedresource.net/ebay-us…

Or Duolingo replacing human language instructors with AI, even though *by definition* language learners are not capable of identifying and correcting errors in AI-generated language instruction (if you knew more about a language than the AI, you wouldn't need Duolingo):

bloodinthemachine.com/p/the-ai…

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I could cite examples all day long, from companies as central as Amazon:

pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/ens…

To smarthome niche products like Sonos:

reuters.com/business/retail-co…

To professional tools like Photoshop:

pluralistic.net/2022/10/28/fad…

To medical implants like artificial eyes:

pluralistic.net/2022/12/12/uns…

To the entire nursing profession:

pluralistic.net/2024/12/18/loo…

To the cars on our streets:

pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/ren…

And the gig workers who drive them:

pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/alg…

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There is clearly an epidemic - a pandemic - of enshittification, and cataloging the symptoms is important to tracking the spread of the disease. But if we're going to *do something* to stem the tide, we need to identify the *contagion*. What caused enshittification to take root, what allows it to spread, and who was patient zero?

That's where "Understood: Who Broke the Internet?" comes in:

cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/135…

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At root, "enshittification" is a story about *constraints* - not the bad things that platforms are doing *now*, but rather, the forces that *stopped them* from doing those things *before*. There are four of those constraints:

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I. Competition: When we stopped enforcing antitrust law, we let companies buy their competitors ("It is better to buy than to compete" -M. Zuckerberg). That insulated companies from market-based punishments for enshittification, because a handful of large companies can enshittify in lockstep, matching each other antifeature for antifeature. You can't shop your way out of a monopoly.

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II. Regulation: The collapse of tech into "five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four" (-T. Eastman) allowed the Big Tech cartel to collude to capture its regulators. Tech companies don't have to worry about governments stepping in to punish them for enshittificatory tactics, because the government is on Big Tech's side.

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(This is why tech bosses are so excited to repeat the story that AI can replace programmers - whether or not it's true, it is an effective way to gut scarcity-driven tech worker power). Without unions, tech worker power vanished.

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IV. Interoperability: The same digital flexibility that lets tech companies pull the enshittifying bait-and-switch whereby prices, recommendations, and costs are constantly changing cuts both ways. Digital toolsmiths have always thwarted enshittification with ad- and tracker-blockers, alternative clients, scrapers, etc. In a world of infinitely flexible computers, every 10' high pile of shit summons a hacker with an 11' ladder.

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This week's "Who Broke the Internet?" focuses on those IP laws, specifically, the legislative history of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a 1998 law whose Section 1201 bans any kind of disenshittifying mods and hacks.

We open the episode with Dmitry Skylarov being arrested at Def Con in 2001, after he gave a presentation explaining how he defeated the DRM on Adobe ebooks, so that ebook owners could move their books between devices and open them with different readers.

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Skylarov was a young father of two, a computer scientist, who found himself in the FBI's clutches, facing a lengthy prison sentence for telling an American audience that Adobe's product was defective, and explaining how to exploit its defects to let them *read their own books*.

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Skylarov was the first person charged with a felony under DMCA 1201, and while the fact of his arrest shocked technically minded people at the time, it was hardly a surprise to anyone familiar with DMCA 1201. This was a law acting exactly as intended.

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DMCA 1201 has its origins in the mid-1990s, when Al Gore was put in charge of the National Information Infrastructure program to demilitarize the internet and open it for civilian use (AKA the "Information Superhighway"). Gore came into conflict with Bruce Lehman, Bill Clinton's IP Czar, who proposed a long list of far-ranging, highly restrictive rules for the new internet, including an "anticircumvention" rule that would ban tampering with digital locks.

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This was a pretty obscure and technical debate, but some people immediately grasped its significance. Pam Samuelson, the eminent Berkeley copyright scholar, raised the alarm, rallying a diverse coalition against Lehman's proposal. They won - Gore rejected Lehman's ideas and sent him packing.

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But Lehman didn't give up easily - he flew straight to Geneva, where he arm-twisted the UN's World Property Organization into passing two "internet treaties" that were virtually identical to the proposals that Gore had rejected. Then, Lehman went back to the USA and insisted that Congress had to overrule Gore and live up to its international obligations by adopting his law. As Lehman said - on some archival tape we were lucky to recover - he did "an end-run around Congress."

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Lehman had been warned, in eye-watering detail, about the way that his rule protecting digital locks would turn into a system of private laws. Once a device was computerized, all a manufacturer needed to do was wrap it in a digital lock, and in that instant, it would become a literal felony of use that digital device in ways the manufacturer didn't like.

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It didn't matter if you were legally entitled to do something, like taking your car to an independent mechanic, refilling your ink cartridge, blocking tracking on Instagram, or reading your Kindle books on a Kobo device. The fact that tampering with digital locks was a crime, combined with the fact that you had to get around a digital lock to do these things, made these things illegal.

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Lehman knew that this would happen. The fact that his law led - in just a few short years - to a computer scientist being locked up by the FBI for disclosing defects in a widely used consumer product, was absolutely foreseeable at the time Lehman was doing his Geneva two-step and "doing an end-run around Congress."

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The point is that there were always greedy bosses, and since the turn of the century, they'd had the ability to use digital tools to enshittify their services. What changed wasn't the greed - it was the law. When Bruce Lehman disarmed every computer user, he rendered us helpless against the predatory instincts of anyone with a digital product or service, at a moment when *everything* was being digitized.

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This week's episode recovers some of the lost history, an act I find very liberating. It's easy to feel like you're a prisoner of destiny, whose life is being shaped by vast, impersonal forces. But the enshittificatory torments of the modern digital age are the result of specific choices, made by named people, in living memory. Knowing who did this to us, and what they did, is the first step to undoing it.

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In next week's episode, we'll tell you about the economic theories that created the "five giant websites filled with screenshots of the other four." We'll tell you who foisted those policies on us, and show you the bright line from them to the dominance of companies like Amazon. And we'll set up the conclusion, where we'll tell you how we'll wipe out the legacies of these monsters of history and kill the enshitternet.

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