> Europe and Canada have passed strong right-to-repair legislation, but those efforts ""have been hamstrung by the anti-circumvention laws"" (like the DMCA). (...) That raises the question of why these countries don't repeal their versions of the DMCA.
> The answer is tariffs, it seems. The US trade representative has long threatened countries with tariffs if they did not have such a law on their books. ""Happy 'Liberation Day' everyone"", he said with a smile, which resulted in laughter, cheering, and applause. The response of most countries when faced with the US tariffs (or threats thereof) has been to impose retaliatory tariffs, making US products more expensive for their citizens, which is a weird way to punish Americans. (...)
> What would be better is for the countries to break the monopolies of the US tech giants by making it legal to reverse-engineer, jailbreak, and modify American products and services. (...)
> Or, let a Canadian company set up an App Store that only charges 3% for payment processing, which will give any content producer an immediate 25% raise, so publishers will flock to it. The same could be done for car and tractor diagnostic devices and more.
Europe should do this now; it would be incredibly good -- and incredibly fun.
No it isn't.
Like literally, the US and it's tariff madness has literally nothing to do with it. The EU and Canada are both signatories to the WIPO Copyright Treaty, and signatories of the WTO provisions that include continued operation to it. They are international treaties with a wide degree of international support, not US inventions. Christ, Europe had a lot more to do with the wording of the anticircumvention provisions in the WIPO treaty than the US did.
People should stop taking Doctorow seriously. He has a long track record of making shit up that is what his audience wants to hear.
They should stop the anti-competitive practices that prevent third-party app stores and so on though.
If you invent a new engine you can patent it. But if you make an engine that works like any other engine, why should society help you prevent your customers from tinkering with it?
No laws against removing the region lock on your DVD player.
No laws against fixing your tractor with 3rd party parts.
When Amazon deletes Nineteen Eighty-Four from your Kindle, you can put it right back.
When a games company "turns off" the game you bought, turn it right back on again.
Slightly off topic, but aren't we in the process of "throwing out copyright law" for the purposes of LLMs a.k.a the "automated" version of enshitification anyway? We've stretched "fair use" so much already, it won't be too big of a challenge to fit reverse engineering (removing DRM) into it.
I think this should be made illegal.
But I also think judging from how bad people are at making laws, what we will get is something that will make it worse for everyone.
It probably already happens where it's already acceptable to request financial checks such as the finance industry.
Edit: their very last entry was on GDPR: https://wayback.archive-it.org/11980/20200131184218/https://...
...Oh, you are worried about power asymmetry? What are you, a communist?
Worker rights only exist in free societies.
If you were in a communist country you are definitely worried about the power asymmetry, and rushing to go to West Germany or just out of the USSR, or to the USA from Cuba or out of pre-capitalist China if you could.
Seems to me that the illegal part would be the cartel of the 3 apps that cornered the whole market.
An app that doesn’t do this could eat their lunch.
Nurses work at hospitals, the supply of which is constrained artificially by the state, so once you sell all of the ones in a region on your app, you have a monopoly. It is a type of regulatory capture.
The lowballing should be counteracted by competition. There isn’t any competition because the number of hospitals is artificially constrained by the state and a cartel can go to all of them in a region (usually a single digit number) and capture all of them, cornering the market for purchasing labor in that field.
The problem is not that the bidders have the information. The problem is that there is effectively only one bidder: the cartel.
An app that doesn’t do this (and thus pays more) would quickly have access to the entire labor pool by offering higher wages. It doesn’t exist because of illegal activity. That’s not caused by the cartel having access to, or using, information.
You are addressing the symptoms of the cartel, not the root cause.
> The final constraint, which did hold back platform decay for quite some time, is labor. Tech workers have historically been respected and well-paid, without unions. The power of tech workers did not come from solidarity, but from scarcity, Doctorow said. The minute bosses ordered tech workers to enshittify the product they were loyally working on, perhaps missing various important social and family events to ship it on time, those workers could say no—perhaps in a much more coarse way. Tech workers could simply walk across the street ""and have a new job by the end of the day"" if the boss persisted.
> So labor held off enshittification after competition, regulation, and interoperability were all systematically undermined and did so for quite some time—until the mass tech layoffs. There have been half a million tech workers laid off since 2023, more are announced regularly, sometimes in conjunction with raises for executive salaries and bonuses. Now, workers cannot turn their bosses down because there are ten others out there just waiting to take their job.
Because the employer has power and the employee doesn’t.
Of course they should, but they have much more influence on the law so they don’t.
Maybe we should not 'democratize' some technologies and keep a bit of difficulty as a gatekeeper.
(Yes, I know this is not really a moral position to hold)
"A ship in harbor is safe, but that's not what ships are built for"
This is the root cause, and as it looks, there is no cure.
The cure is to make so much new engineering talent that this is simply impossible
> Or, let a Canadian company set up an App Store that only charges 3% for payment processing, which will give any content producer an immediate 25% raise, so publishers will flock to it.
It's amazing that merely learning about how items that we own work (so-called "reverse-engineering") and exercising control over them (jailbreaking - this time the term is apt) has been made illegal. A heinous overreach by corporations into the lives of people that own their products, and a ridiculous expansion of IP rights - as if patents weren't enough, they want to treat as trade secrets products with mass-market availability.
Expanding patents to software, in Europe they replaced the 2005 software patent directive by the Unified Patent Court, which will ignore the exclusion of 'computer programs', like the EPO did, with no way for the question to be escalated to the CJEU:
https://ffii.org/unified-patent-court-has-an-eu-treaty-legal...
Multinational corporations also became part time judges, because rubberstamping software patents is easier when you can also corrupt the judicial system:
https://ffii.org/nokia-and-airbus-elected-as-judges-at-the-k...
Is anywhere in EU reverse-engineering, jailbreaking, and modifying any products illegal?
Not that that makes Doctorow's argument any better or make any more sense.
Strange, my country (Poland) has a law that allows reverse engineering to allow given software to work on given hardware. If (and only if) consumer has bought given software.
So e.g. I could reverse engineer MS Word to make it work on Linux and that is within my legal right, any EULA prohibiting that is void.
Same probably applies for jailbreaking - all withing legal right of customer.
I think there is something in EU law also about that, considering SAS Institute Inc. versus World Programming Ltd.
The name of a political movement matters. Always has, always will. It's no different for adjacent concepts that describe a phenomenon the movement is organizing against.
Like shit.
The word spread in common usage about as fast as wildfire because everyone immediately knew what he meant. And the companies are too polite to even be able to say the word! If you can't swear in response to being degraded, pissed on, pissed off, used and thrown away, then you're the kind of sheep they want that they can abuse more and more and more and more and more and more and more without ever facing any consequence.
God forbid that rudeness is involved in collecting the power to stand up to it
Giving something a derogatory name that the yellow press (or rather some Telegram group) can sling around to vent their frustration and fear could be a win in this place. Of course, leadership persons of such groups are usually just demagogues looking out for their personal gain, so it might just as well be another rallying cry leading to really bad policies hitting those that vote in favor the most. But such is the world today ;)
Is Australia not big enough to count?
Eh. Either they weren't going to do so anyway, because doing so goes against the money, or they can come up with a more public-friendly term.
Everyone knows that synonyms exist, and them not having found the more "polite term" in Wikipedia — platform decay — says more about them and their reluctance to engage with the subject and the proposed solutions.
But Cory's a polemicist. He'd absolutely prefer the memorable word he coined himself to the acceptable, drab one that already exists.
(Plus value engineering is only one way to enshittify a product. There's also subscription models, selling data, jamming ads in everywhere... the advantage of Cory's word is that it captures everything).
> Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is a pattern in which two-sided online products and services decline in quality over time. [...]
> platforms squeezing market participants on both sides.
Wasn't that chokepoint capitalism? [1] (i.e. controlling supply and demand IIRC)
From Cory Doctorow's original article [2], one might say that enshittification is the degradation of a platform that transforms it from being customer-centric to prioritizing profit extraction at the expense of user experience. I think that the definition has expanded to include other things non-platform, but I feel that that isn't too far a stretch. Nowadays, I might say that enshittification is just unchecked capitalism doing its thing (and we need to be protected from exploiting us).
But I do concede that Cory was indeed exploring some ideas on his original post [2] that may have made it to his book (and thus, are related to your definition):
> Amazon's monopoly (control over buyers) gives it a monopsony (control over sellers), which lets it raise prices everywhere, at Amazon and at every other retailer, even as it drives the companies that supply it into bankruptcy.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
[1]: https://chokepointcapitalism.com/
[2]: https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittificaiton/#relentl...
I guess my concern is that the term is broad enough to shift this way, from a very precise (and important!) issue to a more broad concept. I feel like picking a more specific term (such as indeed, platform decay), would have made it easier to keep the concepts apart and discuss them. Alas, it is good that the term was coined at all, as it gives a word to something that many of us clearly experience.
Enshittification sounds like an immature bad joke.
It’s not because some underlying physical law.
decay, decline, rot, degradation, etc. all sound like the poor companies couldn’t do anything about it
Doctorow himself I think has a weak sense of disgust (a lot of his writing, and the site he used to run (boingboing) serve the market of people for whom disgusting things are entertaining or funny, so I think he has a blind spot here.
Then again, look how the term has taken off, perhaps it's we who are the shit-marketers.
...as evidenced by the responses to my comment – the sheer hostility to the idea that maybe it's not a great idea to use the word shit in an activist project that aims at political change.
And so you're really not going to get any real change here, because it's easier to complain online and do nothing, while simultaneously shouting away anyone that suggests some minor changes would be more productive. The exact same conversation happens in the open source / free source movement.
