At PyCon US 2025, attendees were in for a treat: activist/blogger/science fiction author Cory Doctorow‘s keynote on the dangers of big-tech’s platform domination.Doctorow had a ready answer when I asked him why this topic for a convention of Python programmers. Because big tech companies “are so pervasive, so structurally important, and so profoundly degraded that there is literally not an audience on Earth that they wouldn’t be appropriate for.”Traveling around the world, Doctorow’s shared the same examples when keynoting the UN’s International Year of the Co-Op launch in New Delhi, for the McLuhan Lecture in Berlin, and in upstate New York for the Neil Postman Award lecture. “They’re the examples in my upcoming book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It and the graphic novel adaptation that will come out the next year…” But he explains more than just how and why customers and businesses end up getting exploited by the gargantuan platforms in between.Doctorow also gives us a blueprint for fixing it…‘The More Desperate You Are…’But first, he’ll set the stage with a thought-provoking story about how nurses are getting hired now in America. There’s a “cartel” of three industry-dominating apps that determine how much — or how little — they’ll end up getting paid… And as Doctorow tells it, before an app offers a nurse a shift, “they go to a data broker and they buy that nurse’s current financial situation. And if the nurse is carrying a lot of credit card debt, especially delinquent credit card debt, then they lower the wage that’s offered to that nurse for that shift.”It sounds horrifying — but throughout his speech Doctorow emphasizes that it symbolizes a process that’s now happening with digitized businesses everywhere…Safely ensconced, our digital overlords can start “twiddling” the parameters of transactions until they’ve maximized every outcome in their favor. “The bosses who are doing this — they’re not more evil than the bosses we had before,” Doctorow said. “They just have better tools.” Unsuspecting visitors to their platforms discover that “every app makes a call to the cloud to ask how it should perform in that moment” — based on all the information it has for endlessly monetizing each individual customer.One mistake was allowing these companies to grow so big that they have these massive hoards of customers to exploit. Though the U.S. enacted antitrust laws back in 1890, Doctorow says things changed in the 1980s when the U.S. and its trading partners adopted “a pro-monopoly policy.” In today’s world tech firms now go virtually unchecked by the free market, Doctorow argues, “because tech firms don’t compete with their rivals. They buy them.”But this lack of competition also leaves these companies “a-slosh in cash — that they can mobilize to make their regulatory preferences into regulation.” If a sector collapses into a handful of powerful players, you’ve suddenly created an ad hoc oligarchy that’s writing its own rules. “That’s a cartel — it’s a racket. It’s a conspiracy in waiting.”There’s a third factor that should be checking digital businesses (but isn’t): interoperability. (If your code excessively hobbles users, surely someone could write workaround code that restores their rights…)Here Doctorow noted the 1998’s “Digital Millennium Copyright Act” — section 1201 — which “makes it a felony to bypass an access control for a copyrighted work, with a maximum penalty of a $500,000 fine and a 5-year prison sentence for a first offense…” He reminds his audience of Python programmers that “Just the act of reverse engineering an app like the Door Dash app is a potential felony!” And as other countries copied America’s protections into their own regulations — sometimes prodded by U.S. trade representatives — we’ve created the landscape we’re living in now…“A world where farmers can’t fix their tractors and independent mechanics can’t fix your car. Where hospitals, during the pandemic lockdowns, could not fix their failing ventilators. Where every time a foreign iPhone user buys an app from a local software author, the dollar they spend makes a round trip through Cupertino California and comes back 30 cents lighter.” It’s a world where — without workarounds for overpriced inkjet cartridges — the toner for your printer now costs $10,000 a gallon.‘A Nuanced Techno-Econo-Political Critique’There’s still a fourth force that could be checking the power of those giant tech companies: labor. Thinking again of his audience, Doctorow pointed out that historically the power of tech workers “never came from solidarity. It came from scarcity…” Unfortunately, “then came the mass tech layoffs — half a million since 2023.” There’s no constraint on a digital company if its supply of tech workers far outpaces its demand. And here Doctorow shares his own theory about why tech bosses love the idea of AI programmers.“It makes them think that they’ll be able to fire coders and replace them with client chatbots who’ll never tell them to fuck off.”So it all leads to customer-exploiting monopolies reaping huge profits while making their products worse and worse — because they can. And Doctorow’s proud of the word he’s coined for the process: “enshittification”“I’m profoundly gratified that people find the word so fun to say,” Doctorow told TNS, calling it “such a useful and versatile word to use colloquially to describe things that corporations are ruining.” (A friend of his even heard someone at climbing gym complaining about “the enshittification of climbing shoes.”)Enshittification, as Doctorow has explained it, is a multistage process that many monopolistic-minded businesses fall into. In the first step, a company, such as social media platform, will work to make its services as easy to use as possible. Once users are locked in, however, they stop worrying about end-users and cease fixing bugs or adding new features and instead start catering more closely to their real money-paying customers, such as advertisers. Finally, with both users and customers locked in, the company no longer has to worry about quality-of-service for either, and so the service as a whole deteriorates from neglect.Do09ctorow has pointed to Google’s search service as an example of a service that has deteriorated over the years.“But most of all, I’m incredibly pleased that the detailed one that I’ve attached to ‘enshittification’ has spread so far and wide. I’ve been trying to get people to care about the consequences of bad technology policy (and the possibilities of good tech policy) since I joined EFF in 2002, and I think that I’ve finally cracked it — it only took me 23 years!”HopeWhen his PyCon keynote had just eight minutes left, Doctorow launched into presenting his big solution. And it started with some good news.“After 40 years of antitrust decline, this decade has seen a massive, global resurgence of antitrust vigor.” Countries around the world “have passed new antitrust laws, launched major antitrust enforcements, and they often collaborate with one another.”The UK’s study of Apple’s 30% “app tax,” as Doctorow calls it, led to government action and penalties in the EU, Korea, and Japan. He’d like to see more right-to-repair legislation, and “Make it legal to reverse engineer, jailbreak, and modify American products and services.” Here, the audience applauded — but that’s just the beginning. “Let Canadians stand up a Canadian app store for games consoles and mobile devices that charges 3% to process transactions — not 30%.”And they’ll get more customers after offering the better software made possible when modifications are legal. Imagine a world where we’re “offering every mechanic in the world a $100-a-month kit that can diagnose every car instead of the $10,000-per-manufacturer per-year official diagnostic tools. Allowing every farmer in the world to buy a kit that lets them fix their own John Deere tractors, instead of doing the repair but then still having to pay John Deere $200 to come out look at your tractor and type an unlock code into the console.”He’s calling for nothing short than a trade revolution. “Any country in the world has it right now in their power to become a tech export powerhouse, making everything cheaper for tech users all over the world while making everything more profitable for anyone who sells media or software in online stores.” More importantly, it strikes a blow against giant tech oligarchs — and right where it hurts. “It takes the revenues from those ripoff scams globally from hundreds of billions of dollars to zero overnight.”His audience applauded again, as Doctorow rose to his fiery conclusion. That the world we have now “didn’t have to be this way.” And therein lies the hope. Since it was specific policy choices that led us here, “We don’t have to be eternal prisoners of the catastrophic policy blunders of clueless lawmakers of old.”“A new, good internet is possible, and it is necessary. And we can build it with all this technological self-determination of the old, good internet — and the ease of Web 2.0…”In short: “We can build that new, good internet. And we must.”The post Cory Doctorow Reveals How He’d Fix Big Tech’s Domination appeared first on The New Stack.