There is a new word for the degradation of the internet, but it’s been happening for years. Why do we tolerate it?
I hate it, and I have no idea of what realistic steps could be taken to roll it back, as noted in the article:
Outlawing purposely crippling interoperability -This would be lobbied against so hard
Passing laws to prevent the system of advertising/entrapping users -Again the giant tech companies would lobby law makers who don’t know anything about why this is bad, and those laws would never pass
It’s extra painful for me having first getting access to the internet in 1996ish, and watching it go from this wild wild west of freedom and openness, to controlled under an iron grip of just a handful of giant tech companies. Maybe “Data” taxes that have been discussed before would help over all. If the huge tech companies had to pay money proportional to how much data they were hording on each user, then they’d at least stop the laser focused advertising portion of this perfect shit storm.
Maybe consolidation was bound to happen but it sucks and its current form was 100% preventable.
Enshittification is a new word for the same monetary corruption we’ve experienced in every single aspect of our civilisation. The only things that remain unaffected by it are non profit projects. Take Wikipedia for example. It doesn’t gain anything from showing you articles you don’t want to see because it’s financed through donations so it’s just a useful collection of information. Imagine it had been built around advertisment. It’d be an absolute shitshow by now with click bait on every page. The only escape from it is to take profits put of the picture entirely. Built open source platforms that aren’t and can’t be owned by any one entity and run them without the goal to generate money.
