01/19/2024

Big Tech Won’t Let You Leave

Here's an exit strategy for you

The platform is the canonical form of internet business: a two-sided market that facilitates connections between end-users and business customers. Uber connects drivers with riders; Amazon and eBay connect sellers with buyers; TikTok and YouTube connect performers with audiences; social media connects people with something to say with people who want to hear it.

And yet, lax competition law has allowed companies to consolidate, cornering their markets. Consolidated sectors, meanwhile, find it easy to sing with one voice, blocking the passage of unfavorable regulation (there's still no U.S. national privacy law) or its enforcement (the EU's General Data Protection Regulation shows that Ireland is even more valuable as a lawless regulation haven than it ever was as a mere tax haven).

Undisciplined by competition or regulation, platforms are free to slide into “enshittification,” in which the company extracts value from both sides of the two-sided market, relying on lock-in to keep users and business customers from defecting to a rival. The year 2023 was when the platforms soured: Twitch, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google Search, and Discord all spiraled into terminal enshittification, transferring value from users to shareholders, leaving behind shambling half-dead things that were disagreeable, but un-quittable.

Please select this link to read the complete article from WIRED.