WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO THE INTERNET?

THE INTERNET HAS BEEN DRAGGED DOWN BY ENSHITTIFICATION, ACCORDING TO CORY DOCTOROW. IAIN THOMSON SITS DOWN WITH HIM TO DISCUSS WHAT WENT WRONG-AND HOW WE FIGHT BACK.

- Cory Doctorow

AIl internet users will recognise that things are getting worse online.

Google searches now require scrolling through AI word soup and sponsored adverts at the top of results, while Facebook has become a morass of promotions and ads. Streaming services that were founded on the principle of no advertising now make users pay to stop them, and your TV is reporting back on what you're viewing.

This is no accident, but the result of deliberate policies in a system that the internet activist and author Cory Doctorow has dubbed "enshittification".

The phenomenon is affecting swathes of platforms technological or otherwise. The practice is now so common that in 2025 the venerable American dictionary titan Merriam-Webster added enshittification to its lexicon as "a digital platform is made worse for users in order to increase profits".

It's a three-stage process, Doctorow explained in a sit-down interview with PC Pro, that starts well and then goes downhill rapidly.

Stage one sees a platform offering a great new business model that attracts a huge swathe of customers.

Then, by design, it sells these customers to businesses - typically (but not exclusively) for advertising and revenue generation, and locks them into their platform. Finally, the platform begins to degrade services for businesses and consumers so it can make ever more money.

"This isn't merely the age of the abusive outsized platform; it's the age of the sick, collapsing abusive outsized platform," Doctorow writes in his latest book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It. "It's the Enshittocene."

The road to hell is paved with good intentions