The Norwegian Consumer Council has published a new report, Breaking Free: Pathways to a fair technological future, about countering big tech's growing abuse of its increasingly concentrated power. The 100-page PDF is accompanied by two cover letters, one in English to various EU/EEA/UK and US institutions, and one in Norwegian to Norwegian authorities. The report starts with the problem of platform decay now known colloquially as enshittification. One change is the demand for action to be taken proactively:
Traditional competition tools are ex-post and focused on the abuse of market dominance by individual companies. The drives of enshittification cannot always be linked to one dominant company's abuse of its dominance. When enforcement relies on established harms rather than potential market disruptions, it will often also be too late – either because the digital market has already been skewed in big tech companies' favor or because big tech can argue that the case is no longer relevant.
The New Competition Tool allows authorities to investigate more general market failures that could potentially lead to future lock-in effects and implement interim measures before any harms have materialised. It gives competition authorities more flexibility when it comes to which services and practices can be investigated, and would allow them to investigate some of the drivers of enshittification, such as lock-in effects. In Norway, Germany and the UK, competition authorities already have such powers. These powers should be extended to other authorities, including to the European Commission.
However, the keys to platform independence, open standards (to include file formats and protocols), only get mentioned in passing. Albeit the goal of open standards, interoperability (whether cooperative or adversarial), does get more coverage.
Via Louis Rossmann Norweigan Government comes out swinging on enshittification (also on Odysee) who discusses the Norwegian Consumer Council's 4-minute hard hitting video on the scope of the problem.
Previously:
(2026) A Post-American, Enshittification-Resistant Internet
(2025) As Internet Enshittification Marches On, Here are Some of the Worst Offenders
(2024) Cory Doctorow Has a Plan to Wipe Away the Enshittification of Tech
(2023) Enshittification Everywhere. Your Car, Your Phone, Your Tractor, Your Computer...
« Satellites Found a 'Brown Ribbon' Near Africa – Now Scientists Are Sounding Alarms | Across Cultures, People Combine Reference Frames to Orient Themselves »
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https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/
Forget F1: the only car race that matters now is the race to turn your car into a digital extraction machine, a high-speed inkjet printer on wheels, stealing your private data as it picks your pocket. Your car's digital infrastructure is a costly, dangerous nightmare – but for automakers in pursuit of postcapitalist utopia, it's a dream they can't give up on.
[...] Don't drive a cab, create Uber and extract value from every driver and rider. Better still: don't found Uber, invest in Uber options and extract value from the people who invest in Uber. Even better, invest in derivatives of Uber options and extract value from people extracting value from people investing in Uber, who extract value from drivers and riders.
Go meta.
An apocryphal tale regarding the late, great footballer George Best being interviewed by a reporter just after getting suspended from Manchester United offers an apt description of today's tech industry right now.
Best was the finest footballer (or soccer in Freedom Language) of his generation during the Swinging Sixties and was one of the first big-money athletes to transcend sport and achieve celebrity. He was handsome, ferociously talented on the pitch, and famously debauched off it. He was once quoted as saying "I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars – the rest I just squandered."
According to the tale, the journalist was ushered into his hotel suite – strewn with empty champagne bottles after a wild party. A former Miss United Kingdom was freshening up in the shower and George sat in an armchair with a cigar and a huge glass of Scotch in his fist. The journalist's first question was: "So Bestie, where did it all go wrong?"
The same question can be asked of today's tech industry which, like Best, experienced initial greatness but has arguably wasted the spoils with loutish behavior and cashing in on past achievements.
Attracting customers and then exploiting them is a phenomenon that's as old as capitalism, but it's become endemic in the tech industry where it has earned a new name: "enshittification."
The coiner of the term, author and activist Cory Doctorow, described it thus.
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
As Internet enshittification marches on, here are some of the worst offenders:
Two years ago, a Canadian writer named Cory Doctorow coined the phrase "enshittification" to describe the decay of online platforms. The word immediately set the Internet ablaze, as it captured the growing malaise regarding how almost everything about the web seemed to be getting worse.
"It's my theory explaining how the Internet was colonized by platforms, why all those platforms are degrading so quickly and thoroughly, why it matters, and what we can do about it," Doctorow explained in a follow-up article. "We're all living through a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit. It's frustrating. It's demoralizing. It's even terrifying."
Doctorow believes there are four basic forces that might constrain companies from getting worse: competition, regulation, self-help, and tech workers. One by one, he says, these constraints have been eroded as large corporations squeeze the Internet and its denizens for dollars.
If you want a real-world, literal example of enshittification, let's look at actual poop. When Diapers.com refused Amazon's acquisition offer, Amazon lit $100 million on fire, selling diapers way below cost for months, until Diapers.com folded. With another competitor tossed aside, Amazon was then free to sell diapers at its price from wherever it wanted to source them.
Anyway, we at Ars have covered a lot of things that have been enshittified. Here are some of the worst examples we've come across. Hopefully, you'll share some of your own experiences in the comments. We might even do a follow-up story based on those.
The videos from the 39C3 are all in place, and Cory Doctorow's fast-paced talk, A post-American, enshittification-resistant Internet, is among them.
That talk is worth special mention. Don't be put off by the gratuitous cursing or the CCC's misspelling of the name Internet. And because it's often easier, and always faster, to just read text than slog through a video, Cory has also posted a transcript of his presentation:
We won that skirmish, but friends, I have bad news, news that will not surprise you. Despite wins like that one, we have been losing the war on the general purpose computer for the past 25 years.
Which is why I've come to Hamburg today. Because, after decades of throwing myself against a locked door, the door that leads to a new, good internet, one that delivers both the technological self-determination of the old, good [I]nternet, and the ease of use of Web 2.0 that let our normie friends join the party, that door has been unlocked.
Today, it is open a crack. It's open a crack!
His presentation is good all the way through, even to the final Q & A.
Basically, the gist is that 1) the US dollar is no longer a (semi-)neutral platform and 2) the threat of withdrawing financial support has already been played and cannot be used for leverage any more. Countries are now forced to actively work around both points, which is inconvenient and expensive, but the result is that they have been liberated from similar future threats and thus in that way have regained a bit of independence as far as software laws go. That liberation is because economic retaliation has already occurred, nations can more or less safely undo the anti-circumvention laws forced down their throats by "free" trade "agreements". The first country to do so will be able to take a very big bite out of the trillions of dollars (or euros) which Apple and the others currently collect.
What other 39C3 presentations have soylentils found interesting in a positive way?
Previously:
(2025) The 39th Chaos Communication Congress (39C3) Taking Place Now in Hamburg Through 30 Dec 2025
(2025) 38th Chaos Communication Congress (38C3) Presentations Online
(2017) 34th Chaos Communication Congress (34C3) Presentations Online
Cory Doctorow Proposes How to Break Free From Digital Domination
So far, every country in the world has had one of two responses to the Trump tariffs. The first one is: "Give Trump everything he asks for (except Greenland) and hope he stops being mad at you." This has been an absolute failure. Give Trump an inch, he'll take a mile. He'll take fucking Greenland. Capitulation is a failure.
But so is the other tactic: retaliatory tariffs. That's what we've done in Canada (like all the best Americans, I'm Canadian). Our top move has been to levy tariffs on the stuff we import from America, making the things we buy more expensive. That's a weird way to punish America! It's like punching yourself in the face as hard as you can, and hoping the downstairs neighbor says "Ouch!"
And it's indiscriminate. Why whack some poor farmer from a state that begins and ends with a vowel with tariffs on his soybeans. That guy never did anything bad to Canada.
But there's a third possible response to tariffs, one that's just sitting there, begging to be tried: what about repealing anticircumvention law?
If you're a technologist or an investor based in a country that's repealed its anticircumvention law, you can go into business making disenshittificatory products that plug into America's defective tech exports, allowing the people who own and use those products to use them in ways that are good for them, even if those uses make the company's shareholders mad.
Simple premise, interesting ramifications - I wonder what the course corrections will look like...
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 03, @03:20PM
https://storage02.forbrukerradet.no/media/2026/02/breaking-free-pathways-to-a-fair-technological-future.pdf [forbrukerradet.no]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 03, @04:48PM (1 child)
We have to devalue their money, and put reasonable limits on copyright, if not abolish it outright
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday March 03, @09:08PM
>We have to devalue their money, and put reasonable limits on copyright, if not abolish it outright
That's two ways, and not the only ones.
Transparency is another big piece of the puzzle.
I don't know how sincere it is, but the recent proliferation of Public Benefit Corporations (like Anthropic and others) in the AI from LLMs space sounds like a nod in the correct direction. Keep their operations transparent and accountable to those public benefit principles and then push that model out to more mainstream players like Google, Farcebook, etc.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by pdfernhout on Tuesday March 03, @07:10PM
"Lightning talk: Free/libre standards for social media and other communications"
https://libreplanet.org/wiki/LibrePlanet:Conference/2022/Lightning_Talks [libreplanet.org]
https://media.libreplanet.org/u/libreplanet/m/lightning-talk-free-libre-standards-for-social-media-and-other-communications/ [libreplanet.org]
The text of the talk in IBIS outline format is available here, which I will include below:
https://pdfernhout.net/libreplanet-2021-lightning-talk-on-free-standards-for-social-media-and-other-communications.txt [pdfernhout.net]
====
What is the title of this LibrePlanet 2022 Lightning Talk?
Free/Libre Standards for Social Media and other Communications
Who is giving this talk?
* Paul Fernhout
https://pdfernhout.net [pdfernhout.net]
What is the talk format in?
* A plain-text IBIS-inspired notation
What is the motivation for this talk?
* A message in Vernor Vinge's 1992 novel "A Fire Upon the Deep" (from an intergalactic Usenet):
Crypto: 0
As-Received-By: OOB shipboard ad hoc
Language-Path: Arbwyth->Trade 24->Cherguelen->Triskweline, SjK units
From: Twirlip of the Mists
[Perhaps an organization of cloud fliers in a single jovian system.
Very sparse priors.]
Subject: Blighter Video thread
Keywords: Hexapodia as the key insight
Distribution: Threat of the Blight
Date: 8.68 days since Fall of Relay
Text of message:
I haven't had a chance to see the famous video from
Straumli Realm, except as an evocation. (My only
gateway onto the Net is very expensive.) Is it true
that humans have six legs? I wasn't sure from the
evocation. If these humans have three pairs of legs,
then I think there is an easy explanation for
--MORE--
What is a current example of a breakdown in communications and sensemaking?
* The Ukraine disaster is in that way a failure of communication and sensemaking.
* The people in every country -- including Russia -- have a reasonable desire to feel secure and connected to global prosperity
* A solution involving bombing civilians in other countries is unlikely to be the best answer to creating national or global security or better connections to global prosperity.
* Unfortunately, Russia made its decision to bomb civilians in Ukraine and their life-supporting infrastructure without adequate local or global discussion of alternatives that might have better achieved intrinsic mutual security for all.
* One sign of this as a failure of sensemaking is that Sergey Beseda, head of the FSB's foreign intelligence branch, was recently arrested along with his deputy, Anatoly Bolyukh.
* See also my related comment on some roots of Putin's tragic and misinformed choice and how free software for global intelligence and sensemaking might have helped prevent this tragedy:
* "A Newer Way of Thinking" [greensite link removed]
* People can recognize there is a problem but then jump to the wrong solution
* Email and IRC Chat have problems, but Facebook and Slack were unlikely to be the best answer.
What are some problems with email?
* Spam on your TODO list
* HTML email privacy risks
* HTML email security risks
* Masquerading with lies about name and website
* Pfishing
* Management of attachments
* Limited file sizes for attached documents, pictures, and especially videos
* Not editable after sent
What are problems with IRC?
* No images
* Too fragmented
* Hard to setup
* Not searchable
What are problems with Facebook?
* Privacy
* Proprietary standards
* Proprietary implementations
* No local copies
* Can be censored or disconnected at any time
* Diverting attention via advertising
* Directing attention with algorithms to increase wealth concentration
* Increased outrage
* Information overload in different ways
* Immoral in a LibrePlanet sense of values and priorities (see also 42 Negative Affirmations of Maat Ancient Egypt example)
What are problems with Slack?
* See "Reasons Not to Use Slack for Free Software Development" (2016)
https://pdfernhout.net/reasons-not-to-use-slack-for-free-software-development.html [pdfernhout.net]
* Slack can change its TOS at any time
* Slack can cut you or your community off at any time
* You need to be online to use Slack
* Slack copies the contents of secret URLs
* Slack makes government surveillance easier
* Slack is a single point of failure for your community
* Slack's privacy policy guarantees very little
* Slack is focused on teams, not communities
* Slack limits are not advertised (like 5000 users maximum per "team")
* It costs a lot to search or delete older messages
* Your Slack discussions for free software projects are not public or findable
* Slack private messages may not be very private
* Slack may change ownership at any time
What are key insights for moving forward?
* Standards unify; incompatible services fragment
* The power of plain text
* Simple Made Easy ( Rich Hickey https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/ [infoq.com] )
* A democratic government is a special case of a free/libre software community
What are current free alternatives?
* Matrix.org
* GNU social
* Mastodon
* Mattermost (can import from Slack)
* Wordpress + plugins
* Drupal + plugins
* Nextcloud
* Email with better clients and servers including using JMAP, Nylas, mailpile etc
* IRC with better clients
* Smallest Federated Wiki (Ward Cunningham)
* Citadel
* Kolab
* Diaspora
* A plain website of text files using Git
* Twirlip (my own experiments, very rough)
* Many others
What are problems with free alternatives?
* Usually more about implementations than standards
* Hard to start using
* Fragmentation of user bases with walled gardens
* Often not federated
* May not scale (like to trillions of messages)
* Design missing the big messaging picture (e.g. whether email can be used to edit wikis)
What is my guess at what the future holds for innovation in messaging?
* Free/Libre standards that unify messaging, with free implementations (a social semantic desktop?)
Example?
* Could be as simple as JSON-ish with a schema
perhaps with references via content hashes,
as git-ish blockchain-ish merkle-tree-ish secured conversations:
{
__type: "fsf-email2",
from: "pdfernhout@kurtz-fernhout.com",
to: "colleague@example.com",
timestamp: "2022-03-19T13:20:12+0000",
authorizationToken: "jlkjlkdjlfh87298723ljlj",
replyTo: "sha256-hash-of-a-message-plus-size-and-type",
editOf: "sha256-hash-of-a-previous-message-plus-size-and-type",
subject: "Re: 2020 LibrePlanet Lightning talk"
message: "Hello! Here is the lightning talk video.",
attachments: ["pdfernhout.net/twirlip/some-hash"],
semanticRDFTriples: [{ ... }, { .... }]
}
* Obligatory XKCD on "How Standards Proliferate": https://xkcd.com/927/ [xkcd.com]
* It is the social consensus issues that are hard at this point, not the technical ones
* We need less, not more: less standards, less code, less features, less division & stupidity
* We need better: better standards, better code, better features, better peacemaking & sensemaking
What are ways to change behavior related to communications? (Lawrence Lessig, Code 2.0)
* Rules (Hierarchy/Planning)
* Norms (Culture/Meshwork)
* Prices (Exchange)
* Infrastructure (Gifts from the Past)
Could a new FSF Campaign for Free/Libre communication standards help with this?
* Yes
+ Important issue to deal with proprietary Services as a Software Substitute trap
+ Many free software developers care about free standards and communications
+ Enough Free Software developers using something might create a de-facto standard
+ Other organizations may put non-free copyrights or patents on their standards
- Diversion from main mission of FSF from promoting free software
- There are other communities who care more about standards
- It's a really hard social problem and may be endless frustrating
====
The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 03, @07:11PM (1 child)
While I'm glad to see that Norway is trying, as the subject says I doubt very much that big tech will bother to listen to any of this.
(Score: 2, Touché) by skaplon on Tuesday March 03, @08:18PM
If it goes over to the European Comission, big tech might better start paying attention
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Undefined on Tuesday March 03, @07:33PM (2 children)
In addition to the privacy, search, advertising, and social media aspects of enshittification, our digital foundations are constantly being eroded by bitrot:
These things independently and in combination arbitrarily and unnecessarily erase huge swaths of good works of software developers, which in turn degrades the end user experience.
Almost all of this is completely unnecessary. APIs should not change; new APIs should be added and the old ones frozen, not removed. Languages should only add new functionality with new syntax and other language elements that don't break existing elements. Applications should add new features without breaking or changing existing features. Applications should not destroy users' established workflow through existing features. Architecture change amelioration should always remain in place once provided in order not to toss huge numbers of applications onto the killing floor.
One of the least worthy objections to keeping our digital universe from crumbling around us is that of OS and application size. Both operating memory and storage are on a consistent curve upwards; and they haven't been in short supply for many years now. CPU power is also increasing, which kills any validity complaints about CPU loading ever had.
When we create something for the public — at both the developer and user levels — there is an obvious (presuming one is not a sociopath) moral obligation not to yank it back. This applies to all of the above, and also to the rapacious and inherently birtotesque practice of subscription-only software applications with proprietary and/or secret end-user data formats.
We are in the unfortunate position of the semi-mythical slowly-boiling frog; we've been all too accepting of these bitrottings over time. It has become something done to us by the thoughtless, the careless, and the greedy almost as a matter of course. We are significantly lessened by it.
I use a dedicated preprocessor to elaborate abbreviations.
Hover to reveal elaborations.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday March 03, @09:13PM (1 child)
>Non-optional security tightenings break well behaving applications
Simply transferring files from an iPad to Windows has died a horrible death of strangulation in the name of security. They actually have made things worse by incrementally requiring more and more and more security options to be disabled, until finally disabling them all still isn't enough to do a network transfer of files from one OS to the other. I'm sure "there's an app for that" and that's what you're supposed to use (/ pay for), starting with iCloud.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Touché) by Spamalope on Wednesday March 04, @12:28AM
'Age verification' requiring proof of identity on every device lest there be anonymous computing out there for anyone other than AI scrapers.