NickMay 26, 2025
Cory Doctorow

"Kick 'Em In the Dongle" is the fourth and final episode of "Understood: Who Broke the Internet?", a podcast series I hosted and co-wrote for the CBC. It's quite a finale!

https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/1353-the-naked-emperor/episode/16148346-kick-em-in-the-dongle

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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/26/babyish-radical-extremists/#cancon

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May 26, 2025 at 3:48pmWeb
Show threadCory DoctorowMay 26, 2025

The thesis of the series is the same as the thesis of enshittification: that the internet turned into a pile of shit because named people, in living memory, made policies that were broadly "enshittogenic" because they insulated businesses that tormented their end users and business customers from any consequences for their cheating:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydVmzg_SJLw

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Keynote Speaker - Cory Doctorow

YouTube
Show threadCory DoctorowMay 26, 2025

Moreover, these people were warned at the time about the certain consequences of their policies, and they ignored and dismissed both expert feedback and public opinion.

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Show threadCory DoctorowMay 26, 2025

These people never faced consequences or any accountability for their actions, as tech criticism focused (understandably and deservedly) on the businesses that took advantage of the enshittogenic policies and enshittified, without any understanding that these firms were turning into piles of shit because of policies that reward them for doing so.

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Show threadCory DoctorowMay 26, 2025

Episode one of the series tells the story an enshittification poster-child: Google. We look at the paper-trail that emerged from the Department of Justice's successful monopoly prosecution of Google, and what it reveals about the sorry state of internet search today:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/08/who-broke-the-internet/#bruce-lehman

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Pluralistic: Who broke the internet? (08 May 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Show threadCory DoctorowMay 26, 2025

That paper-trail documents an intense power-struggle within Google: in 2019, Google's ad revenue czar went to war against Google's search boss, demanding that search be deliberately worsened. This may sound paradoxical (or even paranoid), but for Google, making search worse made a perverse kind of sense.

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Show threadCory DoctorowMay 26, 2025

The company's search revenue growth had stalled, for the obvious reason that Google had a 90% market share in search, which meant that basically *everyone* was a Google search user, leaving the company with no new potential customers to sign up.

In 2019, Prabhakar Ragahavan - the ex-McKinsey, ex-Yahoo MBA who ran ad revenue for Google - came up with an ingenious solution: just make search worse.

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Show threadCory DoctorowMay 26, 2025

If you have to run multiple searches to find what you're looking for, that creates multiple chances to show you an ad:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

Ragahavan's nemesis was Ben Gomes, an OG googler who'd overseen the creation of the company's server infrastructure and had been crowned the head of search.

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The Man Who Killed Google Search

Wanna listen to this story instead? Check out this week's Better Offline podcast, "The Man That Destroyed Google Search," available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts. UPDATE: Prabhakar has now been deposed as head of search, read here for more details. This is the story

Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
Show threadCory DoctorowMay 26, 2025

Gomes hated Ragahavan's idea, and in the memos, we get a blow-by-blow account of the epic fight inside Google between the enshittifiers and the anti-enshittification resistance, who are ultimately trounced, which is how we get today's sloppified, ad-poisoned, spam-centric Google search.

Ragahavan and his clique are obviously greedy monsters, but that's not the whole story.

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Show threadCory DoctorowMay 26, 2025

The real question is, how did we get to the point where Google, a company justly famed for its emphasis on search quality, abandoned its commitment to excellence? That's the question we explore in the next two episodes.

Episode two is "Ctrl-ctrl-ctrl," and it reveals the original sin of tech, the origin of the worst tech policies in the world:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/13/ctrl-ctrl-ctrl/#free-dmitry

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Pluralistic: Who Broke the Internet? Part II (13 May 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Show threadCory DoctorowMay 26, 2025

This is the tale of another epic struggle inside another giant institution, only this struggle takes place in *government*, not Google. We travel back to the Clinton years, when Vice President Al Gore was put in charge of demilitarizing the internet and transforming it into a service that welcomed the public, as well as private firms. Gore's rival in this project was Clinton's copyright czar, the white shoe entertainment lawyer Bruce Lehman.

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Show threadCory DoctorowMay 26, 2025

Lehman wanted Gore to install an "anti-circumvention" policy on the new internet: under Lehman's proposal, copyright law would be rewritten to ban modifying ("circumventing") digital products, services and devices, whether or not those modifications led to anyone's copyrights being violated.

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Show threadCory DoctorowMay 26, 2025

Anti-circumvention would let dominant companies conscript the government to punish upstart rivals and tinkerers who dared to improve their products, say, by blocking commercial surveillance, or by turning off checks that blocked generic parts and consumables or independent repair, or by making existing products more accessible to people with disabilities.

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Show threadCory DoctorowMay 26, 2025

Experts like Pam Samuelson hated this proposal and made a huge stink about it. This led to Gore categorically rejecting Lehman's ideas, so Lehman (in his own words) did "an end-run around Congress" and got the UN's World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) to turn "anti-circumvention" into an international treaty obligation.

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Show threadCory DoctorowMay 26, 2025

Then he went back to Congress and got them to pass an anti-circumvention law, Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), that went even further than the WIPO treaties demanded.

Almost instantly, the direst predictions of Lehman's opponents came true.

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Show threadCory DoctorowMay 26, 2025

A Russian computer scientist named Dmitry Skylarov was arrested by the FBI for giving a technical conference presentation about the weaknesses in Adobe's ebook software, in which he explained how these allowed Adobe customers to do legal things, like transferring their ebooks to a new computer (Adobe's software blocked this).

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Show threadCory DoctorowMay 26, 2025

The chilling effect of DMCA 1201 was deep and far-reaching. It created (in the words of Jay Freeman), a new "felony contempt of business model" system, in which a business could threaten to imprison anyone who tried to disenshittify their products, for example, by making it possible for hospitals to maintain their ventilators without paying a med-tech giant for overpriced, slow service:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/why-repair-techs-are-hacking-ventilators-with-diy-dongles-from-poland/

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Why Repair Techs Are Hacking Ventilators With DIY Dongles From Poland

As COVID-19 surges, hospitals and independent biomedical technicians have turned to a global grey-market for hardware and software to circumvent manufacturer repair locks and keep life-saving ventilators running.

VICE
Show threadCory DoctorowMay 26, 2025

Anticircumvention law lets John Deere stop farmers from fixing their own tractors. It stops independent mechanics from fixing your car. It stops you from using cheap third-party inkjet cartridges. It's why Patreon performers lose 30 cents on every in-app subscription dollar, because only Apple can provide iPhone apps, and Apple uses that control to extract a 30% fee on in-app payments.

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Show threadCory DoctorowMay 26, 2025

It's why you can't stop apps from spying on you - and why Apple (which *does* block apps from spying on you) can track every click, message and movement you make in order to target ads to you:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Anticircumvention let the garage-door opener company that bought every one of its rivals block integration with standard home automation tools, forcing you to use an app that makes you look at ads before you can open your garage-door:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lead-me-not-into-temptation/#chamberlain

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Pluralistic: 14 Nov 2022 Even if you’re paying for the product, you’re still the product – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Show threadCory DoctorowMay 26, 2025

Anticircumvention is why there's no such thing as a Tivo for streaming services, letting you record the programs you enjoy so you can watch them later (say, when Prime charges moves Christmas movies into the paid tier between October and January). It's why you can't get a scraper that lets you leave Facebook or Twitter for Mastodon or Bluesky, and continue to interact with your friends who are stuck on zuckermuskian legacy media:

https://www.eff.org/interoperablefacebook

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Interoperable Facebook

In this video, we discuss the forces that keep us using services like Facebook long after we stop enjoying them (hint, it's not because social media is "addictive") and we present a short "design fiction" explaining what it might be like to use social media in the near future, after big companies...

Electronic Frontier Foundation
Show threadCory DoctorowMay 26, 2025

It's why you can't get an alternative Instagram client that blocks spying, ads and "suggestions," just showing you the latest updates from the people you follow:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/29/23378541/the-og-app-instagram-clone-pulled-from-app-store

Of course, companies that abuse this government-granted weapon might still face consequences, if their behavior was so obnoxious that it drove us into the arms of their competitors.

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The OG App, an ad- and Reels-free Instagram clone, is pulled from the App Store

The OG App promised an Instagram experience without Reels, recommendations, and ads. Just a day after debuting on the App Store, the OG App was pulled. Meta says it’s taking “all appropriate enforcement actions.”

The Verge