#publicinfrastructures — Public Fediverse posts

"If I want to make myself really angry about the enshittified state of the internet, I don’t fume over pages of slop-drenched, spam-drowned Google results; nor about the fake-review garlanded sub-Temu garbage on Amazon. I don’t even rage against Elon Musk’s child porn–choked, bot-infested Twitter.

No, when I want to get good and apoplectic about the internet, I think about policymakers. Specifically, I think about all the policymakers I’ve met and corresponded with and begged with and pleaded with and raged against in my twenty-five years with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

These policymakers are the true authors of our misery. It was they who made decisions that had the foreseeable and foreseen outcome of ushering in the enshittocene, this era in which all of our technology is turning into shit. The thing is, we told them exactly what would happen if they made those policy blunders, and they made them anyway, and now they walk among us, disclaiming any responsibility for systematically rigging the game so that the worst people with the worst ideas make the most money.

It’s as though we used to put down rat poison, and we didn’t have a rat problem, and then these guys told us that we had it all wrong and we didn’t need the rat poison after all. Now, rats are eating our faces off, and these guys refused to accept that their pro-rat policies had anything to do with it. They say we’re living through the Time of the Rat, in which the great forces of history and the iron laws of economics have combined to create rats of unheard-of fecundity. When we point out the rats have bought and shuttered the rat poison factories, they get defiant
(...)
For decades, we allowed companies like Google and Facebook and Amazon to violate competition law. We let them buy their major competitors...

https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/what-was-the-internet/

#Capitalism #OpenWeb #BigTech #PublicInfrastructures #Antitrust #Monopolies #Oligopolies

"If I want to make myself really angry about the enshittified state of the internet, I don’t fume over pages of slop-drenched, spam-drowned Google results; nor about the fake-review garlanded sub-Temu garbage on Amazon. I don’t even rage against Elon Musk’s child porn–choked, bot-infested Twitter.

No, when I want to get good and apoplectic about the internet, I think about policymakers. Specifically, I think about all the policymakers I’ve met and corresponded with and begged with and pleaded with and raged against in my twenty-five years with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

These policymakers are the true authors of our misery. It was they who made decisions that had the foreseeable and foreseen outcome of ushering in the enshittocene, this era in which all of our technology is turning into shit. The thing is, we told them exactly what would happen if they made those policy blunders, and they made them anyway, and now they walk among us, disclaiming any responsibility for systematically rigging the game so that the worst people with the worst ideas make the most money.

It’s as though we used to put down rat poison, and we didn’t have a rat problem, and then these guys told us that we had it all wrong and we didn’t need the rat poison after all. Now, rats are eating our faces off, and these guys refused to accept that their pro-rat policies had anything to do with it. They say we’re living through the Time of the Rat, in which the great forces of history and the iron laws of economics have combined to create rats of unheard-of fecundity. When we point out the rats have bought and shuttered the rat poison factories, they get defiant
(...)
For decades, we allowed companies like Google and Facebook and Amazon to violate competition law. We let them buy their major competitors...

https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/what-was-the-internet/

#Capitalism #OpenWeb #BigTech #PublicInfrastructures #Antitrust #Monopolies #Oligopolies