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:

youtube.com/watch?v=ydVmzg_SJL…

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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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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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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:

pluralistic.net/2025/05/08/who…

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

wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-ki…

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.

^{Edward Zitron (Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At)}

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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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:

pluralistic.net/2025/05/13/ctr…

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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:

vice.com/en/article/why-repair…

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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.

^{Jason Koebler (VICE)}

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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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:

pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/lux…

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:

pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lea…

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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:

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 socia…

^{Electronic Frontier Foundation}

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:

theverge.com/2022/9/29/2337854…

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.”

^{Mia Sato (The Verge)}

But for that to happen, we'd need to *have* meaningful competition, which brings me to episode three, "In God We Antitrust":

pluralistic.net/2025/05/19/kha…

Episode three goes even farther back in time, to the early 1980s, when a racist pig and Nixon co-conspirator named Robert Bork led a successful counterrevolution that destroyed antitrust enforcement in the US, and then around the world.

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It's thanks to Bork - and his idea that monopolies are "efficient" - that we got what Tom Eastman calls an internet of "five giant websites filled with screenshots of the other four." It's why *every* sector in our economy is controlled by a cartel, a duopoly or a monopoly:

openmarketsinstitute.org/learn…

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If Bruce Lehman paved the way for Prabhakar Ragahavan's enshittification of Google, then Robert Bork laid the road that Bruce Lehman traveled to Geneva and the WIPO Internet Treaties.

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Industry consolidation *always* leads to regulatory capture, because a handful of gigantic companies can easily collude to present a disciplined message to its regulators and the fact that they don't compete with one another lets them steal so much from us that they have huge warchests they can use to get their policies enacted.

40 years of Bork's pro-monopoly policies has produced...*monopolies*.

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The reason a handful of powerful executives have more power than any of the world's governments - the reason the public is thwarted on everything from healthcare to climate, minimum wages to privacy - is that Robert Bork overturned generations of antitrust practice and created pro-oligarch policies that created a modern oligarchy.

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The 2020s have seen an impressive and heartening global surge in antitrust activism, motivated by an urge to blunt or even shatter corporate power, bypassing apologetics about "efficiency" that can only be understood through mastering an esoteric mathematics whose own practitioners cheerfully describe as disconnected from any observable reality:

sciencedirect.com/science/arti…

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This global, grassroots movement has provoked a massive backlash from our technofeudal overlords, culminating in the 2024 re-election of Donald Trump, which is where we open our the fourth and final episode of "Understood: Who Broke the Internet?" Trump's inauguration stage featured some unusual attendees: the CEOs of the largest tech companies in America, who had personally donated a million bucks each to Trump's inauguration fund.

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These are some of the richest men in human history, and they're all in on Trump.

Trump lost no time in inflicting misery on the American people, illegally firing the agency personnel most closely associated with the antitrust movement and canceling many of their key policies. But for the rest of the world, the most prominent effect of Trumpism was the imposition of tariffs on every country in the world, including islands without any human inhabitants:

theguardian.com/us-news/2025/a…

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‘Nowhere on Earth is safe’: Trump imposes tariffs on uninhabited islands near Antarctica

Australian prime minister surprised after remote external territories – including islands home to penguins – targeted by US president

^{Kate Lyons (The Guardian)}

The world is changing before our eyes, and it needn't change for the worse. As Trump transforms America into a hermit kingdom, countries around the world have a chance to consider what their policies might be like if they weren't organized around US priorities. That includes Canada.

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Canada *could* retaliate against Trump's tariffs by legalizing and incubating Canadian companies that find ways to improve America's enshittified products, creating mods, plugins, alternative software and other tools that Canadians - and the world - would snap up. Every customer for these disenshittifying tools would constitute a targeted strike against technofeudalism, against Trumpism, against the companies whose CEOs sat behind Trump on the dais.

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More: the Canadian companies that raided America's high-tech giants could use the sky-high rents they extracted through anti-circumvention laws as a kind of disposable rocket stage to boost a new Canadian tech sector into a stable orbit, giving Canada a global tech standing comparable to the power and wealth Finland enjoyed during the Nokia years.

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That's something Canada *could* do, only it can't, because of a 13-year old anti-circumvention law that was crammed onto Canada's statute-books by two ministers in Stephen Harper's government, James Moore and Tony Clement:

pluralistic.net/2024/11/15/rad…

Harper charged Moore and Clement with getting an anticircumvention law because the US Trade Representative had made it clear that failing to do so would result in the US imposing tariffs on Canada.

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But Canadians *hated* the idea of this law. In 2004, a Liberal MP named Sam Bulte lost her Toronto seat after she attempted to ram an anticirumvention law through Parliament. The Tories tried to pass another anticircuvmention law in 2007, and faced so much pushback that the bill died.

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Moore and Clement's tactic for defusing this opposition was to have a public consultation on anticircumvention law, to make it seem like the government was listening to the people. Boy, did *that* idea backfire: 6,138 Canadians wrote in to oppose the proposal. 54 supported it:

michaelgeist.ca/2010/04/copyco…

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But Moore and Clement pressed on. Moore explained to an International Chamber of Commerce meeting in Toronto that he would be discarding nearly every consultation response he'd received, on the grounds that people who disagreed with him were a "babyish...radical extremists":

cbc.ca/news/science/copyright-…

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The most remarkable thing about Canada's 2012 adoption of anticircumvention law is that it came 14 years *after* the US passed the DMCA. We already had a thick record of the damage that law had done. We have all the evidence we needed to see how this US law had hurt everyday Americans. But Moore and Clement still tabled their bill, with language that was actually *worse* than the American law, dispensing with the largely ineffectual safeguards Congress had put in the 1998 DMCA.

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More than a decade on, Canada's "digital locks" law has stalled the country's tech sector and left Canadians defenseless against American enshittification. Even the country's pioneering Right to Repair and interoperability laws, passed last year, can't undo this damage, because they only give Canadians the right to fix or improve things if they don't have to break a digital lock to do so, and *everything* has a digital lock these days, from ebikes to car parts.

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Moore actually gave us a comment for the show, once again dismissing his critics by claiming there was no evidence that his law had created a chilling effect that stopped Canadians from making products and services that unrigged the game American big business forced us all to play. It's nice to see that Moore hasn't changed since his days of calling his detractors "babyish radical extremists."

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The very nature of "chilling effects" is that they can only be observed by looking at what *didn't* happen: Moore seems to interpret the fact that Canadians haven't shipped a privacy tool for phones, or an alternative app store for Xboxes, or a service that jailbreaks your car so any mechanic can fix it as evidence that Canadians wouldn't *want* these things (or that Canadian technologists are too stupid to deliver them).

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Repealing Canada's anticircumvention laws would mark a turning point in tech regulation. For decades now, countries that are upset with tech companies' greed and cruelty have created policies that demand that Big Tech wield its extraordinary power more wisely. Think of content moderation laws, or laws that try to get tech companies to share some of their monopoly ripoff money with news outlets.

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These laws don't seek to take away power from tech giants - they just try to turn it to socially beneficial uses. This is a huge mistake. For a tech company to control its users' behavior, it must have *power* of those users, must observe every action they take and retain the ability to stop them. For a tech company to share its billions with news outlets, it must continue to *make* billions by ripping us all off:

eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/save…

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To Save the News, We Must Open Up App Stores

This is part four of an ongoing, five-part series. Part one, the introduction, is here. Part two, about breaking up ad-tech companies, is here. Part three, about banning surveillance ads, is here.

^{Electronic Frontier Foundation}

The only tech regulation that will truly make us all better off is a regulation that shatters tech power - not one that seeks to harness it. That's what getting rid of anticircumvention would do: it would give us - internet users - the right to defend ourselves against exploitation, manipulation and abuse. It would let us decide how the devices, products and services we use work.

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It wouldn't just make it illegal for tech giants to use our technology to attack us - it would make it *impossible* for them to do so, because our technology would take orders from *us*, not them.

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Repealing anticircumvention laws in Canada and around the world is the best path forward. Ironically, Donald Trump's "Liberation Day" has created the conditions for every country to liberate itself from America's grotesque tech policies - and to export our tools of technological liberation to our American friends, who were the first victims of US Big Tech.

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I'm *so* pleased with how this show worked out. My collaborators - especially showrunner Acey Rowe and producer Matt Meuse - were stone *brilliant* as was our sound designer, Julian Uzielli. The whole team has done *smashing* work getting the word out about the show and making it sound smart and accessible. I couldn't have asked for a better group of colleagues to produce this show, and I couldn't be prouder of how it sounds.

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You can subscribe to "Understood: Who Broke the Internet?" on any podcast app, even the enshittified ones, and you can get the RSS here:

cbc.ca/podcasting/includes/nak…

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