"It's not just you. The internet is getting worse, fast," [1]writes Cory Doctorow . Sunday he shared an excerpt from his upcoming book [2] Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It .

He succinctly explains "this moment we're living through, this Great Enshittening" using Amazon as an example. Platforms amass users, but then abuse them to make things better for their business customers. And then they abuse those business customers too, abusing everybody while claiming all the value for themselves. "And become a giant pile of shit."

So first Amazon subsidized prices and shipping, then locked in customers with Prime shipping subscriptions (while adding the chains of DRM to its ebooks and audiobooks)...

> These tactics — Prime, DRM and predatory pricing — make it very hard not to shop at Amazon. With users locked in, to proceed with the enshittification playbook, Amazon needed to get its business customers locked in, too... [M]erchants' dependence on those customers allows Amazon to extract higher discounts from those merchants, and that brings in more users, which makes the platform even more indispensable for merchants, allowing the company to require even deeper discounts...

>

> [Amazon] uses its overview of merchants' sales, as well as its ability to observe the return addresses on direct shipments from merchants' contracting factories, to [3]cream off its merchants' bestselling items and clone them , relegating the original seller to page umpty-million of its search results. Amazon also crushes its merchants under a mountain of junk fees pitched as optional but effectively mandatory. Take Prime: a merchant has to give up a huge share of each sale to be included in Prime, and merchants that don't use Prime are pushed so far down in the search results, they might as well cease to exist. Same with Fulfilment by Amazon, a "service" in which a merchant sends its items to an Amazon warehouse to be packed and delivered with Amazon's own inventory. This is far more expensive than comparable (or superior) shipping services from rival logistics companies, and a merchant that ships through one of those rivals is, again, relegated even farther down the search rankings.

>

> All told, Amazon makes so much money charging merchants to deliver the wares they sell through the platform that its own shipping is fully subsidised. In other words, Amazon gouges its merchants so much that it pays nothing to ship its own goods, which compete directly with those merchants' goods.... Add all the junk fees together and an Amazon seller is being screwed out of 45-51 cents on every dollar it earns there. Even if it wanted to absorb the "Amazon tax" on your behalf, it couldn't. Merchants just don't make 51% margins. So merchants must jack up prices, which they do. A lot... [W]hen merchants raise their prices on Amazon, they are required to raise their prices everywhere else, even on their own direct-sales stores. This arrangement is called most-favoured-nation status, and it's key to the [4]U.S. Federal Trade Commission's antitrust lawsuit against Amazon ...

>

> If Amazon is taxing merchants 45-51 cents on every dollar they make, and if merchants are hiking their prices everywhere their goods are sold, then it follows you're paying the Amazon tax no matter where you shop — even the corner mom-and-pop hardware store. It gets worse. On average, the first result in an Amazon search is 29% more expensive than the best match for your search. Click any of the top four links on the top of your screen and you'll pay an average of 25% more than you would for your best match — which, on average, is located 17 places down in an Amazon search result.

Doctorow knows what we need to do:

Ban predatory pricing — "selling goods below cost to keep competitors out of the market (and then jacking them up again)."

Impose structural separation, "so it can either be a platform, or compete with the sellers that rely on it as a platform."

Curb junk fees, "which suck 45-51 cents on every dollar merchants take in."

End its most favoured nation deal, which forces merchants "to raise their prices everywhere else, too.

Unionise drivers and warehouse workers.

Treat rigged search results as the fraud they are.

These are policy solutions. (Because "You can't shop your way out of a monopoly," Doctorow warns.) And otherwise, as Doctorow says earlier, "Once a company is too big to fail, it becomes too big to jail, and then too big to care."

In the mean time, Doctorow also makes up a new word — "the enshitternet" — calling it "a source of pain, precarity and immiseration for the people we love.

"The indignities of harassment, scams, disinformation, surveillance, wage theft, extraction and rent-seeking have always been with us, but they were a minor sideshow on the old, good internet and they are the everything and all of the enshitternet."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot readers [5]mspohr and [6]fjo3 for sharing the article.



[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/05/way-past-its-prime-how-did-amazon-get-so-rubbish

[2] https://guardianbookshop.com/enshittification-9781836742227/?utm_source=editoriallink&utm_medium=merch&utm_campaign=article

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/jun/07/independent-uk-retailers-claim-1bn-damages-against-amazon

[4] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/26/amazon-antitrust-lawsuit-analysis-big-tech

[5] https://www.slashdot.org/~mspohr

[6] https://www.slashdot.org/~fjo3