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Cory Doctorow | 1 years ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag 
 #JohnDeere charges six figures for its tractors, then runs a grift that blocks farmers from fixing their own machines, and *then* uses their control over repair to silence farmers who complain about it:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/31/dealers-choice/#be-a-shame-if-something-were-to-happen-to-it

Fair treatment from a corporation isn't a loyalty program that you earn by through sufficient spending. 

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Cory Doctorow | 1 years ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag 
 Companies that *can* sell you out, *will* sell you out, and then cry victim, insisting that they were only doing their fiduciary duty for their sacred shareholders. Companies are disciplined by fear of competition, regulation or - in the case of tech platforms - customers seizing the means of computation and installing ad-blockers, alternative clients, multiprotocol readers, etc:

https://doctorow.medium.com/an-audacious-plan-to-halt-the-internets-enshittification-and-throw-it-into-reverse-3cc01e7e4604?sk=85b3f5f7d051804521c3411711f0b554

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Cory Doctorow | 1 years ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag 
 Which is where the *next* stage of enshittification comes in: when the platform withdraws the surplus it had allocated to lure in - and then lock in - business customers (like advertisers) and reallocate it to the platform's shareholders.

For Google, there are several rackets that let it screw over advertisers as well as searchers (the advertisers are paying for the product, and they're also the product). 

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Cory Doctorow | 1 years ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag 
 Some of those rackets are well-known, like #JediBlue, the market-rigging conspiracy that Google and Facebook colluded on:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue

But thanks to the antitrust trial, we're learning about more of these. #MeganGray - ex-#FTC, ex-#DuckDuckGo - was in the courtroom last week when evidence was presented on Google execs' panic over a decline in "ad generating searches" and the sleazy gimmick they came up with to address it. 

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