What Now? With Trevor NoahWhy Google, Apple & Big Tech Keep Making Everything Worse | Cory Doctorow and Trevor Noah
At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
Enshittification: how monopolies, DRM, and policy choices degrade everything
- Doctorow defines “enshittification” as a predictable lifecycle where dominant platforms and firms worsen products and terms once competition and user exit are constrained.
- He argues the primary engine is policy—not just bad CEOs—highlighting antitrust retreat and laws like DMCA Section 1201 that criminalize bypassing digital locks and block repair, interoperability, and user control.
- Concrete examples include DRM turning purchases into revocable licenses, parts-pairing that bricks repaired devices (cars, ventilators), and alleged internal Google incentives to worsen Search to increase ad impressions.
- He frames Apple’s App Store 30% fee as a “tax on the digital economy,” enabled by platform lock-in and anti-circumvention rules, while noting Apple’s “protection” fails when Apple’s interests or geopolitics change.
- Despite the bleak diagnosis, he sees hope in a global surge of antitrust and regulation (EU DMA/DSA, cases in Asia, stronger Canadian competition law), plus organizing through unions, local politics, and digital-rights groups like EFF.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasEnshittification is a strategy that thrives when exit is blocked.
When users can’t easily switch or modify products, companies can worsen quality, raise fees, and increase surveillance without losing customers—turning “bad ideas” into the most profitable ones.
DMCA 1201 effectively criminalizes fixing and improving your own devices.
Doctorow claims firms can add digital locks and then use anti-circumvention law to make bypassing those locks a felony, chilling repair, reverse engineering, competition, and independent maintenance.
Parts pairing turns repair into vendor permission—sometimes with life-or-death consequences.
He cites locked-down cars and Medtronic ventilators that reject swapped parts, and describes pandemic-era workarounds (e.g., improvised unlockers) that risk prosecution under similar laws abroad.
Platform fees and lock-in function like private taxation.
Apple’s mandated in-app payment rules (30%) are portrayed as pure-margin extraction that ultimately raises consumer prices, while preventing competitors from offering cheaper payment rails (e.g., 3%).
Monopoly shifts internal company culture toward destructive factional battles.
Using Google as an example, Doctorow argues that once competition disappears, incentives favor revenue-maximizing degradation (more searches, more ads) and internal turf wars over user value.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesWe're not prisoners of history. We're just people whose leaders were cowardly and shortsighted and selfish and bad at their jobs. And so, you know, there's obvious remedies for that. They don't always involve a guillotine.
— Cory Doctorow
Section 1201 of the DMCA establishes a felony for modifying technology without permission.
— Cory Doctorow
I call this the Darth Vader MBA, right? As in- ... I'm altering the deal, pray I don't alter it any further, right? Like, that is the one lesson of the Darth Vader MBA.
— Cory Doctorow
Prabhakar Raghavan's got a great idea. He says, "We can grow search revenue by making search worse, so you have to search more than once- ... so that, uh, we can show you more ads."
— Cory Doctorow
Companies aren't just too big to fail. They're not just too big to jail. They get too big to care.
— Cory Doctorow
High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.
