File photo for representational purposes only
Paris: After 25 years as a blogger, campaigner for digital freedoms and virulent critic of big tech companies, Cory Doctorow is starting to see some green shoots of optimism.
This is a big deal for an author who coined the term "enshittification" to describe the decay of today's tech platforms.
His analysis, which has leapt from his blog and into the mainstream over the past two years, describes how platforms lock in users and advertisers before making their products steadily worse as they transfer all remaining value to their shareholders.
On the phone from Los Angeles, Doctorow -- also a prolific science-fiction writer -- told AFP that tech companies acted like this because they "lack discipline".
"If you don't face consequences when you suck, you don't have to try as hard," he said.
"And you can do things that are bad for other people and good for you."
This explains why Facebook users' feeds fill up with junk, Google search is loaded with ads and sponsored content, and why Amazon promotes cheap Chinese-made products no matter what a customer searches for.
But regulators around the world are finally beginning to tackle the monopolists that they have allowed to flourish.
"We're seeing the European Commission and the Federal Trade Commission and many other entities really taking this seriously, in a way that they haven't for 40 years," he said.
At the same time, he said users were finally beginning to desert the big platforms -- as with the mass exodus from Twitter when Elon Musk took over and rebranded it as X.
"There's a really good chance that simply making them face consequences for being bad will make them better," he said.
