The platform is the canonical form of internet business: a two -sided market that facilitates connections between end users and business customers. Uber connects drivers with riders; Amazon and eBay connect sellers with buyers; Tiktok and YouTube connect artists with audiences; Social media connects people with something to say to people who want to hear it.
And yet, lax competition legislation has enabled companies to consolidate and drive their markets to a corner. Consolidated sectors, meanwhile, find it easy to sing with one voice, which blocks the passage of unfavorable regulation (there is still no US national privacy legislation) or its application (the EU’s general data protection regulation shows that Ireland is even more valuable than a Lawless regulation as it was ever as a mere tax haven).
Undisciplined by competition or regulation, platforms are free to slip into “enshittification” in which the company withdraws value from both sides of the two -sided market, and rely on inclusion to prevent users and business customers from breaking to a competitor. The year 2023 was when the platforms soured: Twitch, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google Search and Discord all turned into terminal enshittification, transferred value from users to shareholders and left half -dead things that were unpleasant but unpleasant. – quit.
The secret of that inaugurability is high “conversion costs” – the economists’ term for the things you have to give up to leave a service. You hate Facebook, but you like to connect with your communities, friends and clients. They hold you hostage on behalf of Facebook – and you also hold them hostage. Facebook Bank Literally at this high conversion cost: The US Federal Trade Commission’s Antitrust Case against Facebook has revealed internal memos in which a product manager is explicitly designing to design features that make “convert costs for users very high” to “very difficult Make “for a user to switch” to a competitive service.
Regulators are increasingly aware of the fact that Big Tech is deliberately designing its products to impose high costs on users who have the courage to prefer their competitors. If a company fails to provide official ways to users to take their data with, or to continue communicating with the contacts they leave behind when they change platform, those users have little profession. The once general practice of reverse engineering of a competitive platform to make an unofficial, interoperable bridge – for example, a tool that scratches your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other messages for a common inbox on a new service that Privacy respected – has been effectively banned by laws counter -zone, patents, copyright and exotic contract theories such as “evil -reasonable interference”.
Despite these obstacles to leave that keep users attached to bad platforms, most of the regulatory response to Big Tech was aimed at making it better, rather than making it easier to leave. We continue to make rules that compel Big Tech to police to police, harassment and a wealth of other evils, but with the acceptance of the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), we finally focus on making Big Tech less important to its users, and thus less sticky.
The DMA sets up the commission per -service rules to facilitate “interoperability” connectivity – with new services. It is not mere data transferability, or downloading a blob that contains all the messages you sent and the photos you uploaded. It is the ability to leave a service, set up elsewhere and resume the conversations and transactions you left behind. For example, under the DMA it should be possible to leave Facebook and set up on a community-managed Mastodon server, and continue to participate in group discussions and exchange individual messages with the people who (yet) is ready to leave.
In the UK, the digital markets, competition and consumers who have long been in arrears eventually eventually provide enforcement powers to the digital markets unit at the Competition and Market Authority, which have dozens of smart engineers and policy people on HMG’s payroll, all of which Point stands to change their detailed market studies in policy. If the bill succeeds, they will have a broad latitude to fashion remedies for every dominant service, including interoperability mandates that compel walled gardens to install gates for new market entrants, making it easy for users to leave without making themselves of important social to isolate relationships.
In the US, several interoperability bills with broad two-party support took it out of the committee, just to be denied a vote after intense support recruitment by the technology sector. But if the UK and EU enforce interoperability on technology companies, it won’t matter if America’s trapped legislature can’t manage to add its own – users around the world will get the benefits of inter -operation and burning costs of it .
These remedies will start coming online in 2024. I believe we will see that one or more of the Big Tech platforms face a legal requirement to facilitate their users’ departure: “Mr. Zuckerberg, breaks down that wall (Ed Garden). ”