Tilt Shift: Mozilla Shines a Harsh Light on Enshittification in the Smartphone Era (Premium)

The power of defaults is still real, but since the dawn of the smartphone era, platform makers have engaged in ever-escalating enshittification tactics to maintain their dominance. They’ve become much more aggressive in limiting and ignoring user choice, hobbling third-party alternatives, and steering users to more of their own products and services. This behavior is problematic on many levels, but thanks to the market power enjoyed by today’s dominant platform makers—Apple, Google, and Microsoft—their abuses impact billions of people every day and are often illegal.

But things are starting to change.

Thanks largely to the efforts of EU antitrust regulators and the Digital Markets Act (DMA) that arose in the wake of Spotify’s complaint to the European Commission (EC) about Apple’s abusive App Store policies, there is one major market in which these behaviors are no longer legal. So-called digital gatekeepers—dominant companies with “durable market positions”—are now being held to a higher standard.

The DMA has already had an incredible impact. And as we watch Big Tech complain and then comply, we see how important and effective this regulation can be. The resulting changes that most of Big Tech have made or are making to their products and services—Apple being the key exception—collectively provide an eye-opening peek at an alternative universe in which these companies are still humongous and dominant in their respective markets but, get this, are not as terrible to customers, partners, or developers.

The only problem, of course, is that Big Tech won’t willingly give up any of its power or advantages, and with rare exception, none of these companies are changing their products and services outside the EU to meet the requirements of the DMA. That’s interesting for reasons both obvious and unobvious—cloud services providers have, for example, largely adopted the requirements of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) worldwide as is possible—but it’s forced concerned parties in other countries—antitrust regulators, lawmakers, customers who might organize into class-action lawsuits, third-party developers, and more—to confront their relative ineffectiveness compared with the EU.

Some are fighting back.

Epic Games, God bless ’em, has taken on the abuses of Apple’s and Google’s mobile app stores with mixed and wildly different results. Sonos has sued Google for stealing its smart speaker technologies. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Department of Justice (DOJ) have stepped up their antitrust oversight recently (also with mixed results), as have the attorneys general of many U.S. states. And many technology companies have more publicly and formally complained about the abuses of Big Tech, both here in the U.S. and abroad.

And there have been some victories for the rule of law, but also for fairness and common sense. But not enough of them, and not fully enough to change things. Until and unless the rest of the world adopts and perhaps adapts the DMA for their own markets, these abuses are just going to continue. The enshittification of persona technology is a war without end otherwise. It will just escalate again and again.

Mozilla, the makers of the free and open source Firefox web browser, recently published issued its strongest-yet condemnation of the tactics that Big Tech platform makers use to harm it, other third-party developers, and customers. And like Proton’s charge that the new Outlook app is nothing less than “a surveillance tool for targeted advertising,” it’s one thing to vaguely understand a problem and another thing entirely to be confronted by details about that problem that expose its depth and breadth.

And that’s exactly what Mozilla has done.

Given this organization’s history, it’s fair to say that Mozilla has felt the impact of platform maker abuse for longer than most, and that as personal computing has shifted from PCs to mobile, especially smartphones, that those abuses have only gotten worse. And that is perhaps the most interesting thought that occurred to me in reading Mozilla’s new complaint and the accompanying documentation. This enshittification we are now experiencing all started with the smartphone.

And the smartphone, as we know it today, all started with the iPhone in 2007. And the fateful decisions that Steve Jobs and other Apple executives made at the time. These decisions—locking down the mobile app store, arbitrary and outrageous 30 percent fees, and a set of platform integrations that make the middleware debates from U.S. v. Microsoft look silly by comparison among them—came out of one of the darkest forces driving the cultures embraced by these companies: An overreaction to a previous market defeat that they were determined to avoid in the future.

I’ve written before that Google’s culture was driven by its cofounders and that their deep suspicion and fear of Microsoft—which was a dominant monopoly at Google’s inception—still prevents the online giant from partnering with Microsoft in ways that would counter Apple’s ecosystem advantages and benefit their shared customers. The belligerence we see from Apple has the same roots, in this case with Steve Jobs’ 1980s ouster from Apple, the company he had cofounded, his subsequent decade of defeats with NeXT, and the shaky financial situation and uninterested partners he discovered when he returned to Apple in the late 1990s. These experiences inform everything Apple does today, even though Steve Jobs passed away over 12 years ago. And they are the lens we should use to view all of its decisions and strategies.

Microsoft is the only Big Tech company to have once dominated the entire market, and it is likewise the only to have been subsequently hobbled, in this case by back-to-back antitrust snafus in the U.S. and EU, respectively. This collective slap-down resulted in what I think of as Microsoft’s lost decade, during which now-familiar names like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google created or expanded markets and then dominated them in a way that could never have happened with an unfettered Microsoft. The result was a more heterogeneous world, in some ways. The power hadn’t just shifted, it has spread out.

Two of those companies, Apple and Google, created mobile platforms following the Microsoft era, and those platforms, iPhone and Android, are now dominant worldwide. But because of the culture and institutional memory at the two firms, these platforms were each built with a fear of the past in mind. They are equally terrible as the other, and equally unfair to others, for reasons that might have made sense in the late 2000s when they were still tiny.

The irony, perhaps, is that the popularity and dominance of mobile took the spotlight off Microsoft. And so this third platform maker, which still dominates the PC with Windows and boasts over one billion users of its own, has quietly adopted Apple’s and Google’s strategies where possible, almost as if it hoped no one was paying attention. Anyone reading this can probably count numerous infractions off the top of their heads, from the secretive user tracking that started in Windows 10 to the forced usage of Microsoft Edge in Windows 11. But whatever the details, the rationale is the same: The success of its competitors is a never-ending reminder of its own defeats, and Windows and its users have suffered as a result.

And that brings us back to Mozilla: It is these three fear-driven dominant Big Tech companies that Mozilla faces off against each day. Because, as you know, this tiny organization with limited resources and dwindling usage share makes a web browser. And web browsers are unique. On the one hand, they’re the most important and most frequently used app of all. And on the other, web browsers are entirely dependent on the computing platforms on which they run. It is not coincidental that all three of these platform makers also make their own web browsers. And that each, in overlapping and unique ways, makes it hard or even impossible for third-party web browsers and other products to survive because they funnel their users, in devious ways, to their own solutions.

This is always promoted as being in the user’s best interest, but Apple, Google, and Microsoft push users implicitly and explicitly to their own browsers and other products and services for one reason only, to benefit themselves. And that’s the sad state of the world today: Enshittification occurs when a company disadvantages its own users because doing so is more lucrative than doing what they want or need. And that’s exactly what we see in iOS, Android, and Windows today.

Enshittification is a great word, the perfect term because it’s instantly memorable, and once you understand it, you see it everywhere. But Mozilla has come up with its own language to describe how the three platforms makers disadvantage it and others. It positions the enshittification strategies of Apple, Google, and Microsoft as a “platform tilt” in which they literally tilt the playing field in favor of their own browsers, in this case, at the expense of users and third-party developers. I like this term for some of the same reasons that enshittification is so good: It’s obvious, and the situation it describes is obviously true and impossible to miss once you’re aware of it. And it’s complementary: Where enshittification is about end user impact, platform tilt is about competitive impact.

Here, Mozilla is following in the footsteps of others, like Proton complaining about the new Outlook and Spotify complaining about Apple. But not really: In many ways, Mozilla is the origin story of this sort of complaint. It was born out of Microsoft’s original web browser predations, which led to its 1990s U.S. antitrust issues and, sadly, to the sale and then death of Netscape. But not before it gave birth to Mozilla, the organization, and what became Firefox, its web browser.

Mozilla has always been a different kind of company. And while it has inadvertently mimicked Netscape by making strategy and implementation mistakes that played a part in the decline of Firefox, it’s always stayed true to its original idealistic and open source roots, which it formally voiced in The Mozilla Manifesto in 2007. And it has long been vocal about the forces arrayed against it. Mozilla’s Open Policy & Advocacy blog has posts dating back to 2011, for example, and it has been officially weighing in on its competition concerns since 2021.

The death of Firefox feels inevitable now. Though its usage share peaked at roughly 30 percent in 2009 in the immediate aftermath of the first release of Google Chrome, that browser surpassed it in popularity just two years later and has never looked back. Today, Firefox commands under 7.6 percent usage share on the desktop, compared to 65 percent for Chrome and 8.8 percent for the Mac-only Safari. Factor in mobile, which we must, and it gets even uglier: Firefox has just 3.5 percent usage share worldwide, compared to 64.4 percent for Chrome and 18.8 percent for Safari. The last decade has been a steady, unrelenting decline.

If you are or were a Firefox user, you almost certainly have opinions about what it has and has not done correctly. But Mozilla’s premise here is that the decline of Firefox has more to do with platform tilt and less to do with its own product. And there is an interesting bit of evidence to support that theory: Firefox remains wildly popular on only one personal computing platform, Linux, the one personal computing platform that is not controlled by Big Tech and thus is not suffering from enshittification. No single dominant company is pressing its finger on the scale, artificially tilting the scales in its favor.

Of course, you almost have to take my word on that: Linux usage share is so low on the desktop—3.77 percent as of this writing—that no credible sources track browser usage on that platform. But it’s routinely installed as an in-box app in Linux distributions and is usually the default web browser. And it makes every “best Linux web browser” list, often in first place. I know. Nothing scientific. But this example is still interesting, no matter the real numbers.

Even if you don’t buy my Linux theory, consider that the fall of Firefox coincided with the shift to mobile in the smartphone era. And mobile platforms are much more locked down than desktop platforms, introducing challenges for all kinds of apps, but unique challenges for web browsers, thanks to their uniqueness. And Firefox, perhaps not coincidentally, has just 0.5 percent usage share on mobile. One half of one percent.

At the dawn of the web era, Microsoft architected Windows to disadvantage third-party web browsers, but it was forced to open up Windows to third-party web browsers and other apps as part of its antitrust remedies. One result was a default apps interface by which users could make their app choices explicit. And all Mozilla had to do was make the better product and overcome the power of defaults, where we’ve long understood that most users choose the path of least resistance, in this case, the default browser that came with the operating system.

That was a simpler time. Since then, locked down mobile platforms—so-called walled gardens—have become the norm. And as noted, Microsoft, sensing an opportunity, has started employing similar strategies on Windows. Especially for web browsers. First, it tried to remove and/or defang the default apps interface in Windows 11 before universally negative customer feedback forced it to step back from that cliff. But its moves since then have been no less hostile: Today, Windows 11 lets users configure a default web browser, but it then ignores that choice when users click on links in Search, Widgets, or elsewhere, when it launches Microsoft’s web browser, Edge, instead.

This is enshittification, of course, because it harms users. But it’s also platform tilt because it harms competitors too. In this case, third-party web browsers like Firefox. And Mozilla’s missive on this topic addresses both sides.

“This tilt manifests in a variety of ways,” the post explains. “For example: making it harder for a user to download and use a different browser, ignoring or resetting a user’s default browser preference, restricting capabilities to the first-party browser, or requiring the use of the first-party browser engine for third-party browsers … People deserve choice, and choice requires the existence of viable alternatives. Alternatives and competition are good for everyone, but they can only flourish if the playing field is fair. It’s not today, but it’s also not hard to fix if the platform vendors wish to do so.”

And with that, I come to my third and final takeaway from Mozilla’s exposé. As terrible as all three of Mozilla’s platform maker competitors are, one stands out as the king of enshittification and platform tilt. And it’s not Microsoft.

It’s Apple.

On its GitHub-hosted Platform Tilt dashboard, Mozilla tracks each of the artificial technical issues that Apple, Google, and Microsoft introduce in their platforms to disadvantage it and other third-party web browser makers. And while Google and Microsoft both have three issues listed, Apple takes home the crown, and then some, by racking up no less than 11 issues. It’s working over three times as hard as Google and Microsoft to prevent the would-be competition from establishing even a toehold in its walled garden.

Interestingly, Google and Microsoft share one issue, which is related to some platform features launching the platform maker’s web browser instead of the one the user made the default. Apple doesn’t get dinged for this one—actually, it sort of does—because it doesn’t even open up iOS enough to allow such a thing: Sure, users can “pick” another web browser, but not easily or obviously, and even if the user figures it out, they’re just using Safari under the covers regardless. And that one is in the issue tracker, as “App Store forbids third-party browser engines.” It’s also expressly forbidden by the EU’s DMA regulations. (Apple’s non-compliance with those rules is another story entirely, let’s not get distracted for now.)

Apple is so brazen that it hobbles third-party web browsers and other apps in ways that even Google and Microsoft have too much credibility to attempt. Third-party web browsers aren’t allowed to employ the same multiprocess architecture on iOS that they use on all other platforms, limiting capabilities, performance, and code-sharing. They can’t use all the iOS accessibility features. They can’t import history, bookmarked sites, or cookies from Safari or any other browser. And thanks to Apple’s death-grip on App Store and in-app revenues, they can’t even host their own extensions catalogs. It goes on and on.

I love that Mozilla is fighting the good fight here: They’re on the right side of history, and it’s only a matter of time before Apple, Google, and the rest of Big Tech is forced to fight on a more level playing field everywhere in the world. I also love that it is bringing real evidence to bear with this issue tracker. Apple’s biggest fans, in particular, have a uniquely unsophisticated way of defending the company and its predatory business practices, and I’m sure that’s tied to the company’s excellent marketing. But these lists represent a collective objective truth that is difficult to ignore and, I think, impossible to defend as a whole.

There’s no version of this story where Apple, Google, or Microsoft “engage with Mozilla in this new forum to speedily resolve these concerns,” as the organization asks. But hopefully, other web browser makers and third-party developers will lend their voices to this effort and get antitrust regulators from around the world to use the EU’s DMA as a blueprint for their own overdue efforts to stop Big Tech. It’s not too late, it just feels that way sometimes.

As a customer of all three of these predators, I’d feel a lot better about my technology choices if these companies, each of which I pay considerable sums every year, respected those choices.