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. Unti...