Digital rights activist Cory Doctorow claims Google executives pitched a strategy in 2019 to deliberately make search results worse, forcing users to run multiple queries and view more advertisements despite holding 90 per cent market share, citing internal documents revealed in antitrust proceedings.
The revelation forms part of a broader pattern of platform degradation that Doctorow has documented over decades of observing major technology companies. In conversation with Vox, he outlined how platforms systematically worsen their services after achieving dominance to extract maximum revenue from both users and business customers.
Doctorow terms this systematic degradation “enshittification” – describing it as a process where platforms initially provide excellent service to attract users, then exploit switching costs and network effects to lock them in before worsening the experience to boost profits.
Paying for prominent placement
Doctorow claims the degradation extends beyond consumer services into enterprise markets. Amazon’s advertising business, which he says is now worth more than $50 billion annually, operates as what he calls “payola” – requiring sellers to pay for prominent placement in search results rather than displaying the best value products.
“The first result is often not the best price or best quality; it’s who paid the most,” Doctorow told Vox, drawing on decades of research documented in his book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It. His analysis shows the top search result averages 29 per cent more expensive than the actual best deal.
Doctorow says enterprise customers face additional constraints through “most-favoured nation” clauses that force sellers to raise prices across all platforms if they increase them on Amazon to cover the company’s fees. He argues this mechanism spreads Amazon’s pricing power beyond its own marketplace into broader e-commerce.
The pattern affects business decision-making across digitised sectors as companies gain the technical capability to adjust pricing and service quality on a per-user basis whilst legal protections prevent customers from inspecting or modifying the underlying software, he claims.
Doctorow argues the solution requires structural changes including antitrust enforcement, interoperability rights, and increased worker power rather than consumer choice alone, noting that alternative services often become degraded as dominant platforms eliminate competition.
