The Current - Remember when the internet was… good? What happened?

Episode Date: May 8, 2025

The internet was once a user-friendly place built to connect people, but now it’s rife with bots picking fights, AI fakery and algorithms hellbent on selling you something. In the new CBC podcast Understood: Who Broke the Internet?, tech journalist Cory Doctorow breaks down what he calls the "enshittification" of the internet — and who’s responsible.

When a body is discovered 10 miles out to sea, it sparks a mind-blowing police investigation. There's a man living in this address in the name of a deceased. He's one of the most wanted men in the world. This isn't really happening. Officers are finding large sums of money. It's a tale of murder, skullduggery and international intrigue. So who really is he? I'm Sam Mullins and this is Sea of Lies from CBC's Uncovered, available now.

This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current Podcast. Here's how it goes. You're online, you're searching for a product, some information. There are ads everywhere. You have to slice through all sorts of sponsored posts and you still can't find exactly what you're looking for. Maybe you're on Facebook, you just want to see your friends posts. Instead, your Facebook feed is filled with AI generated celebrity

fake news. The internet of 2025 is full of ads and trolls and algorithms and yelling and privacy issues. It is a far cry from its early days when the internet was fueled by egalitarian ideals around connection and knowledge sharing. What happened to those ideals? Cory Doctorow has a word for it. He calls it the enxidification of the internet. That is the focus of Cory's new CBC podcast, Understood Who Broke the Internet. Cory Doctorow is a science fiction writer, activist and tech journalist. He's in Los Angeles.

Corey, good morning. Good morning, Matt. Before we get to the internet of today, go back to 1994. In the first episode of this podcast, we hear a very young you, you're 23 years old and you are talking to the CBC showing Canada how to, as they said, surf the net

back then. Take us back. What was the promise of the internet for you back then? Well, you know, I listened to that interview. I hadn't heard it in quite some time. And I think I had it pretty right on, which was that the promise of the internet was that it would let people make connections with each other and that they could make those connections even if other people maybe didn't want them to, that we could talk directly to

one another, that much vaunted disintermediation where we get rid of the people who were deciding what was going to be in front of you and who you could talk to and what you could say. And I think you know if we want to flash forward to today what's happened is the people who brought us this intermediation then just promptly re-intermediated us and gave us a new set of gatekeepers. One of the things, you talk about this in the podcast, one of the things I remember, you and I are around the same

age from that time is how small the internet felt, but also in that smallness, how it seemed like you could step through a door and everything was available, that you would go on these Newsnet message groups and you would be able to connect with people about things you couldn't possibly imagine you would be able to find those connections with. Do you remember that smallness? Yeah. And the excitement of finding a stranger who turned out to be someone who was really interesting and just the person that you needed to be talking to.

And that was a theme that came up every single time we interviewed someone for this podcast. All these old internet hands, the thing that they all said was it was a way to connect with people. As Clay Shirky once said, content isn't king. Conversation is content is just what we talk about. Is that just nostalgia or are things really bad right now? No, I think things are really bad. You know, Tom Eastman says that we live in the internet of five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four.

And, and I don't think that, um, uh, people are wrong to say that the vibes on the internet have turned pretty rancid. But where I think this podcast series and my analysis brings something new is to try and create a kind of material account of what happened. So there's a lot of semi-mystical ideas about what happened to the internet. People were greedy and they were mean and venture capitalists came in and they spoiled our Edenic Garden.

The great forces of history bore down upon us to make the internet consolidated or maybe it's the iron laws of economics and return to scale and so on. What I think actually happened, and this is really the thesis of the series, is that named individuals in living memory instituted policies that could predictably have this outcome. They were warned that that would happen at the time. They instituted

them anyway, and everyone forgot who was to blame. Let's talk about one specific example, and this starts off the podcast series. And this is, um, Google search. I remember a time before Google. Um, I remember how it changed everything when it came in and people now, I mean, people use Google just as a default. It is, it is the way the portal that they use to get into the internet. When somebody uses Google search, how, how do you see it being broken?

Yeah, it's funny because I think again, a lot of us have an impressionistic idea that Google search doesn't work the way it used to. And certainly when you remember back to the dawn of Google, if you're my age, you'll remember this, Matt, that there was a time when we searched with things like AltaVista and Ask Jeeves, and you could ask Jeeves all day long,

and Jeeves wouldn't give you an answer that was any good. Then along came the Google search box, and you just typed a few vague words, and then almost by magic, you would get exactly what you were looking for, and none of the spam and none of the bad stuff. That just doesn't seem like it feels that way anymore. Because Google was just on trial for antitrust violations in America,

it actually just lost three antitrust trials that's been adjudicated a monopolist three times over. We suddenly got some insight into what happened to Google. And in particular, we found out that in 2019, Google had an all hands alert because search revenue and search volume were stalling. The reason it was stalling was really straightforward. They had 90% of the market.

They had this all-hands meeting, and Prabhagarh Raghavan has this incredible idea. He says, what if we made search less accurate so that you had to search more than once to get your answer, and every time you have to refine your search, we get to show you more ads. So it's a way to juice growth. And I think, again, like this is not a coincidence, it's not changes to the global environment. What happened here is that Google became a monopolist.

As a court in the United States has found, Google illegally purchased every search box on the internet. So they bribed Apple to be their default search engine, and Mozilla, so they're the search engine in Firefox, Samsung, all the carriers, so that any search box you ever found will be a Google search box, which basically cleared the market of people trying to make a better search engine. Because what's the point of making a better search engine if no one's ever going to find it because all the search boxes default to Google? And so once Google became too big to fail, they became too big to care.

Google had this motto that for many years kind of spoke to what people thought this company was, this idealistic vision of what this company was. And you spoke with the journalist, Stephen Levy. He wrote the history of Google. Here is how he described that. A very famous motto that Google had was, don't be evil, which was coined by an engineer when someone from HR had a meeting.

And so we said, what is our motto? What is our values? One guy said, what are you talking about? It's just like, don't be evil. And the company, the top executives, they embraced it. They wrote about it in their IPO letter. You know, that's our motto. I'm Sarah Trelevin, and for over a year,

I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who was faking pregnancies. I started like warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy. And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth.

How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's baby. It's a long story, settle in. Available now. How does a company go from don't be evil to too big to care?

You know, Google bought all of its competitors. It used to have to care about its workforce as well. So, you know, that don't be evil thing, we make fun of it. But one of the things that don't be evil gets you, if you're Google, is an advantage in an incredibly tight talent market. So one of the things about tech companies is they're famously

extremely productive, right? The amount of money they generate per hour worked by their employees is higher than almost any other sector, which is how you get like Instagram being bought by Facebook for a billion dollars at a time when it only had 12 employees, because they were just insanely productive. So in a market in which there's a job waiting for every tech worker across the street, you have to keep your tech workers happy. It's the

kind of power that workers usually get from unionization, but in this case, they got it from scarcity and they could really tell their bosses to go to hell whenever their bosses asked them to do something terrible. And so Don't Be Evil, it let them hire people who had their choice of places to work. And you know, the disappearance of Don't Be Evil coincides in large part with the labor market catching up with the demand where we finally had enough engineers. And you start to see these mass layoffs across the sector, but especially at Google. Let's talk about one of those other large companies, Amazon. You spoke with Lena Kahn, who's the former commissioner

of the Federal Trade Commission. This is another company that people love to hate or hate to love. It's integrated in so many parts of people's lives. What were her biggest concerns around Amazon and the size of Amazon now? Well, I think that the thing that happens when a platform gets big enough is it goes

from being a facilitator, right? So there's nothing wrong with a facilitator. You know, I'm a writer. I don't want to print my books, publish my books, and stand in a street corner selling my books. Your Toronto listeners might remember there was a great writer called Crad Cullodny. So you stand on the side of the street. Yeah, with a sign that said, very famous Canadian author, buy my books.

And he had a really cheeky sign that just said Margaret Atwood. It was quite funny. Crad was a great writer, but there are a lot more writers I want to hear from than are capable of writing, publishing and selling their own books on Yonge Street in February to drunk spilling out of the bars. And what an intermediary does, what a platform does, is it steps in to mediate between buyers and sellers or drivers and riders or any of those other relationships where it would be quite burdensome for the worker doing the work to also do these arrangements. And what happens is when

they get power, they go from being the facilitator to actually commanding the market, to effectively becoming a regulator. So Amazon, for example, now charges between 45 and 51 percent of every dollar that its platform sellers bring in in the form of these various junk fees. Now, there are a lot of businesses that just can't exist with a 51% tax that they're paying to Amazon, and those businesses just don't sell on Amazon. And if you're not selling to Amazon, in many cases, you're not selling at all because about 90% of affluent US households have Amazon Prime, which means they paid in advance for a year's worth of shipping, which means that they would be fools to go and shop somewhere

else and pay for shipping when they've already paid for it. So their search for a product starts and ends on Amazon. So if you're not on Amazon, you're effectively nowhere for the majority of affluent households and an absolute majority of American households. So about 56 percent of all American households and 90% of affluent households are prime subscribers. And so what Amazon can do is they can structure this market. So it's as though you had a regulator stepping in and saying, these products are for sale,

these products are not. They get to set the prices for those products. So we saw in the antitrust case brought by the DC Attorney General, Ken Racine, that one of the ways that Amazon hides the fact that it's taking 51 cents out of every seller's dollar is they require those sellers to price match their lowest price anywhere else in the world on Amazon. So if you raise your price on Amazon so that you can pay the 51% Amazon tax. You have to raise your price at Target, at Walmart, at Loblaws, at your own

factory store and everywhere else you might sell. So Amazon is actually also setting the price that we pay at every store, not just at Amazon. What do you make of the fact that governments are now trying to reign in these companies like Meta and Amazon and Google? Well, it's really quite a remarkable phenomenon because it's global in Europe, in Australia, and in individual European member states, Germany, France, Spain. And it's amazing to see it is, I think, a genuine see change in the way that people feel

about corporate power and in the way that politicians understand what giving into corporate power will do to their electoral chances. There are questions, and I just mentioned Lena Kahn because you spoke with her. She's the former FTC commissioner and she filed a lot of these antitrust cases that are being heard under the Trump administration. There are questions as to whether all of those cases or some of them will continue given his proximity to billionaires. Here's what she told you about her concerns

now that she's not at the FTC. I do think there's an open question as to whether these tech executives are gonna be able to notch these sweetheart deals that get them out of this litigation. And I think as we see a lot of these companies and their top executives trying to cozy up with the new administration, I think there is, we just all have to be vigilant to make sure

that these legitimate law enforcement actions are not quietly settled on the cheap in ways that don't do justice to the American people. Corey, let me end here with just two quick things. One is, she says the American people. Do you think people, whether it's Americans, Canadians, what have you, do you think people care that the internet isn't what it used to be? Because they still use it.

They still use Amazon, they're still using Google, there's still, I mean, there's all the services that people complain about, but they still use. Do you think people care? Yeah, I really think they do. I think they do because the tech companies have had to go to the most extraordinary lengths to keep people locked onto their platform. And really the crux of our podcast is that there are these specific policies that ban people from tinkering with the code that they use. They're called anti-circumvention rules. And these started in the US in the 90s and they spread to Canada in the 2010s. And the tech companies spent a fortune maintaining the integrity of these laws

because they seemed to understand that if we could change how our technology worked, we would. Well, and if we can name the people who broke the internet, like, is it possible to fix it? Will we be able to say, these are the people who helped stitch this thing back together or created something that actually captured what we all, those of us who were around then, remember as the promise of this thing when it was created. I think more important than naming the people behind these policies is naming the policies, right? Describing what changed in the policy environment.

Criminologists, they talk about-ogenic environments, environments that encourage crime. We created policies that created an enshit-ogenic environment, an environment that encourages enshit-ification that allows companies to worsen their products without losing money. We need a digital infrastructure that is fit for purpose. And we'll only get it when we abolish the policies that created the enxitogenic environment.

And you think we can do that? I absolutely do. I mean, this is not like recovering the lost art of a fallen civilization, right? These are policies that we've had to implement before in the last Gilded Age. It was done by people who are no smarter than us, who faced challenges that were no greater than ours. And if they can do it, we can too. Corey, it's great to talk to you about this. The podcast is fantastic, but it also just

speaks to the frustration that so many people have in wanting something better. Thank you very much. Well, thank you, Matt. Corey Doctorow is a science fiction writer, an activist and a tech journalist. He hosts the CBC podcast, Understood Who Broke the Internet.

His most recent book is Picks and Shovels.