Picture this: you download a dating app and it works beautifully. The algorithm is sharp, the matches feel genuine, the user experience feels almost thoughtful. You convince your friends to join. Three months later, the app has quietly throttled the matching algorithm. Decent profiles disappear. The interface fills with ads and 'premium' prompts. You're locked in, your contacts are there, and leaving means starting over on a rival platform with no social graph.
That pattern, repeated across every corner of the digital world, has a name now."Enshittification" is a term coined by the author and activist Cory Doctorow, which describes the deliberate process of degradation of digital products and services. And this week, a government-funded watchdog from Norway decided to document it with rigour, humour, and policy teeth.
Norway's Forbrukerrådet consumer council is taking aim at the creeping enshittification of modern life in a 100-page report – and a splendid four-minute video which we highly recommend. The report, titled"Breaking Free: Pathways to a fair technological future", is not the dry bureaucratic exercise you might expect.It's in English, and while it is 100 pages long, it is in fact enjoyable and even amusing – it contains a surprising number of puns and the occasional starred-out swearword, such as "Do androids dream of electric s***."
The accompanying film is called "A Day in the Life of an Ensh*ttificator," and runs a second under four minutes. In the sketch, a man sits at his desk with the job title "Enshittificator," dutifully degrading apps and services for the entertainment of his employers and the detriment of users worldwide. The comedy lands, but the underlying message is serious: this isn't accidental or inevitable. It's a choice.
The report's scope is wide.It discusses the problem of renting access to material instead of owning it—notably with a section on video games called "Insert coin to continue." It looks at the unfairness of TikTok's prioritization algorithms. It discusses the increasing restrictions from services such as Netflix. In "Hell on Wheels," it talks about the problems of constantly digitally connected cars—a particular issue in Norway, which has the highest proportion of EV sales in the world.
The council's director of digital policy, Finn Lützow-Holm Myrstad, points to a concrete example.According to Reuters, Meta estimates that ten percent of the company's annual revenue comes from fraudulent ads on its services—amounting to a dizzying 16 billion dollars. Meta is earning billions from consumers being scammed. Even if the company gets fined, the fines only amount to a fraction of these profits. In other words, Meta has no incentive to solve the problem. Meanwhile, the company doesn't lift a finger to help its users, whether their profiles are misused in the scam ads, or they fall victim to the scams.
The underlying economics are worth pausing on. When a service is young and fighting for market share, it offers genuine value to attract users and alternative products. Once network effects lock users in—because everyone else is already there—the incentive reverses. The platform can slowly degrade the experience, restrict features, flood screens with ads, and monetise data, knowing users cannot easily leave.Enshittification often happens through a myriad of small changes that may, in isolation, seem trivial. Cumulatively, they ruin products and services, exploiting both consumers and third-party businesses in the pursuit of profit.
This diagnosis is not wrong, and the council's recommendations are grounded in principle.The Consumer Council suggests concrete measures: stronger rights for consumers to control, adapt, repair, and alter their products and services; interoperability, data portability, and decentralisation as the norm, so the threshold for moving to different services becomes as low as possible; and deterrent and vigorous enforcement of competition law, so that Big Tech companies are not allowed to indiscriminately acquire start-ups.
These are not radical ideas. Right-to-repair movements exist across Europe and North America. Interoperability underpins most of the digital world's older, more stable infrastructure—email, for instance, works across platforms. Competition law has a century of precedent. And yet, in the consumer technology space, they remain counterculture.
Together with more than 70 consumer groups and other actors in Europe and the US, the council is sending letters to policymakers in the EU/EEA, UK and the US. That coalition matters. It suggests the frustration is real and widely shared, not merely the complaint of a Scandinavian regulator.
Here's where the centre-right tension emerges. A fiscally conservative observer might ask: if users remain on these platforms, if they keep buying these devices, aren't they voting with their wallets? The problem is real but behavioural, not regulatory. People would simply switch if a better alternative existed. The fact that Facebook, Netflix, and others degrade their services and still retain users suggests the services remain competitive on balance.
But that argument misses something.Eventually consumers feel locked in because there are no real alternatives. Digital memories, data, functionality, and even connected devices are being controlled by companies that can make any changes they want, at any time. Many of us end up feeling powerless. The lock-in is real. Switching costs in a social network, for instance, are not just monetary; they include the loss of a decade of photos, the disruption of a contact list, the social friction of asking friends to move with you. That's not a market failure in the classical sense. It's a structural problem created by the design of networks and the legal framework that permits them.
The Norwegian report is not calling for the nationalisation of tech companies or the prohibition of profitability. It's calling for the same remedies that emerged from the industrial age: transparency, the ability to exit, the right to repair what you own, and enforcement of rules that prevent the accumulation of unchecked power. Whether one leans left or right, those are reasonable positions.
The real debate is speed and scope. How quickly should these rules take effect? Should they apply to all digital services or only those with market dominance? What does "interoperability" mean in practice? These are legitimate questions where reasonable people disagree. What should not remain in dispute is whether the problem exists. The Norwegian Consumer Council has documented it thoroughly. The rest is implementation.