Major global technology companies are increasingly able to mistreat users and exploit business customers without facing consequences, Katarzyna Szymielewicz, head of the Warsaw-based Panoptykon Foundation, told Poland's PAP news agency.
She said the European Union may be approaching its last chance to introduce rules that give consumers real protection.
Her comments came after 29 nongovernmental organizations, including the Panoptykon Foundation, appealed to the European Commission in March to use its powers to respond to what they called the steady degradation of online platforms.
'Enshittification'
The process has become widely known as “enshittification,” a term coined in 2022 by journalist and technology commentator Cory Doctorow to describe how digital services decline in quality as companies pursue higher profits. The term has since entered dictionary usage.
Szymielewicz said the process is gradual and deliberate. She argued that companies typically begin by attracting users with a new service that appears free or is offered at an artificially low price.
Once they have built a large user base and public excitement around the product, they draw in business customers, usually advertisers, who start paying significant sums.
Only later, when both users and business clients have become dependent on the platform, do companies begin abusing their position and lowering service quality.
“At that stage, users usually discover that the service does in fact have a cost,” she said. “Either they pay with money, or they have to hand over even more data, or spend even longer watching ads.”
She added that business clients often end up paying more for less, or find that the company controlling the platform is taking over their customers instead of helping them reach new ones.
Szymielewicz pointed to a March report by the Norwegian Consumer Council, titled "Breaking Free," which cited Facebook as an example of such practices.
The report said the platform gradually shifted its algorithms away from showing posts from friends and family and toward promoting advertising.
The same report argued that Google has made its search engine less useful in ways that keep users on the platform longer, creating more opportunities to show ads. It also said the search engine increasingly rewards low-quality material and spam.
Szymielewicz said similar patterns can be seen across other parts of the internet. She pointed to music streaming services such as Spotify and Deezer, where she said fully AI-generated music is taking up a growing share of available content.
Observers have been raising alarm about the long-term cultural and economic dangers of such practices.
Szymielewicz also said an industry has emerged around producing large volumes of cheap, low-value AI-generated material for platforms such as Facebook and TikTok, while Amazon allows the sale of AI-generated books that can amount to imitations of works already uploaded by their authors.
She argued that internet users are drawn into these pseudo-services because they seem unbeatable. In many cases, she said, network effects, habit, and even addiction make it hard to leave, while potential rivals are discriminated against or stripped of ideas and intellectual property.
Disinformation, polarization, radicalization
Szymielewicz said the costs extend far beyond inconvenience for individual users. She argued that the broader effects include worsening mental health, more disinformation, deeper polarization and radicalization, pressure on traditional media, and risks to democratic processes.
In her view, the European Commission already has tools to respond. She said the Digital Markets Act, an EU law designed to curb abuses by dominant digital platforms, gives Brussels the power to discipline and fine major platforms if they misuse their market position.
In theory, she said, that could mean forcing changes to contract terms, requiring equal treatment for a platform’s own and rival services, or even ordering the sale of part of a business to restore competition.
She also said the Commission has started work on updating older consumer protection rules to better reflect how today’s internet operates, and that the appeal from civil society groups is aimed at that effort as well.
At the same time, Szymielewicz warned that strong lobbying pressure from the digital industry could weaken the EU response. She noted claims by the Norwegian Consumer Council that the digital sector spends more than EUR 150 million a year lobbying EU institutions.
She said the European Commission has prepared a deregulation package, a set of so-called omnibus laws intended to simplify rules across different sectors. In practice, she argued, those changes could weaken key safeguards, including the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the EU’s main privacy law, as well as consumer protection rules.
Szymielewicz said policymakers should test the reform plans against their real-world effects and ask whether the outcome would help consumers and European businesses, or once again favor global technology companies.
(rt/gs)
Source: PAP