The David McWilliams Podcast Did Big Tech Ruin the Internet? with Cory Doctorow
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Mar 31, 2026 
Cory Doctorow, writer and digital rights advocate known for coining 'enshittification', explains how platforms decay from user-friendly to shareholder-first. He discusses ad fraud, app lock-in, monopoly plays like Facebook and Amazon, regulatory capture, and why political pressure to curb corporate power may be returning.
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Surplus Shifts From Users To Shareholders
- Platforms reallocate surplus away from user welfare toward shareholders, reducing spending on content moderation and user safety.
- Doctorow frames this as a chosen equilibrium: firms decide how much to return to users versus shareholders, often prioritising the latter.
OG App Shows What Users Would Pay For
- Two teenagers built OG App to show Instagram in reverse chronological order and strip ads, reaching top 10 in app stores within a day.
- Meta used takedowns to remove the app from Apple and Google stores, showing platform gatekeeping power.
Fix Policy Not Just CEOs
- Regulators created the policy environment that enabled platform capture by allowing anti-competitive practices and weak enforcement.
- Fixing inshittification requires reversing those policy choices rather than blaming only CEOs.