Trump may be the beginning of the end for 'enshittification' - this is our chance to make tech good again. Cory Doctorow

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/10/trump-beginning-of-end-enshittification-make-tech-good-again

It’s been 25 years since I started working for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an American nonprofit dedicated to preserving and promoting human rights on the internet. I’ve found myself in dozens of countries working with activists, politicians and civil servants to untangle the complex technical questions raised by the internet, and every one of our discussions ended in the same place. “OK,” they’d say, “you’ve definitely laid out the best way to regulate tech, but we can’t do it.”

Why not? Because – inevitably – the US trade rep had beaten me to every one of those countries and made it eye-wateringly clear that if they regulated tech in a way that favoured their own people, industries and national interests, the US would bury them in tariffs.

But deterrents are a funny thing. If someone demands that you follow their orders or they’ll burn your house down, so you do, and they burn your house down anyway … well, you’re a bit of a fool if you keep on doing what they tell you, aren’t you?

Donald Trump’s tariffs have opened up a new possibility for the technology we have become increasingly dependent on. Today, nearly all of our tech comes from US companies, and it arrives as a prix fixe meal. If you want to talk with your friends on a Meta platform, you have to let Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg eavesdrop on your conversations. If you want to have a phone that works, you have to let Apple’s Tim Cook suck 30p out of every pound you spend and give him a veto over which software you can run. If you want to search the web, you have to let Google’s Sundar Pichai know what colour underwear you’ve got on.

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