The video’s opening shot shows a man hiding under a bed snipping in a hole in someone’s sock. Seconds later, the same man uses a saw to shorten a table leg so that it wobbles during breakfast. “My job is to make things shitty,” the man explains. “The official title is enshittificator. What I do is I take things that are perfectly fine and I make them worse.”
The video, released recently by the Norwegian Consumer Council, is an absurdist take on a serious issue; it is part of a wider, global campaign aimed at fighting back against the “enshittification”, or gradual deterioration, of digital products and services.
“We wanted to show that you wouldn’t accept this in the analogue world,” said Finn Lützow-Holm Myrstad, the council’s director of digital policy. “But this is happening every day in our digital products and services, and we really think it doesn’t need to be that way.”
Coined by author Cory Doctorow, the term enshittification refers to the deliberate degradation of a service or product, particularly in the digital sphere. Examples abound, from social media feeds that have gradually become littered with adverts and scams to software updates that leave phones lagging and chatbots that supplant customer service agents.
Here are the proposals: https://storage02.forbrukerradet.no/media/2026/02/2026-02-27-final-letter-to-eu-policymakers-2.pdf
Rebalance power between service providers and consumers.
Tackle dependency on Big Tech
Double down on the enforcement of existing laws.
Close the existing legal loopholes by adopting a strong Digital Fairness Act.
Nothing concrete. 3, 4 are mainly about enforcing GDPR. 2 is a job for public sector. All this is not really related to enshitification, it’s more about independence from US tech.
That leaves us with 1, which they describe as “It should be possible and practical to switch to alternative service providers, or tweak services they already use to suit their needs and preferences”.
Sounds great but what does it really mean? You can already switch to alternative provides. You don’t have to use Google or Facebook. Are they suggesting I should be able to move my facebook account to some other site? Which one? Other than some sort of interoperability between messaging apps I don’t really see how this would work.
Tweak the services? I don’t think trying to fix Big Tech is the right way to go. What tweaks would save Reddit for example? The issue was moderation and bots. What tweaks would fix Instagram?
I think the only alternative to current shitty internet is internet paid for by the users based on common protocols, self-hosting and federation. You want to post things on the internet? Host some open source service or pay someone else to host it for you. Most people will still prefer to pay corporations with their data and watch endless ads instead of paying directly to the service providers but at least there would be an alternative. And as Bit Tech enshittifies more and more people would jump to open source the way we’re seeing with Windows and Linux. For me, what EU should be doing is pouring money into open source project and hosting open source services.
IIRC, when telephones were in their infancy, you would only be able to contact people within your network. Imagine only being able to call other T mobile customers.
We did it back then, we can do it now. No more walled gardens.
Interoperability between messengers was already proposed, that’s why I mentioned it. But other than that? Are they proposing TikTok, Instagram and Youtube Shorts to somehow exchange content and let users from one service interact with content from other service? Messages have very similar functionality but other services not necessarily. What kind of interoperability are we talking about?