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Meta wants to charge EU users $14 a month if they don't agree to personalized ads on Facebook and Instagram
(www.businessinsider.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Maybe enshittification is actually a good thing. Hear me out: the worse things get, the more motivated people are to ask questions, migrate to alternatives, build better platforms, and hopefully 1) enact well-informed legislation, and 2) prevent what appears to be this "necessity" of enshittification from continuing to happen in an endless cycle.
That's the basis for the theory behind the business life cycle. The theory goes that eventually companies mature and settle into a kind of coasting phase, where they maximise profit instead of continuing to innovate. This provides a large opening for competition, who inevitable eat the incumbent's lunch.
Indeed, on a long enough time scale, all companies eventually die. It's just that, living in that moment, it appears that these companies are so unbelievably large and powerful that they could never be unseated. I'm sure people thought that of the Dutch East India company at the time, yet it dissolved 224 years ago.
Eventually, Facebook will kill itself. It's already done such a great job.
It's also that the U.S. has shown repeatedly that it'll prop up companies with ongoing subsidies, or even bail them out as in the 2008 crisis.
I have to concur with the concern. It's not a free market if we don't let bad businesses fail. What's that saying? Privatised profits and socialised losses? Less of that please.