In a revelation from Google‘s 2019 antitrust case, internal company documents exposed a deliberate strategy to degrade search quality for profit, a decision that journalist and activist Cory Doctorow argues exemplifies a phenomenon he calls “enshitification.”
The Department of Justice uncovered memos showing two competing visions within Google. Ben Gomes, a longtime engineer who built Google’s data center network, was “palpably horrified” at proposals to worsen search results. His opponent, former McKinsey consultant Prabhakar Raghavan, advocated making users search multiple times to find answers, generating more ad impressions per query.
“His only argument for not doing this is I didn’t devote my whole life to making a search engine that we made worse,” Doctorow explained. “And Prabhakar Raghavan’s answer is we’re going to make more money if we make the search engine worse and nothing bad will happen to us so why don’t we do that.”
The strategy emerged from a simple business problem: Google had captured 90% of the search market and couldn’t grow further. Rather than accept plateau, executives chose degradation as a growth mechanism. Money talks, and Raghavan’s profit-driven logic prevailed over Gomes’s engineering integrity.
This wasn’t market forces at work, it was monopoly power. Google maintained dominance through anti-competitive practices, including paying Apple $20 billion annually not to create a competing search engine. Without meaningful competition, Google faced no consequences for deliberately worsening its product.
The decision represents a betrayal of the engineers who sacrificed personal lives, missing children’s baseball games and family funerals, to build what they believed was a transformative tool. These workers experienced what librarian theorist Fobazi Ettarh calls “vocational awe,” exploitation of people’s desire to serve users. Tech companies drove employees to 60-80 hour weeks by positioning them as “warrior monks on a holy quest,” but once workers lost leverage through layoffs, their moral objections ceased to matter.
The mechanism behind this degradation is what makes digital platforms uniquely dangerous. Unlike physical products, software can change “from moment to moment and user to user,” allowing companies to extract maximum value by personalizing exploitation.
Google’s search manipulation, Amazon’s 50-60% seller fees, and Apple’s 30% app store tax all represent what Doctorow terms “enshitification,” platforms that were once good to users, then good to business customers, before finally extracting value for shareholders alone.
The pattern follows three stages: first, platforms attract users with superior service while locking them in. Second, they abuse users to attract business customers. Finally, they abuse everyone to maximize profit, leaving just enough value to prevent mass exodus.
Google’s deliberate search degradation marks this final stage, a company so powerful it can make products worse without consequence.
What makes this particularly insidious is the breakdown of traditional market discipline. Competition has been eliminated through decades of unenforced antitrust law. Workers lost power as tech employment normalized. And intellectual property law prevents users from modifying software to escape abuse, making ad blockers for apps illegal, for instance, while websites can be modified freely.
The Google case proves these platforms don’t worsen accidentally through incompetence or market forces. They worsen deliberately, systematically, and profitably, because monopoly power means they can. As one executive’s leaked memo revealed, the calculation was simple: more searches equal more ads equal more money, and “nothing bad will happen to us.”