What: In "Enshittification", Cory Doctorow argues that the decline of digital platforms is not accidental but the predictable result of a three-stage cycle: platforms start by being genuinely good for users, shift to serving business customers, then squeeze everyone to maximise shareholder returns. He locates the root cause in decades of unchecked monopoly consolidation and regulatory failure, and proposes a set of structural remedies including antitrust enforcement, mandatory interoperability, data portability, and treating key digital infrastructure as a public good.

Why it is important: For department store leaders, Doctorow's framework gives precise language to a frustration most retailers know intimately, rising platform fees, pay-to-play visibility, opaque data arrangements, and shrinking margins on Amazon, Meta, and Google. In 2026, as platform regulation tightens and boards face greater scrutiny over digital risk, his lens offers a practical provocation: before deepening any platform dependency, ask what stage-3 extraction looks like, and design your loyalty, CRM, and retail media strategies so the customer relationship stays with the retailer, not the intermediary.

Book Review: Enshittification