I find the moralizing of these actions quite frustrating because they seem to indicate people don’t actually understand why things work the way do.
The C-suite aren’t corrupt. They have a job to do and they’re doing their job. Their job is to maximize returns on the investors’ investments. That’s it. It’s absolutely moral for them to do that job.
One might complain that their actions focus too much on the short term rather than the long term, and that would be a legitimate complaint. But only if it means they’re losing money in the long term. Enshittification usually makes money both in the short and long terms.
Once we recognize that people aren’t being “corrupt” but actually doing the job they’re being paid to do by maximizing their profits, one can focus on how to provide incentives to maximize profits without making things worse. And profit maximization inevitably leads to making things worse because it requires minimizing what you’re giving the customer and maximizing what you’re getting from them.
The free market check on this is competition. But competition only works if it’s a genuinely competitive market, and there are clear signals to the customer who is educated in understanding and valuing those signals, regarding the quality of products.
This used to be much easier earlier where products were simpler, but it’s much harder now. The vast majority of the market will have no ability to evaluate the risk of needing an online account to switch on your light bulb. And so a company which provides the no login option will be less competitive because it won’t be able to make money off your data and it will have to support an additional workflow.
In the absence of customer knowledge and visibility we only really have standards.
Ideally you start with standards provided by industry trade bodies. However, those are ripe for corruption and as a result there’s hardly any such successful standards.
Which leads you to the final option which is govt standards that are either highly encouraged by the threat of possibly instituting firmer regulations or just plain and simple regulated with the threat of fines and jail.