31 Dec 2025 Search

Ed Zitron writes, in The Enshittifinancial Crisis,

You may say that I’m wrong because Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon continue to have healthy net revenues and revenue growth, and as I previously said, these companies are not sharing AI revenues and their existing businesses are still growing due to the massive monopolies they’ve built.”

What if Ed Zitron is an optimist? And for at least some of these companies, their legacy monopoly businesses are in trouble, too? Amazon may be the exception, at least for now, since they are not as far along in building a retail monopoly as the Google/Meta ad duopoly is with their market. But the decisions by Google, Meta, and Microsoft to enshittify are signs of weakness.

Google wouldn’t be running with an FBI-warning-worthy Trademark Policy if they didn’t need to artificially juice search ad revenue.

Instead of enforcing blanket trademark restrictions, they’re shifting the responsibility to the brands themselves. Under the new policy, trademark owners will need to inform Google specifically about advertisers they want to exclude from using their brand. If you come across an ad misusing your brand, simply reach out to Google, and they’ll take care of the issue.

That’s a big simply. Remember that search ads are personalized, so Google’s ML will learn to maximize revenue by showing the infringing ads to likely buyers and avoiding showing them to people who might report the infringement.

The Meta scam ads saga works similarly. ML learns to show each user the scams they’re most likely to fall for—which probably explains how people who take steps to avoid ad personalization are better off financially. What we don’t see enough of in the mainstream media coverage of all this is that running 10% scams doesn’t mean ad revenue at the Big Tech companies would go down by 10% if they cleaned up. The Meta and Google ad systems are auction-based, and scammers bid up the ad rates for the remaining legit advertisers. At Meta and Google, crime is now load-bearing. Which means that eventually, as countries like Denmark clean up their legal environments, the ad revenue at Meta and Google will take a bigger than expected hit.

Meanwhile Microsoft is now offering $10 Windows and $35 Office. Yes, niche sites stores like the Boing Boing and Mashable stores are only a tiny fraction of their sales, but if regular people are getting deals like this just by shopping around, what incentives is Microsoft having to offer to partners and OEMs?

The forced upgrade from Windows 10 makes perfect sense if the company can count on each Windows 11 system to be an effective point of sale device for their other products and services. But in a lot of cases the “AI” stuff is stuck at the free trial or pilot project level. ICYMI: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas.

Transformative innovation is priced in to the Big Tech stocks including their legacy businesses, and there’s only so much remaining crime that they can use to fill in the gaps between investor expectations and what they can realistically deliver. Yes, buying a gilded ballroom for the President of the USA will help them get away with more crime for longer, but in the absence of newly created value they can’t keep extracting more and more. The disruption from the coming AI crash could result in a decline in some other revenue streams previously considered safe. More: speaking truth to weakness