Recently came across the term ‘enshittification’ (or politically correct version: platform decay) coined by Cory Doctrow: https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/

Are we likely to see similar trends in some of the DPI platforms: Aadhaar, UPI, Digiyatra, etc.? True, the controlling shareholder isn’t maximizing for profits but may want to extract a different kind of ‘value’.

https://opentakshashila.net/posts/80874543

OP asks an interesting question, are DPIs likely to enshittify in the future ? Your’s truly noted down his meandering & biased thoughts below.

General thoughts about DPIs & enshittification

DPI (Digital Public Infrastructure)¹ in my view has been implemented quite well in India (thus far), with some minor problematic areas (Privacy in Aadhar). In India, a class of DPIs (UPI, ONDC) have particularly done a great job in greasing the wheels of commerce by building core digital platforms (great that govt incentivizes this). One example I can think of recently is seeing a large market players like Uber to switch a model (inspired by DPI) that is more fair to passengers and drivers.

A lot of people use the word enshittification quite generically & liberally (A service increasing prices or displaying ads is not that)². But enshittification as defined by Corey in the article³ is very specific. His exact words are :

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two-sided market”, where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

In my view, Corey’s definition is overall quite prejudiced against digital platforms. In the long run, entropy is a inherent and comes for everything, decaying it and making it worse. But there is some truth to it. In the digital world where information economics apply, it is a winner takes all market. But I do believe that large players have made the larger economy more efficient from the status quo. Small business do see value in digital ads and people do benefit from Amazon’s low prices and fast delivery even if the customer service has gotten worse.

Forces that prevent DPI enshittification

At a high level, I don’t believe its in the Indian government’s interests to let DPIs enshittify. It gets enormous benefits from running it. Direct Benefit Transfers cut out middlemen and probably saves the government a lot of money. UPI has improved tax compliance⁴ and contributes its coffers. I would say the biggest benefit is significantly reducing operational complexity for a government with limiting state capacity and generally terrible implementation.

There’s also the fact that there is now a rich ecosystem of private players involved. There’s innovations being built on top of these platform primitives. Also knowing that a class of important DPIs are actually run by organisations that are only partly owned by the government is also reassuring.

How could DPIs possibly enshittify ?

DPIs like everything in life need to stave off entropy. One common pitfall that DPIs might mimic from other government processes is become too complex and bottlenecky. My recent experience with Aadhar KYC mess was horrible, I was in KYC hell for a week because I wouldn’t get OTPs on time , but also random mails saying they are random government orgs are authenticating with my Aadhar. Just pure confusion.

DPI are at the end of the day are shaped by the organisation that are made of people . One pitfall could be the lack of maintence due to budgetary constraints (bit rot is a very real thing). Organisational dynamics that spill into DPI (aka Conway’s Law) could lead to platform decay. Not thinking about privacy and security could lead to aggregious issues and lose of user trust.

Amit Verma & Ajay Shah have a great video with their negative opinion about DPI⁵. While I don’t fully agree with their viewpoint, they do hint at how DPIs could get worse in the future and what DPI gets wrong.

On a tangential note, I worry that the government, seeing the successes of DPIs, might forget about the crucial role of private enterprises and push aggressively toward state enterprises, ignoring our country’s troubled history with state-planned economy. For DPIs to work effectively, the government relies on ‘social capital’ and employs various nudges (like demonetization), but like state capacity, this social capital isn’t an infinite resource.