You already know the pattern, even if you didn’t have the word. A platform is good to you until you’re locked in. Then it squeezes you to be good to its business customers. Then it squeezes them too, and everything gets worse at once. Doctorow coined “enshittification” for this, and the book is his long-form case that the decay is not an accident. It’s a strategy that became available.
The strongest chapters ask why it became available. His answer is legal, not technological. Four constraints used to hold: competition, regulation, interoperability, and workers who could walk. Antitrust went quiet, the rules lagged, anti-circumvention law made self-help illegal, and the walking got harder. Remove the constraints and the squeeze is just fiduciary duty doing its work.
As a lawyer I read the interoperability argument closest. The claim that it should be legal to fix, adapt, and build on top of the products you use is older than software, and Doctorow is right that we quietly traded it away in license agreements nobody reads. Whether his remedies are politically achievable is a fair fight. Whether the diagnosis is correct seems, at this point, hard to argue with.
It’s polemic, and it repeats itself — the essays it grew from are still visible in the seams. Read it anyway. I think it will still describe the internet in five years, and not many internet books manage that.