And the W3C's Technical Architecture Group echoes these sentiments in "Web Platform Design Principles," which articulates a "Priority of Constituencies" that is supposed to be central to the W3C's mission:

> User needs come before the needs of web page authors, which come before the needs of user agent implementors, which come before the needs of specification writers, which come before theoretical purity.

https://w3ctag.github.io/design-principles/

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The shift to platforms dominated by treacherous user agents - apps, mobile ecosystems, walled gardens - weakens or removes that constraint. As your ability to discipline your agent so that it serves you wanes, the temptation to turn your user agent against you grows, and enshittification follows.

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If you know that increasing the invasiveness of the ads on your web-page could trigger mass installations of ad-blockers by your users, it becomes irrational and self-defeating to ramp up your ads' invasiveness. The possibility of interoperability acts as a constraint on tech bosses' impulse to enshittify their products.

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The first step of making such a blocker, reverse-engineering the app, creates *criminal* liability under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, with a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a $500,000 fine. An app is just a web-page skinned in sufficient IP to make it a felony to add an ad-blocker to it (no wonder every company wants to coerce you into using its app, rather than its website).

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This is - in Jay Freeman's memorable phrase - "felony contempt of business model." While more than half of all web users have installed an ad-blocker, thus overriding the manufacturer's defaults to make their browser a more loyal agent, *no* app users have modified their apps with ad-blockers.

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An Android device running Chrome and sitting inert, with no user interaction, transmits location data to Google *every five minutes*. This is the "resting heartbeat" of surveillance for an Android device. Ask that device to do *any* work for you and its pulse quickens, until it is emitting a nearly continuous stream of information about your activities to Google:

https://digitalcontentnext.org/blog/2018/08/21/google-data-collection-research/

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These faithless user agents reflect and enable enshittification. The locked-down nature of the hardware and OSes for Android and Ios devices means manufacturers - and their partners - have an arsenal of legal weapons to block anyone who gives you a tool to modify the device's behavior. These weapons are referred to as "IP rights" which are, broadly speaking, the right to control the conduct of a company's critics, customers and competitors:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

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A canny tech company can design their products so that *any* modification that puts the user's interests above its shareholders is illegal, a violation of its copyright, patent, trademark, trade secrets, contracts, terms of service, nondisclosure, noncompete, most favored nation, or anticircumvention rights. Wrap your product in the right mix of IP, and its faithless betrayals acquire the force of law.

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A "faithless" user agent is utterly different from a "clumsy" user agent, and faithless user agents have become the norm. Indeed, as crude early internet clients progressed in sophistication, they grew increasingly treacherous. *Most* non-browser tools are designed for treachery.

A smart speaker or voice assistant routes all your requests through its manufacturer's servers and uses this to build a nonconsensual surveillance dossier on you.

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Mobile phones assign persistent tracking IDs to their owners and transmit them without permission (to its credit, Apple recently switch to an opt-in system for transmitting these IDs) (but to its detriment, Apple offers *no* opt-out from its own tracking, and actively lies about the very existence of this tracking):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

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Smart speakers and voice assistants even secretly record your speech and route it to the manufacturer's subcontractors, whether or not you're explicitly interacting with them:

https://www.sciencealert.com/creepy-new-amazon-patent-would-mean-alexa-records-everything-you-say-from-now-on

By design, apps and in-app browsers seek to thwart your preferences regarding surveillance and tracking. An app will even try to figure out if you're using a VPN to obscure your location from its maker, and snitch you out with its guess about your true location.

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This is only superficially paradoxical. Yes, you asked your browser for a web-page. Yes, the browser defied your request and declined to show you that page. But you *also* asked your browser to protect you from security defects, and your browser made a judgment call and decided that security trumped delivery of the page. No paradox needed.

But of course, the person who designed your user agent/browser can't anticipate all the ways this contradiction might arise.

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Now - as Berjon points out - you might not know *exactly* what you want. Like, you know that you want the privacy guarantees of TLS (the difference between "http" and "https") but not really understand the internal cryptographic mysteries involved. Your user agent might detect evidence of shenanigans indicating that your session isn't secure, and choose not to show you the web-page you requested.

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Like, maybe you're trying to access your *own* website, and you *know* that the security problem the browser has detected is the result of your own forgetful failure to renew your site's cryptographic certificate. At that point, you can tell your browser, "Thanks for having my back, pal, but actually this time it's fine. Stand down and show me that webpage."

That's your user agent serving you, too.

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User agents can be well-designed or they can be faulty. The fact that a user agent is *designed* to act in accord with your desires doesn't mean that it always *will*. A software agent, like a human agent, is fallible.

However - this is the key - if a user agent thwarts your desire due to a fault, that's *fundamentally different* from a user agent that thwarts you because it is *designed to serve someone else's interests*, even when that is detrimental to your own interests.

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Or maybe you (like me) have a low-vision disability that makes low-contrast type difficult to impossible to read, and maybe the page's creator is a thoughtless dolt who's chosen light grey-on-white type, or maybe they've fallen prey to the absurd urban legend that not-quite-black type is somehow more legible than actual black type:

https://uxplanet.org/basicdesign-never-use-pure-black-in-typography-36138a3327a6

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The user agent is loyal to you. Even when you want something the page's creator didn't consider - even when you want something the page's creator *violently objects to* - your user agent acts on your behalf and delivers your desires, as best as it can.

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This notion of a "user agent" is a holdover from a more civilized age, when technologists tried to to build a new digital space where tech served users.

A browser that's a "user agent" is a comforting thought. An agent's job is to serve you and your interests. When you tell it to fetch a page, your agent should figure out how to get that page, make sense of the code that's embedded in, and render the page in a way that represents its best guess of how you'd like the page seen.

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The effects of this are all around us. In *This Is Your Phone On Feminism*, the great @mariafarrell describes how audiences at her lectures profess both love for their smartphones *and* mistrust for them. Farrell says, "We love our phones, but we do not trust them. And love without trust is the definition of an abusive relationship":

https://conversationalist.org/2019/09/13/feminism-explains-our-toxic-relationships-with-our-smartphones/

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I (re)discovered this Farrell quote in a paper by Robin Berjon, who recently co-authored a *magnificent* paper with Farrell entitled "We Need to Rewild the Internet":

https://www.noemamag.com/we-need-to-rewild-the-internet/

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