Platform Decay: Amazon, Meta, and Apple All Under Fire

Three major platform stories ran in parallel today and they all share the same skeleton. Amazon's search is described as three-quarters sponsored ads, making it functionally useless for genuine product discovery. Meta's trial is being compared to Big Tobacco, with the debate centering on what the company knew about addiction and when. Apple, after years of fighting EU regulators on App Store distribution rules, is starting to cave: EU developers now get web distribution with notarization requirements, a meaningful but grudging concession.

The pattern here: every platform that achieved dominance by being genuinely useful has reached a stage where extracting value from that position is in direct conflict with the quality that made it dominant. This is the classic principal-agent problem at platform scale. Amazon optimizes for ad revenue, not search quality. Meta optimizes for engagement, not wellbeing. Apple optimizes for App Store margin, not developer freedom.

The interesting wrinkle is that none of these are fast-moving crises. Amazon's search decay has been happening for years. Meta's trial is the result of conduct from a decade ago. Apple's EU fight has dragged on since 2022. These are slow institutional failures, which makes them easy to ignore until they become unavoidable.