Tech
Growth at all costs is destroying the internet. PR maven Ed Zitron says that’s an opportunity for startups
If you spend any amount of time online, you probably noticed that your user experience keeps getting worse.
Websites are waterlogged with autoplay ads, pop-ups, and tracking scripts. Customer service chatbots are useless, despite the promises of generative AI. Social media algorithms boost rage-bait to keep you scrolling and engaged. Dating apps hide all the good ones behind a paywall. Your printer won’t work without a monthly subscription. Oh, and good luck canceling that subscription in three clicks or less.
This is the backwash of the internet’s shift from a user-first experience to one designed to maximize engagement, ad revenue, and subscriptions.
Ed Zitron, CEO of EZPR and host of the Better Offline podcast, calls it the “rot economy,” the result of “a tech industry that has become so obsessed with growth that you, the paying customer, are a nuisance to be mitigated far more than a participant in an exchange of value.”
In a recent episode of the Equity podcast, I spoke to Zitron — who is writing a book called “Why Everything Stopped Working” — about why the stagnation of major companies creates the perfect opportunity for startups to challenge incumbents across various industries.
Zitron didn’t hold back when describing Big Tech’s decline, criticizing its obsession with quarter-to-quarter growth that leads to subpar products: “They’re ugly, they’re expensive, they don’t work very well, you don’t like using them.” He argued that many of these dominant players have grown “fat and lazy” and “overconfident,” their business models based on the idea that “it’s just easier to stay with us.”
“You can beat that,” Zitron said. “Anything you see on the web that sucks right now is at threat.”
As Zitron sees it, there are numerous areas that are ripe for disruption. One of the most obvious is social media, where he notes that “to use Instagram right now is to fight Meta to get to the things you want” and get past what Meta wants you to see. “And Facebook is even worse,” he laments.
This crummy user experience, combined with the political maneuverings on Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, is why we’re seeing people defect from X and Meta and sign up for platforms on the decentralized web, which is a system of independent, privately owned servers that work together to provide private and secure access to information and services.
Bluesky and Mastodon have emerged as popular alternatives to X, and many startups are throwing their hats in the ring to challenge Instagram and TikTok. In the decentralized space, Bluesky is launching a photo-sharing app called Flashes, and Pixelfed is already attracting users. Many TikTok users have downloaded RedNote as the ByteDance-owned app remains in limbo.
Enterprise and productivity software
Zitron similarly sees massive opportunities when it comes to enterprise and productivity offerings like Microsoft 365 that aren’t “great.”
Zitron said of Microsoft broadly, “They don’t make great products. They haven’t in some time.” Here, he added that he would “maybe put the gaming [division] aside” from this complaint. “I quite like the Xbox division,” he said. Then he added: “But they love laying people off and I’m sure that that place is going to slop soon.”
But it’s not just Microsoft. Zitron argued that many once-beloved Silicon Valley darlings – like Microsoft, Salesforce, Dropbox, and Zoom – lost their way after going public. The pressure to deliver quarter-over-quarter growth to appease shareholders invariably forces companies to prioritize short-term gains over long-term product quality.
He pointed to Google Docs as an example of growing corporate overreach designed to benefit a company at its users’ expense.
“Google Docs was beloved for being this really clean, easy-to-use thing,” Zitron said. “The problem is now it’s telling me that it needs AI. I must use Gemini in it now.”
Zitron called Adobe “the weakest company in tech” at the moment, calling them “desperate” and calling for a replacement. Some potential challengers we’ve seen include Figma, Affinity, and Blender.
Generally, Zitron thinks consumers will have a role to play in this shift as they cotton onto the self-serving “laziness” of incumbents.
“I believe in the next year, we’re going to see a real shift in consumers, both business and otherwise, away from these shitty companies. And when I say shitty companies, I mean most of Big Tech.”
Search
Google in particular is already facing an assault by numerous startups, and deservedly so in Zitron’s mind. Google Search used to surface the best links for your query. Now it surfaces a page of sponsored links that don’t answer your question.
“Google search is bad now,” he said, noting that DuckDuckGo “apparently makes money” and may be able to rise if the judge in Google’s search antitrust trial forces the company to share its datasets with competitors.
Zitron didn’t list all the other search competitors, but it’s worth mentioning a few. Perplexity, for example, is competing with chatbot style search that answers questions directly in a conversational way while citing resources. Diem is a female-focused social search engine with an AI chatbot that’s fighting against data bias in a world designed for men. In the decentralized space, Marginalia Search boosts obscure, non-commercial sites rather than SEO-optimized junk, while OpenSearch is an independent, crawler-based engine.
For users who prioritize not just a better search experience but also a more privacy-focused search, there’s Kagi, a paid, private search engine with a focus on high-quality results and no ads.
There’s also Brave Search, a fully independent search index that doesn’t rely on Google or Bing. Brave also has a privacy-focused browser that blocks ads and trackers by default.
Zitron believes email is another area that a startup could “take on.” While email is one of the dominant communication tools, most of our inboxes are cluttered with spam and disorganized due to clunky UX from giants like Outlook, Gmail, and Yahoo. The same is true for enterprise email, like Microsoft Exchange and Google Workspace.
There are plenty of opportunities for disruption here, notes Zitron. He says an offering from the end-to-end encrypted email service Proton “isn’t as usable as it needs to be,” but it’s not the only game in town (rival services include Tutanota and Skiff). At the same time, increasingly popular alternatives Superhuman, Hey, and Shortwave are trying to rethink user experience in email.
Build products that don’t suck
Zitron sees opportunities for disruption everywhere, and not just in a purely digital sense. He also sees an opportunity for startups to take on Amazon’s shipping and logistics business by “creating a coalition of other companies with smaller businesses – a Shopify for the delivery side.”
Whether it’s coming up with a new real estate technology to replace the “fat and happy” Zillows of the world, or a better version of Canva that’s not bloated with AI offerings, Zitron has called for a fresh take on the venture capital model. He says VC has too long focused on growth at all costs, which has created a stranded generation of startups that raised too much money – and have nowhere to go as a result.
Zitron’s PR business is to draw attention to startups, so it’s in his interests to underscore the many shortcomings of Big Tech in comparison. Still, it was an inspiring chat.
If you’re hankering for a better user experience, or you’re working on something to take down the bigs, you’ll definitely enjoy it. Check out our chat here.
Tech
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Like many AI companies automating work that humans currently do, Basata will eventually face a harder question about where the line is between augmenting workers and displacing them. For now, the founders say the administrative staff they work with aren’t worried about that; they’re more worried about drowning.
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Tech
US defense contractor who sold hacking tools to Russian broker ordered to pay $10M to former employers
Peter Williams, a veteran cybersecurity executive who was the head of the hacking and surveillance tech division of U.S. defense contractor L3Harris, has been ordered to pay $10 million to his former employer. Williams was the central figure in one of the worst leaks of advanced hacking tools in the history of the United States and its closest allies.
On Wednesday, a judge ordered Williams to pay that amount in restitution on top of the $1.3 million he had already been ordered to pay to L3Harris. Williams, a 39-year-old Australian citizen who previously worked in one of Australia’s intelligence agencies, was until last year the general manager of Trenchant. Born out of the acquisition of two sister startups, Trenchant is L3Harris’ division that develops advanced spyware and hacking tools and sells them to the U.S. government and its allies in the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, a coalition of five English-speaking nations that share classified intelligence with one another. In addition to the U.S., the alliance includes Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom.
Veteran cybersecurity reporter Kim Zetter first reported the new order to pay restitution in her newsletter.
Williams’ lawyers did not respond to a request for comment.
Last year, Williams was arrested and accused of stealing seven unspecified trade secrets — almost certainly cyber exploits, which is code that hijacks software vulnerabilities, and surveillance technology — from Trenchant and then selling them to Operation Zero. The Russian firm acts as a broker, buying and selling hacking tools, and it says it works exclusively with the Russian government and local companies.
Williams pleaded guilty and was sentenced to more than seven years in prison.
Williams made $1.3 million selling the trade secrets, which he used to buy luxury watches, a house near Washington, D.C., and family vacations. Trenchant told prosecutors that it suffered losses of up to $35 million due to Williams’ theft.
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U.S. prosecutors said Williams “betrayed” the United States and its allies by giving Operation Zero, which the U.S. government calls “one of the world’s most nefarious exploit brokers,” tools that could have been used to hack “millions of computers and devices around the world.”
As TechCrunch previously reported, Williams took advantage of his privileged “full access” to Trenchant’s internal network to siphon the tools out of the company’s offices. After Williams sold the hacking tools to Operation Zero, some of them ended up being used by Russian government spies in Ukraine, and later Chinese cybercriminals, according to former L3Harris employees who recognized the stolen code in cybersecurity research that Google published after investigating the cyberattacks in which those tools were deployed.
Williams also tried to frame one of his employees for the theft.
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Tech
Poland says hackers breached water treatment plants, and the US is facing the same threat
Poland’s intelligence service said it detected attacks on five water treatment plants where hackers could have taken control of the industrial equipment inside, including, in the worst case, tampering with the safety of the water supply.
The story is relevant beyond Poland’s borders: U.S. water infrastructure has faced similar threats in recent years. In 2021, a hacker briefly gained access to a water treatment plant in Oldsmar, Florida and attempted to increase the level of sodium hydroxide — a caustic chemical — to dangerous levels. The FBI and the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency have since warned that water utilities remain a soft target for foreign hackers.
On Friday, Poland’s Internal Security Agency, the country’s top intelligence agency, published a report covering the last two years of the agency’s operations and threats the country faced. The report said Polish intelligence thwarted multiple acts of sabotage from Russian government spies and hackers, who targeted military facilities, critical infrastructure (essential systems such as power grids, water supplies, and transportation networks), as well as civilian targets. These attacks, according to the report, may have resulted in fatalities.
“The most serious challenge remains the sabotage activity against Poland, inspired and organized by Russian intelligence services. This threat was (and is) real and immediate. It requires full mobilization,” read the report.
The report did not specify whether the hackers behind the attacks on the water treatment facilities were Russian government spies. But Poland has recently been the target of several attempts by Russian government hackers to attack its infrastructure, including a failed attempt to bring down the country’s energy grid. That breach was later attributed to poor security controls at the targeted facilities.
Poland’s experience is part of a growing global pattern of attacks on water and energy infrastructure. As recently as last month, a joint advisory from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the FBI, the NSA, and several other federal agencies warned that Iranian-backed hackers are actively targeting programmable logic controllers — the industrial computers that run water and energy facilities — at U.S. utilities. The same Iranian hacking group, CyberAv3ngers, previously broke into digital control panels at multiple U.S. water treatment plants in Pennsylvania in 2023, in attacks that federal agencies linked to escalating hostilities in the Middle East.
In other words, the attacks against Poland are not unique, they follow a strategy that the Russian government is applying both in war zones such as Ukraine, as well as against Western countries that it sees as longstanding enemies. The plan, according to Polish intelligence, is to destabilize and weaken the West, and cyberattacks and cyberespionage are just tools in a larger toolkit for Putin’s regime.
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