The Norwegian Consumer Council (Forbrukerrådet) is the state-funded consumer protection body that produced the 2018 "Deceived by Design" report on dark patterns — a document that genuinely reshaped how regulators across Europe approached manipulative interface design. In February 2026 it published "Breaking Free: Pathways to a Fair Technological Future," a wide-ranging policy document that deploys "enshittification" — the term coined by author and activist Cory Doctorow in a January 2023 Pluralistic blog post analyzing TikTok's platform decay — as its central analytical framework. The Council defines it as a three-stage process by which platforms attract users with valuable services, exploit those users to attract business customers, and finally extract maximum value for shareholders at the expense of both. The Council uses the term without hedging or scare quotes, treating it as a formal technical concept and building the report's entire analytical architecture around it.

A dedicated chapter frames generative AI as "the next frontier of enshittification," advancing a dual argument: that AI is already accelerating the degradation of existing digital services by <a href="/news/2026-03-14-dead-internet-theory-ai-bots-online-platforms">flooding platforms with synthetic spam and low-quality content</a>, and that AI products themselves are structurally likely to follow the same arc — attracting users with capable free-tier offerings, locking them in through switching costs and data dependencies, and then degrading quality while monetizing aggressively. The report positions generative AI not as a neutral tool but as a structural amplifier of existing Big Tech market power, one that deepens lock-in at precisely the moment AI agents are entering mass-market deployment.

The Council's policy prescriptions fall into three pillars: rebalancing power between consumers and platforms through data portability and interoperability mandates; ending structural dependence on Big Tech via public procurement reform and investment in open-standard alternatives; and vigorous enforcement of existing laws rather than waiting for new regulation. The report explicitly argues that frameworks like the EU Digital Markets Act already contain the necessary tools and that under-enforcement is the core problem. It draws on the work of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Open Markets Institute, and BEUC in situating the analysis within a broader international consumer and competition-policy movement.

The regulatory vocabulary implications are significant for the AI agent space. Consumer regulators across jurisdictions — including the EU, UK CMA, and Australia's ACCC — have historically adopted activist-adjacent frameworks such as "dark patterns" and "surveillance capitalism" once a credible institutional body provides formal cover. By anchoring a 2026 government report in Doctorow's framework and explicitly applying it to AI, the Forbrukerrådet has given "enshittification" the kind of regulatory citation pedigree that can appear in legislative testimony and enforcement actions. For AI agent developers and platforms currently navigating questions of subscription model design, capability tiers, and data portability, the report signals that at least some regulators are approaching the category with an analytical lens that treats platform lock-in as a structural choice — and one subject to reversal through enforcement.