Trump Is Using the Same Logic That Ruins Platforms

The White House wants to squeeze value just like we all do with partners. Are we both wrong?

Despite shaping tech policy, the 47th President of the United States is famously low-tech. He’s said he doesn’t regularly use a computer

“It is now so hard for others to extricate themselves from us that you can begin to squeeze them, and to not squeeze them is to leave money, tribute, power on the table.”

If you’ve worked with digital platforms long enough, this sentence doesn’t sound like foreign policy. Unless it is. In this case, it’s The New York Times’ Ezra Klein describing how the Trump administration approached geopolitics. He uses a platform analogy:

“When you are using early Google Search, early Facebook, and it really does what you want it to do, you almost cannot believe how good it is – at no cost to you – at doing what you want it to do. And over time, when you're locked in and it's very, very hard to get out, they then move from adding value to your life to extracting value from you. They cover you in ads, and they manipulate you, and they draw your attention in and do all these things that change the bargain. Trump and the people around him seem to have seen the liberal world order under American leadership as something similar.”

No one in the White House forty years ago planned a future where alliances would be priced like subscriptions. But incentives shape behaviours, and behaviours shape mindsets. Klein has a point: the way corporations grow their ecosystems eventually shapes how businesspeople (and above all the Businessman‑in‑Chief) see the world. The open transactionalism of the last U.S. administration (everything is for sale, everything has a price, pay for protection) resembles what platforms do when they enter their late stage.

It sounds like a weird connection, but the longer you stay with it, the more the analogy holds. Early on, platforms grow by being generous: low barriers, clear value for partners. Then comes scale. Then dominance. And eventually the strategic question shifts from “How do we grow the ecosystem?” to “How do we extract more from the ecosystem we already control?” Nothing breaks overnight. The experience just gets a little worse each time.

Have coffee with a partner manager from a small digital agency and ask how their partnership with Shopify is going. Hundreds of small agencies evangelized the market when it was still risky, partly because the partnership fees were compelling (~20% lifetime recurring commission on referred merchants’ platform fees, including Plus). Not anymore: partners now get either a one‑time payout or, if they run a qualified launch through the Go‑to‑Market portal, a 15% recurring commission on monthly platform fees. It’s safe to assume this will soon cover only the first year – as is already standard across the e‑commerce landscape.

If you're a Salesforce Commerce Cloud partner, you never saw those economics to begin with: revenue share stops after year one. Renewals, add‑ons, expansions don't typically generate additional commission.

(To be clear, this pattern isn’t universal. I’m deliberately using two late‑stage platforms as examples. In earlier‑stage ecosystems – GitHub, Stripe, even NVIDIA’s CUDA in its middle years – the arc looks different: the platform keeps investing, because it still needs developers more than developers need it. But once a platform matures and the switching costs solidify, the gravitational pull changes.)

“We often talk about enshittification as if it were an execution failure. It isn’t. It’s a worldview: value is something you extract, not something you sustain.”

From a business perspective, it’s rational to challenge legacy status: no matter if you were an early partner, I need you to deliver value now. But from a systems perspective, it’s disastrous. Ecosystems run on trust long before they run on contracts.

We often talk about enshittification as if it were an execution failure: a series of bad decisions made under pressure. It isn’t. It’s a worldview: value is something you extract, not something you sustain.

There’s a reason this logic instinctively reminds people of a protection racket. It’s about how value is framed: a zero‑sum logic, the kind you find in real estate (the world Trump came from) where every negotiation has a winner and a loser.

Once a platform hits late stage, that mentality starts to creep in. Success becomes something you take, not something you build with others. It’s the same worldview that turns ecosystems into extraction machines.

Is this really the only way to run a successful platform? Are we sure gradual extraction is inevitable – or have we simply stopped imagining alternatives because this one is the easiest to defend in a boardroom?