Digital Enclosure: How SaaS Platforms Fence the Commons

In this article:

• What Was the Historical Commons and Why Did It Work
• What Digital Commons Existed Before Platform Enclosure
• How Did SaaS Platforms Enclose the Digital Commons
• What Operational Data Is Being Enclosed Right Now
• Why Is the Commons Still the Correct Alternative
• Frequently Asked Questions
• What is digital enclosure and how does it relate to historical enclosure?
• What did the early internet commons look like before it was enclosed?
• How does open source software resist digital enclosure?
• References

Digital enclosure is the process by which shared, open, or independently owned digital resources are privatized and converted into rent-extracting infrastructure. The historical precedent is not ancient: the enclosure of English common land between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries dispossessed agricultural communities of resources they had built and maintained collectively. The digital version is running the same mechanism on a faster timeline and with less visible violence, but the structural logic is identical: take what the community built on shared infrastructure and convert it into private property that can be used to extract rent from the people who built it.

The reason the historical parallel matters is that it clarifies what is being lost and who is losing it. The enclosure of the English commons was not described at the time as theft. It was described as improvement: more efficient land use, higher agricultural productivity, better outcomes for the national economy. The displacement of the commoners who had built the value of the shared land was framed as an unfortunate side effect of necessary modernization. The digital enclosure of operational data, community value, and the open internet's shared infrastructure is described in the same language. Convenience, scale, better products. The extraction is real. The language that frames it as progress is not.

The commons in the historical sense was not unowned land waiting to be claimed by whoever arrived first. Elinor Ostrom's foundational work on common pool resource governance, for which she received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009, established that commons systems were governed by sophisticated collective rules developed over generations to balance individual use with community sustainability. Commoners had recognized rights: to graze livestock on shared pasture, to gather firewood from shared forest, to farm strips of shared arable land. These rights were not property in the modern individual-ownership sense. They were membership rights in a shared governance system.

The commons functioned because it was governed collectively by the people who depended on it. Ostrom documented dozens of examples across multiple cultures and centuries of commons governance systems that proved stable, productive, and self-regulating over long periods precisely because the governance rules were developed and enforced by the commoners themselves rather than imposed from outside. The commons was not a failure mode of pre-modern resource management. It was a sophisticated solution to the problem of governing shared resources that competitive individual ownership would have destroyed.

Enclosure converted those collective membership rights into private property by asserting individual ownership, fencing the land, and excluding those who had previously depended on shared access. The commoners who lost access did not lose something abstract. They lost the material basis of their subsistence. Enclosure dispossessed people of the infrastructure that made their labor productive. The lord who fenced the commons did not produce the value the commons represented. The commoners had built that value over generations. The enclosure captured it.

The internet of the 1990s and early 2000s had genuine commons qualities that are worth naming precisely because they have been so thoroughly enclosed that it requires deliberate effort to remember them. The technical infrastructure of the early web was built on open protocols: TCP/IP, HTTP, SMTP, DNS. No single entity owned these protocols. Anyone with a computer and a connection could participate without paying tribute to a platform or seeking permission from a gatekeeper. The web was not a product. It was a commons.

Email was decentralized by design. You could run your own mail server, and millions of individuals and organizations did. The mail you sent traveled over open protocols that no company owned. Your email history, your contacts, your sent mail lived on infrastructure you controlled. The same was true of websites: you owned the server, or you rented server space from a hosting company that gave you root access to your files. Your content was yours in the operational sense, not just the legal sense.

The web forum, the mailing list, the independently operated online community: these were commons-governed digital spaces where the infrastructure was owned by the community or by a member of the community acting as steward rather than as landlord. The governance rules were developed by the participants. The value of the community was created by the members and remained accessible to the members as long as the community operated.

SaaS platforms enclosed the digital commons through a mechanism that E.P. Thompson identified in the historical enclosures: they offered something genuinely useful, generated dependency on that usefulness, and then converted the dependency into a mechanism for extraction. The historical enclosers did not immediately exclude commoners from the land they fenced. They enclosed it, then offered commoners access as laborers on terms the lords set. The platform offered the business a better tool than the spreadsheet. Then it accumulated the business's data. Then it priced access to that data at whatever the accumulated switching cost would bear.

Reddit's community is an instructive example of this mechanism operating on community value rather than operational data. The platform built a genuine commons: an aggregation of communities maintained by volunteer moderators and populated by user contributions. The value of Reddit as an asset was created by those contributors. The 2023 API pricing restructure was the enclosure event: the platform asserted ownership over the data the community had generated and repriced access to it in ways that made existing use patterns economically unviable. The community organized against it. The platform waited out the resistance. The enclosure held.

For businesses, the enclosure follows the same sequence with operational data as the subject. The platform built a useful tool. The business generated data through its work. The data accumulated on the platform's infrastructure. The platform enclosed that data by making it non-portable, non-exportable in useful formats, and accessible only through continued subscription. The business improved the landlord's land. The landlord raised the rent.

The resource being enclosed in the business context is specific and worth naming without abstraction. It is the operational history: every transaction record, every customer interaction, every workflow output generated by the business's work over months and years of operation. It is the baseline data that makes performance claims credible. It is the accumulated intelligence that took time and expertise to generate. It is the audit trail that documents what was done, when, and with what result.

This data was not produced by the platform. It was produced by the business's labor, using the platform as infrastructure. The historical commons analogy is exact: the commoner's agricultural labor produced the value of the shared land. The business's operational labor produced the value of the accumulated data. In both cases, the infrastructure owner captured the value of labor it did not perform by controlling the land on which the labor occurred.

The Free Software Foundation Europe's campaign for software freedom, including its push for interoperability mandates and data portability requirements in European digital regulation, is the contemporary equivalent of the commoners' resistance to enclosure. The demand is not for charity or for the platform to be nicer. It is for the structural condition that makes genuine market competition possible: the right to take your accumulated data and use it on infrastructure you choose, without the platform's permission and without losing what you built.

Ostrom's research on commons governance identified the conditions under which shared resources are managed sustainably without private ownership: clearly defined membership, rules developed by the community, graduated sanctions for violations, accessible conflict resolution mechanisms, and governance autonomy recognized by external authorities. These conditions are not utopian. They describe systems that have functioned for centuries in communities that had strong reasons to make them work.

The open source software commons operates under versions of these conditions. The WordPress codebase is governed by a community of contributors. The rules for participation are documented and enforced. The community has mechanisms for resolving conflicts about the direction of the project. External authorities recognize the legitimacy of the GPL license that governs the code. This is not a perfect system. It is demonstrably more resistant to the enshittification sequence than venture-backed platforms because the exit incentive that drives the sequence is absent from the governance structure.

Digital enclosure is not inevitable. It is the outcome of specific ownership structures with specific incentives applied to digital infrastructure that did not have to be organized this way. The internet was built on commons principles and worked. The open web still exists under the layer of enclosed platforms that have been built on top of it. The commons has not been destroyed. It has been buried. The work of recovering it is political, technical, and organizational simultaneously.

Digital enclosure is the privatization of shared digital infrastructure, converting it from a commons governed by collective rules into private property used to extract rent. The historical parallel is the enclosure of English common land between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. The mechanism is identical: offer convenient access, build dependency, assert ownership, extract rent.

The early web ran on open protocols no single entity owned: TCP/IP, HTTP, SMTP, DNS. Anyone with a server could participate without permission. Email was decentralized. Web forums were owned by their members, not by platforms optimizing for advertising revenue. what commons-based infrastructure looks like in practice today.

Open source tools governed by strong community licenses resist enclosure because the mechanism that makes enclosure profitable, proprietary control of the infrastructure, is absent. Anyone can fork the codebase. No single entity can fence it.

Ostrom, Elinor. Governing the Commons. Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Boyle, James. The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind. Yale University Press, 2008.

Thompson, E.P. The Making of the English Working Class. Pantheon Books, 1963.

Doctorow, Cory. Pluralistic. pluralistic.net.

Free Software Foundation Europe. fsfe.org.