Monetization and Monopolies: How the Internet You Loved Died

The thesis that Google was only good because they didn’t face competition gets it completely backwards. There were tons of search engines when Google started, their dominance came from having a lightweight killer product, not the other way around.

> not only are technology monopolies “not so bad”, and not only ought company founders seek to build them, but they are in fact actively good, create massive positive externalities for the public, and are a primary source of innovation for society. When they fail, things actually deteriorate.

The tech sector is fairly unique in that innovative useful products lead quite quickly to a monopoly. That doesn't make the monopoly a good thing. It leads to inefficiencies and degraded consumer experience while the company desperately tries to maintain and suck dry its market share. The author argues that monopolies set the scene for new disruptive technologies to appear, but you could equally well argue the opposite: monopolies slow down progress via a combination of regulatory capture, acquisitions, and anti-competitive practices.

I call this phase the proliferation of stupidity.

Back when the internet started, it was mostly university professors and students using it.

Now its mostly people that are not sure if the world is flat or not.

It was a wonderful place and I’m happy to have lived and saw it for that brief flash before it went supernova. I don’t think people realize what a unique time in history they were alive for and witnessed.

This looks like a big tech propaganda piece.

I know it says that you need to strike a good balance between slacking of and competition, but author spends too much time saying that monopoly is good. It is not. It has never been.

I think enshittification live cycle draws a better picture. I think you can outgrow your initial idea. Company grows until the core idea can grow.

That does not end there. Grow is always expected. When you have perfect monopoly, how else can you grow more? You can diversify, you can buy competition. Creating a new idea beside your core idea often does not pan out. Take a look at google+. How much more can you squeeze out of users? You can enshittify. You squeeze, squeeze users, until your product deteriorates and CEOs leave a shall of a company.

Google does not squeeze users because of competition. It has a ton of money. It could innovate, but they decide to squeeze users. Easy money instead of hard work.

It was inevitable. The internet was a new (un)natural resource, beautiful and useful for what it was, but all that capitalism inevitably saw it as was a space to make money.

And so, once more, the commons were pissed on and filled with information warfare against consumer minds.

> You don’t need aggressive antitrust enforcement to kill them — just wait a while for the march of progress and the innovator’s dilemma to rear their heads.

This is not what happens.

Take Microsoft. It's now 25 years since the antitrust case against them, but since it never actually broke them up, they still have 70% desktop market share and the experience of Windows users continues to degrade over time.

You can say that they lost the mobile market, but that doesn't help anyone still using a PC for work, or stuck with Windows-only software. A new market may outgrow them, but the old market still exists, and why should we want those users to continue to be screwed?

Moreover, the thesis here is that the monopolies are beneficial until they enter the value extraction phase and turn on their customers. But in that case why wouldn't you want to break them up as soon as they do? No need to preserve them after that, their contribution has been made and it's time to smash them to bits so the corpse of what was once greatness can't be commandeered by sociopaths.

This article is what happens when you start out with an assumption that things are getting ever better and then try to fit actual events into that frame.

Progress is a law of nature and we are building the communist workers' paradise so gulags are good, actually!

"the wheel of progress", "civilizational tech tree", give me break and please consider the idea that sometimes things actually do get worse.

This piece kind of blew my mind. It is kind of like the flip side of the "enshittification" argument. Or another way of looking at the same phenomenon. It's not a perfect alegory or whatever, but it's one of the better ways of talking and thinking about "what went wrong" with the Internet that I've come across.

> But something happened around 2012-2014ish.

I think this is just the aftermath of the loss of steve jobs' leadership.

If he had been around, I think all kinds of course corrections would have happened and apple would have continued to rise. It would have been more about better and less about money.