18 ms·

Google, Facebook, and Amazon have fundamentally transformed the web

• fiatjaf 9y ago
  How come the number of websites is increasing if the web is dying? How are these websites getting their attention? Maybe smaller websites are getting less absolute visits than in 2010, but even if that was true, you should say that the web was dying in the 90's. It's also difficult to believe the web will stop working, or that people will stop making websites just because more people are browsing just on the "trinet" (remember, 20 years ago people already wrote websites, even if they would expect only 3 visits per month). Would Facebook, Google and Amazon come up with a plan to stop ISPs from serving other domains? Why would they do that?
  • TuringTest 9y ago
    > It's also difficult to believe the web will stop working, or that people will stop making websites just because more people are browsing just on the "trinet" Is it? Lots of small companies and social groups rely on having a Facebook page as their primary way of contact and advertisement, where they would have created a web page of their own in the past.
    • dictum 9y ago
      I realized something was wrong when many local web design/development shops started redirecting their domains to Facebook profile pages. Never thought I'd miss outdated Flash-only sites. Of course, the saying about the cobbler's children still applies.
  • bertil 9y ago
    It is not in Facebook or Google’s interest to have other websites disappear: they make their value and their money from those quite directly and obviously. Executive of both companies have said so, and I don’t think anyone could doubt this: both companies make money by getting their users onto other websites (well… until they have a fully integrated sales system, like YouTube Red and Facebook Marketplace). Both companies provide website creators with a lot of help, some tied into their platform, some fully open-sourced. What the original post is showing is that a lot of heavy load of the content (videos) and actual access and control (including optimisation for fast loading on mobile clients) is now being controlled. It lowers barriers to entry and success as a YouTuber (no need to fiddle with hosting anymore, like Ze Frank had to). However, having users instinctively connect to a handful of platforms every day, rather than decide to see your content means you might have to pay for most views, pay as high as your margins would allow you to and not make a significant profit. An equivalent (I’m not saying it’s a perfect metaphor) is if there be more taxis roaming the street but to go from an old model where you used to hail marauding cabs from the curb to a new model where all taxis, to get business, have to be affiliated to Uber and Gett. All the revenues of those taxis are now controlled by Uber and Gett. Those revenues might be shaved down to operating costs thanks to heavy-handed optimisation. Upsides of those include better control (you grope your passenger and you are out/you write that this ethnic group should be eradicated and you are out), more free rides/free articles thanks to VC-sponsored acquisition vouchers/advertising. Downsides include that you might, in the future, have to pay whatever profit VCs expect as soon as competition is kept away with deep moats -- and lack of innovation. Being uncomfortable with the Big-Brotheresque aspect of Uber isn’t fully solved by having a single competitor, too. So if you do things in the back seat that some drivers object to (say, French kissing); or if you post something that some people find objectionable (say, show your nipples) then you might lose your ability to travel or publish anymore. Facebook (and I’m assuming Alphabet) employees themselves will acknowledge that they can’t make perfect judgement-calls at their scale. They love (and often actively participate themselves) alternatives. If you see the other options become victims of either margin-squeezing or editorial control, that admission becomes a little too damning.
• BatFastard 9y ago
  This analysis is flawed in that it equates size of traffic with individual user actions. Of course YouTube or another video heavy site like FB is going to dominate when only size is considered. A better metric would be a measurement of user initiated actions. Now sure how to pull that off, but it would be a more accurate measure of how the net is changing.
  • throwawayReply 9y ago
    That's reasonably captured by the "upstream" table which isn't as weighted by large content. Besides, the direction and relative values show clear and growing dominance.
  • inglor 9y ago
    There are a lot of other video content websites that aren't YouTube and are struggling to compete with the large players like YouTube and Netflix that can put a box in every ISP in the world.
    • King_of_Tech 9y ago
      I agree the popularity of YouTube and Netflix won't let other video websites Grow
    • inglor 9y ago
      Seeing this got more attention than I assumed - at Peer5 (YC W2017) we attack this by doing distributed video delivery. It's very challenging to figure out how to do this in a way that benefits users and improves user experience - we are very careful about being fair to users on mobile connections - but I think that a distributed web platform is the future and the only way we can combat the (lack of) net neutrality.
      • BatFastard 9y ago
        Just wait for the next season of Silicon Valley to solve it! We already have a distributed internet, just not as distributed as we had hoped for from a censorship perspective.
• generalpf 9y ago
  “Amplified Mobile Pages”?
  • Aissen 9y ago
    Wrong post ? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15583552 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15583552
• inglor 9y ago
  Andre, you're a swell developer and running into you in open source repos and here has always been educational. I would love reading what you write a lot more if there was less click-bait and sensationalism. This problem (the fact Google has a large majority in web browser and mobile device sales) is very concerning to me - the data is interesting and the points are relevant but I have a very hard time reading past titles like "the web is dying". I hope you read this with the intended respectful tone I wrote it in.
  • nilved 9y ago
    Why do you have a hard time reading that? It's generally better to solve problems before they happen. An dead Web isn't coming back, and we are trending very much in that direction.
  • staltz 9y ago
    Hi, thanks for appreciating some of my work. Click bait titles have a bad reputation because they either lie or don't go in-depth into the topic. That's not the case here. I wrote with depth and research, and the body of the article is truthful to the title. I believe the title is, although sensationally shocking, true.
    • vog 9y ago
      > the body of the article is truthful to the title With all due respect, I don't see how the article backs up this utterly exaggerated claim. Unless, of course, you're using the word "dying" in the sense that everybody and everything will die at some time. But I don't think this is meant here, as that wouldn't be "shocking" at all.
      • nautilus12 9y ago
        huh? He's describing a future where the web no longer exists. Only Google, facebook and amazon's network exists. This seems pretty representative of the term dying.
        • 9y ago
• zecg 9y ago
  I'd wager that FB is at its summit now and it'll become more obvious as more young people who ignore it now continue to do so growing up and the people who use it continue to die.
  • Cthulhu_ 9y ago
    Not yet; they're still expanding in developing countries, going as far as building their own internet (same what Google does) so that they can control it. They've already been slapped on the wrist for breaking net neutrality rules there (free access to FB, pay for the rest). And they're doing it under the guise of providing access to everyone, not the real reason, getting everyone hooked on their products and their slice of the internet (not unlike how we were taught how to work with Windows and Office in school and never even heard of the alternatives until later).
    • dingaling 9y ago
      > free access to FB, pay for the rest) I'm not aware of any internet.org region in which Facebook is the only unbilled service.
  • tambourine_man 9y ago
    Facebook is not the blue website. It's also Instagram, WhatsApp and whatever they buy next. And those are not being ignored by young demographics. At all.
    • fosco 9y ago
      To add to this definition. Facebook is a large conglomerate business that grows by purchasing young successfull social networks in multiple areas of services.
      • shortoncash 9y ago
        It's effectively a kind of hedge fund that dabbles in internet and social-specific assets. The more they diversify their portfolio and occasionally branch out, the harder they will be to fully kill. This is the pattern with a lot of companies. They just become portfolio asset managers with a specific area of interest.
• kuschku 9y ago
  It's especially interesting when you consider that Google has now, for the first time, a fully globe-spanning own network that can interface with any ISP directly, without relying on any intermediate ISP. Google now has at least one product in the entire stack of the internet. You can use a Google Pixel, and Google Chromebook, using Android and Chrome OS, browsing with Chrome, while using Google Fi and Google Fiber, connected directly to Google's backbone, visiting Google's Search, Maps, etc or other sites hosted on Google's cloud, using Google's DNS server. At this point you can use most of the functionality of the internet without ever leaving the Google ecosystem. And this is just going to be expanded.
  • georgeecollins 9y ago
    But also Google is so terrible at making successful physical products in a lot of these spaces, its hard to say the products give them a lot of power in the market. Google Pixel, Google Home, Google TV, do not represent large install bases. If they want a walled garden, it can't be the size of a postage stamp.
    • kuschku 9y ago
      But that's not for a lack of trying. Google has launched 5 social networks, 4 messaging apps, and dozens of phones by now. The only reason it's not yet a walled garden is because Google is incompetent at it for now, but we can't bet the future of the open web on that.
    • brango 9y ago
      Not just physical devices. A lot of the Google stuff I have to use seems half-baked, unfinished or with crappy UI/UX. And Google Cloud is complete shit compared to AWS. I guess that's what happens when engineers lead a company. They'll never have the customer focus that has made Amazon dominant.
      • saas_co_de 9y ago
        > Google Cloud is complete shit compared to AWS that is a bold statement. care to elaborate?
• thesmallestcat 9y ago
  An essay about how the web is dying that leads with a click-bait title? Is this satire?
• Pigo 9y ago
  I do miss when there was more web on the Web. I've been wondering if the problem is that I don't search as much as I used to, or if there just isn't as many fun sites to visit these days. There actually used to be hangouts on the web outside of chat and social media, like bizarre, bangedup, or the old 4chan. It used to be a blast just to read through 4chanarchive, to see how many times Pawn Stars got called during the last BattleToads thread. I used to see anons in front of the Scientology building in Cincy on a regular basis. I think that's why I enjoyed HWNDU so much.
  • Cthulhu_ 9y ago
    You say "more web the Web", but your main example is that your bubble was 4chan; this article implies the exact same thing, but with the bubbles being Google, Facebook and Amazon.
    • d3ckard 9y ago
      I think his point is more that Web used to be plenty of smaller bubbles, with distinct culture and separate communities. Now we have only giant bubbles, which get homogenised, as everything of that scale is. I share the sentiment.
      • Pigo 9y ago
        Yeah, you definitely articulated it better than I could have. But I mentioned other sites besides just 4chan. Even IRC had networks full of active rooms, with people from around the world. I just know there used to be more things that I considered fun, and now I'm hard pressed to find such things. I'm not going into Freenet or Tor just to find something that doesn't violate YouTube or Facebook rules.
        • TallGuyShort 9y ago
          >> Even IRC had networks full of active rooms >> I'm not going into Freenet Well there's your answer.
• mswift42 9y ago
  I'd like submissions with clickbait headlines to get deleted instantly. If your post needs clickbaity embellishments it's probably not worth my time to read it, if it doesn't need any, the post should be able to reach frontpage without them.
• alexasmyths 9y ago
  Should note: much of the web is now 'mobile' and on mobile people use apps considerably more often. So - while possibly not 'the web' as in 'browser' - it's arguably 'the web' nevertheless because almost all these apps depend on a great deal of http-ish interactivity etc... Also - though it's hard to say how much change there has been on the desktop - remember that people do use desktop apps for socially and webby oriented reasons etc.. Imagine: Spotify App vs. Spotify Web, Gmail vs. local client - etc. etc.. This is quite a demarcation. Finally, one might consider also that 'web experiences' have expanded. We may not be uses 'other things' less, rather, FB is a new experience that is taking up addition time allocated to the web. So - we had 'the web' - now we have 'the web + FB web'. But great article, thanks for that.
• kharms 9y ago
  The most interesting tidbit for me was that Apple is the third largest ecommerce company. Very impressive.
• agumonkey 9y ago
  A few things about "the" web and life in general. Google has gone from a welcomed tool (indexing a priori data) to telling what should be the data (ranking). It switched naturally and logically so, but it's a problem IMO. Lastly, when a domain becomes a social organ, everything changes. It has to be regulated, will cause tension, economic impact ..
  • andrewla 9y ago
    There were search engines before Google. Google was an improvement _because_ of their ranking, not despite it.
    • agumonkey 9y ago
      Yes, but at what point the ranker becomes the ruler. It's an implicit shift and we should be aware of it.
  • saas_co_de 9y ago
    google never really recovered from SEO. once professionals started pouring money into gaming the system it stopped working. google search results are actually terrible these days. nothing but commercial sites, ads, and a few hand picked non-commercial sources like wikipedia, stack overflow, etc. i cant remember the last time i found an interesting new site searching on google.
    • agumonkey 9y ago
      I think it's not Google or google being gamed by SEO.. I think the web went from a cute jungle of documents into a boring market filled by baseless content. Today my heuristic is: the older the HTML the better. Often the horrendously crafted website were the work either of naive individuals that had no hidden agenda beside having fun with webpages, or passionated ones that would put long articles full of interesting facts.
      • saas_co_de 9y ago
• logingone 9y ago
  I was thinking something related this morning, that one of the reasons uptime is important to google, apart from the usual reasons, is because if they were switched off for a day people would realise the extent to which they have so many of their eggs in one basket, and a basket over which they have no control. I would expect that would trigger some concern, and significant numbers seeking alternatives, and building them.
• cisanti 9y ago
  You can do your part as a developer and tell managers about the dangers of AMP. It is a stupid idea technically (we have HTML, you can build a slim sites, Google can rank them higher) and stupid business wise by giving away the control, branding, options. I have convinced one project manager to not implement AMP and will continue to try in the future. Please do your part by spreading word of the dangers of GOOG and FB.
  • golergka 9y ago
    Great idea from the user's standpoint though. While many publishers can, technically, build slim sites, almost none do.
    • acdha 9y ago
      Depends on the user – if they like fast page views, AMP's 100KB of render-blocking JavaScript is a problem, and if they care about sharing the fact that it makes the real URL hard to get is also annoying. If they like not being phished, AMP is really bad since it leads a lot of people to believe they're reading something Google has vouched for. This is the inevitable conflict from Google putting their marketing needs ahead of the user experience. If they used site performance as the rating metric, AMP would just be one option for better performance but since the goal was to keep traffic on google.com we're stuck with a worse experience because that's better for Google.
      • nobleach 9y ago
        I'm really concerned with this current crop of "have to please Google" that is become so prevalent by SEO. The current trend is one of reactionary fear. "We have a great website... it would be a shame for its ranking to slip". I can't say that Google is actively, passively, or even part and parcel to promoting that fear. Unfortunately, the biggest reason I see AMP being adopted by many, has nothing to do with it being faster or a better experience. It has everything to do with pressure by Google. (and a belief that it'll improve search ranking)
        • 9y ago
• peterwwillis 9y ago
  Hellooooo hyperbole. Until all peering agreements become null and void, you can always create another ISP to compete in a free market. Sure, it's expensive and complicated to bury fiber, and radio spectrum is limited. But it's not technical or logistical difficulty that keeps people restricted to specific providers. It's usually political, and incumbents always have a huge upper hand. The reason OSPs like AOL became so ubiquitous in the 90s was they made everything easier, and people were willing to pay for that, even if it effectively locked you into a 'smaller internet'. It still provided you internet access because that by itself was still a value-add. Will ISPs & OSPs charge you differently to access different content? Of course, because they know their customers don't give a shit about some romantic vision of unrestricted peering agreements. There's one big elephant in the room that nobody talks about in discussions like this: Content. Whoever controls the Content gets to swing a multi-Billion dollar dick around, and they keep a hundred-Billion dollar advertising dick on a leash. Most people are obsessed with media & entertainment, a 700-Billion dollar industry, and the rest is cat memes and bargain bin chinese vacuum cleaners. The leading lights of the web barely break the budget of a fraction of M&E. They are constantly dogging at each other because the web industry knows that without content, they have no leverage. Which is why Amazon & Netflix make their own content (though a very small amount, and not very valuable). If Google lost its advertising catbird seat, it would die screaming (almost all of its money comes from ads). And you can't sell ads if you can't get access to eyeballs or earholes.
• DanielBMarkham 9y ago
  This is a good article. Andre, don't pay attention to the usual HN cynicism. You posed a good thesis and defended it. The web, as we have traditionally defined it, is dying. Or dead. Yes, technically the protocols still work, but the day-to-day structure and use of the web is completely different than anybody expected or wanted it to be. I think the key place where we went wrong is that we envisioned the web as a utility to help expand each person's mind and communication abilities. Instead it's morphing into a service where large groups of people can clan and waste time around the virtual water cooler. It was supposed to be a brain super-power. Instead it's a shared newsletter for angry mobs. It was supposed to free us up to find out amazing things about the world around us. Instead it's freed up the world around us to examine us in exquisite detail. We don't surf the internet anymore. The internet surfs us. And yes, that sounds a lot like hyperbole, but such is the nature of essays like this. When I wrote "Technology is Heroin" ( http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/02/technology-is-h.php http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/02/technology-is... ) I didn't mean it was literally heroin. I meant it was taking on the role that dangerous drugs had in times past. The web isn't literally dying. It's changing into something so different than what we wanted that it is for all intents and purposes dead. Many folks are getting wrapped up in the semantics of the discussion instead of the underlying meaning. Looking forward to seeing more of your work!
  • staltz 9y ago
    Many thanks! I share your thoughts that tech is "heroin", in fact I've been thinking that UX is killing us, it has become so good, that it's addicting. This is true clinically too, as social media instant gratification releases Dopamine and its usage is an activity comparable to gambling. There is a way forward, though. Between the Old Web and GOOG-FB-AMZN's Trinet, we can build something else: the New Web based on decentralized protocols like IPFS, Dat, blockchains, secure-scuttlebutt, and others. That's what I'm working on.
    • salmonfamine 9y ago
      I have seen articles and repos for various technologies that claim to be the new "decentralized" web, but so far I haven't seen anything that provides a cohesive experience. Could you provide more information as to what you're working on in particular?
• EGreg 9y ago
  "It looks like nothing changed since 2014, but GOOG and FB now have direct influence over 70%+ of internet traffic." The web needs to really become decentralized. Even Tim Berners-Lee has said it [1]. He has started a project to re-decentralize it called Solid [2]. Email was decentralized but now it's become super centralized with GMail etc. And look at how easy it is for the NSA to vacuum all that up from one spot. Wordpress powers 20% of the decentralized web. Because it's a free, open-source piece of software with a plugin ecosystem that runs on a popular runtime - PHP. We need stuff like that, but for things like SOCIAL MEDIA. Nothing currently exists that can rival facebook, google+ etc. I believe that the software can change the internet's topology. Right now all signals go through giant centralized server farms. Consider how people use Google Docs for collaboration Facebook / Slack for conversation or Dropbox for their files. The default is to immediately connect to "the cloud" which is in reality some company's server farm. AWS just capitalized on this trend and made it easier. In fact, you can do all of it LOCALLY by default. There's no reason that bits need to go through Google's servers for a classroom to collaborate on a document, or for an African village to plan a community dinner. Except one: lack of open source software that can run locally, and rival Facebook, Google etc. in ease of use. We are building that software and started around 2011. My company Qbix [3] wants to decentralize not just the web, but also identity [4], data [5] and social networking [6]. We look to partner with companies who want to decentralize cellphone signals (like gotenna) and energy generation (like solar panels) so human networking in the future has a LOT more local options to utilize before ever jumping onto the public internet. PS: Whenever I post this topic, with links to back it up, I get downvoted heavily. But I never get any explanation why. If you are an HN member who disagrees with this thesis, first of all that's not enough reason for a downvote. And secondly, I WOULD LIKE TO KNOW WHY you feel so strongly against what I'm saying here: that the web, cellphone signals and energy generation should be decentralized. Contribute constructively to the conversation, and explain what alternatives do you think are better. Are you so ferventlu against developing software to run on local networks as to militate against comments advocating it? Am I breaking some HN rule by linking to our work that we passionately believe in and spend most of our time on? What are the words behind your downvote? 1. https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_berners_lee_on_the_next_web https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_berners_lee_on_the_next_web 2. https://solid.mit.edu https://solid.mit.edu 3. https://qbix.com https://qbix.com 4. https://github.com/Qbix/auth https://github.com/Qbix/auth 5. https://github.com/Qbix/architecture/wiki/Internet-2.0 https://github.com/Qbix/architecture/wiki/Internet-2.0 6. https://qbix.com/platform https://qbix.com/platform
• taherchhabra 9y ago
  So what can we do now in a realistic way(don't tell me to completely stop using the trio) ?
• zhuzhu 9y ago
  if you are right, what about AWS, google cloud and Azure?
  • neolefty 9y ago
    And Aliyun
  • knowaveragejoe 9y ago
    Amazon/AWS is mentioned as one of the big three in the article, since they're far and away one of the largest. That said, if it weren't them, it'd be someone else.
• azangru 9y ago
  Here's a comment from this thread that I am having issues with: > if you don't rank on google for whatever it is you're launching/publishing -- you don't exist. And yet, Andre and his blog clearly 'exist' (i.e. can be accessed and read, and perhaps even found in a search engine if search terms are relevant enough). Medium blogs (or other indexable and searchable media) obviously 'exist'. Reddit and Hacker News definitely 'exist'. Perhaps that comment refers to commercial viability of internet media, or to their overall reach, but what do we, regular netizens, care about such pecuniary stuff? It's up to executives to think about business models and profitability; while it's up to us to use whatever suits us best on the Internet.
  • thenomad 9y ago
    A quick Google tells me that Andre's currently at the #2 position on Google (at least in my search bubble) for "The Web dying", #4 for "The Web is dying", and so on. And of course he's at the top by a country mile for the exact article title. Hacker News regularly dominates Google queries, and Reddit does too. I do agree that the statement that search engine rank is all misses a rather significant element, that being virality / social reach. If you can regularly gain enormous traffic from Reddit, Facebook, or even HN, you don't necessarily need search engine rankings. If you can afford to pay for ads, likewise. It's if you're in none of those three camps that you might as well not exist on the Web. Tree falls, forest, no-one to hear it, etc.
• Nickersf 9y ago
  This will be horrible for freelancers and people who want to learn web development. There will be no incentive for those people as the globalist mega tech corps create a boring homogeneous internet. Unless of course we all fight back.
• d3ckard 9y ago
  I believe this could be easily solved with a simple regulation - mandatory 50/50 sharing of downstream and upstream on customer level. How Web is supposed to be decentralized if the means of accessing it directly support centralization? You will always prefer external services if your own get capped pretty easily. You cannot have truly distributed web if access points are basically one-way connections.
• NedIsakoff 9y ago
  WTF? Baidu? QQ? Weibo?
  • neolefty 9y ago
    The article draws its data from South America. The fact that the author doesn't see any Chinese companies is an illustration of fragmentation. However, I think it's worth noting that each of these fragmented sub-nets are have more traffic and servers than the global Internet did even a few years ago (how many? I'm not sure).
• scrumper 9y ago
  Something looked odd about that upstream/downstream ranking table. Netflix doesn't feature at all in the downstream bit. Why not? It's huge. Then I noticed the small print under the table: it's peak time mobile usage in Latin America.
• whipoodle 9y ago
  I’m glad it’s not another post griping about JavaScript frameworks or whatever.
• throwme211345 9y ago
  He is totally right excepting popular extrapolation. The basic idea is that people 'eventually' identify with idea venues, not ideas. If (at venue maturity) a venue stops including your ideas you are internet-dead for the masses. Idea venues are created through existing outlets at the time of inception and through superior propaganda and propagation models to the point of maturity. Google is a case in point. They tout themselves as the best and brightest but they pay their bills on advertising. Every move they make is focused on consumption of their product(s) and they give it away to see who will bite. They collect their data and learn the model. They play the model. This is sales 101. You don't need to be smart to be google. You just need to know who is smart and who isn't.
• gnaritas 9y ago
  > This specific part (that dominant companies can ban individuals with no recourse) shouldn't be tolerated. Freedom shouldn't be tolerated, really? We should force private companies in the private market to serve you because why?
  • dang 9y ago
    We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15585321 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15585321 and marked it off-topic.
    • gnaritas 9y ago
      Boo, your moderation has utterly ruined HN. People can't even disagree anymore without you interfering. I'd be willing to bet there's more interesting content in all the detached threads than the content that survives your censorship. HN was a better site before you became a mod.
      • dang 9y ago
        You've routinely violated HN's rules, we've given you countless warnings and requests to stop, and you've responded by being nasty and abusive. I'm not quite sure why we bent the rules for you as long as we did [1] but enough is enough and we've banned this account. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12309403 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12309403, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15107762 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15107762, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14608370 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14608370, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10819316 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10819316, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10252505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10252505, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10065872 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10065872, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9404465 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9404465, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7824349 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7824349
        • gnaritas 9y ago
• gedrap 9y ago
  > GOOG, FB, AMZN A tiny nitpick, but what's with the trend of using stock symbols in non-financial context? GOOGL isn't much shorter than Google, same with AMZN and Amazon. It just looks... annoyingly out of place. Regarding the article itself, the topic of Facebook/Amazon/Google domination is much spoken and written about and this post doesn't really add much new. This issue is well known for a quite a long time, especially in the HN and similar social circles. What most of the posts are missing is how do we escape this? But that might be too late.
  • convery 9y ago
    Because there's a lot of longer ones and it becomes a habit. For example I often talk about ATVI (Activision-Blizzard) in chats as it's a lot shorter.
    • johnchristopher 9y ago
      "in chats". This is a blog post, a forum, not an SMS conversation with 1998's prices. Acronyms look-up on Google gets old really fast. I had to look for YANBU yesterday and it was not fun to get back to the orignal text after that.
    • DougN7 9y ago
      I would never have guessed what ATVI was. So audience is important, which means for a public post, stock symbols probably aren't a great idea.
      • koko775 9y ago
        It's the first result not only on Google but DuckDuckGo as well. Do you not search for unfamiliar terms?
        • DougN7 9y ago
          Sure I do. But if one has an aim to be understood, it's better not to make everyone lookup what you're referring to. If something has a well known name, use the name!
• oldpond 9y ago
  The web died the minute the first advertiser showed up.
  • GuB-42 9y ago
    I did a quick research - The web was invented in 1989 - It became public in 1991 - The first ad banner appeared in 1994 - The first central ad server appeared in 1995 Interestingly ads roughly coincides with the "eternal september", the time when the internet really became public. It means that the greater web, the one that is accessible to all people was born with ads. And BTW, I wouldn't trade todays internet for what we had in the 90s. Yes, it was cleaner back then, ye didn't have to worry too much about ads, privacy, all that stuff and the SNR was much higher but it doesn't make up for the sheer amount of information that is available now backed by search engines that are borderline psychic.
    • intended 9y ago
      I'd trade. I've gotten better at guessing whats coming. I miss the days of yore when we were young and innocent and dreamed of a brighter open future. Now the only solution is to disconnect.
    • ori_b 9y ago
      I would trade. When it comes to searching for things in Google, it feels like the spammers won; there's just not much there that's both relevant and not trying to sell me something. There's more information, but it's much harder to find anything, and outside of small communities, everyone writing interesting things has either stopped or has happily stepped into a walled garden and become undiscoverable.
• immortalx 9y ago
  AOL making a comeback! But hey, now we can choose between 3 options.
  • 659087 9y ago
    AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy
• pdonis 9y ago
  I can't assess what this article is saying without knowing the definition of "traffic" that is being used. Is "traffic" the amount of data transferred (i.e., megabytes, gigabytes, whatever)? Is it the number of requests? Something else?
• platz 9y ago
  stratechery is a better source for this kind of analysis
• user15128 9y ago
  i think this is only one possible outcome. sure it makes sense but imho this can not happen over night and that is where this theory breaks. they cant force "their web" upon the rest of the world. there will _always_ be some form of web where one can be anonymous, where you can run your own server without any hardware from "them", using standard-protocols. maybe the business-people and most poeple who dont care about their privacy will use everything they get thrown from "them". that does not mean the web is dead, it is only that the "mainstream" will live in a separate web. maybe this (their) web will be much bigger than our web. even then, the cool kids will switch to the cool punky web again :D of course everything is just reading tea leaves..
  • sushisource 9y ago
    I think you're totally right. An analogy is the stuff around politicians trying to "ban encryption" all the while not understanding that you can't ban an idea (not meaningfully). So, yeah, maybe 10 years from now things do like almost entirely like the article predicts, but for most consumers that probably really isn't a problem at all except in some theoretical ethical/privacy sense. For the people who really do care, they'll just go make their own custom shit like you describe.
• top256 9y ago
  People used to say the same thing about Wintel until the Web appeared. Not to say his points are wrong just that it lacks some historical perspective. IMHO, these companies are on the verge of becoming irrelevant actually.
  • kenning 9y ago
    what would replace them?
    • deevolution 9y ago
      Decentralized crypto versions perhaps?
    • top256 9y ago
      if I knew I'd be working on precisely that :)
    • dreamfactored 9y ago
      decentralized social such as mastodon?
  • saas_co_de 9y ago
    Yes, it is just a cycle. Companies create an open platform to get users, then they progressively squeeze the platform for more money degrading experience, some other company creates a new open platform that offers a better experience, rinse, repeat.
• dgudkov 9y ago
  Interesting perspective but it's missing one big elephant in the room: China. China is a reason why the trinet will not happen globally. Baidu, TenCent, Alibaba and similar services won't be replaced with Google, FB or Amazon. Maybe for better.
  • ktta 9y ago
    The statistics are about Latin America.
• dalbasal 9y ago
  A lot of the comments here seem to be quibbling. The analysis/argument isn't exactly how you/I would have phrased it. But beyond the details, I think it's hard to argue with the main point. The web is much more of a large corporation's playground today, far more. That means new things will be built in a different, more giant friendly way. The part of that that worries me most is the cultural part, more than the economic side. My favourite example is wikipedia. If we didn't already have wikipedia, I don't think we'd be likely to get one on today's web. The culture is just far too corporate for wikipedia to be the end result. Youtube's another sort of example. Democratic media! A new culture factory!... Youtubes play by the rules these days. Copyright.. business friendly policy, erring on the side of restriction. It's just more manageable. Nudity? Why annoy politicians and advertisers? Just give us the purple hills version. Violence? Do what TV does. Revolution? Maybe, yes. Sure. Up the arab spring! Wait.. no. actually, wait. Hold on, not in america. Look.., no just means not here. Political ads, eh...? How about you leave us out of this. They are no longer interested in the unfolding and unpredictable consequences of their inventions. Facebook is the world's news stand & coffee house. Youtube's regional political radio, newsletters & party magazine. They do not want this job, so they're pretending it isn't they're job. Pretending they won't have to draw lines between truth and lies, free speech and hate speech, laws and despotism. The fear driven incumbent mentality. It's a pity we didn't get more wikipedia's back when the gettin was good. I would have preferred to see a giant wikipedia end up with the fake news problem (which I think these two giants almost created themselves).
  • zitterbewegung 9y ago
    Most adtech aggregators / content hosters start out by bypassing copyright law. Then when they have clients and users large enough to care they lock it down. Also crunchyroll has the same model. The issue with competitors to YouTube is the fact that it has a large moat but Twitch shows you can cross it. I think an upcoming competitor that is interesting is Floatplane because they are bootstrapped and have no VC and have no intention of selling out . https://linustechtips.com/main/store/product/147-join-floatplane/ https://linustechtips.com/main/store/product/147-join-floatp...
    • 9y ago
• zengid 9y ago
  > On the Trinet, if you are permanently banned from GOOG or FB, you would have no alternative. You could even be restricted from creating a new account. A punishment worse than jail in the New World Order.
• phantarch 9y ago
  It feels like a centralized organizing service for web content (and by extension, retail goods sold online) is an inevitability in today's internet. If we switched google off, some other search engine would replace them simply because people need to be able to find things on the internet in a way that doesn't involve spending 30 minutes running through different "top hotlinks" lists on obscure web pages. To me, the real issue is that we have a service which people depend on like a public utility (the internet) whose components are completely privatized and uncontrolled (ISP's, search, social networking). It's not a bad thing that so much of the traffic is being routed through certain pages. What makes this unsettling is that those pages are undemocratically, privately controlled and you've got next to no say in it because if you switch to a different private alternative, who's to say we won't be in exactly the same situation 10 years from now?
• pascalxus 9y ago
  As the article points out, The power google is quite scary. The problem is, we depend on it for too many things. I think the solution is to diversify our usage of it. Perhaps, use a different email service, or start using Bing. Find, something else to replace google docs. By diversifying, we reduce our risk. Same for facebook, perhaps start using a different social network and messaging apps. Sure, no one will see my posts, that is until I send them a good old fashion link, to a photo of my cute daughter. we need those "PODS" from Tim Burner's Lee's https://www.digitaltrends.com/web/ways-to-decentralize-the-web/ https://www.digitaltrends.com/web/ways-to-decentralize-the-w... In this model, all your data belongs to you. Any social network you allow or visit can make use of the data, but it all still belongs to you. And you'll be able to switch from Social network to social network or document provider(docs, spredsheets software) as easily as changing your socks. And we don't have to completely replace GOOG and FB, we should have to offer alternatives and reduce the cost of switching - That's the key to preventing these services from turning Evil. Are there any social networks out there currently that do this yet?
  • pmlnr 9y ago
    I'm hosting my own mail, and running my own server, but I know this is not a viable route for the generic public. Although tools like Yunohost[1] exists for this specific reason. Telegram is nice for instant messaging: it's simple, cross-platform, does well with resources, and run by a non-profit org. Yes, russians might be spying on it. FB/G are spied by others. Meh. (There's Signal as well, but I like my SMS separated.) Google Docs are terrible anyway: slow, lacking lots of features. Libreoffice or (god forbid!), installed M$ Office - and share the docs on, for example, Dropbox. However, it's already very hard to tell people what the web used to be. Just read the entry "I’m 22 years old and what is this."[2] - web devs being in the business for <10 years may not even remember how it was before G or FB. I'd welcome any ideas how to address this. [1]: https://yunohost.org/ https://yunohost.org/ [2]: https://medium.com/@tylrfishr/im-22-years-old-and-what-is-this-d73c2573c254 https://medium.com/@tylrfishr/im-22-years-old-and-what-is-th...
    • pascalxus 9y ago
      But, with telegram, I don't see a way to message people on FB messenger. so that means, I'll need to get them to switch: tough sell.
• pmlnr 9y ago
  Great article, one problem: it's yet another lament. Any ideas how to fix/prevent it? Maybe we should get our wifi routers into a mesh network. Maybe we should start hosting our own stuff, or make simple tools for this, like YunoHost, iRedMail, etc. But please, stop writing articles about how bad it is. "I get things are bad. But what are we doing to fix it?" — Casey Newton (Tomorrowland, 2015)
  • sordidasset 9y ago
    We want to do something, but we haven't figured out what yet. Defining a problem is often the first step to a solution.
    • pmlnr 9y ago
      The problem has been defined, countless times. Examples include 'The Web We Lost'[1] from 2012, 'The Web We Have To Save'[2] from 2015 and so on. I think we spent enough time on defining problems, so let's start working on fixes.[3] [1]: http://anildash.com/2012/12/the-web-we-lost.html http://anildash.com/2012/12/the-web-we-lost.html [2]: https://medium.com/matter/the-web-we-have-to-save-2eb1fe15a426 https://medium.com/matter/the-web-we-have-to-save-2eb1fe15a4... [3]: https://indieweb.org/ https://indieweb.org/
  • pascalxus 9y ago
    This is the ideal solution: Tim Berner Lee's (the creator of the internet). PODS let you own your own data and switch from social network to social networks as easily as changing your socks. https://www.digitaltrends.com/web/ways-to-decentralize-the-web/ https://www.digitaltrends.com/web/ways-to-decentralize-the-w...
    • inimino 9y ago
      Inventor of the Web, not the Internet. However, many of his later ideas, like the Semantic Web, have not taken off. “Own your data” is not a new idea, but it isn’t happening. Most people don’t care. It takes more than a famous name to change that.
• direengineer 9y ago
  So, how does the web go from being a benevolent dictatorship to something more democratic, when the entire kingdom is busy playing with shiny new toys?
• Yetanfou 9y ago
  Out of those three, I only use Google. I still consider the 'net - and I do mean the internet, not 'the web' as that is but a part of the constellation - to be a useful resource with near-unlimited potential. I shun Facebook like the plague and Amazon is not on my radar in any way, due in part to the fact that I'm not in north-America while Amazon is still mostly targeted at that part of the world. As such any thought of these three having fundamentally transformed the web falls flat for me as they just simply failed to do so in my world. I don't deny that these companies - especially Facebook - have an unhealthy amount of influence over many people's outlook on the world around them and that they have the potential to cause great damage - again pointing at Facebook as the main risk factor due to their rather obvious lack of political neutrality - but for now I just see them as big companies intent on carving out as much of the web as they can.
• Animats 9y ago
  At what point will Google decide that Chrome only needs to access their own assets?
• ireallydonot 9y ago
  Google, facebook are really forming our privacy to be sold to advertisers. They are biggest privacy violators.
• b1daly 9y ago
  Some very interesting points made in OP and comments. I’ll add one about user experience. Obviously the big web corporations benefit from the natural advantages of scale. But an overlooked aspect of what makes these platforms sticky is that they all, including Apple, work very hard at making their products easy to use. And these are complex systems (I find Apple’s attempt at maintaining a global user state baffling, just from a user point of view, working with such an unwieldy system must be insane.) Though this is an old problem, I think it remains: product developers and engineers vastly over estimate a potential users willingness/ability to learn a new system. This is a “threshold “ problem, with a binary outcome. If your service is “good enough “ you might get some traction. But if you don’t hit that threshold of usability, your efforts are for naught. The challenge is that usability is often an optimization problem, where one might be inclined to see how the MVP does, before investing the extensive resources in improving user experience. It’s also a big advantage to already have a lot of users, upon which a company can test and iterate. My main point is that the general public has not become more technically skilled. On the contrary, all this effort by Google-Facebook—Amazon is focused on making these services drop dead easy to use. Even technically skilled people have limits on how much they can invest in using alternative, less polished systems.
• kcoul 9y ago
  95 theses on this topic: http://95theses.co.uk/?page_id=21 http://95theses.co.uk/?page_id=21 Background: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/29/why-we-need-a-21st-century-martin-luther-to-challenge-church-of-technology-95-theses https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/29/why-we-ne...
• featherverse 9y ago
  The web isn't dying. The web isn't going to die. The day to day, month to month, or even year to year web trends are not indicative of the future of the web. The irony here is that if anything were going to kill the web, it would be stupid articles like this one. Thankfully, the internet is bigger than all of the short-sighted johnny-come-latelys in the world. Frankly, if you weren't using the web before CSS, then you shouldn't be wasting people's time with your predictions.
• betoharres 9y ago
  Amazon did not, they are just starting here in Brazil, which is a huge player in the internet, not the biggest or the best, but my country is fucking huge and no one knows about amazon, so this is false. Google and facebook? 200% sure they changed the web here. This text and opinions are from people from 1st world castle countries, not the real world
• real-hacker 9y ago
  2 words. Monopoly. Breakup. The question is, why is it not happening?