11 ms·

Anyone remember when Netscape was a browser monopoly? Then microsoft, then google? Or ICQ, then AIM and MSN messenger, then various, culminating in a WhatsApp

Anyone remember when Netscape was a browser monopoly? Then microsoft, then google? Or ICQ, then AIM and MSN messenger, then various, culminating in a WhatsApp owning IM. Or MySpace’s social media monopoly being replaced by Facebook? Yeah privacy is important. Has been since long before we were railing against the Clipper chip in the 90s. Yeah companies have been grabbing data for a while. And it predates the web back to direct marketers and before. Walled gardens and vendor lock-in are nothing new. The publishing platforms of today are doing exactly what AOL was doing over 20 years ago. Today’s web let’s anyone spin up a fresh IP in seconds and use 100% open source software that they can freely modify to publish just about anything they want, while retaining full control of the entire stack down to the NIC, with total portability. If you use one of the many platforms that want to lock you in and eat all your data, that’s your choice. But you don’t have to. Is it that the open minded consumer is dying?

Supermancho 7y ago
> Anyone remember when Netscape was a browser monopoly? No. It was ubiquitous, but not a monopoly as it did not control anything. It was the best implementation at the time, similar to how KFC never had a monopoly on Fried Chicken, despite KFC being the only commercial offering in many regions.
- sethherr 7y ago
  Ummm? This metaphor falls flat. You’ve always been able to purchase fried chicken at other restaurants. Maybe not fast food restaurants that only sell fried chicken
muglug 7y ago
Yup - I remember seeing “type in the AOL keyword ...” in magazines, and not being able to do that because I didn’t have AOL.
- rchaud 7y ago
  I remember seeing that in GamePro magazines back in '95 or so. Did not live in the US so I had no idea what "AOL keyword" was. It didn't matter because the magazine already had a site (gamepro.com) that was accessible from anywhere. No walled garden required.
nine_k 7y ago
Open-minded or not, people want to communicate to other people, like their friends. So they join networks which their friends have joined. This naturally results in a single, winner-takes-all network. That network can be federated, of course! Look how interoperable email or phone networks are. Too bad they are mostly a few behemoths that have to interoperate because they cannot eat each other, for market and legal reasons. A federated network is going to always be less feature-rich, slower, and more hassle to deal with; Moxie Marlinspike wrote a good text about that. So, unless users make a constant, conscious effort to stay on a federated network, outside the luring walled gardens, the walled gardens win. And most people don't even think about all the privacy implications and stuff, they just want to share cat photos with friends.
- lisper 7y ago
  Freedom isn't free, and never has been. But it's always been worth striving for.
  - zelphirkalt 7y ago
    I completely agree with you. The thing is, that many people don't know how to care for their freedom in the Internet and don't know how it is being limited or choose to be blind to it, when being told. With their bad choice, they make it worse or ruin it for others, who do care.
    - lowdose 7y ago
      Bad choice is very subjective. Running a blog on your own domain & infra costs at least $10.000 per year in time, effort etc. Not everyone is in the position to invest such an amount nor are they capable of doing so. Medium really was a great solution when everyone was able to run own domains with a Medium backend. At that time it seemed that the web was moving forward.
      - saagarjha 7y ago
        > Running a blog on your own domain & infra costs at least $10.000 per year in time, effort etc. You mean $10 right? Because that’s about how much I pay for my domain a year and I don’t spend a dime more. I mean, even with Medium you have to take the time to write and format your articles…
ur-whale 7y ago
>Today’s web let’s anyone spin up a fresh IP in seconds and use 100% open source software that they can freely modify to publish just about anything they want, while retaining full control of the entire stack down to the NIC, with total portability. Entirely incorrect: none of the folks in my immediate social network would be able to do something like this. Only a techie would. And statistically, as a group, techies are a tiny minority.
- ACow_Adonis 7y ago
  It's a bit like the old joke of the artist taking 5 minutes to sketch a portrait, but ten years of training to be able to do so. Sure you can do those things in seconds, as long as you don't account for the 10 years it took to train in the tech background and ecosystem that them let's you do that in seconds. I'm a techie/data scientist, but it would probably take me a week of reading and experimentation to put up something minimally useful, because I've got no explicit web development knowledge. To my non techie friends, you might as well tell them to move a stone using the force...
  - disgruntledphd2 7y ago
    Just use wordpress. It's pretty simple to do, as long as you don't do anything crazy like develop locally. Source: I spent a _long_ time fixing harcoded URLs in a wordpress site that my wife built locally.
    - ur-whale 7y ago
      What's a word press ?
      - disgruntledphd2 7y ago
        This is fair. I was just speaking as another data scientist/techie person, like the OP. I do agree that it is 100% not easy for most people.
      - jotm 7y ago
duckMuppet 7y ago
Extremely Well said. Ideas and articles such as these often come from a more credentialed yet less historically literate/knowledgeable generation. I think you typically see similar articles conflating these larger private companies and their shenanigans with the state or federal govts who have actual men with guns to impose their will. For better or worse, words have much different meanings for younger generations.
- hedora 7y ago
  I’m surprised the article didn’t go back a few more years, when computer networks were controlled by a handful of companies that regularly censored content. Before the web browser wars, we had (in the US) three big platforms: AOL, Prodigy and CompuServe. They all had highly censored, walled-garden forums with different focuses. The services had different price points. Something full of well-heeled professionals like Hacker News (bad example, because I’m ignoring the Internet; think quants, or suits) would be on CompuServe, which was far too expensive per hour for students and middle class teenagers. We’re headed back there, and fast. I’ve heard the forums on some of the paid news sites are quite good for discussion of economic matters, for example. Apparently, if I want medical information about coronavirus from actual medical researchers, I can no longer go to YouTube, since they’re taking down all content that hasn’t already been approved by the WHO. Moving forward, I guess that’s all going to paywalled inside $$$ medical journal sites.
  - perezbox 7y ago
    I didn't go back further because there was enough to say about what is happening now. I allude that this is not just something that is happening now, but figured for everyone's sanity it was important to focus on the now. :)
p1mrx 7y ago
> Today’s web let’s anyone spin up a fresh IP in seconds There are fewer IPv4 addresses than people, which means ISPs who haven't deployed IPv6 are a threat to the open web.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  Luckily most VPSes know good ISPs.
- imtringued 7y ago
  Worse, each person can have more than one device.
aylmao 7y ago
> Is it that the open minded consumer is dying? I'd bet the number of open-minded consumers, if anything, is growing and is bigger than it ever was. The problem is the number of not open-minded consumers is perhaps growing faster. The usual "most people don't care" argument aside (which is debatable, IMO, but a tangential issue), consider the literature— a lot of this open world has been written, discussed and built for the english-speaking world. How can a user begin to care if they are never exposed to alternatives, or don't find the support they need in these communities due to language barriers. All of this is just my own guesswork, and I hope I'm wrong, but as the web grows worldwide, the percentage of open-minded consumers with knowledge of these alternatives will probably keep diminishing unless more active work is actively done in making it available to them.
- tren 7y ago
  One interesting search engine is https://millionshort.com/ https://millionshort.com/, you can choose to exclude the most popular sites from search results. It would be good if Google etc did this with a subset of returned results, e.g. show 2 out of 10 lesser ranked sites at random in the serps.
  - LargoLasskhyfv 7y ago
    Oh wow! Thank You!
  - thirdtry 7y ago
    Thanks very much for this link. I am constantly looking for new ways to search, and this is a great tool for my tricky searches.
- _wldu 7y ago
  Your comments are insulting to people who actually do not care and just want to use the same popular platform that all their friends use. A few nerds telling them they are not enlightened won't work. It's the same bunch of nerds telling them to run Linux. Can't the masses just see how wrong they are... yeah, right. I run Linux and use the open web BTW, I'm just old enough to know that insulting people you are trying to convince of something usually backfires. And, most importantly, you should know that they may not want or need your help. You calling them uninformed/ignorant/closed minded/etc. will just get you kicked out faster.
x3blah 7y ago
"Anyone remember when Netscape was a browser monopoly?" I remember when Andreesen wanted to commercially license Netscape Navigator to companies. I remember when Microsoft perceived the web as a threat and wanted to act as the gateway to it. I remember when Google was just a search engine and had no business model. Perhaps the lesson is that there really is no money to be made from consumers, including corporations, for being the "gateway to the web". Rather, the money is in manipulating or selling out those consumers for the benefit of third parties. The money is to be made from third parties, not consumers. Whomever is the gateway is in the best position to do that.
- Torwald 7y ago
  The money from the consumer goes to the ISP.
- srg0 7y ago
  While it was true for _some_ companies in the last 20 years, it won't necessarily remain the same in the next 20 years. Computer business in 1980 was very different from 2000, and it is very different now. And it's not a given that _most_ of the money is being made from third parties. Even now, most of the top tech companies are known as hardware companies (Apple, Samsung, Foxconn, Huawei, Dell...). Alphabet, Microsoft and Facebook are exceptions. And out of these three, only Alphabet and Facebook thrive on middleman strategy.
  - x3blah 7y ago
    The cost of hardware, with few exceptions, e.g., Apple, and the price paid by consumers for it, continues to fall. This has been the trend for at least the past forty years.
bernardlunn 7y ago
Yep "Today’s web let’s anyone spin up a fresh IP in seconds and use 100% open source software that they can freely modify to publish just about anything they want, while retaining full control of the entire stack down to the NIC, with total portability." If you are not techie and want easy use Wordpress, they use open web standards.
- rchaud 7y ago
  Do you mean Wordpress.org? Self-hosted Wordpress requires a lot of setup for non-technical users. They need to: - select a web host and set up an account - use cPanel or some other tool with an ancient, confusing GUI to install WP on the server - set up their MySQL and WP login passwords. Which in addition to the web host account, means they need to have 3 sets of logins to do one thing. and that's not even mentioning the security or functionality issues they may face if they don't set up backups, or decide to fill the site with plugins to accomplish basic functionality that WP doesn't provide.
  - buboard 7y ago
    Most popular web hosts offer preinstalled wordpress. You basically buy the domain and then log in to your wordpress dashboard
amelius 7y ago
> Is it that the open minded consumer is dying? In the beginning of the internet, there were more tech-savvy people on the internet. I assume that these people were more open minded than the rest of the population on average. Then came the big masses, and the percentage of open minded consumers on the net dropped. But, with improved access to information the open minded consumer on the net is on the rise again.
pojntfx 7y ago
It's not a choice. All of my friends, coworkers and family are on proprietary platforms with no way outward; what you call "choice" is really just an illusion of choice if we're being honest to ourselves.
- AndrewUnmuted 7y ago
  Plenty of people make this choice, how could it be an illusion? Social media isn't the only way to stay in touch. In fact all it really is, is a way to automate the means and pleasantries by which we relate with others at the more human/animal level. We "poke" and "react" and "share" on these platforms just like we do via other communicative tools like phones, letters, and telegrams. With the gamification and addictive nature of these social media platforms, we sort of merge sports and games with socializing, allowing everyone to be a socialite like the ones we all have read about from yesteryear. This devalues social relationships and puts a greater emphasis on MORE of them; an opiate addict always ends up eventually using heroin.
  - loup-vaillant 7y ago
    Choice one: get spied on by Google through your phone, analytics, gmail, You tube… Get spied on by Facebook. Carry a tracker everywhere you go. Choice two: No longer answer the phone in a timely manner. Don't follow up on friends. Shut yourself from many social circles. In other words, stop being a first class citizen. There was a time where slaves were considered sub-human because they chose life over freedom. They had a choice, and they chose to be beasts. There's a difference of degree, but but it operate under the same principle: when you have two option, one of which is unacceptable, you don't really have a choice.
lkrubner 7y ago
This is like asking, remember when Mercedes Benz was the largest car company in the world? The 1880s were a magical time! Every industry goes through a period of experimentation. In his 1985 book, Innovation And Entrepreneurship, on page 121, the great business guru Peter Drucker offered this: In the 1920s, literally hundreds of companies were making radio sets and hundreds more were going into radio stations. By 1935, the control of broadcasting had moved into the hands of three "networks" and there were only a dozen manufacturers of radio sets left. Again, there was an explosion in the number of newspapers founded between 1880 and 1900. In fact, newspapers were among the "growth industries" of the time. Since World War I, the number of newspapers in every major country has been going downhill steadily. And the same is true of banking. After the founders -- the Morgans, the Siemenses, the Shibusawas -- there was an almost explosive growth of new banks in the United States as well as in Europe. But around 1890, only twenty years later, consolidation set in. Banking firms began to go out of business or to merge. By the end of World War II in every major country only a handful of banks were left that had more than local importance, whether as commercial or private banks. ...But each time without exception the survivor has been a company that was started during the early explosive period. After that period is over, entry into the industry is foreclosed for all practical purposes. There is a "window" of a few years during which a new venture must establish itself in any new knowledge-based industry. The open period for the Internet appears to have been the 20 years from 1990 to 2010, give or take a year. The biggest surprise about this is that there was a constant public rhetoric about the Internet that argued that it would be the most naturally competitive ecosystem ever invented, the one most resistant to monopoly, but in fact the opposite happened -- it consolidated much more quickly than any other major industry, certainly much faster than the examples that Drucker gives.
- pphysch 7y ago
  Thank you for the historical perspective. Language (communications technology) is power and power is hungry.
- perezbox 7y ago
  < The biggest surprise about this is that there was a constant public rhetoric about the Internet that argued that it would be the most naturally competitive ecosystem ever invented, the one most resistant to monopoly, but in fact the opposite happened -- it consolidated much more quickly than any other major industry, certainly much faster than the examples that Drucker gives This is a great great point!
buboard 7y ago
Suppose people make the massive move from walled media to their own websites. How long will it be until mobs start going after web hosts to demand censorship? The next security/privacy law will probably make it illegal to publish your ideas. Its the mindset that has changed. The only way to fight that would be anonymous, secure, decentralised tech

Supermancho 7y ago

> Anyone remember when Netscape was a browser monopoly? No. It was ubiquitous, but not a monopoly as it did not control anything. It was the best implementation at the time, similar to how KFC never had a monopoly on Fried Chicken, despite KFC being the only commercial offering in many regions.

sethherr 7y ago
Ummm? This metaphor falls flat. You’ve always been able to purchase fried chicken at other restaurants. Maybe not fast food restaurants that only sell fried chicken

muglug 7y ago

Yup - I remember seeing “type in the AOL keyword ...” in magazines, and not being able to do that because I didn’t have AOL.

rchaud 7y ago
I remember seeing that in GamePro magazines back in '95 or so. Did not live in the US so I had no idea what "AOL keyword" was. It didn't matter because the magazine already had a site (gamepro.com) that was accessible from anywhere. No walled garden required.

nine_k 7y ago

Open-minded or not, people want to communicate to other people, like their friends. So they join networks which their friends have joined. This naturally results in a single, winner-takes-all network. That network can be federated, of course! Look how interoperable email or phone networks are. Too bad they are mostly a few behemoths that have to interoperate because they cannot eat each other, for market and legal reasons. A federated network is going to always be less feature-rich, slower, and more hassle to deal with; Moxie Marlinspike wrote a good text about that. So, unless users make a constant, conscious effort to stay on a federated network, outside the luring walled gardens, the walled gardens win. And most people don't even think about all the privacy implications and stuff, they just want to share cat photos with friends.

lisper 7y ago
Freedom isn't free, and never has been. But it's always been worth striving for.
- zelphirkalt 7y ago
  I completely agree with you. The thing is, that many people don't know how to care for their freedom in the Internet and don't know how it is being limited or choose to be blind to it, when being told. With their bad choice, they make it worse or ruin it for others, who do care.
  - lowdose 7y ago
    Bad choice is very subjective. Running a blog on your own domain & infra costs at least $10.000 per year in time, effort etc. Not everyone is in the position to invest such an amount nor are they capable of doing so. Medium really was a great solution when everyone was able to run own domains with a Medium backend. At that time it seemed that the web was moving forward.
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      > Running a blog on your own domain & infra costs at least $10.000 per year in time, effort etc. You mean $10 right? Because that’s about how much I pay for my domain a year and I don’t spend a dime more. I mean, even with Medium you have to take the time to write and format your articles…

ur-whale 7y ago

>Today’s web let’s anyone spin up a fresh IP in seconds and use 100% open source software that they can freely modify to publish just about anything they want, while retaining full control of the entire stack down to the NIC, with total portability. Entirely incorrect: none of the folks in my immediate social network would be able to do something like this. Only a techie would. And statistically, as a group, techies are a tiny minority.

ACow_Adonis 7y ago
It's a bit like the old joke of the artist taking 5 minutes to sketch a portrait, but ten years of training to be able to do so. Sure you can do those things in seconds, as long as you don't account for the 10 years it took to train in the tech background and ecosystem that them let's you do that in seconds. I'm a techie/data scientist, but it would probably take me a week of reading and experimentation to put up something minimally useful, because I've got no explicit web development knowledge. To my non techie friends, you might as well tell them to move a stone using the force...
- disgruntledphd2 7y ago
  Just use wordpress. It's pretty simple to do, as long as you don't do anything crazy like develop locally. Source: I spent a _long_ time fixing harcoded URLs in a wordpress site that my wife built locally.
  - ur-whale 7y ago
    What's a word press ?
    - disgruntledphd2 7y ago
      This is fair. I was just speaking as another data scientist/techie person, like the OP. I do agree that it is 100% not easy for most people.
    - jotm 7y ago

duckMuppet 7y ago

Extremely Well said. Ideas and articles such as these often come from a more credentialed yet less historically literate/knowledgeable generation. I think you typically see similar articles conflating these larger private companies and their shenanigans with the state or federal govts who have actual men with guns to impose their will. For better or worse, words have much different meanings for younger generations.

hedora 7y ago
I’m surprised the article didn’t go back a few more years, when computer networks were controlled by a handful of companies that regularly censored content. Before the web browser wars, we had (in the US) three big platforms: AOL, Prodigy and CompuServe. They all had highly censored, walled-garden forums with different focuses. The services had different price points. Something full of well-heeled professionals like Hacker News (bad example, because I’m ignoring the Internet; think quants, or suits) would be on CompuServe, which was far too expensive per hour for students and middle class teenagers. We’re headed back there, and fast. I’ve heard the forums on some of the paid news sites are quite good for discussion of economic matters, for example. Apparently, if I want medical information about coronavirus from actual medical researchers, I can no longer go to YouTube, since they’re taking down all content that hasn’t already been approved by the WHO. Moving forward, I guess that’s all going to paywalled inside $$$ medical journal sites.
- perezbox 7y ago
  I didn't go back further because there was enough to say about what is happening now. I allude that this is not just something that is happening now, but figured for everyone's sanity it was important to focus on the now. :)

p1mrx 7y ago

> Today’s web let’s anyone spin up a fresh IP in seconds There are fewer IPv4 addresses than people, which means ISPs who haven't deployed IPv6 are a threat to the open web.

saagarjha 7y ago
Luckily most VPSes know good ISPs.
imtringued 7y ago
Worse, each person can have more than one device.

aylmao 7y ago

> Is it that the open minded consumer is dying? I'd bet the number of open-minded consumers, if anything, is growing and is bigger than it ever was. The problem is the number of not open-minded consumers is perhaps growing faster. The usual "most people don't care" argument aside (which is debatable, IMO, but a tangential issue), consider the literature— a lot of this open world has been written, discussed and built for the english-speaking world. How can a user begin to care if they are never exposed to alternatives, or don't find the support they need in these communities due to language barriers. All of this is just my own guesswork, and I hope I'm wrong, but as the web grows worldwide, the percentage of open-minded consumers with knowledge of these alternatives will probably keep diminishing unless more active work is actively done in making it available to them.

tren 7y ago
One interesting search engine is https://millionshort.com/ https://millionshort.com/, you can choose to exclude the most popular sites from search results. It would be good if Google etc did this with a subset of returned results, e.g. show 2 out of 10 lesser ranked sites at random in the serps.
- LargoLasskhyfv 7y ago
  Oh wow! Thank You!
- thirdtry 7y ago
  Thanks very much for this link. I am constantly looking for new ways to search, and this is a great tool for my tricky searches.
_wldu 7y ago
Your comments are insulting to people who actually do not care and just want to use the same popular platform that all their friends use. A few nerds telling them they are not enlightened won't work. It's the same bunch of nerds telling them to run Linux. Can't the masses just see how wrong they are... yeah, right. I run Linux and use the open web BTW, I'm just old enough to know that insulting people you are trying to convince of something usually backfires. And, most importantly, you should know that they may not want or need your help. You calling them uninformed/ignorant/closed minded/etc. will just get you kicked out faster.

x3blah 7y ago

"Anyone remember when Netscape was a browser monopoly?" I remember when Andreesen wanted to commercially license Netscape Navigator to companies. I remember when Microsoft perceived the web as a threat and wanted to act as the gateway to it. I remember when Google was just a search engine and had no business model. Perhaps the lesson is that there really is no money to be made from consumers, including corporations, for being the "gateway to the web". Rather, the money is in manipulating or selling out those consumers for the benefit of third parties. The money is to be made from third parties, not consumers. Whomever is the gateway is in the best position to do that.

Torwald 7y ago
The money from the consumer goes to the ISP.
srg0 7y ago
While it was true for _some_ companies in the last 20 years, it won't necessarily remain the same in the next 20 years. Computer business in 1980 was very different from 2000, and it is very different now. And it's not a given that _most_ of the money is being made from third parties. Even now, most of the top tech companies are known as hardware companies (Apple, Samsung, Foxconn, Huawei, Dell...). Alphabet, Microsoft and Facebook are exceptions. And out of these three, only Alphabet and Facebook thrive on middleman strategy.
- x3blah 7y ago
  The cost of hardware, with few exceptions, e.g., Apple, and the price paid by consumers for it, continues to fall. This has been the trend for at least the past forty years.

bernardlunn 7y ago

Yep "Today’s web let’s anyone spin up a fresh IP in seconds and use 100% open source software that they can freely modify to publish just about anything they want, while retaining full control of the entire stack down to the NIC, with total portability." If you are not techie and want easy use Wordpress, they use open web standards.

rchaud 7y ago
Do you mean Wordpress.org? Self-hosted Wordpress requires a lot of setup for non-technical users. They need to: - select a web host and set up an account - use cPanel or some other tool with an ancient, confusing GUI to install WP on the server - set up their MySQL and WP login passwords. Which in addition to the web host account, means they need to have 3 sets of logins to do one thing. and that's not even mentioning the security or functionality issues they may face if they don't set up backups, or decide to fill the site with plugins to accomplish basic functionality that WP doesn't provide.
- buboard 7y ago
  Most popular web hosts offer preinstalled wordpress. You basically buy the domain and then log in to your wordpress dashboard

amelius 7y ago

> Is it that the open minded consumer is dying? In the beginning of the internet, there were more tech-savvy people on the internet. I assume that these people were more open minded than the rest of the population on average. Then came the big masses, and the percentage of open minded consumers on the net dropped. But, with improved access to information the open minded consumer on the net is on the rise again.

pojntfx 7y ago

It's not a choice. All of my friends, coworkers and family are on proprietary platforms with no way outward; what you call "choice" is really just an illusion of choice if we're being honest to ourselves.

AndrewUnmuted 7y ago
Plenty of people make this choice, how could it be an illusion? Social media isn't the only way to stay in touch. In fact all it really is, is a way to automate the means and pleasantries by which we relate with others at the more human/animal level. We "poke" and "react" and "share" on these platforms just like we do via other communicative tools like phones, letters, and telegrams. With the gamification and addictive nature of these social media platforms, we sort of merge sports and games with socializing, allowing everyone to be a socialite like the ones we all have read about from yesteryear. This devalues social relationships and puts a greater emphasis on MORE of them; an opiate addict always ends up eventually using heroin.
- loup-vaillant 7y ago
  Choice one: get spied on by Google through your phone, analytics, gmail, You tube… Get spied on by Facebook. Carry a tracker everywhere you go. Choice two: No longer answer the phone in a timely manner. Don't follow up on friends. Shut yourself from many social circles. In other words, stop being a first class citizen. There was a time where slaves were considered sub-human because they chose life over freedom. They had a choice, and they chose to be beasts. There's a difference of degree, but but it operate under the same principle: when you have two option, one of which is unacceptable, you don't really have a choice.

lkrubner 7y ago

This is like asking, remember when Mercedes Benz was the largest car company in the world? The 1880s were a magical time! Every industry goes through a period of experimentation. In his 1985 book, Innovation And Entrepreneurship, on page 121, the great business guru Peter Drucker offered this: In the 1920s, literally hundreds of companies were making radio sets and hundreds more were going into radio stations. By 1935, the control of broadcasting had moved into the hands of three "networks" and there were only a dozen manufacturers of radio sets left. Again, there was an explosion in the number of newspapers founded between 1880 and 1900. In fact, newspapers were among the "growth industries" of the time. Since World War I, the number of newspapers in every major country has been going downhill steadily. And the same is true of banking. After the founders -- the Morgans, the Siemenses, the Shibusawas -- there was an almost explosive growth of new banks in the United States as well as in Europe. But around 1890, only twenty years later, consolidation set in. Banking firms began to go out of business or to merge. By the end of World War II in every major country only a handful of banks were left that had more than local importance, whether as commercial or private banks. ...But each time without exception the survivor has been a company that was started during the early explosive period. After that period is over, entry into the industry is foreclosed for all practical purposes. There is a "window" of a few years during which a new venture must establish itself in any new knowledge-based industry. The open period for the Internet appears to have been the 20 years from 1990 to 2010, give or take a year. The biggest surprise about this is that there was a constant public rhetoric about the Internet that argued that it would be the most naturally competitive ecosystem ever invented, the one most resistant to monopoly, but in fact the opposite happened -- it consolidated much more quickly than any other major industry, certainly much faster than the examples that Drucker gives.

pphysch 7y ago
Thank you for the historical perspective. Language (communications technology) is power and power is hungry.
perezbox 7y ago
< The biggest surprise about this is that there was a constant public rhetoric about the Internet that argued that it would be the most naturally competitive ecosystem ever invented, the one most resistant to monopoly, but in fact the opposite happened -- it consolidated much more quickly than any other major industry, certainly much faster than the examples that Drucker gives This is a great great point!

buboard 7y ago

Suppose people make the massive move from walled media to their own websites. How long will it be until mobs start going after web hosts to demand censorship? The next security/privacy law will probably make it illegal to publish your ideas. Its the mindset that has changed. The only way to fight that would be anonymous, secure, decentralised tech