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I've grown pretty pessimistic about the prospects of the Internet as a motor for entrepreneurship. Today it is theoretically still "free" but wherever you go yo

I've grown pretty pessimistic about the prospects of the Internet as a motor for entrepreneurship. Today it is theoretically still "free" but wherever you go you'll find gatekeepers like Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft that keep a tight grip on who is visible on the net and who can offer a service or software product on a given platform. In my view, the market dominance of the big players has led to a new type of hidden taxation and a "winner takes all" Internet economy. Almost all digital markets require you to pass through large companies to get visibility or offer your services, and they get increasingly good at extracting every bit of profit you make. This really needs to stop.

zpeti 5y ago
I think this is just the natural evolution of any market. Unfortunately it leads to this. There's not much competition in the railroad market, or the telco market anymore, which used to be massive spaces for innovation. There are two options: - We have to wait for the next technological revolution. - It is simply just more costly to be an entrepreneur. It's not about throwing together a website or app, it's much more costly to break through the existing monopolies. While you can still make a website or app yourself, I think you do need more and more capital to market it.
- ant6n 5y ago
  There's competition in the railroad market in the EU,because they want there to be a market. In particular they mandate separation of infrastructure and operation, and force rail infrastructure owners to give open access to all (for a toll, which has to be the same for all operators). Once you can't use infrastructure as a moat, competition is much more possible. The US which only regulates rail safety but not the market, has a bunch of local monopolies and calls that a market, being in total denial that markets need to be regulated to actually allow competition.
  - the-dude 5y ago
    Are there any indications that a market for rail is actually more efficient?
    - Ericson2314 5y ago
      It's not! One of the end results is taking trains across national borders is way more annoying than it should be. That in turn I believe has lead to warped statistics on the viability of rail for long distances!
      - ant6n 5y ago
        International passenger rail is a bit of a niche of the overall rail market, but if you compare north America to Europe here, Europe is doing much better.
    - eitland 5y ago
      Maybe not yet, but as someone who lived through the annoying breakup of the telecom monopoly in Norway I'd never ever go back. I guess this will be the same. In 1998 I remember having to dial 1521 or something before the number I was planning to dial to use the cheaper minutes with the competitor. I also remember having to learn to use 8 digit numbers for everyone instead of using 5 digit numbers locally. Annoying, but forgotten 4 years later when you didn't have to prefix numbers anymore and we got cell phones with contact lists. Same will happen with rail I guess. Annoying today, but I guess 4 years from now no one on their right mind will ever want to go back. Oh, BTW, the same with the mail monopoly. A lot of complaints, but the result is I can now get my packages shipped overnight. I literally contacted my broadband provider on chat a Sunday afternoon during the last 30 days and had a new modem in my mail as I woke up the next morning. No way that could have happened with the old telecom and mail monopolies in place.
tomComb 5y ago
That's why the web is so important. When the proprietary platforms get the upper hand you get eg. Apple taking a 50% cut off revenue in their news app.
adventured 5y ago
It's simultaneously true that big tech is too big (and set to get far bigger yet) and there is no scenario where you can escape being under the influence/impact of platform owners. Want to advertise? You had to go through radio stations with license monopolies. Or maybe you had to go through a newspaper, historically there were usually one or two that thrived per city, and usually one dominant super paper in a given city (2-3 times larger than its smaller competitor). Or maybe you had to go through one of the few big broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox). Just a few behemoths dominanted television. Want to transport goods? Say hello to the railroad oligopoly, going back more than a century now. Maybe you needed a lot of vehicles for your business, circa the 1950-1970s. Say hello to the GM and Ford oligopoly, your dependency. Maybe you wanted to buy airplanes, it's 1971 and you're starting a version of Fedex. How many choices do you have? How many suppliers are there in terms of dependency? You want to get something on a store shelf across the country? Let me introduce you to Sears, Pennys, Kmart, Woolworth, WT Grant, Genesco, Allied, McCrory's, May. That's 50 years ago, they owned retail. The new boss, same as the old boss (today some of them are even bigger, that much is true). You can't escape it. Unless you own all the platforms, you will always have to go through other platforms, other gate keepers. The best you can hope for is to intelligently diversify your risk exposure, so it takes more than one of them to cripple you.
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  > maybe you had to go through a newspaper, historically there were usually one or two that thrived per city, and usually one dominant super paper what you 're describing is NOT a monopoly, because the winners were local, physical separation prevented monopolization, and crucially there was more than one dominant player. There is a whole new world on the internet where for every verb there is one, single monopoly for the entire world. In the end , one can look at the money flow: How many people were employed in newspapers vs how many people are in googleplex
- amadeuspagel 5y ago
  > Want to transport goods? Say hello to the railroad oligopoly, going back more than a century now. And regulated as a common carrier[1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier
cblconfederate 5y ago
The endgame of entrepreneurship is monopoly, if possible. The (western) internet has no physical barriers so is infinitely scalable so it got monopolized very very quickly. Whether those monopolies are forming a cartel to prevent new entrants is another matter; it might well be the case that it is now closed for new entrants. There is some innovation in things like decentralized finance which are inherently orthogonal to the current state. There is also the old internet which could never be centralized, it's still out there but it's unmonetizeable now. If there is going to be competition for the big players, it will come when closed markets like Russia or China develop enough to threaten them. It is possible that Europe at some point will also follow their example.
Sargos 5y ago
Thankfully I think Web3 (dapps made from composable protocols collaboratively developed by everyone) will form strong competition and maybe even replace Google in the next 5-10 years. Services like social media, finance, gaming, productivity, etc will all be interoperable by default providing a seamless user experience and be built by millions of developers around the world. Each company coding only what they specialize in and being built on top of existing protocols leads to massive efficiency and what looks like exponential growth. Tech monopolies will likely fade away over time like the early industrial revolution monopolies did just at an accelerated pace due to things working at internet speed. Even Google can't compete with a decentralized worldwide developer network.
- ozten 5y ago
  What are the more successful DAO or dapps we can study, to evaluate this model?
  - Sargos 5y ago
    An example I find interesting and easy to explain is Pool Together which is a no-loss lottery where you can buy $10 in lottery tickets for a chance at a $3,000 weekly prize but if you don't win your tickets still work for the next round and even 10 rounds from now you can withdraw your full $10. It works by putting everyone's money in the same account which earns ~6% interest savings account and the winner actually gets the accrued interest as prize money. This project was built by a team of maybe a dozen people but is rather complex and needs a stablecoin (DAI from MakerDAO), an interest bearing account (Compound), an account system (Ethereum public/private key), and the running of the protocol (the smart contacts are run free for devs by Ethereum and users pay to perform actions) to make the system work. All of these dependencies took other teams years to build and the small Pool Together team leveraged that to make a cool little product by just adding a small amount on top. The ability for small teams to make functional products which can then be used by others to quickly spin up their own experiments and products is incredibly exciting to me and it's a much better method of development then the traditional closed vertically integrated tech giant where innovation is limited by bureaucracy.

zpeti 5y ago

I think this is just the natural evolution of any market. Unfortunately it leads to this. There's not much competition in the railroad market, or the telco market anymore, which used to be massive spaces for innovation. There are two options: - We have to wait for the next technological revolution. - It is simply just more costly to be an entrepreneur. It's not about throwing together a website or app, it's much more costly to break through the existing monopolies. While you can still make a website or app yourself, I think you do need more and more capital to market it.

ant6n 5y ago
There's competition in the railroad market in the EU,because they want there to be a market. In particular they mandate separation of infrastructure and operation, and force rail infrastructure owners to give open access to all (for a toll, which has to be the same for all operators). Once you can't use infrastructure as a moat, competition is much more possible. The US which only regulates rail safety but not the market, has a bunch of local monopolies and calls that a market, being in total denial that markets need to be regulated to actually allow competition.
- the-dude 5y ago
  Are there any indications that a market for rail is actually more efficient?
  - Ericson2314 5y ago
    It's not! One of the end results is taking trains across national borders is way more annoying than it should be. That in turn I believe has lead to warped statistics on the viability of rail for long distances!
    - ant6n 5y ago
      International passenger rail is a bit of a niche of the overall rail market, but if you compare north America to Europe here, Europe is doing much better.
  - eitland 5y ago
    Maybe not yet, but as someone who lived through the annoying breakup of the telecom monopoly in Norway I'd never ever go back. I guess this will be the same. In 1998 I remember having to dial 1521 or something before the number I was planning to dial to use the cheaper minutes with the competitor. I also remember having to learn to use 8 digit numbers for everyone instead of using 5 digit numbers locally. Annoying, but forgotten 4 years later when you didn't have to prefix numbers anymore and we got cell phones with contact lists. Same will happen with rail I guess. Annoying today, but I guess 4 years from now no one on their right mind will ever want to go back. Oh, BTW, the same with the mail monopoly. A lot of complaints, but the result is I can now get my packages shipped overnight. I literally contacted my broadband provider on chat a Sunday afternoon during the last 30 days and had a new modem in my mail as I woke up the next morning. No way that could have happened with the old telecom and mail monopolies in place.

tomComb 5y ago

That's why the web is so important. When the proprietary platforms get the upper hand you get eg. Apple taking a 50% cut off revenue in their news app.

adventured 5y ago

It's simultaneously true that big tech is too big (and set to get far bigger yet) and there is no scenario where you can escape being under the influence/impact of platform owners. Want to advertise? You had to go through radio stations with license monopolies. Or maybe you had to go through a newspaper, historically there were usually one or two that thrived per city, and usually one dominant super paper in a given city (2-3 times larger than its smaller competitor). Or maybe you had to go through one of the few big broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox). Just a few behemoths dominanted television. Want to transport goods? Say hello to the railroad oligopoly, going back more than a century now. Maybe you needed a lot of vehicles for your business, circa the 1950-1970s. Say hello to the GM and Ford oligopoly, your dependency. Maybe you wanted to buy airplanes, it's 1971 and you're starting a version of Fedex. How many choices do you have? How many suppliers are there in terms of dependency? You want to get something on a store shelf across the country? Let me introduce you to Sears, Pennys, Kmart, Woolworth, WT Grant, Genesco, Allied, McCrory's, May. That's 50 years ago, they owned retail. The new boss, same as the old boss (today some of them are even bigger, that much is true). You can't escape it. Unless you own all the platforms, you will always have to go through other platforms, other gate keepers. The best you can hope for is to intelligently diversify your risk exposure, so it takes more than one of them to cripple you.

cblconfederate 5y ago
> maybe you had to go through a newspaper, historically there were usually one or two that thrived per city, and usually one dominant super paper what you 're describing is NOT a monopoly, because the winners were local, physical separation prevented monopolization, and crucially there was more than one dominant player. There is a whole new world on the internet where for every verb there is one, single monopoly for the entire world. In the end , one can look at the money flow: How many people were employed in newspapers vs how many people are in googleplex
amadeuspagel 5y ago
> Want to transport goods? Say hello to the railroad oligopoly, going back more than a century now. And regulated as a common carrier[1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier

cblconfederate 5y ago

The endgame of entrepreneurship is monopoly, if possible. The (western) internet has no physical barriers so is infinitely scalable so it got monopolized very very quickly. Whether those monopolies are forming a cartel to prevent new entrants is another matter; it might well be the case that it is now closed for new entrants. There is some innovation in things like decentralized finance which are inherently orthogonal to the current state. There is also the old internet which could never be centralized, it's still out there but it's unmonetizeable now. If there is going to be competition for the big players, it will come when closed markets like Russia or China develop enough to threaten them. It is possible that Europe at some point will also follow their example.

Sargos 5y ago

Thankfully I think Web3 (dapps made from composable protocols collaboratively developed by everyone) will form strong competition and maybe even replace Google in the next 5-10 years. Services like social media, finance, gaming, productivity, etc will all be interoperable by default providing a seamless user experience and be built by millions of developers around the world. Each company coding only what they specialize in and being built on top of existing protocols leads to massive efficiency and what looks like exponential growth. Tech monopolies will likely fade away over time like the early industrial revolution monopolies did just at an accelerated pace due to things working at internet speed. Even Google can't compete with a decentralized worldwide developer network.

ozten 5y ago
What are the more successful DAO or dapps we can study, to evaluate this model?
- Sargos 5y ago
  An example I find interesting and easy to explain is Pool Together which is a no-loss lottery where you can buy $10 in lottery tickets for a chance at a $3,000 weekly prize but if you don't win your tickets still work for the next round and even 10 rounds from now you can withdraw your full $10. It works by putting everyone's money in the same account which earns ~6% interest savings account and the winner actually gets the accrued interest as prize money. This project was built by a team of maybe a dozen people but is rather complex and needs a stablecoin (DAI from MakerDAO), an interest bearing account (Compound), an account system (Ethereum public/private key), and the running of the protocol (the smart contacts are run free for devs by Ethereum and users pay to perform actions) to make the system work. All of these dependencies took other teams years to build and the small Pool Together team leveraged that to make a cool little product by just adding a small amount on top. The ability for small teams to make functional products which can then be used by others to quickly spin up their own experiments and products is incredibly exciting to me and it's a much better method of development then the traditional closed vertically integrated tech giant where innovation is limited by bureaucracy.