The first mover advantage also means that, as a matter of everyday experience for most people, the internet is not an open and free place, it is a highly struct

The first mover advantage also means that, as a matter of everyday experience for most people, the internet is not an open and free place, it is a highly structured and controlled place. Most people can only do stuff on the internet if a company has made a web hosted app that allows them to do that thing. That goes all the way down to DNS and connecting a server to the internet in the first place. ICANN and IANA allow you to have a name and IP address, but you pay a middleman extra (in many cases a whole lot extra) for those because ICANN and IANA don't want to deal with you directly so you do it they way they want you to. Amazon/Microsoft/Google allow you to have server time and hard drive space, you buy from them because servers are super expensive...because they bought up all the servers and continue to do so. Also you can't run a server at home anyway because the company that bought the rights to lay network cable in your town/county/city doesn't allow you to. You might be able to run a server anyway if you buy or rent an office in one of the locations they serve business internet to, but you'll run it they way they allow, for the uses they allow, at the speeds they allow, and you'll pay a lot for it. If you want to self publish, even with a basic site you probably use Wordpress or something similar because the existence of design platforms has raised the public's expectations for what a site should look like and be able to do. So you design your site the way the design companies allow you to. If all that's too much and you're just looking to write stuff for people to read on the internet, you most likely use Medium or Substack or something similar. And to do so you agree to their terms of service and end up discovering what gets attention and what gets ignored on that platform. So instead of writing what you want per se, you write what they allow you to. If you want to share video content, you do it the way YouTube wants people to, right down to reminding people to like and subscribe and hit the bell, in every damn video. If you want to share your love of crafts, you use Etsy. If you want to sell stuff generally, Amazon again. In both cases, you follow their encyclopedic sets of rules about what and how to sell as well as their convoluted, ever changing, unpublished rules around what shows up where on the listings and searches. If you want to connect with people, you connect how and to whom Facebook or Tiktok allow you to. If all this pisses you off and you want to rage at random people, you rage about the things Twitter allows you to. In theory anyone can do any of those things without the platforms, of course, but in practice they don't and always for a slew of reasons that basically amount to someone got here first and built a moat. In the most basic cases, anyone trying to do something on their own will at least need to advertise...on the platforms, the way Google, Facebook, and TikTok allow you to. Good luck.