Google didn’t break the internet. They failed to execute on social and rewarded shitty players with traffic. Since the 80s or earlier, companies always sought

Google didn’t break the internet. They failed to execute on social and rewarded shitty players with traffic. Since the 80s or earlier, companies always sought to exert control over their audience. Things like Compuserv were early entrants, followed by Prodigy and eventually AOL and Microsoft’s entry - MSN. Google made the network aspect of the internet better and ended up being a sort of gatekeeper. Facebook reinvented AOL, and a thousand copycats did variants of the same… Discord, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit. Social wounded the internet. If anything “killed the internet”, it was Reddit and Twitter, cancer-like services both of which metastasized to destroy small-time internet properties, only to consolidate them into poorly managed, unprofitable companies.