Think for example about a one person business like daringfireball.net, that was the type of business Gates was envisioning. Or Drudge report.
They're very close to that. And the same is true to other content, e.g. Spotify, Amazon Kiddle, Netflix for films, YouTube for video, etc.
People still go to other sources, but increasingly less so, and those sources all increasingly fringe (Daring Fireball? Compared to Facebook and the like?). Nothing like the wild west (and much freer and distributed) market it was 10 and 20 years ago.
Between the 3-4 big social aggregators for example, there goes 80% of the internet advertising pie.
Gates (as quoted below): "There will be no content club in my life time with $4 billion revenue...you are on drugs if you think that".
Meanwhile there are like 5 "content clubs" with much higher revenue...
[1] https://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-no-id...
> Meanwhile there are like 5 "content clubs" with much higher revenue...
Good CEOs and Chairpersons don't blather about things that can adversely affect their company. Do you recall what happened after Musk tweeted that funding was secured?
No, case in point, DDG is generating more traffic than ever. You can also see Facebook losing ground with teenagers and young adults.
There's assault on all sides to decentralize the web as well. And Facebook is not the only social network, you can use Reddit to interact with your communities of interest and live completely off Facebook so your point does not really stand.
Kindle is not a monopoly either. You have Kobo and several other e-readers with attached stores available on the market, and you can buy e-pubs on numerous sites that are not Amazon.
Netflix also has to compete with Amazon Video and Apple services, they don't operate in a vacuum. And nothing prevents you from renting/buying physical media as well, even though it's not fashionable anymore.
Youtube is the closest thing that looks like a monopoly for video sharing- granted. There are alternatives but they tend to be weak in comparison (at least at this stage).
They are entrenched and are not expanding their services, instead, they are digging in and keeping their foothold within their regions, limiting/eliminating competition, both from a rules/laws (like preventing municipal ISPs from forming) and limiting their service footprint to maximize their "profits" within their regions. Next expanding, but always increasing the amount they charge to poor service and access to the "internet."
If anything, it appears that ISP behavior is similar to the original Ma-Bell (USA) telephone Corp. It looks like somebody needs to break them up. But that's wishful thinking this day & age, just like having a nation wide (USA) fiber deploy to all states, cities and towns. Imagine, a Renaissance would develop.
Peace
I think your comment is only valid for a particular place in the world. In other countries you have wild competition between land providers and also mobile internet providers that keep offers priced low and more and more competitive as they go. If you want to benefit from competition, you need to ensure the regulators fight against local monopolies, or force them to license their lines.
That shocked me.
Costa Rica is below #100. About 1/5 to 1/6 the average speeds in the US, with US speeds increasing faster year-over-year despite the difference. Costa Rica is comparable to what you see in Iran or Nigeria, around four to five mbps.
Your premise comes across as dramatically overstated (even if you did encounter a coffee shop in LA with poor Internet).
Or, my only non-satellite option in rural Colorado.
I've worked at almost every coffee shop on the West Side of Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Culver, Venice.
With the exception of Starbucks who has some sort of deal worked out with Google the average connection speed is 5Mbs - 10Mbs.
[0] https://twitter.com/codinghorror/status/1056426165274009600
Vodafone in Egypt blocks Skype because it has its own voip app. That's what I'm remembering when I hear of ‘net neutrality‘—not even arbitrary blocking of torrent sites in various countries.
I don't think many people in your family know the site.