Monetization and Monopolies: How the Internet You Loved Died | Hacker News Reader

Monetization and Monopolies: How the Internet You Loved Died

radicalcontributions.substack.com

53 pointsjfil49 comments

The thesis that Google was only good because they didn’t face competition gets it completely backwards. There were tons of search engines when Google started, their dominance came from having a lightweight killer product, not the other way around.

> lightweight killer product

Also many of those search engines were are least partly focused on being a big curated directory of large/preferred sites.

In contrast, early-Google was amazing at bringing in the other stuff from small sites (and web-forums) that didn't have an advertising/marketing budget.

I really miss those trees of categorised sites however because they were great for discovery of similar sites as well whole topic areas. We lost something too when we stopped doing that and replaced it with the similar site search engines and roughly tracking popularity of sites.

I mean. Lets be real.

Search engines/a publically traversable & reality reflecting of the physically accessible WWW is by design outlawed. DMCA saw to that. Now, if you want that, you have to spider. The moment you create that representation and make it available to anyone else for any level of financial gain, and it's all over.

...And given all the assholery of the typical scraper these days, yhe Web is increasingly having to do away with good faith serving to novel bots; because assholes gonna asshole.

Can't have noce things.

I'm having a little trouble parsing this comment.

> Search engines/a publically traversable & reality reflecting of the physically accessible WWW is by design outlawed. DMCA saw to that.

Do you mean in the sense that the DMCA forces everyone to censor their data on demand, and therefore data cannot be both accurate (containing certain items) and public?

> Now, if you want that, you have to spider.

Isn't "that" already the same thing as "spidering"?

Or do you mean that "you" (i.e. the data consumer) have to do your own in-house spidering, because nobody is allowed to centralize the work and then redistribute (complete) data?

Originally they were indeed quite a good search engine amidst a sea of less good ones, in part because their tech was simply better, in part because they weren't as-yet merged with an advertisement company. Like Page and Brin put this up themselves as a reason why their contemporary competitors sucked[1].

Though their subsequent en-shittening has been in a relative competitive vacuum, really Bing sometimes with different front-ends.

I think today their main sticking power is how integrated they are. Not just with their browser, but the search engine with maps and what have you. Like if you build a search engine that just does internet search, users are confused why it can't tell them local restaurants' opening hours.

[1] http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf Appendix A

Google was vastly better than the alternative when they started. It wasn't even close.

The problem is that the alternatives then looked like google right now.

Other search engines at the time (I'm thinking Altavista, Lycos, AskJeeves, Yahoo) were plagued with ads and also their search results were not as good. You might find what you're looking for on the eighth page of results, whereas with Google it was the first result practically all the time. It loaded, fast, it had no ads, it was magic. That's when the "I feel lucky" button meant something (before it was killed off years later in the name of serving up more ads)

The article is about Google being at its best when it had the least competition. You should read it.

It rose to prominence because it was better than its competitors. A perceived lack of competition didn't make it good.

That is exactly the thesis and the point of that whole section! I’m sorry you got downvoted for saying it, perhaps your tone was too blunt.

It’s not that Google was created as a monopoly with no competition — there’s a neat little graph about what happened to Yahoo in there! It’s that the experience of using Google and the Google suite was at its peak in their clear & unchallenged market leader phase.

Source: am author

You say that in a way that suggests that Google being a market leader is what caused or allowed them to develop a peak user experience. To me - and I suspect others too, given the downvotes - this causality is in the opposite direction to what common sense dictates. And simply pointing at the correlation doesn't help prove your case.

To me, it looks like Google achieved a market dominance because they had a great product, but quite quickly they began practising anti-competitive behaviours and before long the user experience began to degrade.

> not only are technology monopolies “not so bad”, and not only ought company founders seek to build them, but they are in fact actively good, create massive positive externalities for the public, and are a primary source of innovation for society. When they fail, things actually deteriorate.

The tech sector is fairly unique in that innovative useful products lead quite quickly to a monopoly. That doesn't make the monopoly a good thing. It leads to inefficiencies and degraded consumer experience while the company desperately tries to maintain and suck dry its market share. The author argues that monopolies set the scene for new disruptive technologies to appear, but you could equally well argue the opposite: monopolies slow down progress via a combination of regulatory capture, acquisitions, and anti-competitive practices.

Consider another area: (personal) computer hardware.

The IBM PC was a big deal. But innovation really exploded when the PC compatibles came on the scene. IBM tried to stop that by switching to a proprietary architecture (MicroChannel). The market rejected that, because a better bus was less important than all the innovation that came through an open bus.

So, yeah. IBM tried to slow down progress so they could suck more profit out of the market, and the market ran them over with a non-proprietary alternative.

I think you're arguing that it doesn't matter when a monopoly tries to slow down progress, because a competitor will then overtake them. It sounds like IBM misjudged the market. This isn't how it always plays out - for example, Amazon forces you not to list your products cheaper elsewhere if you want it displayed as a "Featured" buy. But because the lack of viable alternatives means that most sellers bend over backwards rather than take their business elsewhere.

Exactly. Monopolies are always a bad thing. Sometimes they result in a benefit that outweighs that bad, but that situation is temporary 100% of the time.

I call this phase the proliferation of stupidity.

Back when the internet started, it was mostly university professors and students using it.

Now its mostly people that are not sure if the world is flat or not.

I don't know if I would entirely characterize it like that. Much of what is bad about the modern internet is the result of very intelligent people ("the brightest minds of my generation...") maximizing and hyper-focusing on a particular form of marketing, monopolization, financialization, and profit seeking, to the detriment of basically anything else.

It's not just "more stupid people are using the internet more", it's also "very smart people have changed the way that 95% of people can interact with the internet."

Shearing the sheep only requires one to be smarter than the sheep.

The term you are looking for is "Eternal September".

No, this is entirely different.

Stupid people click on adverts. So, businesses promote and foster stupidity.

Large businesses like Facebook, Reddit, and other social media is about collecting the largest pile of ad-clicking morons together in a package and selling access to advertisers.

It was a wonderful place and I’m happy to have lived and saw it for that brief flash before it went supernova. I don’t think people realize what a unique time in history they were alive for and witnessed.

I wish I had been around at the time to appreciate it. It always sounds like a nice place to have been

You can try it with I2P or at https://wiby.me

This looks like a big tech propaganda piece.

I know it says that you need to strike a good balance between slacking of and competition, but author spends too much time saying that monopoly is good. It is not. It has never been.

I think enshittification live cycle draws a better picture. I think you can outgrow your initial idea. Company grows until the core idea can grow.

That does not end there. Grow is always expected. When you have perfect monopoly, how else can you grow more? You can diversify, you can buy competition. Creating a new idea beside your core idea often does not pan out. Take a look at google+. How much more can you squeeze out of users? You can enshittify. You squeeze, squeeze users, until your product deteriorates and CEOs leave a shall of a company.

Google does not squeeze users because of competition. It has a ton of money. It could innovate, but they decide to squeeze users. Easy money instead of hard work.

Respectfully, there’s a 1,000 word section in the middle about the fundamentally zero-sum nature of media and the competition for consumer eyeballs that I wrote to explain why the stunning success and growth of the mobile internet and walled garden apps is in fact a source of existential competition for Google and their open web.

Google’s share of consumer eyeballs, both direct on their own web properties & indirect via ads displayed on Web 2.0 sites, is smaller now than it was in 2012.

Of course, Google DID innovate. They spawned the modern AI industry. They just totally missed the boat on commercializing it, like many other ossifying monopolies before them.

It was inevitable. The internet was a new (un)natural resource, beautiful and useful for what it was, but all that capitalism inevitably saw it as was a space to make money.

And so, once more, the commons were pissed on and filled with information warfare against consumer minds.

> information warfare against consumer minds.

Random quixotic idea: The Constitutional Right To Mental Filtering. (Cannot be signed away through contract.)

So you can't be sued for using blocking software for ads or disliked material, and working around technical roadblocks to that end would be protected. Not just in a browser, but also using a VR headset to hide ads as you walk around.

In the meantime, there's an interesting-but-unusual interpretation of Section 230 [0] that occupies similar legal territory.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/05/professor-sues-m...

Has anyone actually been suedfor personally using blocking software or similar? I could see a company having gone after a company behind blocking software, but suing the user seems suprising.

Very Big Company threatened it, anyway. [0] Even when an "impossible" lawsuit may not succeed, they can effectively harm victims when there is no quick/easy/cheap way to get it dismissed and have the attacker pay a cost for harassment. (Which is why anti-SLAPP laws are important. [1])

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28801908

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_publ...

> You don’t need aggressive antitrust enforcement to kill them — just wait a while for the march of progress and the innovator’s dilemma to rear their heads.

This is not what happens.

Take Microsoft. It's now 25 years since the antitrust case against them, but since it never actually broke them up, they still have 70% desktop market share and the experience of Windows users continues to degrade over time.

You can say that they lost the mobile market, but that doesn't help anyone still using a PC for work, or stuck with Windows-only software. A new market may outgrow them, but the old market still exists, and why should we want those users to continue to be screwed?

Moreover, the thesis here is that the monopolies are beneficial until they enter the value extraction phase and turn on their customers. But in that case why wouldn't you want to break them up as soon as they do? No need to preserve them after that, their contribution has been made and it's time to smash them to bits so the corpse of what was once greatness can't be commandeered by sociopaths.

I don't recall the Microsoft antitrust case having been about breaking the company up though. The issue at hand was that one company shouldn't ship a web browser preinstalled in the OS, not that the same company shouldn't make both an OS and a web browser.

The initial judgment called for breaking up Microsoft. That was overturned on appeal. (Yes, the case was about Microsoft using OS dominance to dominate the browser market, but breaking up Microsoft was the initial remedy.)

Oh that's really interesting, not sure how I lost that fact to the sands of time. Thanks!

Microsoft has 70% desktop market share? They once had 95%. There are real alternatives now, alternatives that are generally supported and that interoperate with everything else. You don't have to be marginalized to use a non-Microsoft desktop.

But, more to the point, consider Sun's motto: "The network is the computer". The action isn't on desktop apps any more. "Computing" is primarily done online, not via locally-running apps. So which OS you run makes little real difference. And more and more of that network access is via phones rather than PCs. The PC OS makes even less difference when you're not using a PC.

The Microsoft antitrust case meant that Microsoft couldn't use its desktop dominance to control the browser (and thereby control the Web). When they lost that case, they lost their ability to control the future. It was a really big deal. The entire internet would not be a Microsoft-controlled walled garden.

> Microsoft has 70% desktop market share? They once had 95%.

And that's the point. It took 25 years from them to drop from 95% to 70%. It happens, but it's not fast. And that's a long time for things to be in a bad way.

> There are real alternatives now, alternatives that are generally supported and that interoperate with everything else. You don't have to be marginalized to use a non-Microsoft desktop.

Which is why it's 70% instead of 95%. But if you've actually used both modern Windows and modern Linux, you might notice that one has ads on the start menu, keeps pushing Microsoft apps and services on you even if you prefer alternatives and heavily pressures you to sign in with a Microsoft account, etc. It's a fairly hostile experience.

And, sure, some people are actually switching. I've heard more people saying they're going to dump Windows 11 for Linux this year than in the ten years prior combined.

But there still plenty of people stuck with it. They have legacy software that isn't supported well or at all on other platforms, or their company is all in on Active Directory and Microsoft Office and those things don't work as well on other platforms but take a big one-time effort to switch away from once they're entangled with your business.

Now suppose there were a dozen companies that had a license to modify and sell Windows, like there had been with Unix. They'd all support legacy Win32 apps but the first one that tried to put ads on the start menu would lose customers to the others. Then they'd start to diverge from each other, so there would be a call to create a compatibility layer so developers could target all of them, which would end up being something like Qt or GTK that can also target Linux and Mac, only all the developers would use it instead of a minority. One of the Micro Bells might go for an open source strategy, and then you get the Windows equivalent of BSD, forcing the others to innovate to gain an advantage. Back in the day people would use Solaris specifically for ZFS and things, even when BSD was free.

What would be the downside of this, compared to what we have now?

This article is what happens when you start out with an assumption that things are getting ever better and then try to fit actual events into that frame.

Progress is a law of nature and we are building the communist workers' paradise so gulags are good, actually!

"the wheel of progress", "civilizational tech tree", give me break and please consider the idea that sometimes things actually do get worse.

Agreed. The weird thing is that the author explicitly concedes that things are worse now than they were 10 or 20 years ago. They concede that there's no easy way for them to access their own music that they bought. They concede that the internet is less fun; a walled, attention-stealing garden. They concede that corporations are intentionally trying to leasify their products. But they try to squeeze it into their worldview by framing it as a temporary downturn before some great new innovation comes along.

This piece kind of blew my mind. It is kind of like the flip side of the "enshittification" argument. Or another way of looking at the same phenomenon. It's not a perfect alegory or whatever, but it's one of the better ways of talking and thinking about "what went wrong" with the Internet that I've come across.

> But something happened around 2012-2014ish.

I think this is just the aftermath of the loss of steve jobs' leadership.

If he had been around, I think all kinds of course corrections would have happened and apple would have continued to rise. It would have been more about better and less about money.

I mean, you are kidding right?

Nah, I think he's correct (look at the reply in the context of the article).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com