
Google, Facebook, and Amazon have fundamentally transformed the web - staltz
https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying-in-2014-heres-how.html
======
dalbasal
A lot of the comments here seem to be quibbling. The analysis/argument isn't
exactly how you/I would have phrased it.

But beyond the details, I think it's hard to argue with the main point. The
web is much more of a large corporation's playground today, far more. That
means new things will be built in a different, more giant friendly way. The
part of that that worries me most is the cultural part, more than the economic
side.

My favourite example is wikipedia. If we didn't already have wikipedia, I
don't think we'd be likely to get one on today's web. The culture is just far
too corporate for wikipedia to be the end result.

Youtube's another sort of example. Democratic media! A new culture factory!...

Youtubes play by the rules these days. Copyright.. business friendly policy,
erring on the side of restriction. It's just more manageable. Nudity? Why
annoy politicians _and_ advertisers? Just give us the purple _hills_ version.
Violence? Do what TV does. Revolution? Maybe, yes. Sure. Up the arab spring!
Wait.. no. actually, wait. Hold on, not in america. Look.., no just means not
here. Political ads, eh...? How about you leave us out of this.

They are no longer interested in the unfolding and unpredictable consequences
of their inventions. Facebook is the world's news stand & coffee house.
Youtube's regional political radio, newsletters & party magazine. They do not
want this job, so they're pretending it isn't they're job. Pretending they
won't have to draw lines between truth and lies, free speech and hate speech,
laws and despotism.

The fear driven incumbent mentality.

It's a pity we didn't get more wikipedia's back when the gettin was good. I
would have preferred to see a giant wikipedia end up with the fake news
problem (which I think these two giants almost created themselves).

~~~
chasd00
"The web is much more of a large corporation's playground today, far more."

I don't know, I can get a VM and a public IP much cheaper now than ever
before. It's never been easier to put content or innovation in front of the
entire Internet.

Use to be when someone thought they could do something better they'd do it and
let the Internet judge. For example, if you want a different social network
then build one and get your friends to try it out. If they like it then maybe
it'll grow. That's pretty much how every social site that was ever tried
(including Facebook) started. Will your idea fail? Probably, but failure is
just part of the process.

Seems like here you read a lot of "well Google/Facebook exists so why even
bother?". That mentality is the real problem.

~~~
Animats
_I don 't know, I can get a VM and a public IP much cheaper now than ever
before. It's never been easier to put content or innovation in front of the
entire Internet._

No one will look at it. I had a Diaspora account. There's nothing and nobody
there.

~~~
NotSammyHagar
but they had nothing to offer over facebook, really.

------
pascalxus
As the article points out, The power google is quite scary. The problem is, we
depend on it for too many things. I think the solution is to diversify our
usage of it. Perhaps, use a different email service, or start using Bing.
Find, something else to replace google docs. By diversifying, we reduce our
risk.

Same for facebook, perhaps start using a different social network and
messaging apps. Sure, no one will see my posts, that is until I send them a
good old fashion link, to a photo of my cute daughter.

we need those "PODS" from Tim Burner's Lee's
[https://www.digitaltrends.com/web/ways-to-decentralize-
the-w...](https://www.digitaltrends.com/web/ways-to-decentralize-the-web/)

In this model, all your data belongs to you. Any social network you allow or
visit can make use of the data, but it all still belongs to you. And you'll be
able to switch from Social network to social network or document
provider(docs, spredsheets software) as easily as changing your socks.

And we don't have to completely replace GOOG and FB, we should have to offer
alternatives and reduce the cost of switching - That's the key to preventing
these services from turning Evil.

Are there any social networks out there currently that do this yet?

~~~
pmlnr
I'm hosting my own mail, and running my own server, but I know this is not a
viable route for the generic public. Although tools like Yunohost[1] exists
for this specific reason.

Telegram is nice for instant messaging: it's simple, cross-platform, does well
with resources, and run by a non-profit org. Yes, russians might be spying on
it. FB/G are spied by others. Meh. (There's Signal as well, but I like my SMS
separated.)

Google Docs are terrible anyway: slow, lacking lots of features. Libreoffice
or (god forbid!), installed M$ Office - and share the docs on, for example,
Dropbox.

However, it's already very hard to tell people what the web used to be. Just
read the entry "I’m 22 years old and what is this."[2] - web devs being in the
business for <10 years may not even remember how it was before G or FB. I'd
welcome any ideas how to address this.

[1]: [https://yunohost.org/](https://yunohost.org/) [2]:
[https://medium.com/@tylrfishr/im-22-years-old-and-what-is-
th...](https://medium.com/@tylrfishr/im-22-years-old-and-what-is-
this-d73c2573c254)

~~~
the_common_man
Yup, I self-host email, blog and all my stuff except with Cloudron [1]. I use
wire instead of telegram.

One challenge (at least amongst my circles) is that people do not seem to
value diversity and are for some reason obsessed with mono-culture. For
example, they are not willing to try another docs or email or phone provider.
Even if they try something new, they are quick to jump to opinions in mere
seconds (for example, I asked a friend to try mattermost[2] instead of slack
and he wanted to go on about how the shade of blue was unappealing...). Many
of my friends are also truly vested into converting their entire household
into apple or google products (i.e one of them). If apple made a mattress
tomorrow, they would immediately buy it :)

[1]: [https://cloudron.io](https://cloudron.io) [2]:
[https://about.mattermost.com/](https://about.mattermost.com/)

~~~
xj9
i think what we need is another type of walled garden, what i'm calling a
freedom garden. a complete alternative to APPL and GOOG that has media,
devices, apps, &c.

free software projects and linux distributions have been around for years, but
the focus is often on compatibility and familiarity. i say, we throw all of
that in the trash. we need fresh ideas, fresh designs, and interfaces.
interesting new devices and interaction models. app stores that engage
creators as a revenue channel. there's no reason why liberty and profit should
be at odds. [0]

i especially think that we need to rethink how we develop applications. clouds
are useful, but why are the developers on the hook for all of that compute? i
think we need to radically simplify the tools we use for provisioning compute
resources in a way that allows users to leverage all of their compute
resources and easily attach more on-demand. this echoes back to plan 9, which
has this idea of creating a virtual system out of many hosts.

we're just getting started, and there are a lot of challenges ahead of us. if
any of this sounds interesting or fun, maybe you want to get involved with our
nonsense. [1]

[0]: [https://developer.elementary.io/](https://developer.elementary.io/)

[1]: [https://heropunch.io/join.html](https://heropunch.io/join.html)

~~~
cutler
It's not about applications, it's about hardware. The corporate giants control
the mobile hardware.

~~~
xj9
read the website, bud. we're tackling that one too.

[https://www.heropunch.io/tomo/cybredeck/](https://www.heropunch.io/tomo/cybredeck/)

most of the action is happening in #heropunch:matrix.org i'm on the os side,
actually. @mlg:matrix.org is tackling the hardware. we're starting simple with
off the shelf parts, but if people like our shit we are def interested in
scaling up to make more advanced devices.

also, if you would like to back something that exists _right now_ there's the
librem 5

[https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/](https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/)

~~~
cutler
Amazing. I hope you pull it off.

------
BatFastard
This analysis is flawed in that it equates size of traffic with individual
user actions. Of course YouTube or another video heavy site like FB is going
to dominate when only size is considered.

A better metric would be a measurement of user initiated actions. Now sure how
to pull that off, but it would be a more accurate measure of how the net is
changing.

~~~
inglor
There are a lot of other video content websites that aren't YouTube and are
struggling to compete with the large players like YouTube and Netflix that can
put a box in every ISP in the world.

~~~
inglor
Seeing this got more attention than I assumed - at Peer5 (YC W2017) we attack
this by doing distributed video delivery.

It's very challenging to figure out how to do this in a way that benefits
users and improves user experience - we are very careful about being fair to
users on mobile connections - but I think that a distributed web platform is
the future and the only way we can combat the (lack of) net neutrality.

~~~
BatFastard
Just wait for the next season of Silicon Valley to solve it!

We already have a distributed internet, just not as distributed as we had
hoped for from a censorship perspective.

------
Pigo
I do miss when there was more web on the Web. I've been wondering if the
problem is that I don't search as much as I used to, or if there just isn't as
many fun sites to visit these days. There actually used to be hangouts on the
web outside of chat and social media, like bizarre, bangedup, or the old
4chan. It used to be a blast just to read through 4chanarchive, to see how
many times Pawn Stars got called during the last BattleToads thread. I used to
see anons in front of the Scientology building in Cincy on a regular basis. I
think that's why I enjoyed HWNDU so much.

~~~
Cthulhu_
You say "more web the Web", but your main example is that your bubble was
4chan; this article implies the exact same thing, but with the bubbles being
Google, Facebook and Amazon.

~~~
d3ckard
I think his point is more that Web used to be plenty of smaller bubbles, with
distinct culture and separate communities. Now we have only giant bubbles,
which get homogenised, as everything of that scale is. I share the sentiment.

~~~
Pigo
Yeah, you definitely articulated it better than I could have. But I mentioned
other sites besides just 4chan. Even IRC had networks full of active rooms,
with people from around the world. I just know there used to be more things
that I considered fun, and now I'm hard pressed to find such things. I'm not
going into Freenet or Tor just to find something that doesn't violate YouTube
or Facebook rules.

~~~
TallGuyShort
>> Even IRC had networks full of active rooms

>> I'm not going into Freenet

Well there's your answer.

~~~
Pigo
I know there's a freenet on IRC, but it seems to be people mostly talking
about programming. Which is handy sometimes. But the freenet I was actually
referencing was this project
[https://freenetproject.org](https://freenetproject.org)

~~~
TallGuyShort
Ooohhh and what I'm thinking of is actually freenode. My mistake :)

------
scrumper
Something looked odd about that upstream/downstream ranking table. Netflix
doesn't feature at all in the downstream bit. Why not? It's huge.

Then I noticed the small print under the table: it's peak time mobile usage in
Latin America.

------
phantarch
It feels like a centralized organizing service for web content (and by
extension, retail goods sold online) is an inevitability in today's internet.
If we switched google off, some other search engine would replace them simply
because people need to be able to find things on the internet in a way that
doesn't involve spending 30 minutes running through different "top hotlinks"
lists on obscure web pages.

To me, the real issue is that we have a service which people depend on like a
public utility (the internet) whose components are completely privatized and
uncontrolled (ISP's, search, social networking). It's not a bad thing that so
much of the traffic is being routed through certain pages. What makes this
unsettling is that those pages are undemocratically, privately controlled and
you've got next to no say in it because if you switch to a different private
alternative, who's to say we won't be in exactly the same situation 10 years
from now?

------
azangru
Here's a comment from this thread that I am having issues with:

> if you don't rank on google for whatever it is you're launching/publishing
> -- you don't exist.

And yet, Andre and his blog clearly 'exist' (i.e. can be accessed and read,
and perhaps even found in a search engine if search terms are relevant
enough). Medium blogs (or other indexable and searchable media) obviously
'exist'. Reddit and Hacker News definitely 'exist'.

Perhaps that comment refers to commercial viability of internet media, or to
their overall reach, but what do we, regular netizens, care about such
pecuniary stuff? It's up to executives to think about business models and
profitability; while it's up to us to use whatever suits us best on the
Internet.

~~~
thenomad
A quick Google tells me that Andre's currently at the #2 position on Google
(at least in my search bubble) for "The Web dying", #4 for "The Web is dying",
and so on. And of course he's at the top by a country mile for the exact
article title.

Hacker News regularly dominates Google queries, and Reddit does too.

I do agree that the statement that search engine rank is all misses a rather
significant element, that being virality / social reach.

If you can regularly gain enormous traffic from Reddit, Facebook, or even HN,
you don't necessarily need search engine rankings. If you can afford to pay
for ads, likewise.

It's if you're in none of those three camps that you might as well not exist
on the Web. Tree falls, forest, no-one to hear it, etc.

------
DanielBMarkham
This is a good article. Andre, don't pay attention to the usual HN cynicism.
You posed a good thesis and defended it. The web, as we have traditionally
defined it, is dying. Or dead. Yes, technically the protocols still work, but
the day-to-day structure and use of the web is completely different than
anybody expected or wanted it to be.

I think the key place where we went wrong is that we envisioned the web as a
utility to help expand each person's mind and communication abilities. Instead
it's morphing into a service where large groups of people can clan and waste
time around the virtual water cooler. It was supposed to be a brain super-
power. Instead it's a shared newsletter for angry mobs. It was supposed to
free us up to find out amazing things about the world around us. Instead it's
freed up the world around us to examine us in exquisite detail. We don't surf
the internet anymore. The internet surfs us.

And yes, that sounds a lot like hyperbole, but such is the nature of essays
like this. When I wrote "Technology is Heroin" (
[http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/02/technology-
is...](http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/02/technology-is-h.php) ) I
didn't mean it was literally heroin. I meant it was taking on the role that
dangerous drugs had in times past. The web isn't literally dying. It's
changing into something so different than what we wanted that it is for all
intents and purposes dead. Many folks are getting wrapped up in the semantics
of the discussion instead of the underlying meaning.

Looking forward to seeing more of your work!

~~~
staltz
Many thanks! I share your thoughts that tech is "heroin", in fact I've been
thinking that UX is killing us, it has become so good, that it's addicting.
This is true clinically too, as social media instant gratification releases
Dopamine and its usage is an activity comparable to gambling.

There is a way forward, though. Between the Old Web and GOOG-FB-AMZN's Trinet,
we can build something else: the New Web based on decentralized protocols like
IPFS, Dat, blockchains, secure-scuttlebutt, and others. That's what I'm
working on.

~~~
kowdermeister
_UX is killing us_

Like guns kill people, right?

~~~
knowaveragejoe
Guns do kill people, but it's obviously less extreme than that. Killing us in
a long term way by encouraging sedentary behavior, for example.

------
kuschku
It's especially interesting when you consider that Google has now, for the
first time, a fully globe-spanning own network that can interface with any ISP
directly, without relying on any intermediate ISP.

Google now has at least one product in the entire stack of the internet.

You can use a Google Pixel, and Google Chromebook, using Android and Chrome
OS, browsing with Chrome, while using Google Fi and Google Fiber, connected
directly to Google's backbone, visiting Google's Search, Maps, etc or other
sites hosted on Google's cloud, using Google's DNS server.

At this point you can use most of the functionality of the internet without
ever leaving the Google ecosystem.

And this is just going to be expanded.

~~~
georgeecollins
But also Google is so terrible at making successful physical products in a lot
of these spaces, its hard to say the products give them a lot of power in the
market. Google Pixel, Google Home, Google TV, do not represent large install
bases. If they want a walled garden, it can't be the size of a postage stamp.

~~~
brango
Not just physical devices. A lot of the Google stuff I have to use seems half-
baked, unfinished or with crappy UI/UX. And Google Cloud is complete shit
compared to AWS. I guess that's what happens when engineers lead a company.
They'll never have the customer focus that has made Amazon dominant.

~~~
saas_co_de
> Google Cloud is complete shit compared to AWS

that is a bold statement. care to elaborate?

~~~
brango
Well for a start you have to stop a GCE instance to add a new scope to it. So
if your devs want to use a new API and you're running a massive production K8s
cluster, you somehow have to stop your instances to add the new scope and
otherwise mess around. Of course if you know this in advance you can plan to
do blue-green deployments with K8s, but if you don't know that you won't
architect for it and it'll bite you.

Their authentication in general seems convoluted and complicated, their
console is slow and useless (why aren't all the search results preloaded? I
type in 'iam' and it takes several seconds for the results to appear). Oh, and
also alpha K8s clusters will terminate after 30 days whether you like it or
not (perhaps you're using a feature that's apparently stable but languishing
in alpha - I'm looking at you, cronjob). There's a lack of services in general
(an elasticache type service would be nice) and development seems to move
glacially.

Also, they seem to have multiple versions of SDKs, some with outstanding bugs
that were reported years ago but are just closed or there are comments in the
README that only critical bugs will be addressed. There's no indication which
SDK to use where there are several versions. Oh, and if you only want to use
one service in python, you have to install about 40 different packages because
splitting them up is too difficult.

We've had DFP buckets have their configs get screwed up so we mysteriously
couldn't access them, logs stopped being delivered, etc. Apparently Google
have such poor monitoring that we had to prompt them about these things which
took too longer to get resolved. I could go on...

~~~
stanley
An easy workaround for the scope issue is to set a custom service account when
creating the instance (template). You can then modify the IAM roles for that
service account without having to take the instance offline. Allow that
service account to have full access to all APIs on the instance level, then
fine-tune what's actually possible through IAM Roles.

------
logingone
I was thinking something related this morning, that one of the reasons uptime
is important to google, apart from the usual reasons, is because if they were
switched off for a day people would realise the extent to which they have so
many of their eggs in one basket, and a basket over which they have no
control. I would expect that would trigger some concern, and significant
numbers seeking alternatives, and building them.

------
dgudkov
Interesting perspective but it's missing one big elephant in the room: China.
China is a reason why the trinet will not happen globally. Baidu, TenCent,
Alibaba and similar services won't be replaced with Google, FB or Amazon.
Maybe for better.

~~~
ktta
The statistics are about Latin America.

------
zecg
I'd wager that FB is at its summit now and it'll become more obvious as more
young people who ignore it now continue to do so growing up and the people who
use it continue to die.

~~~
tambourine_man
Facebook is not the blue website. It's also Instagram, WhatsApp and whatever
they buy next. And those are not being ignored by young demographics. At all.

~~~
fosco
To add to this definition.

Facebook is a large conglomerate business that grows by purchasing young
successfull social networks in multiple areas of services.

~~~
shortoncash
It's effectively a kind of hedge fund that dabbles in internet and social-
specific assets. The more they diversify their portfolio and occasionally
branch out, the harder they will be to fully kill. This is the pattern with a
lot of companies. They just become portfolio asset managers with a specific
area of interest.

~~~
pascalxus
but we don't need to kill them to be successful. It's all about offering
alternatives and making the switch to alternatives easier. This keeps
platforms competing with each other, which keeps them in check.

~~~
shortoncash
Fair point, and I accept it. But, it's important to add that our task is much
harder because they get added "synergies" they get from the "connectedness" of
their portfolio.

------
top256
People used to say the same thing about Wintel until the Web appeared.

Not to say his points are wrong just that it lacks some historical
perspective.

IMHO, these companies are on the verge of becoming irrelevant actually.

~~~
kenning
what would replace them?

~~~
deevolution
Decentralized crypto versions perhaps?

------
b1daly
Some very interesting points made in OP and comments.

I’ll add one about user experience. Obviously the big web corporations benefit
from the natural advantages of scale.

But an overlooked aspect of what makes these platforms sticky is that they
all, including Apple, work very hard at making their products easy to use. And
these are complex systems (I find Apple’s attempt at maintaining a global user
state baffling, just from a user point of view, working with such an unwieldy
system must be insane.)

Though this is an old problem, I think it remains: product developers and
engineers vastly over estimate a potential users willingness/ability to learn
a new system.

This is a “threshold “ problem, with a binary outcome. If your service is
“good enough “ you might get some traction. But if you don’t hit that
threshold of usability, your efforts are for naught.

The challenge is that usability is often an optimization problem, where one
might be inclined to see how the MVP does, before investing the extensive
resources in improving user experience. It’s also a big advantage to already
have a lot of users, upon which a company can test and iterate.

My main point is that the general public has not become more technically
skilled. On the contrary, all this effort by Google-Facebook—Amazon is focused
on making these services drop dead easy to use.

Even technically skilled people have limits on how much they can invest in
using alternative, less polished systems.

------
oldpond
The web died the minute the first advertiser showed up.

~~~
GuB-42
I did a quick research

\- The web was invented in 1989

\- It became public in 1991

\- The first ad banner appeared in 1994

\- The first central ad server appeared in 1995

Interestingly ads roughly coincides with the "eternal september", the time
when the internet really became public. It means that the greater web, the one
that is accessible to all people was born with ads.

And BTW, I wouldn't trade todays internet for what we had in the 90s. Yes, it
was cleaner back then, ye didn't have to worry too much about ads, privacy,
all that stuff and the SNR was much higher but it doesn't make up for the
sheer amount of information that is available now backed by search engines
that are borderline psychic.

~~~
ori_b
I would trade. When it comes to searching for things in Google, it feels like
the spammers won; there's just not much there that's both relevant and not
trying to sell me something.

There's more information, but it's much harder to find anything, and outside
of small communities, everyone writing interesting things has either stopped
or has happily stepped into a walled garden and become undiscoverable.

------
d3ckard
I believe this could be easily solved with a simple regulation - mandatory
50/50 sharing of downstream and upstream on customer level.

How Web is supposed to be decentralized if the means of accessing it directly
support centralization? You will always prefer external services if your own
get capped pretty easily. You cannot have truly distributed web if access
points are basically one-way connections.

------
pmlnr
Great article, one problem: it's yet another lament. Any ideas how to
fix/prevent it?

Maybe we should get our wifi routers into a mesh network. Maybe we should
start hosting our own stuff, or make simple tools for this, like YunoHost,
iRedMail, etc. But please, stop writing articles about how bad it is.

"I get things are bad. But what are we doing to fix it?" — Casey Newton
(Tomorrowland, 2015)

~~~
pascalxus
This is the ideal solution: Tim Berner Lee's (the creator of the internet).
PODS let you own your own data and switch from social network to social
networks as easily as changing your socks.

[https://www.digitaltrends.com/web/ways-to-decentralize-
the-w...](https://www.digitaltrends.com/web/ways-to-decentralize-the-web/)

~~~
inimino
Inventor of the Web, not the Internet.

However, many of his later ideas, like the Semantic Web, have not taken off.
“Own your data” is not a new idea, but it isn’t happening. Most people don’t
care. It takes more than a famous name to change that.

------
Yetanfou
Out of those three, I only use Google. I still consider the 'net - and I do
mean the internet, not 'the web' as that is but a part of the constellation -
to be a useful resource with near-unlimited potential. I shun Facebook like
the plague and Amazon is not on my radar in any way, due in part to the fact
that I'm not in north-America while Amazon is still mostly targeted at that
part of the world. As such any thought of these three having fundamentally
transformed the web falls flat for me as they just simply failed to do so in
my world. I don't deny that these companies - especially Facebook - have an
unhealthy amount of influence over many people's outlook on the world around
them and that they have the potential to cause great damage - again pointing
at Facebook as the main risk factor due to their rather obvious lack of
political neutrality - but for now I just see them as big companies intent on
carving out as much of the web as they can.

------
kharms
The most interesting tidbit for me was that Apple is the third largest
ecommerce company. Very impressive.

------
user15128
i think this is only one possible outcome. sure it makes sense but imho this
can not happen over night and that is where this theory breaks.

they cant force "their web" upon the rest of the world. there will _always_ be
some form of web where one can be anonymous, where you can run your own server
without any hardware from "them", using standard-protocols.

maybe the business-people and most poeple who dont care about their privacy
will use everything they get thrown from "them". that does not mean the web is
dead, it is only that the "mainstream" will live in a separate web. maybe this
(their) web will be much bigger than our web. even then, the cool kids will
switch to the cool punky web again :D

of course everything is just reading tea leaves..

~~~
sushisource
I think you're totally right. An analogy is the stuff around politicians
trying to "ban encryption" all the while not understanding that you can't ban
an idea (not meaningfully).

So, yeah, maybe 10 years from now things do like almost entirely like the
article predicts, but for most consumers that probably really isn't a problem
at all except in some theoretical ethical/privacy sense.

For the people who really do care, they'll just go make their own custom shit
like you describe.

------
pdonis
I can't assess what this article is saying without knowing the definition of
"traffic" that is being used. Is "traffic" the amount of data transferred
(i.e., megabytes, gigabytes, whatever)? Is it the number of requests?
Something else?

------
fiatjaf
How come the number of websites is increasing if the web is dying? How are
these websites getting their attention?

Maybe smaller websites are getting less absolute visits than in 2010, but even
if that was true, you should say that the web was dying in the 90's.

It's also difficult to believe the web will stop working, or that people will
stop making websites just because more people are browsing just on the
"trinet" (remember, 20 years ago people already wrote websites, even if they
would expect only 3 visits per month). Would Facebook, Google and Amazon come
up with a plan to stop ISPs from serving other domains? Why would they do
that?

~~~
TuringTest
_> It's also difficult to believe the web will stop working, or that people
will stop making websites just because more people are browsing just on the
"trinet"_

Is it? Lots of small companies and social groups rely on having a Facebook
page as their primary way of contact and advertisement, where they would have
created a web page of their own in the past.

~~~
dictum
I realized something was wrong when many local web design/development shops
started redirecting their domains to Facebook profile pages. Never thought I'd
miss outdated Flash-only sites.

Of course, the saying about the cobbler's children still applies.

------
NedIsakoff
WTF? Baidu? QQ? Weibo?

~~~
neolefty
The article draws its data from South America.

The fact that the author doesn't see any Chinese companies is an illustration
of fragmentation.

 _However_ , I think it's worth noting that each of these fragmented sub-nets
are have more traffic and servers than the global Internet did even a few
years ago (how many? I'm not sure).

------
immortalx
AOL making a comeback! But hey, now we can choose between 3 options.

~~~
659087
AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy

------
kcoul
95 theses on this topic:
[http://95theses.co.uk/?page_id=21](http://95theses.co.uk/?page_id=21)
Background: [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/29/why-we-
ne...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/29/why-we-need-a-21st-
century-martin-luther-to-challenge-church-of-technology-95-theses)

------
betoharres
Amazon did not, they are just starting here in Brazil, which is a huge player
in the internet, not the biggest or the best, but my country is fucking huge
and no one knows about amazon, so this is false. Google and facebook? 200%
sure they changed the web here. This text and opinions are from people from
1st world castle countries, not the real world

------
ireallydonot
Google, facebook are really forming our privacy to be sold to advertisers.
They are biggest privacy violators.

------
taherchhabra
So what can we do now in a realistic way(don't tell me to completely stop
using the trio) ?

------
Animats
At what point will Google decide that Chrome only needs to access their own
assets?

------
zengid
_> On the Trinet, if you are permanently banned from GOOG or FB, you would
have no alternative. You could even be restricted from creating a new account.
_

A punishment worse than jail in the New World Order.

------
direengineer
So, how does the web go from being a benevolent dictatorship to something more
democratic, when the entire kingdom is busy playing with shiny new toys?

------
EGreg
_" It looks like nothing changed since 2014, but GOOG and FB now have direct
influence over 70%+ of internet traffic."_

The web needs to really become decentralized. Even Tim Berners-Lee has said it
[1]. He has started a project to re-decentralize it called Solid [2].

Email was decentralized but now it's become super centralized with GMail etc.
And look at how easy it is for the NSA to vacuum all that up from one spot.

Wordpress powers 20% of the decentralized web. Because it's a free, open-
source piece of software with a plugin ecosystem that runs on a popular
runtime - PHP. We need stuff like that, but for things like SOCIAL MEDIA.
Nothing currently exists that can rival facebook, google+ etc.

I believe that the software can change the internet's topology. Right now all
signals go through giant centralized server farms. Consider how people use
Google Docs for collaboration Facebook / Slack for conversation or Dropbox for
their files. The default is to immediately connect to "the cloud" which is in
reality some company's server farm. AWS just capitalized on this trend and
made it easier.

In fact, you can do all of it LOCALLY by default. There's no reason that bits
need to go through Google's servers for a classroom to collaborate on a
document, or for an African village to plan a community dinner. Except one:
lack of open source software that can run locally, and rival Facebook, Google
etc. in ease of use.

We are building that software and started around 2011. My company Qbix [3]
wants to decentralize not just the web, but also identity [4], data [5] and
social networking [6]. We look to partner with companies who want to
decentralize cellphone signals (like gotenna) and energy generation (like
solar panels) so human networking in the future has a LOT more local options
to utilize before ever jumping onto the public internet.

PS: Whenever I post this topic, with links to back it up, I get downvoted
heavily. But I never get any explanation why. If you are an HN member who
disagrees with this thesis, first of all that's not enough reason for a
downvote. And secondly, I WOULD LIKE TO KNOW WHY you feel so strongly against
what I'm saying here: that the web, cellphone signals and energy generation
should be decentralized. Contribute constructively to the conversation, and
explain what alternatives do you think are better. Are you so ferventlu
against developing software to run on local networks as to militate against
comments advocating it? Am I breaking some HN rule by linking to our work that
we passionately believe in and spend most of our time on? _What are the words
behind your downvote?_

1\.
[https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_berners_lee_on_the_next_web](https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_berners_lee_on_the_next_web)

2\. [https://solid.mit.edu](https://solid.mit.edu)

3\. [https://qbix.com](https://qbix.com)

4\. [https://github.com/Qbix/auth](https://github.com/Qbix/auth)

5\.
[https://github.com/Qbix/architecture/wiki/Internet-2.0](https://github.com/Qbix/architecture/wiki/Internet-2.0)

6\. [https://qbix.com/platform](https://qbix.com/platform)

~~~
digi_owl
The problem not a technical one, it is a social/economic/political one.

It is how the big players gets to dictate policy virtually unchecked.

Email, on the protocol level, is still decentralized. But Google and a few
other big players have via their spam filters dictated how every email server
on the planet is to behave, or else.

And we are seeing similar things happening with web servers and browsers, just
look at the railroading the W3C DRM spec got.

~~~
EGreg
W3C DRM happened because of Tim Berners-Lee himself. And I agree that, since
W3C is a central point, it is the target for attacking. But it's possible to
decentralize things in a way that stays decentralized, for LOCAL
communications.

Email spam is only a problem across the global internet. Not within local
networks. Same goes for other types of communications.

Human speech for example has remained peer to peer even as radio was invented
:)

I really think the problem is a technical one. The social and political
outcomes are almost inevitable, just like the two party system is a nearly
inevitable outcome of the first-past-the-post ballot.

Lots of paradigms changed as technologies were introduced. The phone, radio,
the printing press etc. Technology has a great impact on society.

------
agumonkey
A few things about "the" web and life in general.

Google has gone from a welcomed tool (indexing a priori data) to telling what
should be the data (ranking). It switched naturally and logically so, but it's
a problem IMO.

Lastly, when a domain becomes a social organ, everything changes. It has to be
regulated, will cause tension, economic impact ..

~~~
andrewla
There were search engines before Google. Google was an improvement _because_
of their ranking, not despite it.

~~~
agumonkey
Yes, but at what point the ranker becomes the ruler. It's an implicit shift
and we should be aware of it.

------
Nickersf
This will be horrible for freelancers and people who want to learn web
development. There will be no incentive for those people as the globalist mega
tech corps create a boring homogeneous internet.

Unless of course we all fight back.

------
zhuzhu
if you are right, what about AWS, google cloud and Azure?

~~~
knowaveragejoe
Amazon/AWS is mentioned as one of the big three in the article, since they're
far and away one of the largest. That said, if it weren't them, it'd be
someone else.

------
real-hacker
2 words. Monopoly. Breakup.

The question is, why is it not happening?

------
platz
stratechery is a better source for this kind of analysis

------
gedrap
> GOOG, FB, AMZN

A tiny nitpick, but what's with the trend of using stock symbols in non-
financial context? GOOGL isn't much shorter than Google, same with AMZN and
Amazon. It just looks... annoyingly out of place.

Regarding the article itself, the topic of Facebook/Amazon/Google domination
is much spoken and written about and this post doesn't really add much new.
This issue is well known for a quite a long time, especially in the HN and
similar social circles. What most of the posts are missing is how do we escape
this? But that might be too late.

~~~
zukzuk
A not-so-subtle way of pointing out that these are all profit-seeking
companies? A lot like how people used to write Micro$oft, back when Bill Gates
was the nerds' devil. We're all sophisticated financially-aware grown ups now,
so we've moved on to ticker symbols, as a way of signalling our enlightenment.

~~~
bitwize
Just the opposite. It actually started in the 90s during the dotcom mania when
_what a company was doing_ , for good or ill, became eclipsed by _how much
money its stock could make the reader base_. Ostensible tech sites turned into
_The Wall Street Journal_. During the early 90s it was "Microsoft announces a
new version of Windows. Here are the features you can look forward to (or
dread)!" The late 90s turned more toward "Microsoft (MSFT) experienced a stock
price jump when it announced a new version of Windows."

------
cisanti
You can do your part as a developer and tell managers about the dangers of
AMP. It is a stupid idea technically (we have HTML, you can build a slim
sites, Google can rank them higher) and stupid business wise by giving away
the control, branding, options.

I have convinced one project manager to not implement AMP and will continue to
try in the future. Please do your part by spreading word of the dangers of
GOOG and FB.

~~~
golergka
Great idea from the user's standpoint though. While many publishers can,
technically, build slim sites, almost none do.

~~~
acdha
Depends on the user – if they like fast page views, AMP's 100KB of render-
blocking JavaScript is a problem, and if they care about sharing the fact that
it makes the real URL hard to get is also annoying. If they like not being
phished, AMP is really bad since it leads a lot of people to believe they're
reading something Google has vouched for.

This is the inevitable conflict from Google putting their marketing needs
ahead of the user experience. If they used site performance as the rating
metric, AMP would just be one option for better performance but since the goal
was to keep traffic on google.com we're stuck with a worse experience because
that's better for Google.

~~~
nobleach
I'm really concerned with this current crop of "have to please Google" that is
become so prevalent by SEO. The current trend is one of reactionary fear. "We
have a great website... it would be a shame for its ranking to slip". I can't
say that Google is actively, passively, or even part and parcel to promoting
that fear. Unfortunately, the biggest reason I see AMP being adopted by many,
has nothing to do with it being faster or a better experience. It has
everything to do with pressure by Google. (and a belief that it'll improve
search ranking)

~~~
acdha
Google is most definitely actively encouraging that. Right now the proposition
is that you either use AMP and let Google host your pages on their server or
your competitors' content will appear above your content on search results
pages. The fact that they're technically not changing the search ranking isn't
significant as long as the prominent carousel which appears first is
restricted to hosted AMP content.

------
inglor
Andre, you're a swell developer and running into you in open source repos and
here has always been educational. I would love reading what you write a lot
more if there was less click-bait and sensationalism.

This problem (the fact Google has a large majority in web browser and mobile
device sales) is very concerning to me - the data is interesting and the
points are relevant but I have a very hard time reading past titles like "the
web is dying". I hope you read this with the intended respectful tone I wrote
it in.

~~~
staltz
Hi, thanks for appreciating some of my work.

Click bait titles have a bad reputation because they either lie or don't go
in-depth into the topic. That's not the case here. I wrote with depth and
research, and the body of the article is truthful to the title. I believe the
title is, although sensationally shocking, true.

~~~
kowdermeister
Not remotely true, the web isn't dying, it's changing, but that's less
clickbaity :) For such a hard claim you have to specify what do you exactly
mean by "the web".

 _" The original vision for the Web according to its creator, Tim Berners-Lee,
was a space with multilateral publishing and consumption of information. It
was a peer-to-peer vision with no dependency on a single party."_

This web is still alive and well, nobody stops you from grabbing a domain name
and launch anything you wish. Tim was a bit naive that he assumed profit
seeking won't mess with his creation.

The underlying protocol is still the same as it was 20 years ago. With
3,885,567,619 internet users this dying platform is the best thing in
computing we had so far. Of course it's changing, but the web is much larger
than GOOG, FB, AMZN.

Yo are ignoring the long tail and that tail is very long.

~~~
TheRealDunkirk
And, yet, network effects being what they are, how does anyone with an
independent thought rise to visibility, outside of someone else's platform,
when the "web" completely dominated by 100 web properties?

~~~
gnaritas
That's a different question and has nothing to do with the web dying, which it
isn't. The freedom to put your voice out there has never included the right to
be heard or popular. You have more ability today to be heard than ever before,
but you're one of billions, it's not supposed to be easy.

~~~
TremendousJudge
if fb and google don't like you, you can't put your voice out there if they
control everything

~~~
gnaritas
They don't control everything, they never have, and they never will.

------
alexasmyths
Should note: much of the web is now 'mobile' and on mobile people use apps
considerably more often.

So - while possibly not 'the web' as in 'browser' \- it's arguably 'the web'
nevertheless because almost all these apps depend on a great deal of http-ish
interactivity etc...

Also - though it's hard to say how much change there has been on the desktop -
remember that people do use desktop apps for socially and webby oriented
reasons etc..

Imagine: Spotify App vs. Spotify Web, Gmail vs. local client - etc. etc..

This is quite a demarcation.

Finally, one might consider also that 'web experiences' have expanded.

We may not be uses 'other things' less, rather, FB is a new experience that is
taking up addition time allocated to the web.

So - we had 'the web' \- now we have 'the web + FB web'.

But great article, thanks for that.

------
featherverse
The web isn't dying. The web isn't going to die. The day to day, month to
month, or even year to year web trends are not indicative of the future of the
web.

The irony here is that if anything were going to kill the web, it would be
stupid articles like this one. Thankfully, the internet is bigger than all of
the short-sighted johnny-come-latelys in the world.

Frankly, if you weren't using the web before CSS, then you shouldn't be
wasting people's time with your predictions.

------
generalpf
“Amplified Mobile Pages”?

~~~
Aissen
Wrong post ?
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15583552](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15583552)

------
gnaritas
> This specific part (that dominant companies can ban individuals with no
> recourse) shouldn't be tolerated.

Freedom shouldn't be tolerated, really? We should force private companies in
the private market to serve you because why?

~~~
psyc
Freedom for 800-ton corporate gorillas shouldn't be privileged over the
freedom of the average individual. And the word "freedom" is empty
sloganeering if you pretend it's separate from power.

~~~
gnaritas
Not offering you their services isn't restricting your freedom. Your freedoms
don't include a right to other people's services against their will.

~~~
Analemma_
> Not offering you their services isn't restricting your freedom.

It is if you have a monopoly.

>Your freedoms don't include a right to other people's services against their
will.

They do if you have a monopoly.

~~~
gnaritas
They don't have monopolies so your counter is irrelevant.

~~~
sordidasset
But what if they do in the future? Suppose the author is right and ISPs don't
support any packets/protocols other than FB, GOOG, and AMZN.

Are you arguing that in sum total, humanity is better off allowing private
organizations to control communications in order to adhere to free market
principles than the reverse?

~~~
gnaritas
No, I'm arguing future crime isn't a thing. You don't get to punish people
because they "might".

------
thesmallestcat
An essay about how the web is dying that leads with a click-bait title? Is
this satire?

------
peterwwillis
Hellooooo hyperbole.

Until all peering agreements become null and void, you can always create
another ISP to compete in a free market. Sure, it's expensive and complicated
to bury fiber, and radio spectrum is limited. But it's not technical or
logistical difficulty that keeps people restricted to specific providers. It's
usually political, and incumbents always have a huge upper hand.

The reason OSPs like AOL became so ubiquitous in the 90s was _they made
everything easier_ , and people were willing to pay for that, even if it
effectively locked you into a 'smaller internet'. It still provided you
internet access because that by itself was still a value-add. Will ISPs & OSPs
charge you differently to access different content? Of course, because they
know their customers don't give a shit about some romantic vision of
unrestricted peering agreements.

There's one big elephant in the room that nobody talks about in discussions
like this: Content. Whoever controls the Content gets to swing a multi-Billion
dollar dick around, and they keep a hundred-Billion dollar advertising dick on
a leash. Most people are obsessed with media & entertainment, a 700-Billion
dollar industry, and the rest is cat memes and bargain bin chinese vacuum
cleaners.

The leading lights of the web barely break the budget of a fraction of M&E.
They are constantly dogging at each other because the web industry knows that
without content, they have no leverage. Which is why Amazon & Netflix make
their own content (though a very small amount, and not very valuable). If
Google lost its advertising catbird seat, it would die screaming (almost all
of its money comes from ads). And you can't sell ads if you can't get access
to eyeballs or earholes.

------
mswift42
I'd like submissions with clickbait headlines to get deleted instantly.

If your post needs clickbaity embellishments it's probably not worth my time
to read it, if it doesn't need any, the post should be able to reach frontpage
without them.

