
The Internet's Gilded Age - jboynyc
http://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2017-03/gilding.html
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okket
The Author (Geoff Huston) also presented this thesis in a talk during APRICOT
2017, highly recommended to watch:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FI7rRfNI8u4&t=46m17s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FI7rRfNI8u4&t=46m17s)

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Decade
My perspective is different, as a resident of San Francisco, while Huston is a
scientist in Australia. Though, I think he is essentially right.

These new Internet businesses employ fewer people than the industries that
they displace, but these are American jobs they are creating. For
(unspecified) reasons the US has a high amount of entrepreneurship, so that a
web site running from a desktop in a dorm room can shortly become an
international power. The top 5 or so most valuable companies in the world are
all American.

When we want a list of the gilded age Internet companies, they are all
American. This makes regulation a bit tricky. Germany is trying to regulate
Google; where is the German Google? The only competitors are in China and
Russia, where the government outright banned Google and Facebook.

This is also a challenge for America. It’s better for us for the jobs to be
American, but I don’t want to kill the entrepreneurship. Hillary Clinton told
the coal miners to go back to school and reenter the work force with new jobs.
They revolted and voted for Donald Trump.

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NotSammyHagar
There are large, multinational companies not in the us, maybe they aren't in
the top 5 in market cap, perhaps because a bunch of them are state owned (like
the forthcoming saudi 'public company' oil company. It will be up there, but I
don't see them being listed for their desired 2 trillion market cap.

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contingencies
So basically the head of APNIC is saying "we have a problem: private control
of public services". A familiar issue.

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wmf
If CDNs are so powerful I wonder why they're paying broadband ISPs instead of
vice versa.

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throwaway000002
To clarify, the author uses CDNs to indicate the content silos that are goog,
appl, amzn, fb, etc., which is not traditional usage.

But in light of this, I see him as essentially correct. Any one of them could
demand payment from ISPs for their content (their endusers would revolt
otherwise). The new willingness to dismantle "net neutrality" does not hurt
any of them, only startups. And, as for the carriers, cablecos, telcos, etc,
their window of monopoly is over, they should have invested in content when
they had the chance.

~~~
throwaway000002
Seriously, if my ISP was forced to have no Gmail tomorrow, I'd flip out, and
change ISPs (thankfully I have that option).

~~~
pjmlp
Which is why even though I use gmail as an aggregator of my email accounts,
that isn't my actual main email, as they are older than Google.

