
The future belongs to Google and Facebook - rukshn
https://medium.com/refresh-magazine/here-is-why-the-future-belongs-to-facebook-and-google-b30b33424f98
======
hardwaresofton
Google and Facebook are conglomerates/oligopolists/burgeoning monopolies. My
simplistic belief is that it's in the best interest of any single company to
become a monopoly, for the simple reason that the easiest way to making the
maximum amount of profit is to be the only player in the market. Yes, it's
possible for multiple players to work off each other in order to expand a
market and create a bigger pie, but that's quite a macro view that I don't
think any of the players take, without nudges from external entities.

That said, the future thankfully does NOT belong to Facebook (not quite sure
about Google) -- the younger generation is already over it, and are fleeing to
newer more interesting/less controlling apps. As facebook continues to acquire
the newer apps, people will continue fleeing to new things (as facebook almost
inevitably changes the apps it takes over into something the people will
dislike for the same reason they don't like facebook). If children are our
future, facebook is going to have to do a better job of tricking them into
liking facebook.

Also, the younger generation is starting to recognize the negative effects of
social media usage, and I think that percentage of people is going to grow in
the future (the alternative being everyone just starts to take it as normal).
At some point, privacy will be a thing people realize they want, the question
is will it be too late at that point.

Google's domination of email and search is unfortunate and much harder to
dethrone/replace -- they're trying to be the silent (but definitely not
sleeping) backbone of the internet, and they're succeeding. Even still,
projects like protonmail ([https://protonmail.com/](https://protonmail.com/))
and duckduckgo ([https://duckduckgo.com/](https://duckduckgo.com/)) continue
to ofer alternatives.

There's a silver lining to the coming insanity around net neutrality from the
FCC -- if the internet as it exists today becomes so shitty/expensive to use,
maybe decentralized internet approaches will take off, and the dream of a
fully mesh-networked internet will be a reality. IPV6 is here, ever-improving
algorithms, standards, and antennae are here. What's stopping us?

