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Monetization and Monopolies: How the Internet You Loved Died
Or Why Tech Monopolies Are Actually Good For Society. A defence of “Big Tech” on the principles of progress. Hold on! Stow the pitchforks! Hear me out...
Today, in 2024, if you’re picturing someone sitting down at a desktop computer or a macbook, actually navigating to Google’s homepage, then typing in a generically-phrased search term in order to discover websites full of other users like themselves with an interest in a given niche… do I even need to mock this set up? But their model is at odds with the open internet Google created, their content is richer and better tailored for newer platforms, they compete for internal corporate resources and external ad spend…it’s all a zero sum game in the end. There’s a tremendous irony that online gripers can be found writing repeatedly over the past decade about the sad lack of a modern analog to Bell Labs(itself obviously unsustainable once its parent company was broken up in the early 1980s) —
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