One thing I've grown concerned about, after watching the Twitter migration fizzle out, is we can imitate the old internet on a small scale, but on a large scale it just doesn't work. For Twitter specifically, the outcome was even worse, many users just migrated to other more centralized services or existing monopolies (like Instagram.)
Users are too used to being able to instantly stream 4k HDR 60fps. They are too used to limited amounts of spam. They are too used to having most non-agreeable content filtered. All of this stuff that big tech delivered now is replicate-able at the cost of tens of billions of dollars. The only business model that can pay for that is owning a giant ad platform.
Thinking about all of the issues the EU has had enforcing things like GDPR, which big tech companies largely haven't followed for years or straight up lied to their customers about, along with a possible failure of the DMA now due to tariffs.. and yet on the other side of the Atlantic, the US utterly failed to ban or control Tiktok. Endless announcements of upcoming deals that were either lies (Oracle protecting American's data) or postponements.
Meanwhile, all of the spam, hacking, bots, and DDoS attacks persist and grow, along with layer upon layer of (probably intentionally) poorly written and often conflicting legislation across multiple jurisdictions have truly made it impossible for the internet as it was designed and meant to exist to continue. (Sure you can just set up a basic web forum like you could do 20 years ago, not use Cloudflare, not host it at a major datacenter, and ignore all of the GDPR and age verification laws, but good luck. Hell, it doesn't even sound like it's really legal to run a Mastodon server anymore.)
One small hope is that if internet companies follow any pattern we've seen in other industries, when the growth ends, the managers will switch to tearing the conglomerates apart in to pieces and selling them off. One day CloudFlare might be split in to 30 pieces, along with Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon. But it could be a while.
One thing I've grown concerned about, after watching the Twitter migration fizzle out, is we can imitate the old internet on a small scale, but on a large scale it just doesn't work. For Twitter specifically, the outcome was even worse, many users just migrated to other more centralized services or existing monopolies (like Instagram.)
Users are too used to being able to instantly stream 4k HDR 60fps. They are too used to limited amounts of spam. They are too used to having most non-agreeable content filtered. All of this stuff that big tech delivered now is replicate-able at the cost of tens of billions of dollars. The only business model that can pay for that is owning a giant ad platform.
Thinking about all of the issues the EU has had enforcing things like GDPR, which big tech companies largely haven't followed for years or straight up lied to their customers about, along with a possible failure of the DMA now due to tariffs.. and yet on the other side of the Atlantic, the US utterly failed to ban or control Tiktok. Endless announcements of upcoming deals that were either lies (Oracle protecting American's data) or postponements.
Meanwhile, all of the spam, hacking, bots, and DDoS attacks persist and grow, along with layer upon layer of (probably intentionally) poorly written and often conflicting legislation across multiple jurisdictions have truly made it impossible for the internet as it was designed and meant to exist to continue. (Sure you can just set up a basic web forum like you could do 20 years ago, not use Cloudflare, not host it at a major datacenter, and ignore all of the GDPR and age verification laws, but good luck. Hell, it doesn't even sound like it's really legal to run a Mastodon server anymore.)
One small hope is that if internet companies follow any pattern we've seen in other industries, when the growth ends, the managers will switch to tearing the conglomerates apart in to pieces and selling them off. One day CloudFlare might be split in to 30 pieces, along with Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon. But it could be a while.