The Internet Is Dead. Long Live The Internet.

The overall frequency of Internet usage is relatively steady these days. But something about that usage is changing: Google, Facebook, and Amazon “now have direct influence over 70%+ of internet traffic.”

What is direct influence? Search traffic and social media links are what sends people to the sites they use that aren’t actually one of those three giants. So increasingly, the algorithms and mechanisms used to direct people around the internet are dictated by corporations with an interest in how we are using the web.

And the “tech giants” are in open competition with each other (plus some less-open kinds of competition), and in many cases able to block cross-traffic as they see fit.

The author of this semi-alarmist piece, André Staltz, sees the future of the internet as a “trinet” completely reliant upon and owned by this corporate trifecta. Staltz’s prediction is that even the physical infrastructure of the web, such as the underwater cables that connect parts of the world, will become completely owned by those three companies. 

The original dreams that supposedly underpinned our cyber-era — freedom of information, peer-to-peer decentralized exchange — will not be possible in the future he envisions.