A lot of the comments here seem to be quibbling. The analysis/argument isn't exactly how you/I would have phrased it.<p>But beyond the details, I think it's hard to argue with the main point. The web is much more of a large corporation's playground today, far more. That means new things will be built in a different, more giant friendly way. The part of that that worries me most is the cultural part, more than the economic side.<p>My favourite example is wikipedia. If we didn't already have wikipedia, I don't think we'd be likely to get one on today's web. The culture is just far too corporate for wikipedia to be the end result.<p>Youtube's another sort of example. Democratic media! A new culture factory!...<p>Youtubes play by the rules these days. Copyright.. business friendly policy, erring on the side of restriction. It's just more manageable. Nudity? Why annoy politicians <i>and</i> advertisers? Just give us the purple <i>hills</i> version. Violence? Do what TV does. Revolution? Maybe, yes. Sure. Up the arab spring! Wait.. no. actually, wait. Hold on, not in america. Look.., no just means not here. Political ads, eh...? How about you leave us out of this.<p>They are no longer interested in the unfolding and unpredictable consequences of their inventions. Facebook is the world's news stand & coffee house. Youtube's regional political radio, newsletters & party magazine. They do not want this job, so they're pretending it isn't they're job. Pretending they won't have to draw lines between truth and lies, free speech and hate speech, laws and despotism.<p>The fear driven incumbent mentality.<p>It's a pity we didn't get more wikipedia's back when the gettin was good. I would have preferred to see a giant wikipedia end up with the fake news problem (which I think these two giants almost created themselves).
As the article points out, The power google is quite scary. The problem is, we depend on it for too many things. I think the solution is to diversify our usage of it. Perhaps, use a different email service, or start using Bing. Find, something else to replace google docs. By diversifying, we reduce our risk.<p>Same for facebook, perhaps start using a different social network and messaging apps. Sure, no one will see my posts, that is until I send them a good old fashion link, to a photo of my cute daughter.<p>we need those "PODS" from Tim Burner's Lee's <a href="https://www.digitaltrends.com/web/ways-to-decentralize-the-web/" rel="nofollow">https://www.digitaltrends.com/web/ways-to-decentralize-the-w...</a><p>In this model, all your data belongs to you. Any social network you allow or visit can make use of the data, but it all still belongs to you. And you'll be able to switch from Social network to social network or document provider(docs, spredsheets software) as easily as changing your socks.<p>And we don't have to completely replace GOOG and FB, we should have to offer alternatives and reduce the cost of switching - That's the key to preventing these services from turning Evil.<p>Are there any social networks out there currently that do this yet?
This analysis is flawed in that it equates size of traffic with individual user actions. Of course YouTube or another video heavy site like FB is going to dominate when only size is considered.<p>A better metric would be a measurement of user initiated actions. Now sure how to pull that off, but it would be a more accurate measure of how the net is changing.
I do miss when there was more web on the Web. I've been wondering if the problem is that I don't search as much as I used to, or if there just isn't as many fun sites to visit these days. There actually used to be hangouts on the web outside of chat and social media, like bizarre, bangedup, or the old 4chan. It used to be a blast just to read through 4chanarchive, to see how many times Pawn Stars got called during the last BattleToads thread. I used to see anons in front of the Scientology building in Cincy on a regular basis. I think that's why I enjoyed HWNDU so much.
Something looked odd about that upstream/downstream ranking table. Netflix doesn't feature at all in the downstream bit. Why not? It's huge.<p>Then I noticed the small print under the table: it's peak time mobile usage in Latin America.
It feels like a centralized organizing service for web content (and by extension, retail goods sold online) is an inevitability in today's internet. If we switched google off, some other search engine would replace them simply because people need to be able to find things on the internet in a way that doesn't involve spending 30 minutes running through different "top hotlinks" lists on obscure web pages.<p>To me, the real issue is that we have a service which people depend on like a public utility (the internet) whose components are completely privatized and uncontrolled (ISP's, search, social networking). It's not a bad thing that so much of the traffic is being routed through certain pages. What makes this unsettling is that those pages are undemocratically, privately controlled and you've got next to no say in it because if you switch to a different private alternative, who's to say we won't be in exactly the same situation 10 years from now?
Here's a comment from this thread that I am having issues with:<p>> if you don't rank on google for whatever it is you're launching/publishing -- you don't exist.<p>And yet, Andre and his blog clearly 'exist' (i.e. can be accessed and read, and perhaps even found in a search engine if search terms are relevant enough). Medium blogs (or other indexable and searchable media) obviously 'exist'. Reddit and Hacker News definitely 'exist'.<p>Perhaps that comment refers to commercial viability of internet media, or to their overall reach, but what do we, regular netizens, care about such pecuniary stuff? It's up to executives to think about business models and profitability; while it's up to us to use whatever suits us best on the Internet.
This is a good article. Andre, don't pay attention to the usual HN cynicism. You posed a good thesis and defended it. The web, as we have traditionally defined it, is dying. Or dead. Yes, technically the protocols still work, but the day-to-day structure and use of the web is completely different than anybody expected or wanted it to be.<p>I think the key place where we went wrong is that we envisioned the web as a utility to help expand each person's mind and communication abilities. Instead it's morphing into a service where large groups of people can clan and waste time around the virtual water cooler. It was supposed to be a brain super-power. Instead it's a shared newsletter for angry mobs. It was supposed to free us up to find out amazing things about the world around us. Instead it's freed up the world around us to examine us in exquisite detail. We don't surf the internet anymore. The internet surfs us.<p>And yes, that sounds a lot like hyperbole, but such is the nature of essays like this. When I wrote "Technology is Heroin" ( <a href="http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/02/technology-is-h.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/02/technology-is...</a> ) I didn't mean it was literally heroin. I meant it was taking on the role that dangerous drugs had in times past. The web isn't literally dying. It's changing into something so different than what we wanted that it is for all intents and purposes dead. Many folks are getting wrapped up in the semantics of the discussion instead of the underlying meaning.<p>Looking forward to seeing more of your work!
It's especially interesting when you consider that Google has now, for the first time, a fully globe-spanning own network that can interface with any ISP directly, without relying on any intermediate ISP.<p>Google now has at least one product in the entire stack of the internet.<p>You can use a Google Pixel, and Google Chromebook, using Android and Chrome OS, browsing with Chrome, while using Google Fi and Google Fiber, connected directly to Google's backbone, visiting Google's Search, Maps, etc or other sites hosted on Google's cloud, using Google's DNS server.<p>At this point you can use most of the functionality of the internet without ever leaving the Google ecosystem.<p>And this is just going to be expanded.
I was thinking something related this morning, that one of the reasons uptime is important to google, apart from the usual reasons, is because if they were switched off for a day people would realise the extent to which they have so many of their eggs in one basket, and a basket over which they have no control. I would expect that would trigger some concern, and significant numbers seeking alternatives, and building them.
Interesting perspective but it's missing one big elephant in the room: China. China is a reason why the trinet will not happen globally. Baidu, TenCent, Alibaba and similar services won't be replaced with Google, FB or Amazon. Maybe for better.
I'd wager that FB is at its summit now and it'll become more obvious as more young people who ignore it now continue to do so growing up and the people who use it continue to die.
People used to say the same thing about Wintel until the Web appeared.<p>Not to say his points are wrong just that it lacks some historical perspective.<p>IMHO, these companies are on the verge of becoming irrelevant actually.
Some very interesting points made in OP and comments.<p>I’ll add one about user experience. Obviously the big web corporations benefit from the natural advantages of scale.<p>But an overlooked aspect of what makes these platforms sticky is that they all, including Apple, work very hard at making their products easy to use. And these are complex systems (I find Apple’s attempt at maintaining a global user state baffling, just from a user point of view, working with such an unwieldy system must be insane.)<p>Though this is an old problem, I think it remains: product developers and engineers vastly over estimate a potential users willingness/ability to learn a new system.<p>This is a “threshold “ problem, with a binary outcome. If your service is “good enough “ you might get some traction. But if you don’t hit that threshold of usability, your efforts are for naught.<p>The challenge is that usability is often an optimization problem, where one might be inclined to see how the MVP does, before investing the extensive resources in improving user experience. It’s also a big advantage to already have a lot of users, upon which a company can test and iterate.<p>My main point is that the general public has not become more technically skilled. On the contrary, all this effort by Google-Facebook—Amazon is focused on making these services drop dead easy to use.<p>Even technically skilled people have limits on how much they can invest in using alternative, less polished systems.
I believe this could be easily solved with a simple regulation - mandatory 50/50 sharing of downstream and upstream on customer level.<p>How Web is supposed to be decentralized if the means of accessing it directly support centralization? You will always prefer external services if your own get capped pretty easily. You cannot have truly distributed web if access points are basically one-way connections.
Great article, one problem: it's yet another lament.
Any ideas how to fix/prevent it?<p>Maybe we should get our wifi routers into a mesh network. Maybe we should start hosting our own stuff, or make simple tools for this, like YunoHost, iRedMail, etc.
But please, stop writing articles about how bad it is.<p>"I get things are bad. But what are we doing to fix it?"
— Casey Newton (Tomorrowland, 2015)
Out of those three, I only use Google. I still consider the 'net - and I do mean the internet, not 'the web' as that is but a part of the constellation - to be a useful resource with near-unlimited potential. I shun Facebook like the plague and Amazon is not on my radar in any way, due in part to the fact that I'm not in north-America while Amazon is still mostly targeted at that part of the world. As such any thought of these three having fundamentally transformed the web falls flat for me as they just simply failed to do so in my world. I don't deny that these companies - especially Facebook - have an unhealthy amount of influence over many people's outlook on the world around them and that they have the potential to cause great damage - again pointing at Facebook as the main risk factor due to their rather obvious lack of political neutrality - but for now I just see them as big companies intent on carving out as much of the web as they can.
i think this is only one possible outcome. sure it makes sense but imho this can not happen over night and that is where this theory breaks.<p>they cant force "their web" upon the rest of the world. there will _always_ be some form of web where one can be anonymous, where you can run your own server without any hardware from "them", using standard-protocols.<p>maybe the business-people and most poeple who dont care about their privacy will use everything they get thrown from "them". that does not mean the web is dead, it is only that the "mainstream" will live in a separate web. maybe this (their) web will be much bigger than our web. even then, the cool kids will switch to the cool punky web again :D<p>of course everything is just reading tea leaves..
I can't assess what this article is saying without knowing the definition of "traffic" that is being used. Is "traffic" the amount of data transferred (i.e., megabytes, gigabytes, whatever)? Is it the number of requests? Something else?
How come the number of websites is increasing if the web is dying? How are these websites getting their attention?<p>Maybe smaller websites are getting less absolute visits than in 2010, but even if that was true, you should say that the web was dying in the 90's.<p>It's also difficult to believe the web will stop working, or that people will stop making websites just because more people are browsing just on the "trinet" (remember, 20 years ago people already wrote websites, even if they would expect only 3 visits per month). Would Facebook, Google and Amazon come up with a plan to stop ISPs from serving other domains? Why would they do that?
Amazon did not, they are just starting here in Brazil, which is a huge player in the internet, not the biggest or the best, but my country is fucking huge and no one knows about amazon, so this is false. Google and facebook? 200% sure they changed the web here. This text and opinions are from people from 1st world castle countries, not the real world
<i>> On the Trinet, if you are permanently banned from GOOG or FB, you would have no alternative. You could even be restricted from creating a new account. </i><p>A punishment worse than jail in the New World Order.
So, how does the web go from being a benevolent dictatorship to something more democratic, when the entire kingdom is busy playing with shiny new toys?
<i>"It looks like nothing changed since 2014, but GOOG and FB now have direct influence over 70%+ of internet traffic."</i><p>The web needs to really become decentralized. Even Tim Berners-Lee has said it [1]. He has started a project to re-decentralize it called Solid [2].<p>Email was decentralized but now it's become super centralized with GMail etc. And look at how easy it is for the NSA to vacuum all that up from one spot.<p>Wordpress powers 20% of the decentralized web. Because it's a free, open-source piece of software with a plugin ecosystem that runs on a popular runtime - PHP. We need stuff like that, but for things like SOCIAL MEDIA. Nothing currently exists that can rival facebook, google+ etc.<p>I believe that the software can change the internet's topology. Right now all signals go through giant centralized server farms. Consider how people use Google Docs for collaboration Facebook / Slack for conversation or Dropbox for their files. The default is to immediately connect to "the cloud" which is in reality some company's server farm. AWS just capitalized on this trend and made it easier.<p>In fact, you can do all of it LOCALLY by default. There's no reason that bits need to go through Google's servers for a classroom to collaborate on a document, or for an African village to plan a community dinner. Except one: lack of open source software that can run locally, and rival Facebook, Google etc. in ease of use.<p>We are building that software and started around 2011. My company Qbix [3] wants to decentralize not just the web, but also identity [4], data [5] and social networking [6]. We look to partner with companies who want to decentralize cellphone signals (like gotenna) and energy generation (like solar panels) so human networking in the future has a LOT more local options to utilize before ever jumping onto the public internet.<p>PS: Whenever I post this topic, with links to back it up, I get downvoted heavily. But I never get any explanation why. If you are an HN member who disagrees with this thesis, first of all that's not enough reason for a downvote. And secondly, I WOULD LIKE TO KNOW WHY you feel so strongly against what I'm saying here: that the web, cellphone signals and energy generation should be decentralized. Contribute constructively to the conversation, and explain what alternatives do you think are better. Are you so ferventlu against developing software to run on local networks as to militate against comments advocating it? Am I breaking some HN rule by linking to our work that we passionately believe in and spend most of our time on? <i>What are the words behind your downvote?</i><p>1. <a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_berners_lee_on_the_next_web" rel="nofollow">https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_berners_lee_on_the_next_web</a><p>2. <a href="https://solid.mit.edu" rel="nofollow">https://solid.mit.edu</a><p>3. <a href="https://qbix.com" rel="nofollow">https://qbix.com</a><p>4. <a href="https://github.com/Qbix/auth" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Qbix/auth</a><p>5. <a href="https://github.com/Qbix/architecture/wiki/Internet-2.0" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Qbix/architecture/wiki/Internet-2.0</a><p>6. <a href="https://qbix.com/platform" rel="nofollow">https://qbix.com/platform</a>
A few things about "the" web and life in general.<p>Google has gone from a welcomed tool (indexing a priori data) to telling what should be the data (ranking). It switched naturally and logically so, but it's a problem IMO.<p>Lastly, when a domain becomes a social organ, everything changes. It has to be regulated, will cause tension, economic impact ..
This will be horrible for freelancers and people who want to learn web development. There will be no incentive for those people as the globalist mega tech corps create a boring homogeneous internet.<p>Unless of course we all fight back.
> GOOG, FB, AMZN<p>A tiny nitpick, but what's with the trend of using stock symbols in non-financial context? GOOGL isn't much shorter than Google, same with AMZN and Amazon. It just looks... annoyingly out of place.<p>Regarding the article itself, the topic of Facebook/Amazon/Google domination is much spoken and written about and this post doesn't really add much new. This issue is well known for a quite a long time, especially in the HN and similar social circles. What most of the posts are missing is how do we escape this? But that might be too late.
You can do your part as a developer and tell managers about the dangers of AMP. It is a stupid idea technically (we have HTML, you can build a slim sites, Google can rank them higher) and stupid business wise by giving away the control, branding, options.<p>I have convinced one project manager to not implement AMP and will continue to try in the future. Please do your part by spreading word of the dangers of GOOG and FB.
Andre, you're a swell developer and running into you in open source repos and here has always been educational. I would love reading what you write a lot more if there was less click-bait and sensationalism.<p>This problem (the fact Google has a large majority in web browser and mobile device sales) is very concerning to me - the data is interesting and the points are relevant but I have a very hard time reading past titles like "the web is dying". I hope you read this with the intended respectful tone I wrote it in.
Should note: much of the web is now 'mobile' and on mobile people use apps considerably more often.<p>So - while possibly not 'the web' as in 'browser' - it's arguably 'the web' nevertheless because almost all these apps depend on a great deal of http-ish interactivity etc...<p>Also - though it's hard to say how much change there has been on the desktop - remember that people do use desktop apps for socially and webby oriented reasons etc..<p>Imagine: Spotify App vs. Spotify Web, Gmail vs. local client - etc. etc..<p>This is quite a demarcation.<p>Finally, one might consider also that 'web experiences' have expanded.<p>We may not be uses 'other things' less, rather, FB is a new experience that is taking up addition time allocated to the web.<p>So - we had 'the web' - now we have 'the web + FB web'.<p>But great article, thanks for that.
The web isn't dying. The web isn't going to die. The day to day, month to month, or even year to year web trends are not indicative of the future of the web.<p>The irony here is that if anything were going to kill the web, it would be stupid articles like this one. Thankfully, the internet is bigger than all of the short-sighted johnny-come-latelys in the world.<p>Frankly, if you weren't using the web before CSS, then you shouldn't be wasting people's time with your predictions.
> This specific part (that dominant companies can ban individuals with no recourse) shouldn't be tolerated.<p>Freedom shouldn't be tolerated, really? We should force private companies in the private market to serve you because why?
Hellooooo hyperbole.<p>Until all peering agreements become null and void, you can always create another ISP to compete in a free market. Sure, it's expensive and complicated to bury fiber, and radio spectrum is limited. But it's not technical or logistical difficulty that keeps people restricted to specific providers. It's usually political, and incumbents always have a huge upper hand.<p>The reason OSPs like AOL became so ubiquitous in the 90s was <i>they made everything easier</i>, and people were willing to pay for that, even if it effectively locked you into a 'smaller internet'. It still provided you internet access because that by itself was still a value-add. Will ISPs & OSPs charge you differently to access different content? Of course, because they know their customers don't give a shit about some romantic vision of unrestricted peering agreements.<p>There's one big elephant in the room that nobody talks about in discussions like this: Content. Whoever controls the Content gets to swing a multi-Billion dollar dick around, and they keep a hundred-Billion dollar advertising dick on a leash. Most people are obsessed with media & entertainment, a 700-Billion dollar industry, and the rest is cat memes and bargain bin chinese vacuum cleaners.<p>The leading lights of the web barely break the budget of a fraction of M&E. They are constantly dogging at each other because the web industry knows that without content, they have no leverage. Which is why Amazon & Netflix make their own content (though a very small amount, and not very valuable). If Google lost its advertising catbird seat, it would die screaming (almost all of its money comes from ads). And you can't sell ads if you can't get access to eyeballs or earholes.
I'd like submissions with clickbait headlines to get deleted instantly.<p>If your post needs clickbaity embellishments it's probably not worth my time to read it, if it doesn't need any, the post should be able to reach frontpage without them.