The net’s long decline into “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four” isn’t a mystery. Nor was it by any means a forgone conclusion. Instead, we got here through a series of conscious actions by big businesses and lawmakers that put antitrust law into a 40-year coma. Well, now antitrust is rising from its slumber and we have work for it to do.
As regulators and lawmakers think about making the internet a better place for human beings,their top priority should be restoring power to users. The internet’s promise was that it would remove the barriers that stood in all our way; distance, sure, but also the barriers thrown up by large corporations and oppressive states. But the companies gained a toehold in that environment of lowered barriers, turned right around, and put up fresh barriers of their own. That trapped billions of us on platforms that many of us do not like but feel we can’t leave.
Platforms follow a predictable lifecycle: first, they offer their end-users a good deal. Early Facebook users got a feed consisting solely of updates from the people they cared about, and promises of privacy. Early Google searchers got result screens filled with Google’s best guess at what they were searching for, not ads. Amazon once made it easy to find the product you were looking for, without making you wade through five screens’ worth of “sponsored” results.
The good deal for users is only temporary. Platforms today use a combination of tools, including taking advantage of collective action problems, “Most Favored Nation” clauses, collusive back-room deals to block competitors, computer cr
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