The Web began dying in 2014, here's how

“GOOG and FB now have direct influence over 70%+ of internet traffic.” ⤴️
“GOOG in 2014 started reorganizing itself to focus on artificial intelligence only. In January 2014, GOOG bought DeepMind” ⤴️
“They used to attempt to compete, and this competition kept the internet market diverse. Today, however, they seem mostly satisfied with their orthogonal dominance of parts of the Web, and we are losing diversity of choices.” ⤴️
“The original vision for the Web according to its creator, Tim Berners-Lee, was a space with multilateral publishing and consumption of information. It was a peer-to-peer vision with no dependency on a single party. Tim himself claims the Web is dying: the Web he wanted and the Web he got are no longer the same.” ⤴️
“GOOG’s goal is to gather as much rich data as possible, and build AI. Their mission is to have an AI provide timely and personalized information to us, not specifically to have websites provide information. Any GOOG concerted efforts are aligned to the AI mission.” ⤴️
“GOOG promotes lock-in and proprietary technologies such as Firebase and Google-dependent AMP installations as much as it advocates open PWAs. GOOG does not consistently defend the open Web. They dropped XMPP in Gtalk, and Gtalk itself was deprecated, favoring Google Hangouts with a proprietary protocol. Chrome Web Store is a walled garden like App Store. They shutdown Google Reader based on RSS, an open standard. Google Cloud TPU is proprietary hardware that only exists in their datacenters, supporting their open source framework TensorFlow.” ⤴️
““proprietary creep”: non-standard, closed algorithms that promise to organize your life, an essential component of a lock-in based business model.” ⤴️
“The internet’s infrastructural diversity is directly tied to the success of diverse Web businesses and communities. The Web’s openness is vital for its security, accessibility, innovation and competitiveness.” ⤴️
“After 2014, we started losing the benefits of the internet’s infrastructural and economical diversity. It is difficult to compete with AMZN’s and GOOG’s Cloud Services, which host a massive amount of sites for other businesses. Any website aspiring for significant traffic depends on Search and Social traffic.” ⤴️
“Google used to be just a tool that played the important role of assisting the Web, by indexing it.” ⤴️
“in their mission statement, “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”, the search engine approach has been exhausted” ⤴️
“As an index, people have different expectations on search result neutrality. Some want Google Search to be entirely neutral, some demand immediate action to remove some results. The European Union has both demanded GOOG to comply with removal requests, and fined GOOG for not being neutral in shopping queries.” ⤴️
“The internet is just the underlying transport layer for data from their cloud to end-user devices, but the Web itself is being bypassed.” ⤴️
“Schmidt’s vision for the future is one where internet services are ubiquitous and personalized, as opposed to an experience contained in web browsers in desktop machines.” ⤴️
“while AMZN’s business still relies on traffic to their desktop web portal (accounting for 33% of sales), a large portion (25%) of their sales happen through mobile apps, not to mention Amazon Echo. Like Google Home, Amazon Echo bypasses the Web and uses the internet just for communication between cloud and end user.” ⤴️
“They can even directly block each other, like GOOG recently cut support for YouTube traffic in Amazon Echo devices.” ⤴️
“GOOG, MSFT, FB, and AMZN are mimicking AAPL’s strategy of building brand loyalty around high-end devices. Through a process I call “Appleification”, they are (1) setting up walled gardens, (2) becoming hardware companies, and (3) marketing the design while designing for the market.” ⤴️
“The next wave of walled gardens might look different: less noticeable, but nonetheless disruptive to the Web.” ⤴️
“In the knowledge internet and the commerce internet, being efficient to provide what users want is the goal. In the social internet, the goal is to provide an efficient channel for communication between people.” ⤴️
“most people on the internet communicate with other people via a mobile app, not via a browser.” ⤴️
“The common pattern among these three internet giants is to grow beyond browsers, creating new virtual contexts where data is created and shared.” ⤴️
“the underlying infrastructure could be optimized only for GOOG traffic, FB traffic, and AMZN traffic. It wouldn’t conceptually be anymore a “network of networks”, but just a “network of three networks”, the Trinet, if you will.” ⤴️
“ISPs would recognize the obsolescence of the internet and support the Trinet only, driven by market demand for optimal user experience from GOOG-FB-AMZN.” ⤴️
“We forget how useful it has been to remain anonymous and control what we share, or how easy it was to start an internet startup with its own independent servers operating with the same rights GOOG servers have.” ⤴️
“As private businesses, GOOG, FB, and AMZN don’t need to guarantee you access to their networks. You do not have a legal right to an account in their servers, and as societies we aren’t demanding for these rights as vehemently as we could” ⤴️
“GOOG and FB now have direct influence over 70%+ of internet traffic.” ⤴️
“GOOG in 2014 started reorganizing itself to focus on artificial intelligence only. In January 2014, GOOG bought DeepMind” ⤴️
“They used to attempt to compete, and this competition kept the internet market diverse. Today, however, they seem mostly satisfied with their orthogonal dominance of parts of the Web, and we are losing diversity of choices.” ⤴️
“The original vision for the Web according to its creator, Tim Berners-Lee, was a space with multilateral publishing and consumption of information. It was a peer-to-peer vision with no dependency on a single party. Tim himself claims the Web is dying: the Web he wanted and the Web he got are no longer the same.” ⤴️
“GOOG’s goal is to gather as much rich data as possible, and build AI. Their mission is to have an AI provide timely and personalized information to us, not specifically to have websites provide information. Any GOOG concerted efforts are aligned to the AI mission.” ⤴️
“GOOG promotes lock-in and proprietary technologies such as Firebase and Google-dependent AMP installations as much as it advocates open PWAs. GOOG does not consistently defend the open Web. They dropped XMPP in Gtalk, and Gtalk itself was deprecated, favoring Google Hangouts with a proprietary protocol. Chrome Web Store is a walled garden like App Store. They shutdown Google Reader based on RSS, an open standard. Google Cloud TPU is proprietary hardware that only exists in their datacenters, supporting their open source framework TensorFlow.” ⤴️
““proprietary creep”: non-standard, closed algorithms that promise to organize your life, an essential component of a lock-in based business model.” ⤴️
“The internet’s infrastructural diversity is directly tied to the success of diverse Web businesses and communities. The Web’s openness is vital for its security, accessibility, innovation and competitiveness.” ⤴️
“After 2014, we started losing the benefits of the internet’s infrastructural and economical diversity. It is difficult to compete with AMZN’s and GOOG’s Cloud Services, which host a massive amount of sites for other businesses. Any website aspiring for significant traffic depends on Search and Social traffic.” ⤴️
“Google used to be just a tool that played the important role of assisting the Web, by indexing it.” ⤴️
“in their mission statement, “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”, the search engine approach has been exhausted” ⤴️
“As an index, people have different expectations on search result neutrality. Some want Google Search to be entirely neutral, some demand immediate action to remove some results. The European Union has both demanded GOOG to comply with removal requests, and fined GOOG for not being neutral in shopping queries.” ⤴️
“The internet is just the underlying transport layer for data from their cloud to end-user devices, but the Web itself is being bypassed.” ⤴️
“Schmidt’s vision for the future is one where internet services are ubiquitous and personalized, as opposed to an experience contained in web browsers in desktop machines.” ⤴️
“while AMZN’s business still relies on traffic to their desktop web portal (accounting for 33% of sales), a large portion (25%) of their sales happen through mobile apps, not to mention Amazon Echo. Like Google Home, Amazon Echo bypasses the Web and uses the internet just for communication between cloud and end user.” ⤴️
“They can even directly block each other, like GOOG recently cut support for YouTube traffic in Amazon Echo devices.” ⤴️
“GOOG, MSFT, FB, and AMZN are mimicking AAPL’s strategy of building brand loyalty around high-end devices. Through a process I call “Appleification”, they are (1) setting up walled gardens, (2) becoming hardware companies, and (3) marketing the design while designing for the market.” ⤴️
“The next wave of walled gardens might look different: less noticeable, but nonetheless disruptive to the Web.” ⤴️
“In the knowledge internet and the commerce internet, being efficient to provide what users want is the goal. In the social internet, the goal is to provide an efficient channel for communication between people.” ⤴️
“most people on the internet communicate with other people via a mobile app, not via a browser.” ⤴️
“The common pattern among these three internet giants is to grow beyond browsers, creating new virtual contexts where data is created and shared.” ⤴️
“the underlying infrastructure could be optimized only for GOOG traffic, FB traffic, and AMZN traffic. It wouldn’t conceptually be anymore a “network of networks”, but just a “network of three networks”, the Trinet, if you will.” ⤴️
“ISPs would recognize the obsolescence of the internet and support the Trinet only, driven by market demand for optimal user experience from GOOG-FB-AMZN.” ⤴️
“We forget how useful it has been to remain anonymous and control what we share, or how easy it was to start an internet startup with its own independent servers operating with the same rights GOOG servers have.” ⤴️
“As private businesses, GOOG, FB, and AMZN don’t need to guarantee you access to their networks. You do not have a legal right to an account in their servers, and as societies we aren’t demanding for these rights as vehemently as we could” ⤴️