The Centralisation of the Internet

The corporatisation and centralisation of the internet is by far the greatest threat to current internet culture and content. Forget malware propagation or government legislation, there is no greater threat than this. With the recent explosion of internet usage over the last decade, the internet has become a tool and platform that everyone uses. Not just for a niche for nerds, geeks and teens; but an everyday surfing ground for anyone and everyone. There is no entry barrier, no idiot nets no nothing. This huge influx of users has brought one major asset. Money. Or at least a platform from which to make money. The precursor to this was the .com bubble of the late 90s. Businesses, mostly small, jumped on to the new biggest thing and jumped straight back of when that burst. But nowadays we have something much more sinister, corporations based around the internet. These are companies that built the current web we use everyday, pioneered innovations that we take for granted. Such as Google and the only successful search engine, or Facebook with there super-profit machine MySpace rip-off. Companies such as these make a lot of money. And with this money they can do two things. They can invest into their own projects to make them the best around; or they can buy other people's projects that are already the best around. Great, right? Now these companies will build a service that everyone can use (probably for free) and it'll be the best in the world! There's no need for alternatives when there is one, objectively best option! Hmm. Once one company, or website, has a monopoly on a market; there is virtually no incentive for smaller competition to attempt to rival them. And once nobody rivals them, there is no point for the large company to invest any further into that product, from a business perspective.

Take Youtube for example. When Youtube was a baby, it had a multitude of rival sites that had either the same, or slightly nuanced, functionality. For example, if you wanted to post animations to the net, Youtube was not the place to do it. Newgrounds maybe? And nobody in their right mind would post music there. There's SoundCloud or BandCamp for that. But over the years Youtube became the place for internet video hosting; and once it was purchased by Google, there was no turning back. Youtube is currently the second most visited site on the internet, beaten only by Google's own Google, so any competition would have to be in the multi-millions-of-dollars range to present to much as a scratch to the site's base. As for users, Youtube is really the only viable option to find an audience at any amount that will rake money. Even content that Youtube was never built for, such as music or even product selling has migrated over, just because of the huge potential audience crowded in one spot. And the more people migrate to Youtube, the less reason there will be to ever leave, thus forming a vicious circle where Google always wins. Damn even this fucking blog is built on a Google-owned framework. There is no escape from giants.

This is a pattern that can be seen throughout the internet. Whatever the type of site, there will almost invariably be a huge, conglomerate site that dwarfs and squashes any rivals out of importance. Micro-blogging with Twitter, video-games with Steam, streaming with Twitch; even the more traditional base of text-forums are being funneled into Reddit. We've seen it all before. In the real world globalisation has made starting and maintaining a small business something that relies mostly on luck and is incredibly rare to occur. Try and set up successful grocery store that can compete with any supermarket, good luck. In a sense the internet represents a totally interconnected 100% globalised market. Any site is as easy to access than any other, so why would you use for anything other than the best? And once the internet base is completely controlled by a few huge, corporate, faceless monstrosities your precious “culture” and "innovative content" will be squashed with whatever they need in order to maximise their profits. Innovation will die without its incentive; why strive to be better when there's no rival to beat? The internet will stagnate, just as globalisation has stagnated so much before.

Enforce the stupidity police! Keep out the normies! Boycott the fat cats! Nothing will work, we need to innovate fast. Make something cleverer than the huge sites, attack their weak points. Return the internet to a bastion of expression and innovation. Keep the wild west free.