I’ve been closely watching coverage on Google’s two antitrust trials on Big Tech on Trial.

I am not naïve — as a public-traded company that is only and rightfully accountable to the shareholders, I have always known Google is not simply benevolent when it comes to funding the Web. But not only until hearing about the details revealed by the States in court, I realized how successful Google has been (and illegally, alleged by the States) at capturing both ends of the Web, effectively capturing its values in a way that is as profitable as closed platforms.

Google has been paying billions of dollars to all browser vendors to allow Google to be the default search engine¹ — something the court deemed to be illegal just recently — to capture all traffic that goes into the Web.

In the ad marketplace, Google has captured the entire ad revenue stream of the content Web, making it impossible for any content provider to generate ad revenue — the primary business model of content — without Google. This is something the States allege to be anti-competitive, and the court is going to weigh in pretty soon.

As it turned out, the Web being a ubiquitous technical success is a chess piece of Google’s money-making machinery. People who claimed to advocate for Open Web without talking about the nuances are just doing community evangelism for Google without getting paid by them.

Where do we go from here?

The browser engines need new business models and revenue streams. People are surely talking. I agree that engines are implementations of the one and only viable mostly non-proprietary application platform. They deserve to exist as public goods. Regretfully, unlike rails and tunnels, their public benefits are as abstract as any other software infrastructures (obligatory XKCD reference). We are often blind by our passion for technologies to think of them, but it will take some persuasion to be entitled to public money — skipping the persuasion part sometimes sounds arrogant.

The ad revenue dependency of the content web is a much harder problem. The Sherman Act can only ensure the market is fair; it can’t create new markets. Donations/subscriptions have been successful in a few content segments, but they have not yet become mainstream. Lots of YouTubers have been talking about that — I have no more insights to offer than to provide my support occasionally as a consumer².

Do I still believe in better access to the Web and better application capabilities offered on the Web? Honestly, it is a MAYBE now.

I see great use cases of powerful APIs like Web Bluetooth and agreeable arguments made for them, but I also value the security sandbox promised by the Web. I wanted to see features that prioritize the decentralized root of the Web than re-enforce it, but nothing has truly happened yet other than questionable offerings from cryptobros.

Again, looking at the grip Google has on the Web right now, I would decline to be their useful idiots.

1. Which is the primary revenue of my previous employer, and I benefited. I am certainly also benefited indirectly by working in tech and as an index fund investor. ↩︎
2. Yes, my account credential was leaked on Patreon. ↩︎

This post is a response to We can have a different Web by Molly White. I enjoy her takes and her colorful metaphors. Go read that post and support her if you can.

I too have a few things to say and it didn’t fit into a Mastodon post. So I guess this is the topic to take it over to a self-hosted blog.

While I too have an indieweb presence since 2000, what is lacking is not technologies nor advocacy. Molly correctly pointed out the (almost) forever backward compatible Web means the technologies exist back then are still available today. There are surely enough warnings on the dangers of walled gardens and the toxicity of algorithms. Yet I feel that the barrier is simply economics on what people wanted out of the time and effort they spent.

People put themselves on the Web to connect. Many may want to be influencers, but a lot more are just here to find their crowds. The relentless network effect means you’ll need to meet people where they are, and to do that you need to go to one of these “five websites.” It just doesn’t make sense, for most people, to build a cozy cabin on the indieweb, with no visitors.

Just take myself as an example. I enjoy the company of my tech folks on Mastodon, but I still had to regretfully log on to other social platforms not lose touch with my other friends. Every time I do it, I feel that I am risking my mental health by exposing myself to algorithmic toxicity, in exchange for staying connected. It must be worse for people without any other places to escape.

So what was the economics that enabled the old indieweb?

People used to be able to host content on Geocities, which was ad-supported.

People used to be able to find their crowds in much smaller self-hosted forums, web rings, and human-curated web directories.

What made the business model of Geocities unsustainable, or made the self-hosted forums die out? What gave rise to the walled garden content websites? What made algorithm-curated content win?

I don’t have a clear answer to all these questions. I am not going to start a new web ring or a web directory. I just know that we’ll need to tilt the balance again to make indieweb work again.

Allow me to end this post with something I’ve said before:

When I look at the history of the commercialization of the internet & web (no, Al Gore didn’t invent the internet), it always reminds me that proprietary information services (like CompuServe) existed before that, and will likely continue to exist afterward.

We must remind ourselves that open systems, like democratic forms of governance, are the outliers of human history, not the norm, no matter how precious we feel.