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>>lopesp+(OP)
The elephant in the room is the size distribution of "other people's kingdoms". Having oversized kingdoms and overbearing kings is not a god-given parameter, its down to regulation, political and economic choices. Its not for nothing that the current digital world has been called neo-feudal.

The real solution is to force these kingdoms to build permanently open gates and roadways that connect the land, increase all around traffic and opportunity.

Only when people turn from digital vassals to digital citizens will we emerge from the middle ages we are currently in. In this sense the most important development in the online world is still ahead if us.

>>openri+El1
When it comes to the "internet" - you are 30 years late to apply such forces. Everything is now DRMed, closed garden proprietary bs - there is no legal framework, nor will to reverse that and we are going to pay.

And this is not cynic talking ...

>>neon_m+xF1
The web is still open.

Wide open.

For anything to build.

More users online than ever, and able to get their attention too.

>>j45+eR1
It looks like you got down-voted but I'm not sure why, because you're technically correct.

Rewind 20 years and YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, iPhones, TikTok, Discord and what we think of as the "contemporary Internet" didn't really exist. Google existed, and even back then SEO was a thing and people were talking about not putting all of your eggs into Google's basket when it comes to your business model (which I remember vividly because I started a business in 2003 running a for-profit website that would continue to exist until 2022).

Fast forward to the present and yeah users are opting in to "platforms" that require accounts that keep content within the walled garden. And Google search has declined in quality so much that I and many others don't use it anymore.

But the world wide web, as a technology that is accessible to everyone, that existed 20 years ago still exists.

You can still build a website

You can still create opt-in email newsletters

And there are a lot more people online today than there were 20 years ago, which in many regards makes it easier to reach an audience today than it did back then... even if how you would choose to go about it might differ because of user behaviour.

It's fashionable to be pessimistic towards the tech industry.. and I myself get pessimistic about it all the time.

But when I look back at the fact that I was able to, beginning in 2003, create an online business that allowed me to work from home and feed my family for 15 years at a time before YouTube existed and when the dominant social media platform was still MySpace ... and now I see content creators getting millions of views and some of them are just talking heads in a bedroom ... yeah the world changed but in many ways it's easier to reach people today than it was before this modern era of walled gardens and a google search that sucks.