One of my favorite tech guys, Ev Williams, was recently featured in The Atlantic in a fascinating article about the challenges an open internet faces. Williams is cynical. His vision of a closing internet aligns with recent comments from other tech insiders about the consolidation of power and the end of startups’ unicorn era. One paragraph in the article raises a fascinating point: the internet’s trend towards closed systems (social media networks, messaging platforms) mirrors the same trends that any form of communication technology has historically gone through: That trend towards scale means that the established companies eventually grow large enough to squash the upstarts. The closing internet can be controlled by a shrinking number of power players. It’s a problem in the greater startup community, too, as a new study from MIT economists Jorge Guzman and Scott Stern reveals. Their data, cover 15 U.S. states between the years of 1988 and 2014, found that the number of “high-quality” startups founded remained basically the same over time, but the number of these startups that succeeded was going down. As the Technology Review covered it: Ev Williams’ solution to an increasingly closing internet is to create his own corner of the internet, Medium, and to rule over it as a benevolent dictator. Hey, whatever works.
