From: Harry Brown <
wd8oe...@SBCGLOBAL.NET>
Date: Tue, 7 Nov 2017 15:06:31 -0500
Hi all,
This is not the greatest news, but didn't we know this was coming anyway?
I do like the fact that when you type in a question in the google search
engine, more and more you don't have to read a bunch of search results
to get your question answered, because the answer is right there on the
result page to your question.
But there are bad things coming as well.
Here's the link to the article
https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying-in-2014-heres-how.html
I'm just the messenger.
Harry
(Text of article follows)
André Staltz - The Web began dying in 2014, here's how
André Staltz
THE WEB BEGAN DYING IN 2014, HERE'S HOW
30 OCT 2017
Before the year 2014, there were many people using Google, Facebook, and
Amazon. Today, there are still many people using services from those three
tech
giants (respectively, GOOG, FB, AMZN). Not much has changed, and quite
literally the user interface and features on those sites has remained mostly
untouched.
However, the underlying dynamics of power on the Web have drastically
changed, and those three companies are at the center of a fundamental
transformation
of the Web.
block quote
It looks like nothing changed since 2014, but GOOG and FB now have direct
influence over 70%+ of internet traffic.
block quote end
Internet activity itself hasn’t slowed down. It maintains a steady growth,
both in amount of users and amount of websites:
Amount of internet users and websites from 2011 to 2017
(Sources:
https://news.netcraft.com/archives/category/web-server-survey
and
http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users/)
What has changed over the last 4 years is market share of traffic on the
Web. It looks like nothing has changed, but GOOG and FB now have direct
influence
over 70%+ of internet traffic. Mobile internet traffic is now the
majority of traffic worldwide
and in Latin America alone, GOOG and FB services have had 60% of mobile
traffic in 2015, growing to 70% by the end of 2016. The remaining 30% of
traffic
is shared among all other mobile apps and websites. Mobile devices are
primarily used for accessing GOOG and FB networks.
Share of internet traffic in Latin America from 2015 to 2016
(Source:
https://www.sandvine.com/resources/global-internet-phenomena/2016/north-america-and-latin-america.html)
block quote
The press, unlike before, depends on GOOG-FB to stay in business.
block quote end
Another demonstration of GOOG and FB dominance can be seen among media
websites. The most popular web properties that don’t belong to GOOG nor FB
are usually
from the press. For instance, in the USA there are
6 media sites in the top 10 websites
; in Brazil there are
6 media sites in the top 10
; in UK it is
5 out 10.
From where do media sites get their traffic? Prior to 2014, Search Engine
Optimization (SEO) was a common practice among Web Developers to improve
their
site for Google searches, since it accounted for approximately 35% of
traffic, while more than 50% of traffic came from various other places on
the Web.
SEO was important, while Facebook presence was nice-to-have. Over the next 3
years, traffic from Facebook grew to be approximately
45%,
surpassing the status that Search traffic had. In 2017, the Media depends on
both Google and Facebook for page views, since it’s the majority of their
traffic.
Referral source of traffic to top web publishers
(Source:
https://blog.parse.ly/post/2855/facebook-continues-to-beat-google-in-sending-traffic-to-top-publishers/)
The relationship between media sites and the two tech giants is
difficult.
In 2014, FB built Facebook Paper as an attempt to have a larger control over
news consumption. Their tactic failed, but their strategy persisted through
different means such as Facebook Instant Articles. The media, being
dependent on social traffic and threatened by the social behemoth, reacted.
They
pulled out support for Instant Articles.
Meanwhile, GOOG notices how its Search traffic hadn’t improved, while
Facebook had picked up steam, so GOOG launches their Instant Articles
alternative
called Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and proactively starts serving
articles from GOOG servers instead of directing traffic to media sites. The
press
reacts similarly to how they did for FB: reported bold stories about the
Search behemoth’s thirst for control over news consumption.
block quote
GOOG and FB ceased competing directly, focusing on what they do best
instead.
block quote end
Data shows FB has dramatically improved its dominance on the Web, while
Google Search hasn’t significantly changed. How exactly did FB achieve that,
and
what events were key to that development? Prior to 2014, both companies had
a portfolio of multiple web services. GOOG hadn’t yet become Alphabet, so
it’s
focus was diffused. GOOG was trying to enter the social market, first with
Google Wave, then Google Buzz, Orkut, and Google+. In total,
GOOG has acquired 18 companies from the social media category,
of which only 1 acquisition happened post-2014, while 5 of those happened in
2010 alone. FB was competing in the search market, through Bing, in
partnership
with MSFT.
During 2014, FB apparently reorganized itself to focus on social only. In
February, it bought WhatsApp, for 11 times the price GOOG bought YouTube. In
December, it canceled its Bing partnership with MSFT. User retention on
Facebook.com grew steadily (see chart below). Through its four simple
products,
Facebook, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram, FB had become the social
superpower.
Facebook daily active users (DAU) divided by Facebook monthly active users
(MAU)
(Sources:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/346167/facebook-global-dau/
and
https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/)
Similarly, GOOG in 2014 started reorganizing itself to focus on artificial
intelligence only. In January 2014, GOOG bought DeepMind, and in September
they
shutdown Orkut (one of their few social products which had momentary success
in some countries) forever. The Alphabet Inc restructuring was announced in
August 2015 but it likely took many months of meetings and bureaucracy. The
restructuring was important to focus the web-oriented departments at GOOG
towards
a simple mission. GOOG sees no future in the simple Search market, and
announces to be migrating “From Search to Suggest” (in Eric Schmidt’s
own words)
and being an “AI first company” (in Sundar Pichai’s
own words).
GOOG is currently slightly behind FB in terms of how fast it is growing its
dominance of the web, but due to their technical expertise, vast budget,
influence
and vision, in the long run its AI assets will play a massive role on the
internet. They know what they are doing.
These are no longer the same companies as 4 years ago. GOOG is not anymore
an internet company, it’s the knowledge internet company. FB is not an
internet
company, it’s the social internet company. 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. Which leads us to another part of
the
internet: e-commerce and AMZN.
AMZN does not focus on making profit.
Amazon's Long-Term Growth
(Source:
https://www.statista.com/chart/4298/amazons-long-term-growth/)
Instead, its mission is to seek market leadership, crushing competitors in
the USA.
Amazon has outgrown competitors
I could elaborate on how AMZN is the e-commerce company, but I would be just
repeating
Scott Galloway’s exposure of this topic.
It’s worth watching his talks.
What the Web was and what it became
The events and data above describe how three internet companies have
acquired massive influence on the Web, but why does that imply the beginning
of the
Web’s death? To answer that, we need to reflect on what the Web is.
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.
block quote
Doesn’t GOOG defend in the open Web?
GOOG, as a company born from the Web, has helped take it forward both
technologically and in adoption. That is undeniable. They still lead efforts
to improve
the open Web, such as
advocacy of Progressive Web Apps (PWAs)
over native mobile apps.
Isn’t GOOG trying to guarantee the open Web stays alive? Not necessarily.
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.
Mobile usage is on the rise – having already crossed desktop as the primary
channel for internet usage – and native mobile apps are so far the best way
of providing good user experience on mobile. GOOG collects little or no data
from native mobile apps, to some extent on Android, but specially on iOS.
PWAs happen to live in the neutral and open Web, and are better suited for
data collection while providing great user experience on mobile.
Desktop versus Mobile internet usage
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. Google Inbox suffers “proprietary
creep”:
non-standard, closed algorithms that promise to organize your life, an
essential component of a lock-in based business model.
GOOG is a huge company where employees have autonomy and multiple projects
and efforts are occurring. Big efforts, though, are coherent, concerted, and
well aligned with its mission: to be an AI-first company, an AI that is
closed and lives in their cloud.
block quote end
From the 90s until the 2010s, the Web we have experienced has been, albeit
somewhat imperfectly, faithful to its original purpose. The Web’s diversity
has granted space for multiple businesses to innovate and thrive,
independent hobbyist communities to grow, and personal sites to be hosted on
whatever
physical servers can host them. 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.
What the Web will become under GOOG-FB-AMZN
The following analysis is an extrapolation for the future, based on the
current state of the Web and strategies made public by executives at
GOOG-FB-AMZN.
The War for Net Neutrality in the USA won a
battle in 2014,
but in 2017 we are seeing a
second battle
which is more likely to be lost. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are
probably soon going to dictate what traffic can or cannot arrive at people’s
end
devices. GOOG-FB-AMZN traffic would be the most common, due to their
popularity among internet users. Because of this market demand, ISPs will
likely provide
cheap plans with access to GOOG-FB-AMZN, while offering more expensive plans
with full internet access.
It is already a reality in Portugal.
This would grow even more the dominance the three tech giants already enjoy.
There would be no more economical incentive for smaller businesses to have
independent websites, and a gradual migration towards Facebook Pages would
make more sense. Smaller e-commerce sites would be bought by AMZN or go
bankrupt.
Because most internet users couldn’t open all the sites, GOOG would have
little incentive to be a mere bridge between people and sites.
GOOG’s shift away from Search is a sign how they are growing their strategy
beyond the Web. For many years, Google used to be just a tool that played
the
important role of assisting the Web, by indexing it. Lately, however, it is
not attractive for Google to be a mere search engine of the Web. For the
purposes
expressed in their
mission statement,
“to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and
useful”, the search engine approach has been exhausted. The multi-second
path
from search query, to search results, to webpage, to information, is too
long to provide an ideal user experience. Their goal is to cut the middlemen
in
that path. They have tried to cut out the results page with their “I’m
feeling lucky” button, but without intelligent analysis they cannot reliably
take
shortcuts in that path. With AI, they believe they can shorten the path to
just one step, “get information”, even without searching for it in the first
place. That’s the purpose of Suggest.
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.
It is not beneficial for GOOG to assume the role of an impartial arbiter of
content, since it’s not supporting their business model. Quite the contrary,
they are under public scrutiny from multiple governments, potentially
risking their reputation.
The Suggest strategy is being currently deployed through Google Now, Google
Assistant, Android notifications, and Google Home. None of these mentioned
technologies are part of Web, in other words, not part of “browser-land”
made of websites. 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.
Similarly, 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. In these new non-web contexts,
tech giants have more authority over data traffic. They can even directly
block each other, like
GOOG recently cut support for YouTube traffic in Amazon Echo devices.
The Appleification of tech giants
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. It is a threat to AAPL
itself, because they are behind the other giants when it comes to big data
collection and its uses. While AAPL’s early and bold introduction of an App
Store shook the Web as the dominant software distribution platform, it
wasn’t enough to replace it. The next wave of walled gardens might look
different:
less noticeable, but nonetheless disruptive to the Web.
GOOG devices
There is a tendency at GOOG-FB-AMZN to bypass the Web which is motivated by
user experience and efficient communication, not by an agenda to avoid
browsers.
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. This explains FB’s
10-year strategy with Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) as the
next medium for social interactions through the internet. This strategy
would also bypass the Web, proving how more natural social AR would be than
social
real-time texting in browsers. Already today, 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 Web
may die like most other technologies do: simply by becoming less attractive
than newer technologies. And like most obsolete technologies, they don’t
suddenly
disappear, neither do they disappear completely. You can still buy a Walkman
and listen to a tape with it, but the technology has nevertheless lost its
collective relevance. The Web’s death will come as a gradual decay of its
necessity, not as a dramatic loss.
The Trinet
The internet will survive longer than the Web will. GOOG-FB-AMZN will still
depend on submarine internet cables (the “
Backbone
”), because it is a technical success. That said, many aspects of the
internet will lose their relevance, and 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. The concept of workplace network which gave birth
to the internet infrastructure would migrate to a more abstract level:
Facebook
Groups, Google Hangouts, G Suite, and other competing services which can be
acquired by a tech giant. Workplace networks are already today emulated in
software as a service, not as traditional Local Area Networks. To improve
user experience, the Trinet would be a technical evolution of the internet.
These
efforts are already happening today,
at GOOG.
In the long-term, supporting routing for the old internet and the old Web
would be an overhead, so it could be beneficial to cut support for the
diverse
internet on the protocol and hardware level. Access to the old internet
could be emulated on GOOG’s cloud accessed through the Trinet, much like how
Windows 95 can be today emulated in your browser.
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.
Perhaps a future with great user experience in AR, VR, hands-free commerce
and knowledge sharing could evoke an optimistic perspective for what these
tech
giants are building. But 25 years of the Web has gotten us used to
foundational freedoms that we take for granted. 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. On the Trinet, if you are permanently banned from GOOG or
FB, you would have no alternative. You could even be restricted from
creating
a new account. 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, to counter the strategies that tech giants are
putting
forward.
The Web and the internet have represented freedom: efficient and
unsupervised exchange of information between people of all nations. In the
Trinet, we
will have even more vivid exchange of information between people, but we
will sacrifice freedom. Many of us will wake up to the tragedy of this
tradeoff
only once it is reality.
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