Welcome to the Lounge

from Read, Write, Own intro...

Starting in the mid-2000s, a small group of big companies wrenched control away. Today the top 1 percent of social networks account for 95 percent of social web traffic and 86 percent of social mobile app use. The top 1 percent of search engines account for 97 percent of search traffic, and the top 1 percent of e-commerce sites account for 57 percent of e-commerce traffic.
Outside of China, Apple and Google account for more than 95 percent of the mobile app store market. In the past decade, the five biggest tech companies grew from about 25 percent to nearly 50 percent of the market capitalization of the Nasdaq-100. Startups and creative people increasingly depend on networks run by megacorporations like Alphabet(parehnt of Google and YouTube), Amazon, Apple, Meta (parent of Facebook & Instagram), and Twitter (rebranded as X) to find customers, build audiences and connect with peers.

The internet got intermediated, in other words. The network went from pemisionless to permissioned.