The Internet's Broken Promise

In 2004, you could type a question into Google and get ten blue links.

Ten doors. Ten choices. You picked one, walked through it, and landed on someone's website. A real website, made by a real person or company, with information they wrote and published and owned.

That's over.

The ten blue links are gone. And almost nobody noticed.

The promise nobody kept

In 1995, Bill Gates wrote that the internet would create "friction-free capitalism." The pitch was irresistible: connect buyers directly to sellers. No brokers. No agents. No distributors. No middlemen. Just people finding each other across a wire.

Nicholas Negroponte at MIT said the shift from atoms to bits would make intermediaries obsolete. The Cluetrain Manifesto in 1999 declared that "markets are conversations." Direct conversations. No translators needed.

And for a while, it looked like they were right.

Craigslist destroyed newspaper classifieds. A multi-billion dollar industry, gone. Wikipedia eliminated the encyclopedia salesman. Amazon let you skip the bookstore. eBay let you sell your stuff to strangers without a dealer.

Middlemen were dying. The future was direct.

Except it wasn't. What actually happened was something nobody predicted: the old middlemen died and new ones took their place. Bigger ones. Smarter ones. With better data, stronger lock-in, and global reach the old middlemen couldn't have dreamed of.

The internet didn't kill the middleman.

It made the middleman invisible.

Google became the answer

Google started as a librarian. You asked a question, and it pointed you to the best shelf. It didn't try to answer the question itself. That wasn't its job. Its job was the pointing.

Then, slowly, the librarian started reading the books out loud.

Google Shopping launched in 2002 as a free product search tool, then became pay-to-play in 2012. Google Flights arrived in 2011 after Google bought ITA Software for $700 million. Google Hotels followed. Google Jobs. Google Recipes. Google's Knowledge Panels started answering questions directly in 2012. Featured Snippets extracted the best paragraph from someone's website and displayed it at the top of the results, so you never had to visit the website at all.

The EU noticed. In 2017, the European Commission fined Google EUR 2.42 billion for systematically promoting its own shopping service while demoting competitors. Google appealed. It lost. Twice. The fine stuck.

But the strategy didn't change.

Fifty-nine out of every hundred people who type something into Google never click on anything. They get the answer on Google's page, from content that Google scraped from someone else's website.

The librarian stopped pointing to the shelf. The librarian just reads you the book now. And the author doesn't get paid.

In August 2024, a US federal judge ruled Google a monopolist. Not a competitor. Not a market participant. A monopolist. The company that was supposed to organize the world's information instead captured it. The doorway became the destination.

The tollbooth economy

Google is just the most visible example. But the pattern is everywhere. Every industry on the internet has developed its own tollbooth. Sometimes two. Sometimes five.

Here is what it looks like to book a hotel room in 2026.

The hotel makes $19. The middlemen make $61. Nobody in the middleman stack owns a bed. Nobody launders a sheet. Nobody checks you in at midnight.

And this is the normal case.

Amazon tells a similar story. In 2014, Amazon's total take from third-party sellers was roughly 19% of seller revenue. By 2023, it reached 50%. That's referral fees, fulfillment fees, and the advertising you now must buy just to be visible on the platform you're already paying to sell on. Amazon's advertising business alone generated $56.2 billion in 2024. That's not revenue from selling products. That's revenue from charging sellers for the right to be seen.

DoorDash takes 15-30% from restaurants operating on 3-9% margins. Apple takes 30% from every app developer. Airbnb charges both the host and the guest. Etsy raised its seller fees to 6.5% and then made offsite advertising mandatory for sellers earning over $10,000.

The pattern is universal. The specifics vary. The direction doesn't.

Every platform follows the same three-step playbook. First, be generous to attract users. Second, start squeezing suppliers once they're dependent. Third, extract as much as possible for yourself.

Cory Doctorow calls this enshittification. The American Dialect Society named it their 2023 Word of the Year. That should tell you something.

The middleman's middleman

The absurdity becomes clear when you stack the layers.

A guest searches for a hotel on Google. Google shows its own hotel results. The guest clicks through to Booking.com (Booking.com paid Google for that click). The guest books a room (the hotel pays Booking.com 20%). The payment is processed by Stripe (2.9% + $0.30). The charge runs through Visa's network (interchange fees to the issuing bank, assessment fees to Visa).

Four middlemen. Five, if you count the guest's bank. None of them own a hotel.

The same stack exists everywhere. A musician on Spotify is intermediated by the streaming platform, the label, the distributor, the payment processor, and the card network. An author on Amazon is intermediated by the marketplace, the fulfillment system, the advertising auction, the payment processor, and the card network.

In programmatic advertising, the stack gets truly absurd. The industry created a chart called the LUMAscape to map all the intermediaries between an advertiser and a publisher. It started with 49 categories. It now includes nearly 5,000 companies. A 2023 ANA study found that only 36 cents of every programmatic advertising dollar actually reaches the publisher. The other 64 cents go to demand-side platforms, supply-side platforms, data management platforms, verification vendors, ad exchanges, and agency trading desks. The original LUMAscape looked like a subway map. Now it looks like a conspiracy wall.

Visa and Mastercard sit underneath almost all of this. In 2024, US merchants paid a record $187.2 billion in combined credit and debit card swipe fees. That number has quadrupled since 2009. Visa alone processed $16 trillion in payment volume, earning $35.9 billion in revenue at a 55% profit margin. They hold zero credit risk. They lend zero money. They are pure infrastructure rent.

The internet didn't eliminate the middleman. It stacked middlemen on top of middlemen. And then it made the stack invisible.

Now the robots want a cut

You might think AI would fix this. You might think a smart assistant that searches the entire internet for you would cut through the layers. That's the pitch, anyway.

It's not what's happening.

What's happening is a new middleman is being built on top of all the existing ones. And it's moving faster than any middleman before it.

In September 2025, OpenAI launched "Buy it in ChatGPT". You ask ChatGPT about a product. It shows you a card. You buy it without leaving the chat. The store never sees you. Shopify, Etsy, and Walmart are already plugged in, with over a million merchants coming online. OpenAI takes a fee from every transaction.

Perplexity went even further. In October 2025, they launched Comet, an AI browser that shops for you. It browses product pages, compares prices, logs into your accounts, and completes purchases autonomously. You don't even pick the store. The AI picks, clicks, and buys.

Amazon sued them. A federal judge blocked Comet from accessing Amazon on March 9, 2026. Perplexity appealed. The Ninth Circuit granted an emergency stay eight days later. The middlemen are now fighting each other for the right to stand between you and the store.

Meanwhile, Amazon launched its own AI agent, "Buy for Me", which shops other retailers' websites without leaving the Amazon app. Shopify launched Agentic Storefronts so merchants can sell inside AI conversations. Google announced a Universal Commerce Protocol for checkout inside AI search. Every company is racing to become the agent that stands between you and the purchase.

And the traffic damage is real. Google's AI Overviews now reduce organic click-through rates by 61%. Google search referrals to publishers fell 33% globally in 2025. Small publishers lost 60% of their search traffic over two years. The websites that created the information don't get the traffic. The AI consumed their content and regurgitated it. For free.

The original search engine was a middleman that at least pointed you somewhere. The AI search engine is a middleman that keeps you right where you are. It's not a doorway. It's not even a hallway. It's a room with no exits.

And the advertising arrived right on schedule. In February 2026, OpenAI started showing ads in ChatGPT for free-tier users. Microsoft put ads inside Copilot. Google added ads inside AI Overviews. Every AI company that launched with "no ads, just answers" now sells ads. Every single one.

The pattern hasn't changed. The technology has. The playbook hasn't.

The walled garden ate the open web

It's not just search. Every major platform followed the same trajectory: start open, end closed.

Facebook used to show your posts to 16% of your followers. Today, the average is 2.6%. If you want to reach the audience you spent years building, you pay for ads. Meta's ad revenue in 2023 was $131.9 billion. That's not money from building connections. That's money from charging you to use the connections you already built.

LinkedIn gives posts with external links 6x less reach. Instagram never allowed clickable links in posts. TikTok uses an in-app browser so you never really leave. Twitter/X explicitly downranks posts that link elsewhere.

Every platform started by welcoming external content. Links were currency. Sharing was the point. Then, once the audience was locked in, the platforms changed the rules. Native content only. Stay inside the walls. Stop linking out. The open web became a threat to the walled garden.

Google Reader, the most popular RSS client with 24 million users, was shut down in 2013. RSS was the purest form of direct subscription: you chose what to follow, you got every update, no algorithm decided what you saw. Google killed it. There's a reason for that. A direct connection between a reader and a publisher is a connection that Google can't monetize.

A 2024 Pew Research study found that 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible. The open web is literally shrinking. Not because people stopped making websites. Because the platforms captured the attention, and without attention, there's no reason to keep the lights on.

The question nobody asks

Here's what I keep thinking about.

The internet was built on a protocol called TCP/IP. Any node can talk to any other node. No central authority required. The architecture was designed for direct, peer-to-peer communication. No gatekeepers. No tollbooths.

The technology still works this way. You can still put up a website, write something, and anyone with a browser can read it. The protocol hasn't changed.

What changed is the economics.

When distribution costs fell to zero, the old middlemen (the bookstore, the travel agent, the classified ad department) lost their advantage. But the discovery problem exploded. With a billion websites, how do you find the right one? Whoever solves the discovery problem becomes the new middleman. And unlike the old middlemen, who were bounded by geography and competed locally, the new middlemen operate at global scale with winner-take-all network effects.

Ben Thompson calls this Aggregation Theory. The internet made distribution free, which shifted all power to the entities that aggregate demand. Google aggregates search intent. Amazon aggregates shopping intent. Facebook aggregates social attention. The aggregator owns the customer relationship. The supplier becomes interchangeable.

The internet eliminated intermediaries of distribution.

It created intermediaries of discovery.

And the second kind is more powerful than the first.

The only escape

There's no clever hack for this. No trick. No plugin.

The only escape from the middleman economy is to own the relationship directly.

Own your website. Not a Facebook page. Not an Instagram profile. Not a storefront on someone else's marketplace. A website you control, on a domain you own, with content you publish, and data you keep.

Own your audience. An email list is yours. Social media followers are rented. If the platform changes an algorithm tomorrow, or goes bankrupt, or decides your category isn't profitable, your rented audience disappears. Your email list doesn't.

Own your data. When your analytics live on Google's servers, Google decides what you see. They decide how long your data is retained, what gets sampled, what gets aggregated into oblivion. And they use your visitor data to improve their own ad targeting. You gave them your customers' behavior, for free, and they used it to sell ads to your competitors.

That's why the answer isn't another platform. It's boring, unfashionable independence. Your own website. Your own analytics. Your own email list. Tools where you're the customer, not the product.

The internet's original promise wasn't wrong. It was just premature. Direct connections between people are still possible. They're still more valuable than intermediated ones. They're just not the default anymore.

Every platform wants to stand between you and your customer. Every algorithm wants to decide what your audience sees. Every new AI tool wants to summarize your work and keep the traffic.

The question is whether you'll let them.