From Julian Lucas’s long profile of Tim Berners-Lee:
In a forthcoming book, The Age of Extraction, Tim Wu, a Columbia law professor who coined the term “net neutrality,” identifies 2012 and 2013 as the years when “platform power” took hold. Since the nineties, it had been assumed that the web would democratize society, empowering bloggers to compete with media conglomerates, and small manufacturers to bypass big retailers. Some of that happened. But the web’s Davids had only traded one Goliath for another — corporate platforms that stood between them and their markets. As Wu writes, “Paeans to small-is-beautiful and the transformation of the human existence” soon gave way to “a strategy that extracted from dependent businesses and harvested the time and data of the masses.”
A true account — but some of us still hold to the small-is-beaitiful ethos and are practicing a non-extractive life on the Web. The dream isn’t dead!