Everyone sits in the same traffic now

The internet once resembled a global village of independent sites, communities, and unexpected discoveries. Strickler argues that platforms such as Google, Meta, and Amazon have remade it into a few heavily trafficked digital highways: feeds, search results, and shopping services designed to keep people scrolling, shopping, and generating value for platform owners. He compares this transformation to New York builder Robert Moses, whose highways and other projects reshaped the city while displacing residents and prioritizing cars over public transit. Like Moses’s infrastructure, today’s platforms have made decisions that persist across generations; their popularity does not prove users are satisfied, especially when leaving means losing work, contacts, and community.

The essay warns that AI could deepen this concentration, turning open websites into sources of material that agents collect and privately repackage, leaving fewer shared spaces for people to gather. Strickler calls for an internet built around user-controlled communities and four practical rights: to move data and work elsewhere, take connections along, save work locally, and retain credit for it. Interoperable systems, public APIs, and shared protocols could make those rights real, as experiments such as Bluesky and Mastodon suggest. Good governance matters, but it cannot replace the ability to leave without forfeiting what people have built. The essay’s central test for better technology is whether people can choose to stay rather than being trapped by infrastructure.