/biz/ - Business & Finance

So short or long FAANGs?

>Like countless other high-profile creators, PewDiePie repeatedly has slammed YouTube for opacity in its policies on monetization, copyright and content restrictions. He also has called out YouTube—a Google subsidiary since 2006—for bowing to corporate whims at the expense of the creators and users who made the platform popular in the first place.

>And it is not just YouTube. As Quillette readers know, something similar is going on with Patreon, Google, Facebook, Twitter and Amazon. Defying its foundational architecture, the internet is no longer decentralized. A cartel of politically aligned capitalists controls access not just to cyberspace in the abstract, but, arguably, the very means of online business functionality. This is why PewDiePie has become a lightning rod: He has managed to buck this trend by building up a massive following that (for now) allows him to defy corporate control.

>Venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya once recalled his work with Facebook this way: “We trumpeted [our platform] like it was some hot-shit big deal. And I remember when we raised money from Bill Gates…And Gates said something along the lines of, ‘That’s a crock of shit. This isn’t a ‘platform.’ A platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it exceeds the value of the company that creates it. Then it’s a platform.’” The brilliant Microsoft founder knew that his own Windows operating system was a true platform because, as Microsoft openly bragged, the company itself captured only a minority of the value created through the Windows ecosystem. Facebook, YouTube and Google are in a completely different category—because the vast majority of the wealth they generate is controlled by the social-media oligopolies themselves. They aren’t platforms so much as rent-seeking agents that oversee a set of critical economic protocols.

https://quillette.com/2018/12/20/pewdiepies-battle-for-the-soul-of-the-internet/