Creating an Internet anti-monopoly
MetaBrief #002 🌶️
Act I: The anti-monopoly history of Monopoly
As a kid, a game of Monopoly with my family always descended into chaos and hilarity as the game dragged on. We pilfered the bank when nobody was looking and cut backroom deals with one another. Pretty on the nose stuff.
Interestingly enough, the earliest version of Monopoly had two sets of rules: an anti-monopolist version, which rewarded all players during wealth creation events, and a monopolist version with the goal of dominating the board and forcing other players out. American anti-monopolist Lizzie Magie created the game to illustrate that wealth accrues disproportionately to landlords and monopolists, explaining why poverty exists in the face of technological and economic progress.
Ironically, creator Lizzie Magie only received $500 for her game, while another man who stole the idea for the game became the first-ever millionaire game designer in history.
Act II: The monopolization of the Internet
In the early 90’s, British computer programmer Tim Berners-Lee convinced his employer CERN not to patent the World Wide Web, releasing it into the public domain as an open and democratic platform for all. However, similar to the game Monopoly, the original intent of the Internet has since been lost. Value, in the form of our data, has accrued to tech incumbents, the new landlords and monopolists.
This is suboptimal for both businesses and individuals. From a business perspective, our tech landscape is dominated by monopolies, which is particularly damaging to smaller players and new entrants. Even larger players are beholden to a veritable tech oligopoly. Case in point: Google Cloud recently sold $800M worth of cloud services to TikTok.
On a personal level, our aggregated data is used against us to advance the agendas of corporations and governments by influencing our purchasing decisions and shaping our opinions.
In the words of Tim Berners-Lee, “We demonstrated that the Web had failed instead of served humanity, as it was supposed to have done, and failed in many places.”
Act III: Enter a new era of the Internet
The problems with technology today are not inherent to technology itself. Through the power of scaling, we have “100x”-ed the uneven distribution of power within society.
Although it’s easy to forget, the Internet is still a relatively new technological innovation, which has only existed for around thirty years in its modern form. In comparison, telephone and radio technology, the Internet’s predecessors in the open dissemination of information, have been in use for over one hundred years.
Even newer yet is the emergence of blockchain technology and the crypto industry, which have been around for just over ten years. The creation of blockchain technology is revolutionary because value exchange can now occur natively online, representing the first real challenge to our understanding of money in centuries. As Lizzie Magie tried to illustrate decades ago, those who control value (whether in the form of land, money, information, or other guise) control power within a society.
The only way in which we can achieve an Internet anti-monopoly is by rebuilding the scaffolding that has upheld millennia of centralized decision-making. Decentralized collective decision making through DAOs, decentralized governance of platforms & protocols, and so on will help usher in a new era of anti-monopolism with the Internet.
As Henry Ford once said, “It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”
I think he’s right — a new anti-monopolist era of the Internet is already in motion.
Into the Metaverse,