A week ago, I had the pleasure of judging a business competition. Young men and women, between 16 and 25 presented their plans for the next great business, including both their ideas, competitive advantage, sale strategy, and marketing design. It was remarkable to see, how many of these potential startups would rely on an open and accessible internet to promote their idea. Thus, I thought about, why the Internet is still relevant in the age of Google and Facebook and what we can do to preserve it.
Marketplace for Anything
When the internet evolved in the early 1990s, it was primarily a medium to communicate and thus a marketplace of ideas. Fast forward 30 years and the internet has turned from a place to share thoughts and message into an exchange for anything and everything. From goods and services to hate and crime, if you can name it, you can find it.
This place of exchange enables us to find customers at the snap of a finger or rather the click of a button and to pursue a supplier at the same speed. We can turn a thought into a business empire and can find people to do it for you. We can destroy the reputations of anyone who disagrees with us and make them take their life.
The internet has turned out the best and the worst in us. However, while we like to focus on the horror stories, it has done a far greater deal to create good, then evil.
Threats from all sides
Today, that open marketplace is under threat from multiple sides. Government and businesses want to regulate our thoughts, internet service providers want to exploit their monopolies, and the crooked company wants to get our money.
No matter the amount of coverage, the first two items receive over the year. The last one is still the mightiest threat. Today, the duopoly of Google and Facebook has created a system, where not the best information can prevail. Instead, the incentive is too perverse the system in the way, that it brings the best ad revenue. Clickbait and the viral spread of information are in their best interest. They even acknowledge the fact, whenever social pressure gets too big. For example when the amount of misinformation on vaccinations got so big, that they were forced to step in. Our eroding trust in the medium thus might lead us to abandon parts of the internet entirely and thus limit the spread of ideas. Consequently, a short term gain for Google and Facebook shareholders might destroy the growth potential for the same shareholders and society as a whole.
State regulation is another thread to the internet. Today, we already see it in Russia and China, that ideas, that the leaders perceive as a thread are systematically made unavailable. Instead of a discussion about the way of society, the internet only echos the beliefs of the party. However, we do not only see this trend in autocracies. Even in free countries, the thread to the free exchange of ideas is ever present. Try to criticize Islam in Great Britain, and you might find yourself in troubled waters. In the US, you will not get into trouble with the law, but Twitter, Facebook, and Google might ban you from their platforms, which threatens not only the exposure but often the financial viability of legitimate ideas.
Plan a Bottom Line
While many startups are traditionally not profitable in the beginning, it is remarkable how the exit strategies for founders have changed over the last couple of years. We are in a boom age for M&As as well as for IPOs of not-profitable companies. In a sense, we like to make ourselves dependent on other peoples money.
While it indeed is a great idea to move wealth in our pockets, what is the long term gain for the investors? Without a clear plan on how to achieve and maintain profitability in a stable way, we will never create an economic value but only a bubble. Focusing on a firm bottom line in your companies and investment is thus crucial to maintaining economic growth and not just create a new tech bubble like the one around the year 2000.
An Old-New Way of Thinking
When taking a holistic view, we today have multiple ways to change the internet from a platform to advance our society into an echo chamber, that strips us of our individuality and privacy. If it comes to that, we not only would lose many ideas, which I had the pleasure of judging, but would likewise strip ourselves but would also put our financial and economic growth at the mercy of a few companies. While it might be great for the pocketbooks in the short term, there is no long term growth in stagnation.