The internet wassupposed to belongto everyone

I’ve watched the internet grow from the start, and it has become far more than a tool that helps us. Its effects on society are profound.

In the beginning it felt like it belonged to everyone: free, open and full of opportunity. My first site was on Angelfire, with a guestbook, reached over AOL on dial-up. Then came Friends Reunited and MySpace. Anyone could publish, and people were masters of their own corner of the web.

Anyone still can. But being seen is another matter. The big platforms now decide what we see and what we don’t, and small businesses have to pay them for ads just to be found. What began as a democratic space has become a top-down system, and that comes down to who holds the power.

The Starry Night theory

Look up at the night sky and you see a handful of stars. Look deeper and there are billions you couldn’t see before. Power works the same way: once you start looking, you see it everywhere.

Take the whole tax system. Whoever writes the rules decides who benefits, and the people with the most money have the most say in writing them. Big players can afford the lobbyists, the lawyers and the accountants. Small businesses can’t, so we get rules that are heavy on the ones growing and light on the ones who’ve already made it. The VAT threshold is a good example: cross it and you have to add 20% to your prices or swallow it in your margins, so plenty of small firms hold back to stay under the line.

None of this is an accident, and it suits the people at the top. If it’s hard to scale, you’re less likely to become a competitor. And if you do build something worth having, the easiest option is to sell, so the big fish can swallow you up.

The startup world teaches the same lesson. You’re told the whole point of a startup is to sell it, and that building something to last is naïve. I think that’s the system talking. It turns founders who could become competitors into acquisitions, and it keeps the ownership where it already was. I’ve built Wootzoo to stay independent, with no plan to raise or sell, and I’d rather prove it can be done.

Meanwhile working men and women, and the small businesses that employ them, keep holding the whole system up while being kept in their place.

AI is the latest example. It could help everyone, but it’s being shaped by, and for, the people who already have the most. Companies talk about doing more with fewer people, and the savings go to owners, not to those who lost their jobs. Not every layoff blamed on AI is really down to AI, but the direction is clear to me.

Every time, control goes to whoever owns the infrastructure, whether that’s the platforms, the tax rules or the AI models, and everyone else is left to adapt.