Jonathan Taplin Not Quite Ready to 'Move Fast and Break Things'

"So my thesis is that the internet, originally, was conceived as a very decentralized, communitarian network. It was funded by government money. And, in the late 80s, early 90s, when these libertarians came out of Silicon Valley, it changed radically. They understood that the internet could be a winner-takes-all business, and that there would be a single winner in search, a single winner in e-commerce, and, eventually, what developed as social networks; a single winner in that. And that's essentially what happened."

"They believe that they need to disrupt everything in order to get where they want to go. And we don't get a vote in that, they just do it. A lot of this comes out of a very libertarian ethos that came from Ayn Rand that informed the thinking of Larry Page and Peter Thiel and Jeff Bezos, which was, "I don't have to ask permission. Who's going to stop me?" That was what Ayn Rand said."

The internet began as a decentralized, communitarian network funded by government money. A libertarian ethos among late 1980s and early 1990s Silicon Valley founders reframed the internet as a commercial, winner-takes-all opportunity. That mindset promoted disruption without public consent and prioritized single dominant players in search, e-commerce, and social networking. Major firms leveraged this approach to capture overwhelming market shares, concentrating power across platforms. The concentration of platform power reshaped culture, commerce, and political information flows, producing systemic impacts on democratic processes and the public sphere.

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