Actions taken by Big Tech after violence at the Capitol may have sowed the seeds for Internet 3.0, which will be defined by open protocols and decentralization
Context & Ripple Effects
Stratechery's argument lands at the end of a two-year arc the related coverage has been tracing: the end of the shoot-first 'Wild Wild Web' era of willfully naïve platform strategy, followed by Foreign Affairs' proposal to strip Big Tech of its content-gatekeeper role entirely by letting users choose their own information feeds. The Capitol violence forced the platforms to exercise that gatekeeper power visibly — and in doing so handed ammunition to both camps.
The significance is that decentralization now has a political constituency on two flanks: users alienated by moderation decisions, and governments whose unprecedentedly broad moves to limit tech power make centralized chokepoints a liability rather than a moat. The counterweight is mnot's warning that regulatory action can just as easily produce a more fragmented, ossified internet than an open one.
First-order effects
- The platforms that deplatformed accounts after the Capitol attack demonstrated that a handful of companies can silence even a sitting president's channels — making their gatekeeper role the explicit target of both user backlash and the Foreign Affairs-style proposal to move feed curation to users.
Second-order effects
- Developers and publishers gain an incentive to build on open protocols rather than platform APIs, since the episode showed that access to distribution can be revoked unilaterally; regulators in the US, UK, and EU meanwhile face the design choice between fostering that openness and accidentally entrenching incumbents through compliance costs.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the industry structure shifts from a few moderated walled gardens toward protocol-level competition where no single company controls distribution — though whether that produces genuine openness or the fragmentation-and-ossification outcome mnot describes is the open question this analysis cannot resolve.
The trend: Platform governance is migrating from corporate moderation decisions toward open protocols and user-controlled curation, driven jointly by moderation backlash and regulatory pressure.