Creating a maintainable and thriving web
I knew the day would come when users would wake up and realize that centralizing stuff is not good for the Internet. Today two signs that things are sorting themselves out. — 1. Steve Rubel writes about the danger of routing all our URLs through TinyUrl.
Context & Ripple Effects
Dave Winer's argument about web centralization has a long tail in his own archive — the core idea was first posted on 4/12/04 and re-run in February 2006 — and Steve Rubel has been circling the same economics from the marketing side since Micro Persuasion's August 2006 take on the Web 2.0 economic conundrum.
What changed by November 2007 was that the abstraction got a concrete villain: TinyUrl, the free redirect service bloggers route links through. Rubel's warning lands two months after AdAge laid out strategies for thriving on the decentralized web, and the piece traveled fast enough that Fred Wilson's A VC picked it up off Techmeme as 'a cautionary tale' — evidence the concern reached investor audiences, not just practitioners.
First-order effects
- Publishers and bloggers who shortened outbound or inbound links through TinyUrl now face a single point of failure they don't control: if the service degrades or disappears, every routed URL breaks at once.
- For Rubel, the warning converts an abstract decentralization argument into a concrete checklist item for the PR industry he advises at CooperKatz — audit where your links actually resolve.
Second-order effects
- The obvious knock-on is a shift toward self-hosted redirects on publishers' own domains, moving the value of a click back to infrastructure the publisher controls rather than a third party.
- A VC amplifying the piece via Techmeme puts the reliability question in front of the investors funding centralized consumer-web conveniences, raising the bar for how such services must demonstrate durability.
Third-order effects
- If link-routing keeps consolidating into a handful of intermediaries, URL permanence becomes a trust question — who stands behind a link resolving years from now — which points toward platform-level commitments or standards rather than ad-hoc free services.
- The broader pattern Winer names — convenience features quietly becoming chokepoints — recurs across web services, making decentralization resilience a design criterion rather than an ideology.
The trend: Web publishing is testing whether free convenience layers like URL shorteners can remain durable shared infrastructure or will be forced toward self-hosting as publishers internalize the cost of centralization.