Can Anything Stop The Facebook Juggernaut?
So. Facebook. $35 billion valuation; 600 million users; 25% of all US Web traffic — and all that with fewer employees than Google has job openings. The inventor of the World Wide Web recently warned that the web may be endangered by Facebook's colossal walled garden.
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook has been on this trajectory since the platform's 2007 breakout was first framed as a revolution rather than a college network. That same year Fortune argued Google was already running scared, while skeptics asked whether the company could sell any ads at all — a question that has never fully been answered even as valuations climbed.
What changed by November 2010 is scale meeting legitimacy: after Signal vs. Noise's September argument that $33 billion overshot any defensible number, secondary-market pricing now sits at $35 billion with 600 million users and a quarter of US Web traffic behind it. Tim Berners-Lee reframing the story as an open-web-versus-walled-garden problem turns a valuation debate into a structural one about who controls the web's center of gravity.
First-order effects
- Google now competes for advertising budgets against a service that captures 25% of US Web traffic with fewer employees than Google itself has job openings — a cost structure no rival can match head-on.
- Publishers and advertisers face immediate pressure to move distribution and spend inside Facebook's graph, since that is where a quarter of American web attention already sits.
Second-order effects
- Berners-Lee's warning gives competitors, publishers, and standards advocates a rallying frame for backing open alternatives — expect 'open web' positioning to become a marketing weapon against the platform.
- The employee-count asymmetry intensifies the talent war: a company generating this much traffic and value per head can bid up engineers, forcing Google and startups alike to pay more for scarce technical staff.
Third-order effects
- If the market keeps pricing Facebook at $35 billion despite the unresolved 2007-era monetization doubts, capital will concentrate further around closed-network platforms at the expense of open-web businesses.
- The Berners-Lee critique points toward a governance conflict: web standards bodies and platform operators contending over whether the web's default architecture stays open or fragments into proprietary gardens.
The trend: Consumer attention and advertising value are consolidating into a single walled-garden platform faster than the open web's institutions and business models can mount a response.