Popular anxiety about the internet and technology in 2017 has taken a different form from the 1990s and 2000s, as big companies dominate now
John Herrman / New York Times :
Context & Ripple Effects
Writing at the end of 2017, John Herrman argues that popular anxiety about technology has changed shape: the fear is no longer the open-web chaos of the 1990s and 2000s but the dominance of a handful of big companies that now set the terms of online life. The related coverage shows this was the opening move of a longer arc — Benedict Evans had already traced how events in 2016 polarized the conversation and pushed people toward easy regulatory answers.
What came after validated the framing: within months, the Cambridge Analytica scandal turned casual data-sharing into resentment and distrust, and by 2021 the Times was documenting [[a:965449|governments worldwide moving to limit tech-company power with an urgency no single industry had faced]]. A 2019 retrospective on how the internet deviated from its sunny vision of mass empowerment closes the loop Herrman opened.
First-order effects
- The dominant platforms become the subject of coverage rather than its disruptors — scrutiny shifts from whether they will be overtaken to what their scale does to speech, competition, and public life.
Second-order effects
- Once anxiety attaches to concentrated corporate power rather than open-network risk, the policy conversation follows: regulators and governments gain a public mandate to treat platform dominance as a problem to be limited, the path the 2021 reporting documents.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the industry's legitimacy cycle inverts permanently — each new wave of technology is now greeted through the lens of who controls it, making antitrust-style scrutiny a standing condition for large consumer-tech firms rather than an episodic response.
The trend: Public anxiety about technology has migrated from the openness of the early web to the concentration of power in a few platform companies, converting cultural unease into regulatory pressure.