The business models that made Bezos and Zuckerberg two of the richest people on Earth are crumbling. Some might say they've already disintegrated, and these legacy beasts are just lumbering on. Dead men walking.

The ad-driven, surveillance-powered model that runs today's internet is fundamentally broken. When your revenue comes from harvesting attention and personal data, you optimise for addiction and engagement farming; not utility, usefulness, or human need.

But what comes next? What comes after big tech?

Software that serves you, again

Remember when you bought software and it just… worked for you? No ads cluttering the interface, no algorithms designed to keep you scrolling, no dark patterns manipulating your behaviour. The software succeeded when you succeeded.

That relationship is coming back. When software isn't funded by surveillance capitalism—when data harvesting becomes irrelevant—everything changes. Value gets measured by utility, not by attention extracted.

Social media optimised for helping you maintain relationships instead of maximising screen time. News apps designed to inform you efficiently rather than trap you in outrage cycles. Creative tools that amplify your abilities instead of harvesting your creations.

From platforms to protocols

Here's the fundamental shift: we're moving from a landscape of closed platforms to one built on open protocols.

Think of it like the postal system. Today's internet is as if one company owned all the roads, all the post boxes, your mail, and even your address. Leave their service and you lose everything --your connections, your history, your digital life.

But with open protocols, we all understand how things work. The rules are transparent and agreed upon. Don't like your delivery service? Switch to another. Your address stays yours. Your connections remain intact.

The network effects happen at the base level (the protocol itself) not at the platform level. Because we've designed out lock-in entirely.

Interoperability as freedom

This approach makes interoperability the default. Your data doesn't get locked in proprietary silos. You can mix and match services, customise your experience, and switch providers without losing your digital life.

Competition happens over who can provide the best interface, the best features, the best user experience, not who can trap you most effectively in their walled garden.

And the entry to that competition has the lowest of bars now, because the moats of old are gone. All developers have access to the same global infrastructure. A level playing field. No huge capital requirements. No need to worry about handling personal data, or CDNs, or geographic constraints.

And in a time when the very nature of what apps, what software even is, is changing completely… when bespoke software can be created on the fly, in the moment, morphed and manipulated and hyper-customised… what matters is the input (your ideas, needs, intent and context) and the output (the connections, communications, and goals being met): the data.

You should be in charge and own those inputs and outputs. No one else. And the infrastructure that it all stands upon? That must belong to us all.

That's the power of autonomous networks delivered by a new set of protocols for the web.

The post-platform economy is coming. And it's going to be owned by all of us.