The layer where every human activity became a venture-backed destination, every destination became a feed, every feed became ad inventory, and every ad market became a machine for producing more things to interrupt you with.
Underneath that layer is another internet: older, slower, less polished, harder to monetize, and much harder to kill.
It is not utopia. It is full of spam, abandoned servers, broken clients, hostile nodes, strange old commands, half-maintained software, and people arguing in plain text about things no normal person should care about.
The statement that the new commercial veneer is dying needs to be backed up: YouTube, TikTok, Spotify, and Reddit still drive traffic, despite the slop, and because of the commercialization. Meta and Facebook are doing fine.
I like what he says about the underlying protocols, but it is missing a bit of nuance: Google has been instrumental in the evolution of HTTP; SMTP became a very different game when Google (via Gmail) pushed authentication; DRM made it into browsers thanks to Google and media companies.
Commercial companies may be benefiting from open protocols, but they are also pushing them in new directions. The stack the author remembers still exists, but it has been changed by that commercial “veneer”.
XMPP/Jabber protocol has been used by WhatsApp, and then closed off from the rest of the network. Theoretically, it could be inter-operable.