One to Many: Modern Trustbusting
“Zero to One.” It’s the philosophy proposed in Peter Thiel’s book by the same name, in which he advises startup founders to seek out and build upon ideas that not only create entirely new markets, but ideally ensure they become the sole provider. Whatever your opinion on Thiel—whose PayPal Mafia alumni have prominently backed Donald Trump’s political ambitions—his book remains necessary reading for aspiring entrepreneurs. Nevertheless, the ideas within establish his religious fervor toward monopoly and work actively against the promise of the Internet.
You remember the promise of the Internet? Information made readily available for anyone to read, for anyone to disseminate. The capacity to publish democratized. In its most idealistic days, we envisioned how it would transform the world, our rose-tinted glasses suggesting it would inevitably benefit humankind.
Looking back, we might consider such thoughts naïve.
But I still believe in them.
Our vision of the Internet was suffused with hope, but that was during an era when decentralization reigned. We believed the promise would endure as smartphones became ubiquitous and social media connected us all.
What we failed to grasp was the nature of networks themselves—that they would become yet another arena for monopolists to dominate.
Perhaps the greatest challenge we face today is that, while technology has become omnipresent and we are increasingly networked to one another, we lack the technological literacy as a society to understand the substrate upon which modern life is constructed.
Let us examine, then, the most crucial element of this substrate: a concept known as “interoperability.”
The reason no single telecommunications monopoly can “own” a gated Internet is, first and foremost, a blessing. Second, it’s a function of interoperable standards defined within protocols that govern the Internet’s underlying technology.
These standards are essential for the Internet’s operation, with TCP/IP serving as its backbone. Internet providers must implement these standard protocols to enable our interconnectivity. In the 1990s, scientists at CERN invented the World Wide Web—a set of standards (now governed by the World Wide Web Consortium) that define protocols for content transmission, display, and interaction on the web. The beauty of interoperability and protocols is that they unlock the possibility of competition and choice.
In practice, telecommunications companies still tend toward monopolization, but that’s a function of infrastructure—who gets to lay fiber-optic cables. Competition remains possible through alternatives like satellite Internet, which still implements the same aforementioned protocols.
In sum, protocols and interoperability set the default permission for market competition to “yes.”
Conversely, most social-media companies (with the notable exception of BlueSky), dating sites, and search engines have become monopolies.
A key aspect of monopolies is what economists call “deadweight loss.” Though abstract, consider when you must call your telecommunications provider’s customer service and remain on hold for three hours. That’s deadweight loss. The monopoly—an organization you have no choice but to engage with—becomes dead weight upon your life, your wallet, your precious time.
Network monopolies create their own pernicious form of deadweight loss. Because these are networks of human beings and their communications under centralized ownership, this loss is imposed upon society’s collective psyche.
Even when social media is nominally free, a transaction still occurs: your time and attention traded for content and advertisements. Deadweight loss manifests as social-media addiction, which has produced myriad downstream social problems.
We can see deadweight loss with dating applications. Each new bespoke dating app typically concludes its existence by selling to Match Group, which has acquired over 45 dating properties since 2009. Dating apps become vessels of network monopolies that eventually merge with Match Group’s broader monopolistic network. The deadweight loss manifests in troubling online communities like The Red Pill or Female Dating Strategy, which, amplified by social-media monopolies, produce the alarming phenomenon we now call The Gender Wars.
Network monopolies, by their very nature, breed social hells.
Consider a specific instance: Meta’s network monopoly provided the substrate upon which the genocide of the Rohingya in Myanmar became possible. As documented by the United Nations fact-finding mission, Facebook was “a useful instrument for those seeking to spread hate,” becoming a primary vehicle for coordinating violence against the Rohingya minority. A single, centralized platform made it easy to find one’s tribe—in this case, a tribe with bloodlust. And this centralized platform was governed by distant figures who either didn’t know or didn’t care. Just as a telecommunications monopoly might fail to appear for your scheduled router installation, Meta neglected content moderation in a faraway land. They were too immense to care. And if you did care? Your friends and family remained on Facebook—their network monopoly ensured that you couldn’t bring your connections elsewhere. All of this is deadweight loss.
There is only one viable escape from this technological purgatory: interoperability. Had Facebook been built upon an open protocol, users could have departed in protest of genocide while maintaining their social connections.
Fortunately, we witnessed this pressure valve in action when Elon Musk acquired Twitter. Many users migrated to a social-media application built atop an open protocol: the Activity Protocol used by BlueSky. This represents the first node in a social-media network constructed on interoperability principles, and its future may indeed be promising, should we collectively will it so.
There is a beauty to interoperability: it naturally promulgates competition. It takes the One Monopoly and through market pressures fragments it into Many companies. This trend towards perfect competition through interoperability produces a curious effect: profit margins drop to near zero, and what emerges often resembles cooperation more than competition. Interoperability and open standards frequently result in an abundance of open-source alternatives alongside proprietary options—as witnessed with technologies governed by the W3C, from web browsers to email clients. The success of email as a communication medium, despite numerous attempts to create proprietary alternatives, stands as perhaps the most enduring example of interoperability’s power to maintain an open commons.
To the lawyers and traditional policy makers: you cannot dismantle tech companies as you once did with banks, oil companies, and railroads during the era of the robber barons. This approach is simply unfeasible and represents perhaps the European Union’s primary regulatory failure. Instead, we should look to precedents like the 1996 Telecommunications Act that successfully mandated interoperability in other network industries. You may assemble thousands of lawyers and policy makers, but the problem-solving approaches that function in the physical realm cannot seamlessly transfer to the binary world of ones and zeros. Despite efforts by the E.U. and Canadian Liberals attempting to regulate American social media under Prime Minister Trudeau, this approach has proved inadequate.
This is precisely why we must embrace interoperability and open protocols. By creating and supporting new interoperable standards, we can unleash perfect competition against the fortresses of American Big Tech—without requiring their permission. But this will necessitate government policy makers, industry leaders, and institutions throughout Canada, the E.U., and non-American liberal democracies to conceptualize new market structures built upon interoperable and open protocols, whether for social media, dating applications, ride-sharing services, or any domain currently dominated by American network monopolies.
Recent initiatives like the Digital Markets Act in Europe and bipartisan legislation in the United States suggest growing momentum for interoperability requirements. Today, sufficient cross-partisan political will exists throughout the international liberal-democratic community, along with consumer antipathy toward American firms, to coordinate efforts to challenge American tech giants through the perfect competition of thousands of smaller firms built upon interoperable and open standards.
The path from “Zero to One” need not lead to monopoly. In fact, the healthiest trajectory might be “One to Many”—where innovation creates new markets that then fragment into vibrant, competitive ecosystems through the power of interoperability. This isn’t just better economics; it’s better for our collective social fabric.
