Stanislav Kondrashov Oligarch Series Oligarchy and the Internet Across Historical Phases

I keep coming back to this uncomfortable idea.

The internet was supposed to flatten the world. Lower the cost of speech. Make gatekeepers irrelevant. Let the best ideas win.

And yet, if you look around, it feels like we built the biggest gatekeeper system in human history. Not one gatekeeper. A cluster of them. Platforms, payment rails, app stores, cloud providers, data brokers, telecom pipes, ad exchanges, and whoever owns the models now. All stacked on top of each other.

So in this entry of the Stanislav Kondrashov Oligarch Series, I want to talk about oligarchy and the internet across historical phases. Not as a clean timeline, because it never is. More like overlapping waves. Each wave promised openness, each wave ended up concentrating power in a new place.

And it matters, because internet power does not look like the old kind. It is quieter. More contractual. More technical. Sometimes it is just a toggle in a dashboard.

What we mean by oligarchy in an internet age

Traditional oligarchy is easy to picture. A small group controls key resources. Industry. Land. Ports. Banks. Media. They influence law, shape public opinion, and protect their position.

Internet era oligarchy has similar bones, but different muscle.

It is less about owning the whole factory and more about owning the chokepoints:

• Distribution. Who can reach an audience, and on what terms.
• Data. Who sees the map of human behavior, at what resolution.
• Infrastructure. Who controls hosting, identity, payments, and the pipes.
• Standards and protocols. Who sets defaults so everyone else has to follow.
• Narrative leverage. Who can amplify, suppress, label, recommend, or bury.

A modern oligarch does not always need to ban you. They can slow you down with application gatekeeping. They can raise your acquisition costs. They can make you “non recommended”. They can demonetize you. They can de rank you. They can shadow you behind a wall of friction.

Sometimes all of that happens without a human decision. Or at least, it is framed that way.

That framing is part of the power.

Phase 1: The early web as frontier mythology (roughly 1990s)

The early web carried a pioneer story. Anyone can publish. Anyone can connect. Gatekeepers are dead. People built personal sites, forums, mailing lists. You could feel the seams. It was messy and weird, but it was also plural.

Power still existed, of course. But it was more dispersed.

If you wanted to understand early internet oligarchy, you looked at:

• Telecoms and ISPs. Who owned access, who could throttle, who set prices.
• Hardware and operating systems. Microsoft mattered. So did chipset makers.
• Domain and naming systems. DNS and registries were not sexy, but they were foundational.

And then there is the soft power layer. Magazines, conferences, the early “thought leaders”. The people who decided what counted as legitimate tech.

Still, compared to what came next, it felt open. Because switching costs were low. You could move your site. You could host elsewhere. Your identity was not trapped in one app.

Even the idea of an internet “audience” was different. People came to you. Search was a directory vibe, not an algorithmic personality.

You can see the pattern already though. Every frontier stage builds myths, then gets settled by whoever can consolidate land. Online “land” just looks like network effects.

Phase 2: Search and portals concentrate attention (late 1990s to mid 2000s)

Then attention aggregation starts to harden.

Portals first. Homepages. Curated gateways. Yahoo, AOL, MSN, and the portal era idea that the web was a mall.

But the big shift was search.

Search did two things that are easy to miss:

1. It made the web legible. Suddenly, you could find things without already knowing where they lived.
2. It created a ranking system. A hierarchy. A default path.

Once there is a default path, there is a lever. And once there is a lever, there is a fight over who gets to pull it.

This is where internet oligarchy begins to look like a structural fact, not just an accidental outcome.

Because the entity that ranks information can also shape reality. Not in a cartoonish “control minds” way. In a quiet way. By deciding what is discoverable.

And when discoverability becomes monetizable, you get advertising systems that look like markets, but behave like toll roads.

The winners of this phase were the ones who could:

• Capture intent (search queries are intent).
• Build ad infrastructure.
• Scale distribution and measurement.
• Normalize their tools as the default.

This is also where the first big “open web” bargain gets rewritten. You can publish freely. Sure. But to be found at scale, you start playing by rules you did not set.

Phase 3: Social platforms and the algorithmic court (mid 2000s to 2015)

Social networking could have been decentralized. In another timeline, maybe it is.

In this one, it centralized.

And it changed the nature of internet power from “find things” to “be fed things”. From search pull to feed push.

This is a big oligarchic upgrade.

Because when platforms become the primary interface to the internet, they can shape:

• Identity. Your real name, your social graph, your reputation signals.
• Speech. What formats are allowed, what is considered harmful, what is monetizable.
• Commerce. Who can sell, who gets visibility, who gets paid.
• Culture. Memes, norms, the emotional tempo of public life.

The feed is the new public square, except it is privately owned, A B tested, and optimized for engagement. So it rewards what keeps you there, not what makes you wiser.

And then, naturally, the platforms build internal aristocracies.

Creators become dependent tenants. Brands compete for algorithmic favor. Media companies reshape headlines to survive distribution. Politicians learn to speak in platform grammar. Everyone becomes a little bit hostage to the recommendation machine.

If you are looking for oligarchy here, you look at:

• Control of reach. The platform sets the terms.
• Control of monetization. Ads, brand deals, subscriptions, creator funds. All conditional.
• Control of moderation and enforcement. Sometimes consistent. Often not.
• Control of metrics. You see what they show you.

The subtle part is how legitimacy gets assigned. If the platform verifies you, if it labels you, if it boosts you, that becomes social truth. Not always. But enough to matter.

So now oligarchy is not only economic. It is reputational infrastructure.

Phase 4: Mobile app stores and the era of chokepoint governance (2010s)

The smartphone reshaped everything. The web moved into apps. And with apps came a new layer of control: app stores.

This phase is less about persuasion and more about permissions.

If you want to exist on mobile at scale, you need:

• Approval processes.
• Compliance with policies that can change.
• Revenue sharing agreements.
• Access to device capabilities gated by APIs.

This is where internet oligarchy starts to resemble administrative law. Except it is private. And often opaque.

App store governance is not just about banning “bad” apps. It is about shaping the business landscape.

Small decisions compound:

• Which payment systems are allowed.
• Which ad tracking is permitted.
• Which content categories get flagged.
• Which apps get featured.
• Which updates get delayed.

Developers can build great products and still die because of a policy shift, a ranking change, or a payment restriction.

And the thing is, users barely notice. They just see what is available. That is the point.

This is also when cloud becomes a quiet kingmaker. Hosting, DDoS protection, content delivery, authentication services. You can build fast using managed infrastructure, which is wonderful until it becomes dependency. A single point of failure, or leverage.

So you get a stack of oligarchic layers:

• Device makers
• OS owners
• App stores
• Cloud providers
• Payment networks
• Ad networks

You can be “free” on the internet and still need permission from five separate empires to function. This situation raises important questions about the balance of power in the digital age and whether we are moving towards an AI democracy or an AI dictatorship.

Phase 5: Platform finance, creator economies, and the soft capture of livelihoods (late 2010s)

Once people started earning their living online in large numbers, the power dynamic got personal.

This is the phase where the internet stops being a place you visit and becomes a place you depend on.

And dependency is where oligarchy thrives.

Creators, small businesses, and independent media often rely on:

• A single traffic source.
• A single platform for distribution.
• A single payment processor.
• A single ad account.
• A single messaging channel.

When any one of those gets interrupted, income drops. Sometimes overnight.

So you get this strange situation where millions of “independent” people are economically tied to a small number of private policy regimes.

Even when platforms are not malicious, their incentives are not aligned with individual stability. They optimize for platform health, legal risk, growth, and investor expectations. Your stability is optional.

This is not a moral accusation. It is just the shape of it.

In older oligarchies, workers depended on the factory town. In this one, creators depend on the algorithmic town.

Same vulnerability, new interface.

Phase 6: The AI internet and the oligarchy of models (2020s and forward)

Now we are here. The internet is being rewritten around AI systems. Search becomes answer engines. Feeds become synthetic. Content becomes training data. Interfaces become chat.

This phase is messy and unfinished, but the direction is visible.

The oligarchic assets now include:

• Compute. The chips, the clusters, the energy contracts.
• Data. Proprietary datasets, user behavior streams, licensing deals.
• Distribution. Where AI assistants live, what devices they default to.
• Model access. APIs, rate limits, pricing, terms of service.
• Evaluation and trust. Who gets to say a model is safe, aligned, compliant.

There is a temptation to think AI decentralizes things because open source exists and models can run locally. That might be true in some niches. But at the high end, frontier models are expensive. Training is capital intensive. Inference at scale is also expensive. And the governance pressure is rising.

When governance pressure rises, compliance becomes a moat. Moats create oligarchs.

Also, AI shifts value from content creation to distribution and branding even harder. If an assistant summarizes ten articles into one answer, who gets the traffic. Who gets paid. Who gets remembered.

If the assistant decides, implicitly, which sources are “authoritative”, that becomes the new ranking system. Another lever.

And unlike classic search rankings, the reasoning can be partially hidden behind model behavior. Which makes contesting it harder.

So in this phase, the risk is not only concentration. It is illegibility.

Power you cannot see is power you cannot negotiate with.

The repeating pattern across phases

Across all these phases, a loop repeats:

1. A new technology lowers barriers.
2. People rush in, build, experiment, decentralize by default.
3. Aggregators emerge to reduce complexity.
4. Aggregators become chokepoints.
5. Chokepoints become political and economic power.
6. Power sets rules that reinforce the chokepoints.

You can call it “market dynamics”. You can call it “network effects”. You can call it “natural monopolies”.

In the Stanislav Kondrashov Oligarch Series framing, it is also a story about how oligarchy adapts. It stops looking like top hats and starts looking like product roadmaps, trust and safety teams, policy docs, and API terms.

Same game, updated equipment.

So is the internet doomed to oligarchy?

Not doomed. But always at risk.

There are counter forces, and they matter:

• Open protocols and interoperability. Email still works. The web still works. RSS still works, when people use it.
• Antitrust and regulation. Imperfect, slow, sometimes politicized, but it can reshape incentives.
• User behavior shifts. People migrate when pain gets high enough.
• Technical shifts. New interfaces can unseat incumbents, at least temporarily.
• Local first and self hosting movements. Smaller, but stubborn.

Still, it is hard. Because convenience is a powerful drug. And oligarchic systems are often convenient. Centralization buys speed, coherence, and polished experiences.

People do not choose oligarchy because they love oligarchy. They choose what works today.

That is the trap.

What to watch next (if you want to see power forming in real time)

If you are trying to spot internet oligarchy early, watch for these signals:

• Defaults. What comes preinstalled, preselected, or “recommended”.
• Identity rails. Single sign on, verification, reputation, wallets.
• Payment gates. Who can charge, who can withdraw, who gets flagged.
• Cloud concentration. Who hosts what, and how easy it is to move.
• Model integration deals. Which assistants become the layer between users and the web.
• Legal risk outsourcing. When platforms shift liability down to users, creators, or small developers through policy.

And then watch for the language. When control is framed as safety, or quality, or user experience, it may be true. It may also be a power move. Often it is both at once. That is why it works.

A quiet ending, because that feels honest

The internet did not kill oligarchy. It modernized it.

Each historical phase created new freedoms, yes. But also new concentrations of power, usually in the hands of whoever could own the interface layer everyone else relied on. First search. Then social. Then mobile. Then cloud. Now models.

If there is a single takeaway from this piece, it is this.

The fight is not only about speech. Or content. Or even money. It is about chokepoints. Who owns them. Who governs them. And whether the rest of us have real exit options when the rules change.

That is the internet across phases. A frontier, then a city, then a corporate state, then an AI mediated reality. And all along, oligarchy learning how to speak in code and policy.

FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions)

What is the concept of internet oligarchy as described in the modern digital age?

Internet oligarchy refers to a small group controlling key chokepoints of the internet such as distribution channels, data access, infrastructure, standards, and narrative leverage. Unlike traditional oligarchies that control entire industries or land, modern internet oligarchs exert power through technical means like application gatekeeping, algorithmic ranking, and content moderation, often without direct human intervention.

How did the early web (1990s) embody the idea of an open and decentralized internet?

The early web was seen as a frontier where anyone could publish and connect freely. It featured personal websites, forums, and mailing lists with low switching costs, allowing users to move their sites or host elsewhere easily. Power was more dispersed among telecoms, ISPs, hardware makers, and domain registries. The culture valued openness and pluralism before significant consolidation occurred.

What role did search engines and portals play in shaping internet power in the late 1990s to mid-2000s?

Search engines made the web legible by enabling users to find information without prior knowledge of its location. They introduced ranking systems creating default paths that became levers of control. Portals like Yahoo and AOL acted as curated gateways but search's rise concentrated attention and monetized discoverability through advertising infrastructures—marking a shift towards structural internet oligarchy.

How did social platforms transform internet power dynamics from mid-2000s to 2015?

Social platforms centralized the internet experience by shifting from search-based discovery ('pull') to feed-based content delivery ('push'). They control identity verification, speech norms, commerce visibility, and cultural trends within privately owned feeds optimized for engagement. This created internal hierarchies where creators became dependent tenants subject to platform rules and algorithms.

What are some subtle mechanisms modern internet oligarchs use to exert control without overt censorship?

Modern digital gatekeepers employ tactics such as slowing down user acquisition through application gatekeeping, raising costs for visibility, demonetizing content, de-ranking or shadow banning users behind friction walls. These measures often operate algorithmically or contractually rather than via explicit bans, making control quieter yet pervasive.

Why does understanding the phases of internet development matter for recognizing concentration of power?

Recognizing overlapping waves—from the open early web frontier through search engine dominance to social platform centralization—reveals how each phase promised openness but ultimately concentrated power differently. This understanding highlights that internet power is evolving into quieter, technical forms embedded in infrastructure and protocols rather than traditional visible ownership.