the_landlords_of_the_internet
Something Feels Off
Over the past few years, things on the internet have been changing. It's not sudden or drastic, but it's a collection of little changes that add up. Streaming subscriptions are getting more expensive, while offering less to users. Companies are stuffing "AI" into seemingly everything these days: word processors, email programs, operating systems, browsers. They're adding these features, and announcing them excitedly, but no customers actually seem all that enthusiastic about it.
Phones are shipping with less included storage, at higher prices. That means we need to buy a subscription to cloud storage so that we can keep access to our data, and the phone OS providers are happy to charge us for the privilege. Privacy policies tell us that even though we're paying them, they still get to use our data to train their AI models. Providers are offering less and charging more, and it feels like it's everywhere all at the same time.
This isn't just a coincidence, and it didn't happen by accident: there's a common thread that ties these observations together. The specifics may appear random and complex, but the thread connecting all these observations leads somewhere most people haven't thought to look. Once you've noticed it, you will see it everywhere.
Where Did All The Hard Drives Go?
Last month, I saw the news that Western Digital, manufacturer of hard disk drives, is sold out for all of 2026. Sold out for the year. In January. To seven buyers.
Retail markets (you and me) represent only 5% of their revenue. That's nothing - a rounding error on some spreadsheet somewhere. They're not building products to sell to us, they're building and selling to Enterprise customers, whose data centers need HDDs so that they can sell us a cloud storage subscription.
This isn't a unique event, either. Last year, RAM was suddenly sold out everywhere, because they won't sell it to us. Before that, it was graphics cards that were unavailable and expensive. We are no longer the customer for hardware manufacturers, and these are not separate, distinct events: they're evidence of a pattern of behaviour within the industry as a whole. The buyers have names you'll recognize. Their motives, however, are less obvious.
All The Chips, Too?
As an example, let's look at Nvidia's H100 GPU - the premier chip for AI data processing. While they're not the kind of chips you might find in a gaming rig, they're made in the same fabrication plants, and more H100s means fewer gaming rigs. And Nvidia is in the business of manufacturing whatever sells best, so if they can sell more H100s, they'll make them.
Who wants to buy up all these chips? It's the usual collection of companies, but this time they're hoarding them. Zuckerberg's Meta wants 350 000 of them. Musk's xAI and Tesla are looking for hundreds of thousands. Sam Altman and OpenAI are renting theirs from Microsoft. They're vacuuming up all the manufacturing capacity, ordering staggering amounts of hardware, and the result: existing hardware is priced out-of-reach of the ordinary consumer, if it's even available at all.
These are industry-wide impacts, and this kind of action doesn't require any collusion or conspiracy in a market dominated by a tiny number of huge corporate entities. The incentives of these actors align all on their own, and positions these corporations in direct opposition to the customer.
Bezos, Zuckerberg, Musk, Nadella, and Huang, the individuals running these corporations, all understand the implications of complete consolidation of tech infrastructure, and what it means for the consumer. When corporate interests are set against the consumer, and there are no viable alternatives for customers to choose, exploitation inevitably follows.
Caught in the Act
Microsoft recently decided to integrate their Copilot product into Microsoft 365, and raise their prices, in some markets by as much as 45%. Satya Nadella appears to be betting that the cost to Microsoft customers of moving away from depending on Office 365 would be higher than just accepting the increase. After all, people don't like change, and changing the communication infrastructure for an entire organization involves a lot of cost and effort.
However, they also offered the option to keep a cheaper, "Classic" plan, but they put it somewhere most users wouldn't find it: within the cancellation process. According to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), this is false or misleading.
After this happened, Microsoft made a change and offered a way to decline the AI features, finally in compliance with the law. After getting caught. And they're still raising prices.
The Biggest Project That Doesn't Exist
Last September, the news was everywhere that Nvidia and OpenAI had made a deal for one hundred billion dollars of investment, where Nvidia would "invest" the money into OpenAI, who would use the money to purchase chips from Nvidia source.
The mainstream media reported eagerly on this deal. Jensen Huang, Nvidia's CEO, called it "the largest computing project in history." A few weeks later, Nvidia's total market cap exceeded 5 trillion dollars.
A couple months later, when speaking to investors, Nvidia's CFO quietly let investors know that the "deal" was still at the letter of intent stage. In effect, two months with no progress beyond the "middle-school valentine" level of commitment, quietly shared with the people who hold the purse-strings.
Last week, Huang told reporters that the "deal" was, in fact, never a contract, had no legal basis, and suddenly, Nvidia's investment in OpenAI was reduced to only 30 billion in equity investment.
The biggest project in computing history disappeared without notice, but high prices stuck around. Consumers can't afford to buy hardware, if they can even find it, investors are overly-optimistic because they're under a mistaken impression. Corporate executives are getting the board's blessing for keeping that stock price inflated.
The Plan Is In The Pattern
The handful of companies who own our internet infrastructure are following a simple business model. They use their outsized resources to consolidate supply, obscure or undercut alternatives, raise prices, and they only relent when forced by authority. It's not a conspiracy, it's a business strategy that only works when competition does not exist in any meaningful way.
Jeff Bezos has been arguing since 2008 that individually-owned compute is obsolete, and claims that it's akin to a brewery generating its own electricity before it could be purchased from a utility. He initially used the metaphor to sell cloud services to corporations, but it is clear he aims to own and control the means of compute.
The actions are established already: buy up all the hardware, lock customers into software platforms, announce vaporware deals to influence investor opinion, and maximize extraction from a captive customer base. While these companies provide a service to the public, they do not work in service of the public.
Unlike the utilities that provide electricity to breweries and homes, they want to do this without regulation and without consumer protection. They want to be the electric company, the generator company, and the solar panel company; complete market domination. We will no longer be able to purchase any resource, we will only be able to rent access.
Your photos that are "in the cloud" live behind someone else's locked door. Videos you took of your family are on someone else's hard drive, but you can pay every month to retain access. Software you rely on for work can go dark. You can still paint a picture, but you need to rent the canvas.
They will own the means, they will set the terms, they will control access. Our only way in to the digital world will be to pay by the minute.
The Roadmap
We can predict where this is headed. Hardware is unaffordable, with supplies completely consumed by corporate purchase agreements. The hardware available to consumers will become less capable, rely more on cloud resources, subscription services, and data connections. Suspensions will become arbitrary, loss of access unrecoverable, alternatives non-existent, and this will have a negative impact on people's livelihoods. Terms and conditions will dictate who gets to participate in the economy, and how. Providers will consolidate into a de-facto monopoly, raise prices, and remove features and content without notice.
We are moving toward a world where exploitation is a core feature of the digital infrastructure. Our data will be collected, sold, and used to make software even more adversarial and exploitative.
The people making these things happen know what they're doing. They create an illusion that serves their interests, then retreat only when journalists or regulators force their hand, and they just call it a "misunderstanding." Markets move with fictional narratives in press releases filled with bold, vague claims.
Across the industry, this class of economic actor has bought the studios, the news outlets, and the platforms that distribute them. They own and manipulate the editorial narrative. They want to own the entire information ecosystem: creation, distribution, and access, and they want us to pay rent on all of it.
It's more than hiding information from us, they're manufacturing a narrative to exploit both investors and customers.
Where This Goes
This is where the world is headed. There's no question these companies intend to harm consumers; the evidence is clear. The question that remains is, will enough people understand what's being built before it's finished.