I mean, Bill wasn't really wrong. Just maybe naive?
People have been lying/wrong in print forever. This is not new [0]. What's new is the vast amount of information. He was definitely correct with "for all practical purposes there'll be an infinite amount of text".
What he got wrong is that he seemed to have expected these "referees" to grow vertically when they grew horizontally. Instead of multiple levels of referees filtering the output of one another, we ended up with a few players that vastly outpaced the rest [1].
The rest is the same thing that happens anytime you have a monopoly or relatively few big players. The big players get bigger and bigger. The barrier to entry grows with them. Before long, they control the space.
That space includes the information and the flow of information within it. Sure, they don't have perfect control, but they control enough of it to shape it to however they need (Facebook is a great example of this).
Today, we can all rattle off maybe a dozen companies that clearly control the internet. It is not the wild west anymore. There is the odd exception that might wrestle control of a niche space for a while (e.g. GitHub, Reddit), but once they get big enough to show up on Google's [2] radar, they're bought, threatened, replaced, or somehow otherwise removed.
And then there are things like analytics.
[0]: No, I don't have a source or example, but surely I don't need it to say "somebody has lied in a book or newspaper before".
People have been lying/wrong in print forever. This is not new [0]. What's new is the vast amount of information. He was definitely correct with "for all practical purposes there'll be an infinite amount of text".
What he got wrong is that he seemed to have expected these "referees" to grow vertically when they grew horizontally. Instead of multiple levels of referees filtering the output of one another, we ended up with a few players that vastly outpaced the rest [1].
The rest is the same thing that happens anytime you have a monopoly or relatively few big players. The big players get bigger and bigger. The barrier to entry grows with them. Before long, they control the space.
That space includes the information and the flow of information within it. Sure, they don't have perfect control, but they control enough of it to shape it to however they need (Facebook is a great example of this).
Today, we can all rattle off maybe a dozen companies that clearly control the internet. It is not the wild west anymore. There is the odd exception that might wrestle control of a niche space for a while (e.g. GitHub, Reddit), but once they get big enough to show up on Google's [2] radar, they're bought, threatened, replaced, or somehow otherwise removed.
And then there are things like analytics.
[0]: No, I don't have a source or example, but surely I don't need it to say "somebody has lied in a book or newspaper before".
[1]: Namely, Google.
[2]: Or some other Big Internet Company™.