The first two eras of the internet

From the 1980s to the early 2000s, the first era of the internet saw services built on open protocols managed by the internet community. This caused people or organisations to grow their internet presence, knowing that the rules of the game would remain unchanged.

In the second era of the internet, from the mid-2000s to the present, for-profit companies built software and services that outpaced the capabilities of the open protocols, such as GAFA - Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon. Users eventually migrated from open services to centralised services.