Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University,

bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems.

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Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler.

Today, I am chatting with Chris Dixon, who is a general partner at Indreason Harwitz.

He has a longstanding history in the tech field. He started off in a way as a

blogger, and we now have out the paperback edition of Chris's recent book, a very stimulating and

provocative read. It is called read-write-own, building the next error of the internet. Chris, welcome.

Thanks for having me.

Let me ask you a very fundamental question so people can see where you're coming from.

Sure.

What's wrong with that arrangement?

How is it you think we can make it better?

Yeah, I mean, so the kind of core thesis of my book and kind of the core thesis of my career now is that, you know, the internet began as a decentralized network, which what that meant was that if you created a website, or let's say you were a musician and you created a website and you sold your music, you would sell directly to the consumers.

And there would be no one sits, no intermediary in between taking money from that transaction.

Challenge with things like Spotify and YouTube and just generally the structure of the modern internet

is that you've had these services pop up, which, you know, are very dominant.

It's very consolidated.

Sort of 90% of the internet traffic runs through, you know, are very dominant. It's very consolidated. Sort of 90% of the internet traffic

runs through, you know, less than 10 services and companies. And they have very high what we call

...