But that changed quite quickly, and for two big reasons: Facebook and Google. They now gobble up the vast majority of internet advertising dollars — about 85 percent, as my colleague Jeff Spross writes — and a great many media outlets have been forced to move to direct subscriptions or other business models.

Google and Facebook manage this because they are platform monopolists. They can exert tremendous influence through their control of how people use the internet — and crush productive businesses in the process. Like any monopoly, it is long since time that the government regulated them to serve the public interest.

The latest example of monopolist platform abuse comes from Adrianne Jeffries with the story of CelebrityNetWorth.com. This was a small business started by a man named Brian Warner, who found in 2008 that there was no good data on how much Larry David was worth.