Apple vs Google vs Facebook and the slow death of the web

[Commentary] So let's talk about ad blocking. You might think the conversation about ad blocking is about the user experience of news, but what we're really talking about is money and power in Silicon Valley. And titanic battles between large companies with lots of money and power tend to have a lot of collateral damage.

The Apple vs. Google fight has never been more heated or more tense, and Facebook's opportunity to present itself as the savior of media has never been bigger -- through hey-it's-just-about-speed Instant Articles, which will almost certainly be featured higher in the News Feed, and huge things like its massive video initiative, which is a direct assault on YouTube. And oh -- Apple's new tvOS, that huge bet on bringing apps to TV? Doesn't support WebKit at all. So it's Apple vs Google vs Facebook, all with their own revenue platforms. Google has the web, Facebook has its app, and Apple has the iPhone. This is the newest and biggest war in tech going today. And the collateral damage of that war -- of Apple going after Google's revenue platform -- is going to include the web, and in particular any small publisher on the web that can't invest in proprietary platform distribution, native advertising, and the type of media wining-and-dining it takes to secure favorable distribution deals on proprietary platforms. It is going to be a bloodbath of independent media.