This Man Controls 40% of the Internet and It’s a Problem
Meet Matt Mullenweg.
In the early 2000s, an 19-year-old developer named Matt Mullenweg forked a CMS called b2/cafelog to add features he thought were missing.
By October 2009, the project, going by the name of WordPress, had become the most popular open-source CMS on the Internet, today powering some 810 million websites worldwide, or 40% of the Internet.
About anyone, from the NYT to Neil Patel, uses WordPress for their blog, e-com store, company website, portfolio, and more.
Free, light, great for SEO, easy to use, WordPress is also open-source which means that anyone can copy, contribute to, and tweak it as they wish.
Until they couldn’t.
In September 2024, Mullenweg complained that the WordPress hosting company WP Engine was a cancer to WordPress due to their little contribution to the open-source project and their appropriation of the WordPress brand.
A few days later, WP Engine sent a cease and desist letter to Mullenweg asking him to stop making these comments.
In retaliation, Mullenweg blocked WP Engine from WordPress and their customers could no longer update their website.
