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My take on this is that the network effects of living in a big city vs. small town actually increased post-internet. Ie. the value proposition of the physical city network is even greater with internet.

One obvious example is on demand food delivery. In a small town you still just get one or two places delivering food, the internet cannot solve that.

But in a city you’re immediately connected to every provider in your radius. It was technically true before but required walking around, local knowledge etc. The internet removed that upfront investment and made the physical network available to anyone immediately.



A model of the net increase in network size pre- and post-internet would be interesting but I don't know of any.




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