Here is the pattern we keep watching play out, across every domain, every decade. Someone builds infrastructure. Others build on top of it. The infrastructure owner, eventually, starts charging for the privilege. And the people who built on top are suddenly paying rent on the foundation of their own business.
Three stories broke the same week, across completely different industries. One about the UK considering extending the BBC license fee to cover streaming platforms like YouTube, so that simply watching video on the internet would cost you $240 a year. One about Apple's new smart home hardware and why renters shouldn't install it, because a landlord can change your lease and you can't take a hardwired smart lock with you when you go. And one about companies like Ramp and Stripe quietly building internal platforms so their non-engineering teams can ship their own tools, without queuing up a ticket and waiting for dev capacity.
On the surface, these have nothing to do with each other. A broadcast tax. Smart home gadgets for renters. Internal tooling trends at fintech firms. But they all describe the same trap: building your operation on top of someone else's foundation, and learning too late that the foundation has a price tag you didn't agree to.
The fungal network literature makes this concrete in a way we find genuinely clarifying. Evolutionary biologist Toby Kiers, writing in Quanta, describes how underground fungal networks "trade" nutrients with plants in a system that looks almost like a market. Plants that cooperate and share carbon with the network get better access to phosphorus and water. Plants that don't contribute get cut off. No brain required. The network enforces its own terms. You either participate on its conditions or you find yourself without the resources you thought were just part of the environment.
That is exactly what every major platform does, eventually. AWS decides to charge for egress. Shopify changes its app revenue split. YouTube restructures monetization. The App Store takes its cut. Stripe raises fees. The infrastructure that felt like the air you breathed becomes a line item you have to explain on a board call. And founders who built deep into one of these systems without a plan discover that they don't really own their business. They rent it.
The Apple renter story is the cleanest version of this. You invest in the hardware, you do the installation work, you learn the ecosystem, you build your routines around it. And then your landlord says no modifications, or you move, or the lease terms change, and none of it comes with you. You put equity into someone else's asset. Your effort created value that you cannot take back.
Watch this happen in software all the time. A founder builds their entire customer acquisition funnel on Instagram organic reach, then Meta throttles reach to push ad spend. A small label puts its catalog exclusively on one streaming platform, then that platform changes the royalty calculation. A gym owner builds their booking and billing workflow entirely inside a SaaS tool, then that tool gets acquired, deprecated, or repriced above their margin. The investment was real. The ownership was not.
This is what makes the Ramp and Stripe internal tooling move so interesting. The article frames it as a trend about "vibe coding" and non-engineers building apps. We read it differently. What those companies are actually doing is internalizing capability that previously lived on external platforms or inside vendor relationships. They are building the layer they depend on, rather than renting it. Non-engineers can ship their own tools because the infrastructure is theirs. No ticket queue to an outside system. No pricing change that breaks a workflow. No terms of service update that requires an emergency call with legal.
The BBC licensing story is the scariest version of this, because it's government-level infrastructure tax. Not a platform company changing its terms. An entire nation potentially requiring that you pay a fee to access the internet's default video layer. YouTube is not infrastructure you chose. It's infrastructure that became so embedded in public life that taxing it starts to look reasonable to a policy committee. If you run a business that depends on YouTube for distribution, this is not hypothetical. It's a preview of what happens when you build on infrastructure you have no influence over and no exit from.
So what do you actually do about this?
First, audit your single points of failure. Map every workflow in your business to the platform or vendor that enables it. If that vendor raised prices 40% next year, what breaks? If they shut down, what dies? This is not a theoretical exercise. It is the most important operational review a founder at your stage can run, and most of you have never done it.
Second, distinguish between tools and foundations. A tool is something you use. A foundation is something you build on. Tools can change. Foundations are sticky. Treat any external platform you are building your customer relationships, your data, your core workflows, or your distribution on as a foundation and make sure you have an exit plan or a fallback before you go deeper.
Third, invest in owned infrastructure earlier than feels necessary. Email lists over social followers. Your own database over platform-native analytics. Internal tooling for the workflows that run your business, rather than SaaS seats you can't export from. None of this means refusing to use platforms. It means not letting any single platform become the thing your business cannot function without.
The fungal network doesn't punish every plant. It punishes the ones that take without contributing, and the ones that have no other options. The plants that thrive are the ones that participate in the network from a position of redundancy. They have root systems that reach beyond the network. They can survive a disruption.
Build your business the same way. Use the platforms. Just never let any one of them be the only door.
Every infrastructure owner eventually learns that they have pricing power. The founders who stay independent are the ones who learn that lesson first.