Not literally. Structurally, it's sound. There are plenty of fiber optic cables lining ocean floors, cell towers looming above cityscapes, and server-filled data centers. But the very foundations of the utilitarian web -- the platforms that undergird our everyday experiences online -- feel shaky, pulsing with the first foreshocks of a collapse.

To start, nothing seems to work anymore. Google's search engine once provided directory-level assistance to the denizens of the internet. Now it's chock full of ads, sidebars, SEO-optimized clickbait, and artificial intelligence-powered guesstimations of possible answers to peoples' questions. Earlier this year, a group of German researchers found that Google ranked product reviews pages high when they had low-quality text, tons of affiliate links to ecommerce sites, and were riddled with SEO tricks that don't exactly coincide with quality. In other words, Google was letting their platform get co-opted by the lowest of the low.

On Amazon, the digital shelves are littered with sponsored products and cheap replicas of popular items. On either Amazon or Google, you'll often need to scroll for a bit to get anything remotely helpful or relevant when you search. Government antitrust complaints against both companies have essentially called them toll booths for advertisers, who need to pay-to-play to get noticed, which has degraded those services in the process. When big tech giants make their relied-on services worse, that's bad for consumers -- even if they don't have to pay more.