When a company sells a product straight to you on the internet, instead of first selling it to a shop that then sells it to you, that skipping of the shop is disintermediation. Picture the old path: the factory sells to a store, the store sells to you. The new path: the factory's website sells to you. The store was the person in the middle. This word names the act of taking that middle step away. Though actually, business people use it more widely than shops versus websites. Any time the middle person is cut out — a musician putting songs online without a record company, a traveller booking a room without a travel agent, a saver moving money without walking into a bank — they may call it disintermediation. The internet made this common, so learner books often explain it with online selling, but the idea is older and bigger: remove the go-between. It is a formal, boardroom-and-textbook word. You will see it in news about business and finance. At the dinner table, people just say they sell direct, or they cut out the middleman. And though the word sounds like a clean success story, the new website or app sometimes becomes a new middleman of its own.

去中介化