The web as designed by Tim Berners-Lee was a decentralized system where you could host a website and others could see it.

Google came along and made finding these websites much more convenient and accessible. Along the way Microsoft IE began using monopoly advantage to make the web in Microsoft’s image. It was a clunky unstandardized mess for many years as only Microsoft could officially push a standard. You could build for Netscape/Firefox, but you would be breaking 90% of your users due to undocumented and tailored code.

Now Google has the market share. The standards are much more aligned amongst the major players, and it would be a stretch to call it a monopoly. That’s the goal.

Google unofficially pushes the new browsers standards towards Google’s image, just as Microsoft had before. Just look at Chrome extensions for an example. It’s not a coincidence ad blockers are becoming weakling in the name of “security”.

Apple has their entrenched user base, solidifying with every iOS app unavailable to other ecosystems. Compound the issue when people have paid real money for useful apps that they don’t wish to sink the cost for.

It’s better than before, but companies will never have your best interests at heart. Profit is incentivized first, then product (including you).

A decentralized web is possible, we have the technology. There is no reason a static site server couldn’t be implemented with a proxy hiding feature, even using IPFS potentially. Large plates can still cache and serve data to get paid, but your data doesn’t have to be centralized.

Moreover, serving up a web server from your local machine could be as easy as opening a custom pinned tabbed and sharing it out. CRDTs and homomorophic tech open worlds of possibility with secure p2p applications at scale.

But this is not what a cloud provider wants. It is not the direction we are heading. We are trained to be paranoid (rightful so unfortunately), and cloud providers tout themselves as the panacea. In some ways they are, but at what cost?

We no longer trust the user to have a direct connection. All of your services should be on the cloud if you’re “enterprise” enough, and you’ll pay for it accordingly.

What I want to see: Governments recognize that the internet is a public utility at this point, and reduce the roadblocks to hosting your own data. Allow all GUA IPv6 addresses to be static if requested. Don’t allow carriers to give special preference to business accounts vs personal for static assignment. There is no technical reason for this if a customer requests it. We’re not running out of IPv6 addresses.

This fixes the STUN/TURN debacle created by NAT, and opens up the field for new possibilities. It also allows for real decentralized competition with cloud providers.

It used to be that I got excited about the random blog posts I could find. Simple HTML sites from interesting people, which I mostly get on Hacker News now. Search engines filled with ads and SEO/AI garbage only exist because of the profit structure and centralized control.

With ID verification a certainty due to AI advances, we’re going to be even more locked into these monopolistic systems. We need competition, and as long as they hold the search screen, we’re only going to move towards higher profits for them. Yet something tells me our governments have something to do with it. Data collection isn’t just profitable, it’s potent.