He is right to say that the open web is under pressure from powerful companies that have grown rich by extracting value from open systems and are now becoming hostile to the norms that made those systems possible in the first place.
That said, I think it’s important to be careful not to turn this into a story where A.I. The problem, or even the beginning of a problem. The current AI wave is accelerating the scope of the web, but the problems of the open web go back much further than that. I wrote about part of this in The Curse more than a decade ago: The dynamics of winner-take-all, convenience, monopoly power, and cost of change were pushing people toward centralization long before LLM crawlers were worried about it.
Furthermore, I think it’s much easier to tell the story as if the open web is just attacked From outside. It also obscures the fact that we actually traded the web.
We took away the business of the open web
Big platforms did not become powerful simply because they were aggressive, well-funded, or unethical. They also became powerful because We chose them again and again, even after their deal became clear.
We recreated our social graphs inside private databases, not because the audience was already there, but because the platform promised to lure us with vanity follower counts or view counts. Then we did the rest for them: We invited our friends, inspired our readers to follow us there, imported our communities, and gradually trained everyone around us to believe that these private spaces were natural spaces for public life online.
We embedded follow buttons, added share widgets, installed trackers, and told our friends, readers, colleagues, and communities that the right place to find us was Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, Substack, or whatever silo was ascending that year.
We accepted that “free” was good enough, even when it was clear that advertising would ultimately require monitoring, optimization, concentration, and manipulation.
I think this is the part of the story we need to sit with longer.
convenience is never neutral
The most important feature of the platforms was not their technology. This was a convenience.
Convenience is not a superficial thing. It forms compounds. If a closed platform makes identity easier, makes payments easier, makes search easier, makes hosting easier, makes moderation easier, makes mobile apps easier, makes analytics easier, and makes graphs easier, it doesn’t just offer a better product. It changes what people are willing to tolerate architecturally.
Once enough people realize that convenience matters more than portability, openness starts to seem like a hobby rather than a public good.
The value of the open web was always expensive. Someone has to run the server. Someone has to maintain the software. Someone has to define the standards. Someone has to pay for storage, bandwidth, security, spam mitigation, abuse management, moderation, and UX work. The idea was never that these costs did not exist. The idea was that advertising would cover the needs of advertisers and middlemen without reshaping the system around them.
Looking at the history of the last twenty years it is difficult to conclude that this was a catastrophic mistake.
neglect is not innocence
I’m not saying that users are primarily guilty, or equally guilty. Power matters. Market structure matters. Monopoly power matters. Venture capital incentives matter. The choices of billionaires and big companies matter a lot.
But neglect is not innocence.
If the open web was really valuable, why did so few of us support it financially?
Why were so many people willing to pay for streaming subscriptions, cloud storage, food delivery, and games, but so resistant to paying for publishing tools, independent software, hosting, RSS services, moderation, or subscription systems?
Why do so many organizations (or even politicians) that used to loudly celebrate the open web still direct their communities toward closed channels as soon as development, analysis, or convenience comes on the table?
Why did we continue to outsource identity, distribution, and monetization to companies whose incentives were clearly aligned with ours?
This is because, collectively, we have prioritized the short-term consumer surplus of convenience over the long-term responsibilities of management.
And this is not the moral failure of some villains. This is a cultural choice.
The lesson is not just to protest. It has to be big.
If we want a better Web, I don’t think it’s enough to sound the alarm every time a big company behaves exactly as its incentives predict.
We also need to be more assertive towards ourselves.
This means admitting some uncomfortable things:
The better option may be less convenient at first.
Healthy models may have to pay for things that appeared to be free.
Improving your relationship with your audience may require more work than just renting access to someone on a platform.
Without good products, protocols don’t win, but without user agency, products eventually become traps.
Most importantly, an open web cannot survive if most of its participants consider themselves merely consumers. Open systems require maintainers, contributors, donors, paying members, standards participants, hosts, and institutions willing to absorb some friction in exchange for flexibility.
In other words, the open web needs netizens again.
How does that feel?
This would mean publishing in places you can visit.
This will mean using tools that export the data in a clean way.
This would mean directly supporting independent software and media.
This will mean rebuilding social and economic primitives, identity, follow graphs, payments, subscriptions, search on systems that are portable and not simply profitable.
This would mean that products would be evaluated not only on the basis of whether they are enjoyable at the time, but also on whether they maintain freedom of movement later.
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