The Web is a Dead End

Companies like Google, Facebook and LinkedIn have transformed from scrappy upstarts to de facto gatekeepers of the internet. What can we do about it?

The web is the internet’s greatest app – the single entry point to all the world's data. It started as a brilliant hack at CERN, designed to connect research data across systems. What it became was something much larger: a universal medium that wired how humanity connects, learns and transacts. But the journey from innovation to ubiquity has also revealed its flaws

The Web Was a Revolution

Let’s rewind. In its earliest days, the web felt like a revolution. Web 1.0 gave us a landscape of personal websites, wikis and forums – a decentralized patchwork of ideas stitched together with little more than links and curiosity. By Web 2.0, the web matured into a more interactive and social beast: blogs gave way to Facebook; and static pages evolved into dynamic platforms. The web became less about discovery and more about connection. It felt hopeful, idealistic, like a tool for the people.

Even in those early days, the web had a fundamental blind spot: it had no business model baked into its DNA. Its core protocols – HTTP, HTML and URLs – were agnostic to economics and governance. Those who could monetize attention quickly filled that vacuum. First came ads, then data mining and eventually, algorithmic control. By the 2000s, a handful of companies like Google, Facebook and LinkedIn had transformed from scrappy upstarts to de facto gatekeepers of the internet. They solved big problems, such as search, social connections and scalability, and they reaped enormous rewards.

Today, the glow has dimmed. What once felt empowering now feels oppressive. Google’s name is now shorthand for corporate overreach. Facebook has gone from a cultural phenomenon to a punchline. LinkedIn is the poster child for enshittification. The term "digital feudalism" is apt: we are tenants on platforms we don’t own, ruled by algorithms we don’t choose, serving shareholders whose interests diverge sharply from our own.

The Unrealized Promise of Web 3.0

This is where Web 3.0 enters the scene. The vision for Web 3.0 is compelling: a decentralized internet where users own their data, control their identities and participate directly in governance. The reality? Less so. For now, Web 3.0 is a landscape dominated by speculative tokens, NFT marketplaces and over-hyped promises. Look closely, and you’ll see the same centralized patterns repeating themselves, cloaked in the language of decentralization.

Take blockchain, the backbone of many Web 3.0 dreams. It’s undeniably powerful, but its limitations are glaring. By design, blockchains distribute every piece of data across all participating nodes. This ensures trust but at a high cost: performance. Blockchains don’t scale easily, and when they’re tethered to centralized infrastructure like cloud servers, they inherit all the problems of Web 2.0. As Signal creator Moxie Marlinspike pointed out, decentralized apps often depend on centralized clouds for critical functions. If someone controls the cloud, they control the app. Decentralization becomes a mirage.

To understand why these issues persist, we have to go back to the web’s core architecture: the client-server model. This structure is inherently hierarchical. Whoever controls the server controls the user experience. It’s a model optimized for efficiency and scale, not equality and autonomy. Worse, the foundational protocols didn’t account for the complexities of ownership, privacy or economic incentives.

Consider HTTP. It’s good at delivering data but blind to the question of who owns it. HTML lets you display content but offers no way to enforce rights over that content. This lack of built-in governance has left us with a web where all our interactions are monetized, and we are the product. The rise of cloud computing has only deepened this problem. What we call "the cloud" is really someone else's computer. It’s a central point of control disguised as a convenience. The cloud is a prison.

The challenge isn’t just building better technologies. It’s also rethinking the foundations. Technologies like blockchain and distributed ledgers offer pieces of the puzzle but can’t solve it alone. For a truly decentralized web, we need systems that combine the scalability of cloud architectures with the cryptographic trust of blockchains. More importantly, these systems must prioritize us – not as consumers, but as co-owners and collaborators.

This is where new innovations, like the work we’re doing with the local-first protocol AnySync, come into play. Imagine a network that scales infinitely, preserving blockchain's cryptographic integrity while giving us privacy and control over their data. This isn’t just an incremental upgrade; it’s a paradigm shift. Building such systems is a Herculean task, and the obstacles aren’t just technical. As it exists today, the web is controlled by monopolies – companies that own the browsers, frameworks, and infrastructure we rely on. The rules of this game were written for them, by them. There is a lot of gravity.

The Future of the Internet Doesn’t Have to be the Web

So we face a choice: do we keep patching the web we have, or do we try something different? Platforms like iOS and Android proved it’s possible to reinvent the way people interact with technology, but they too came with centralization. Could we make a similar leap, but with decentralization at its core? What if the next great platform isn’t an app or a protocol?

The web is everywhere, but ubiquity isn’t a reason to cling to it. It’s a reason to question it. There is a chance the future of the internet doesn’t look like the web at all. Maybe it’s time to build something entirely new. As the web evolves, so must our understanding of its purpose. The future isn’t written in code; it’s written in the values we choose to uphold.

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