Nobody "stole" the web as such, what they did was lure in the sheep to the herd like what happened in "The Pied Piper of Hamelin" [1]. The web grew, both in num

Nobody "stole" the web as such, what they did was lure in the sheep to the herd like what happened in "The Pied Piper of Hamelin" [1]. The web grew, both in number of users as well as in size, from Geocities (also centralised, grew annoying habits like adding advertising to users' pages) through Myspace to the current Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/Snapchat/Tumblr/etc. concoction. I consider these to be growing pains, as long as there are no China-like restrictions on actual internet connections the web - or what follows after it - will find a way to grow past this stage. The real problems will start when the censorship and leaching of data is moved to the entry points for the 'net, i.e. the internet access providers. The only way around such an obstacle would be some form of "darknet", either a "virtual" infrastructure on top of the physical one offered by the 'net or something which bypasses it altogether. We're not there yet but it doesn't take that much thought to realise that once some form of self-hosting takes off - with more and more fibre-connected users this becomes a viable proposition - those who call for censorship will not be satisfied much longer when they see the efficacy of their filters dwindle. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pied_Piper_of_Hamelin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pied_Piper_of_Hamelin