You are confounding things here. The actual free and open web is certainly one of the best things ever. But all the app ecosystem we have built on it, the ins

You are confounding things here. The actual free and open web is certainly one of the best things ever. But all the app ecosystem we have built on it, the insecure and wasteful universe of web apps, and all the cruft that is created to support them in the name of free and open web, none of them are necessary for tye web to be free and open. Is the open web this whole business of tracking and data ransom? No. It is the content that people publish, and it needs only a fraction of all this complexity. The rest is the closed web. Nobody bars anybody from publishing proper application software or make usable web applications that do not require clients to have software that takes hundreds of megabytes on disk and multiple gigabytes on ram. In thr nineties MS had almost 100 marketshare in consumer OS market. How much does Apple ecosystem has now. MS and Apple is incomparable in that you can prefer to not use an apple device, but for a long long time you could not prefer to not use the MS software, whatever consumer hardware you had.