It's both technical and incentive. The problem is that so much of technology is standing on the shoulders of giants. If we re-write, how much of the giants do

It's both technical and incentive. The problem is that so much of technology is standing on the shoulders of giants. If we re-write, how much of the giants do we decide to lop-off? For example, could you get Google, Apple, Mozilla, to all agree where to draw the line? Should we still use HTTP? Should everything use QUIC? An entirely new standard? What about DNS? But let's say they do agree. Then what, they create entirely new browsers (I'll call Chrome2, Safari2, etc). Maybe they don't even use the DOM or HTML at all, but an entirely new setup. A side note – if the web was re-built today it probably wouldn't have "View Source." As you said, I imagine it'd lean into WASM and "isomorphic" code, which could just be WebGL/canvas/some new paradigm/etc. So then what... everyone says abandon my original website and download a new browser to access the new one? Because that's what throwing out backwards compatibility looks like. And that seems like a non-starter to most people. Browsers are too big to fail; too big to be thrown out and re-written. Our hope is incremental, not revolutionary. Things like WASM in browsers let us pursue new paradigms while also being backwards compatible. Lastly, I'd say the incentives for a new web would be worse than an old web. The original web was written by tinkerers and tech startups like Netscape/Mozilla. The new web would be written by multibillion dollar companies who like and know how to build moats. It would have microtransactions (not necessarily bad by itself) and I worry would look more like an app store.