If I was going write a response to this it would be with the title "The Open Web is dead. Long live the Open Web" People often look to Tim Berners-Lee for thou

If I was going write a response to this it would be with the title "The Open Web is dead. Long live the Open Web" People often look to Tim Berners-Lee for thought leadership on the web, as the pioneer of hypertext and now director of the W3C. But if you read, say, Roy Fielding's REST paper you'd notice things like this https://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/rest_arch_style.htm#sec_5_2_1_1 https://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/rest_arc... (and remember Roy was a co-founder of the Apache HTTP Server and contributor to https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt) "Since centralized link servers are an anathema to the immense scale and multi-organizational domain requirements of the Web, REST relies instead on the author choosing a resource identifier that best fits the nature of the concept being identified. Naturally, the quality of an identifier is often proportional to the amount of money spent to retain its validity, which leads to broken links as ephemeral (or poorly supported) information moves or disappears over time." The two things I take away here were... - The guys working on the fundamentals of the web at that time couldn't imagine it would be possible to scale centralised services to serve links - Money was a key consideration to determining "system quality" - they were not building utopian systems here - they knew there would be a relationship between which information would "succeed" and how much money was behind it That in turn means the key to making a "better open web" is making it more economically viable and able to out-compete existing centralized services. That doesn't necessarily mean "distributed web" is the right answer