More and more, I think the open web would have been extinguished in the '90s (at least in the US) if AOL was as brazen as US tech companies are now in bribing g

More and more, I think the open web would have been extinguished in the '90s (at least in the US) if AOL was as brazen as US tech companies are now in bribing government to shut down the competition. This WWW-hostile vision popped up again with iTunes and the iOS App Store, with Steve Jobs successfully fearmongering about the dangers of downloading apps from 'untrustworthy' websites, eventually turning the walled garden into a billion-dollar business. We've never recovered from that; iOS, Windows Phone, ChromeOS, these were all locked-down systems that had hundreds of millions of users thinking it's the same thing as a computer. Which of course encouraged vendors to start imposing similar limitations in desktop OSes.