> There is no competition, there are no web standards anymore except what the monopolistic browser vendors decide, and indeed the WHATWG successfully executed a

> There is no competition, there are no web standards anymore except what the monopolistic browser vendors decide, and indeed the WHATWG successfully executed a coup d'état against the W3C standards body. The remarkable thing is how the WHATWG gang successfully got lots of observers to cheer this on as a good thing. (Relatedly, are there any archived copies of the old, disappeared "Last Week in HTML5" blog floating around out there?) Overall the Web is a classic (probably by now the classic) example of Too Big To Fork https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6810259 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6810259 : as the size and interconnectedness of a piece of software or a protocol go up, the power of incumbents and those with deep pockets over it increases, effectively nullifying more and more any legal open-source or open-standard status it has. The glass-half-full implication is that this is a to a large extent a technical problem: it can be ameliorated by making the Web more modular and/or easier to independently reimplement. The glass-half-empty implications are that this is a difficult technical problem—it's not straightforwardly obvious how this can be done even starting with a clean slate, let alone how to get there from here—and that without technical improvements, any attempts to solve this with regulation, antitrust action, consumer activism or whatever is going to be unsatisfactory in one way or another.