I just read Anil Dash’s recent piece, Endgame for the Open Web, and I think it is important.

He is right to point out that the open web is under pressure from powerful companies which have grown rich by extracting value from open systems and are now increasingly hostile to the norms that made those systems possible in the first place.

That said, I think it is important to be careful not to turn this into a story where AI is the problem, or even the beginning of the problem. The current AI wave is accelerating the enclosure of the web, but the open web’s troubles are much older than that. I wrote about part of this more than a decade ago in The Curse: winner-takes-all dynamics, convenience, monopoly power, and the cost of change were already pushing people toward centralization long before anyone worried about LLM crawlers.

Even further, I think it is too easy to tell the story as if the open web was simply attacked from the outside. It also obscures the fact that we actually traded the web away.

We traded the open web away

The large platforms did not become powerful only because they were aggressive, well funded, or unethical. They also became powerful because we chose them, repeatedly, even after their bargain had become obvious.

We rebuilt our social graphs inside private databases not because the audience was already there, but because the platforms promised us one in lured us with vanity follower counts or view counts. Then we did the rest of the work for them: we invited our friends, pushed our readers to follow us there, imported our communities, and slowly trained everyone around us to believe that these private spaces were the natural place for public life online.

We embedded the follow buttons, added the share widgets, installed the trackers, and told our friends, readers, coworkers, and communities that the right place to find us was Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, Substack, or whichever silo was ascendant that year.

We accepted that “free” was good enough, even when it was apparent that advertising would eventually require surveillance, optimization, concentration, and manipulation.

That is the part of the story I think we should sit with longer.

Convenience was never neutral

The most important feature of platforms was not their technology. It was convenience.

Convenience is not a superficial thing. It compounds. If a closed platform makes identity easier, payments easier, discovery easier, hosting easier, moderation easier, mobile apps easier, analytics easier, and the graph easier, then it does not merely offer a better product. It changes what people are willing to tolerate architecturally.

Once enough people internalize that convenience matters more than portability, then openness starts to look like a hobby rather than a public good.

The open web’s values were always expensive. Someone has to run the servers. Someone has to maintain the software. Someone has to define the standards. Someone has to pay for storage, bandwidth, security, spam mitigation, abuse handling, moderation, and UX work. The fantasy was never that these costs did not exist. The fantasy was that advertising would cover them without eventually reshaping the system around the needs of advertisers and intermediaries.

It is hard to look at the history of the last twenty years and not conclude that this was a catastrophic mistake.

Neglect is not innocence

I am not saying that users are primarily to blame, or even equally to blame. Power matters. Market structure matters. Monopoly power matters. Venture capital incentives matter. The choices of billionaires and large companies matter a great deal.

But neglect is not innocence.

If the open web was truly valuable, then why did so few of us support it economically?

Why were so many people willing to pay for streaming subscriptions, cloud storage, food delivery, and games, but so resistant to paying for publishing tools, independent software, hosting, RSS services, moderation, or membership systems?

Why did so many organizations (or even policitians) that loudly celebrated the open web still direct their communities toward closed channels as soon as growth, analytics, or convenience were on the table?

Why did we keep outsourcing identity, distribution, and monetization to companies whose incentives were obviously misaligned with ours?

It is because, collectively, we preferred the short-term consumer surplus of convenience over the long-term responsibilities of stewardship.

And that is not a moral failure of a few villains. It is a cultural choice.

The lesson is not just to resist. It is to grow up.

If we want a better web, I do not think it will be enough to ring the alarm every time a big company behaves exactly as its incentives predict.

We also need to become more demanding of ourselves.

That means accepting a few uncomfortable things:

The better alternative may be less convenient at first.

The healthier model may require paying for things that used to appear free.

Owning your relationship with your audience may require more work than renting access to one on a platform.

Protocols without good products do not win, but products without user agency eventually become traps.

Most importantly, an open web cannot survive if most of its participants think of themselves only as consumers. Open systems require maintainers, contributors, donors, paying members, standards participants, hosts, and institutions willing to absorb some friction in exchange for resilience.

In other words, the open web needs netizens again.

What would that look like?

It would mean publishing in places you can leave.

It would mean using tools that export data cleanly.

It would mean supporting independent software and media directly.

It would mean rebuilding social and economic primitives, identity, follow graphs, payments, memberships, discovery, on systems that are portable and not merely profitable.

It would mean judging products not only by whether they are delightful in the moment, but by whether they preserve freedom of movement later.