> From the beginning the web has been about cutting out middlemen.
That should have read 'the internet' not 'the web', otherwise it is pretty accurate.
That should have read 'the internet' not 'the web', otherwise it is pretty accurate.
On an hardware/network level "the internet" was actually about tolerating more "middlemen", moving away from single-owner corporate or governmental networks and dedicated pipes.
It still is. And the web was all about that too, but billions of $ were spent to push it in the direction of walled gardens and data silos.
And now we have moved in a totally different direction, where all the would-be-small-middlemen and their functions have been absorbed into a couple of giant data warehouses/web properties. That's about as far away from the 'peer-to-peer' nature of the internet as you could be. Firewalls were also a huge nail in the coffin, the fact that to be able to securely connect a computer to the net at a consumer level your best bet is to make it a device that does not allow connections from the outside in.