I feel like the web as we know it should be abandoned to coorporations and people that want an open platform for knowledge sharing should start something new that has to stay open.
"corporate interests" haven't trapped the web.
People are choosing to pretend that the web has somehow ceased to exist outside of a few silos, or that javascript has no purpose other than to further corporate or media interests, or that Facebook owns HTML now, but none of that is true. The web is just as open as it's ever been.
Just because mainstream viewing habits tend to converge towards a few corporate owned social media sites does not mean the web has become owned by corporations, it just means people have gotten lazy and don't want to work to discover new content.
We are building drm into the browsers themselves now. We are letting companies tell people that "there is no way to access media, unless you go through our walled garden" and defending the company! The open web is farther gone than it's ever been.
No one is putting a gun to anyone's head and forcing them to use EME when they distribute media, and it certainly will no more be the case that all media will be forced through DRM and a walled garden than it ever was. The companies that will use this are the companies that would have used DRM anyway, just in another form. The web, as a whole, is unaffected.
We don't need to "start something different" we just need to ensure that what's there can still be used for both corporations, and the public at large.
Of all these alternatives, I think bitchute.com is really innovative in that it has a Bittorrent video viewer that solves the bandwidth usage problem by going p2p. Not a lot of stuff on there yet. For now, that site is mostly full of political content that would get banned, or at least demonitized, on YouTube.
I have a hard time getting over the irony that the alt-right are going to be the ones to save the open Internet while the rest of Silicon Valley sits around and does nothing because they need to be protected by the machines of loving grace [1] that are the vast content moderation and filtering apparatus of the major social networks.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Watched_Over_by_Machines...
Of course it will be a bit slower at startup times, but it's still faster than a video that has been removed in your country or removed due other arbitrary reasons.
How moving to a new, less popular distribution mechanism would make that any better is not clear to me.